Drake fans have spent the better part of the last two years waiting for the rapper’s highly-anticipated sixth album, Certified Lover Boy. While the wait was quite lengthy, the rapper didn’t make it a grueling one for his supporters. A heavy feature run and projects that include Dark Lane Demo Tapes and Scary Hours 2 made it a bit easier to stay patient for Drake’s album. At long last, the rapper dropped Certified Lover Boy, and nearly two weeks after the project was delivered to the world, it tops the Billboard 200 in what is the biggest week in 2021.
Certified Lover Boy goes No. 1 on the album charts after posting 631,000 units sold in its first week. This number is comprised of 562,000 streaming equivalent album units based on 743.67 million on-demand streams of the album’s 21 tracks. It also posted a total of 46,000 pure album sales. With that, Certified Lover Boy becomes Drake’s tenth No. 1 album which makes him the eighth artist alongside The Beatles, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Barbara Streisand, Eminem, Elvis Presley, and Kanye West as the only artists with ten chart-topping releases.
Drake’s first week numbers for his sixth album are also the most by a project in over a year. The last album to post a bigger first week than Certified Lover Boy was Taylor Swift’s Folklore back in August 2020. In terms of just hip-hop projects, the last album to have a better debut than Certified Lover Boy was Drake’s 2018 fifth album Scorpion.
You can revisit our review of Drake’s Certified Lover Boy here.
Certified Lover Boy is out now via OVO Sound/Republic. Get it here.
