It looks like Rod Wave’s recent arrest for battery didn’t cool off his musical hot streak as his latest album, Beautiful Mind, becomes his second to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The Florida crooner last topped the list with his 2021 album, SoulFly. Even more impressively, he’s done all this without the benefit of algorithm-boosting features; the album’s only two guest appearances come from Jack Harlow and December Joy. He racked up 115,000 equivalent album units with 113,000 from streaming.
Meanwhile, Megan Thee Stallion’s new album, Traumazine, bows at No. 4, marking her fifth consecutive top-ten debut and pretty much perfectly highlighting the whole “misogyny in hip-hop” problem (the guy accused of strangling his girlfriend in front of their children outsells one of rap’s most outspoken survivors of domestic violence? You couldn’t write it in a prestige drama on HBO). She accumulated 63,000 equivalent album units with 54,000 streaming units and 8,000 album sales.
Also in the top ten are Bad Bunny, whose Un Verano Sin Ti was finally dethroned (again) after eight weeks at No. 1, although his equivalent album units earned only dropped less than 1%. Beyonce’s Renaissance is No. 3, down 29%. No. 5 is YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s The Last Slimeto (there’s another guy whose treatment of women hasn’t deterred him from success). Morgan Wallen, Harry Styles, The Weeknd, Future, and Olivia Rodrigo round out the top 10.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. .
