After a nearly four year wait, fans of The Weeknd finally received his fifth album, After Hours last week. The album did fairly well critically but it did even better commercially, debuting atop the Billboard album charts. It’s The Weeknd’s third No. 1 album and, thanks to After Hours, fourth No. 1 release overall.
The album, which had a first-week total of 444,000 equivalent album units sold, served as the biggest opening week for The Weeknd, surpassing the previous mark set by his 2015 album, Beauty Behind The Madness. On top of that, After Hours also had the biggest overall opening week and the second-biggest pure album sales week of 2020, falling second to BTS’ Map Of The Soul 7, which nabbed 347,000 pure album sales in its opening week. Of the 444,000 equivalent album units sold, 275,000 were pure album sales — most likely coming from the merch bundles he offered on his website — while 163,000 were streaming equivalent album units.
In addition to the aforementioned accolades, the first-week numbers for After Hours gave it he biggest streaming week ever for an R&B album, registering a total of 220.7 million on-demand streams, and the biggest overall week for an R&B album since Beyonce’s 2016 album, Lemonade.
Elsewhere on the top five, Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake moved down one stop to No. 2, with 115,000 units sold, and Lil Baby’s album, My Turn, also moved down a spot to No. 3 with 60,000. Bad Bunny’s YHLQMDLG comes in at No. 4 with 51,000 units sold and Conan Gray’s debut full-length album, Kid Krow, checks in at No. 5 with 49,000 units sold.
Read our review of After Hours here.
[via Billboard]