Drake is back on top of the charts. $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, the rapper’s collaborative album with fellow Canadian PartyNext Door, has debuted atop Billboard’s 200 albums chart, the publication confirmed on Sunday, marking Drake’s 14th Number One album.
The record opened with 287.04 million first-week streams, along with 25,000 album sales, according to Luminate (via Billboard). The album replaced Kendrick Lamar‘s GNX for the Number One slot, perhaps a bit of a consolation prize as GNX skyrocketed last week after Lamar’s lauded Super Bowl halftime show earlier this month.
$ome $exy $ongs 4 U marks Drake’s first Number One album since he and Lamar’s rap beef infamously escalated last year. Lamar’s “Not Like Us” became the runaway hit from a series of barbs the two rappers threw at one another, with Lamar calling drake a pedophile. The song went on to win five Grammys, including for Record and Song of the Year, and it topped the Hot 100 for three weeks.
Drake filed a defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, his own record company, back in January, claiming the label group “decided to publish, promote, exploit, and monetize allegations that it understood were not only false, but dangerous.” UMG denied the allegations, firing back that Drake “seeks to weaponize the legal process to silence an artist’s creative expression and to seek damages from UMG for distributing that artist’s music.”
While the results of the suit remain to be seen, $ome $exy $ongs seemed to represent Drake turning the page on an artistic front. “Fuck a rap beef, I’m tryna get the party lit,” he rapped on “Gimme a Hug.”
For PartyNextDoor, $ome $exy $ongs marks his highest-charting debut ever, and his highest-charting album since 2016’s PartyNextDoor 3, which peaked at Number Three.
Elsewhere on the chart, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet came in second this week, GNX took third, SZA’s SOS took fourth and Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos rounded out the top five.
