Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers’ Bows at No. 1 With Year’s Biggest First-Week Debut
23.05.2022 - 02:29
/ variety.com
Thania Garcia Kendrick Lamar had the biggest debut of any album so far this year with “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” his first album in five years and his fourth to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart.The truly long-awaited release came in hot with 295,500 equivalent album units earned in the U.S.
in the week ending May 19, according to Luminate via Billboard.It’s the third straight week in which a new bar has been set for the best 2022 debut to date. Lamar claiming that record means Bad Bunny’s summer blockbuster, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” only had one week in which to hold the title; it debuted last week at No. 1 with 274,000 equivalent album units.
The week before that, it was Future’s “I Never Liked You” premiering on top, with 222,000. In the five years since he released 2017’s cultural shifter “Damn” (which spent four weeks atop the Billboard 200), Lamar became the first hip-hop artist to win the Pulitzer Prize, earned an Oscar nomination for his contribution to “Black Panther,” launched a media company, performed at the Super Bowl and announced his impending departure from the label TDE.As Variety‘s Andrew Barker wrote in his review of the 19-track, 72-minute album, “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers” “is almost entirely concerned with the long periods that Lamar spent out of the spotlight in between.
He’s been going through quite a few things since we last heard from him, and he’s never been more willing to share them all.”Also premiering in the top 10 was the Big Hit group Tomorrow X Together, which scored its second top 10 album and highest-charting release yet with the No. 4 debut of “Minisode 2: Thursday’s Child,” clocking in with 68,500 equivalent album units. The vast majority of that tally, 65,500 units,
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