Justin Bieber returned to the album charts after four years with surprise album Swag, and for the first time, his LP did not debut at Number One, instead bowing at Number Two. But that only tells part of the story: Swag still marks the singer’s biggest streaming debut of his career.
Swag was a highly anticipated album, to say the least. Despite announcing the record mere hours before its release, the hype for new music had been building for quite some time. Not only did it mark his first album in four years, but it came amid a tumultuous period in Bieber’s life. In June 2022, his face was left partially paralyzed following a Ramsay Hunt Syndrome diagnosis, which forced him to halt his Justice tour and then cancel it entirely. In early 2023, he sold his publishing and recorded music rights to Hipgnosis Songs Capital, which covered his entire back catalog. More recently, Bieber officially split with his longtime manager Scooter Braun, after rumors of both personal and financial tension between the two. Last year, he and his wife Hailey had their first child.
A Rolling Stone review of the album lauded the musician for processing his “adult reality” in “some of the most creative and wide-ranging music of his life.”
But while Swag didn’t land in the top spot — that distinction belonged to Travis Scott’s Jackboys 2 — it came pretty damn close. According to Variety, Scott’s project came in with 232,000 equivalent-album units, while Bieber had 163,000. It was also a personal win for Bieber: The album enters the chart with a stronger showing than 2021’s Justice, which did debut Number One at the time. Swag earned 163,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate, which was 9,000 more than his previous LP earned. On Monday, Billboard reported that an impressive 16 songs of the album’s 21 tracks charted in the Hot 100.
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Swag also earned him his biggest streaming week to date, debuting at Number One on the Top Streaming Albums chart with 198.77 million on-demand streams. Meanwhile, the album’s single “Daisies” debuted at Number Two on the Hot 100.
All in all, Swag still has swag on the charts, despite it not landing in the top spot in its first week.
