Lizzo is not mincing words about how demoralizing it was that her new album, Bitch, failed to chart on the Billboard 200 album tally upon its release earlier this month. In a chat with the Swiftologist podcast, Lizzo described her attempt to boost the LP’s profile in the weeks leading up to its June 5 release, but when the reaction was tepid at best, the singer said it made her reassess her focus on the parameters of success.
“It dropped, and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this isn’t what I thought it would be,’” she told host Zachary Hourihane in this week’s episode. “I didn’t think it would be crazy, but I also didn’t think it would be this. There was, like, 24 hours of my life where I based my success and my worth on a number, and I think that was soul-crushing.”
The follow-up to Lizzo’s Grammy-winning 2022 Special album — which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 — sold just 2,649 copies according to Rolling Stone, a major comedown from Special‘s 39,000-copy debut. Similarly, the previous album’s lead single, “About Damn Time,” hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 charts and won the record of the year Grammy, while the Bitch singles “Don’t Make Me Love U” and the title track also failed to significantly impact the charts; Bitch is also Lizzo’s first album not to chart on the Billboard 200 since her 2015 sophomore effort Big Grrrl Small World.
Lizzo said she was “really stressed” and sad for a few days after the album’s release because she truly thought it was some of her best work to date.
“I had to reframe and be like, ‘But aren’t you proud of yourself?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I actually am proud of myself.’ Aren’t you excited to sing these songs? Aren’t you glad they’re out?’ Yeah,” the singer said about her internal pep talk following the album’s disappointing debut and her belief that her true fans will eventually find it. She added that prerelease was curious to see how Bitch would land, because it was originally supposed to be released in 2025, and could have even come out in 2024.
After Special, Lizzo wrote and produced some songs on SZA’s breakthrough SOS album and appeared on the Barbie movie soundtrack with the song “Pink.” In early 2025 she began teasing a project she referred to as LIRL, later releasing the title track to her then-planned fifth album, Love in Real Life. While that album did not manifest — she told Billboard in May that LILR was not shelved, but just retitled — she did release her third mixtape, My Face Hurts From Smiling, last June.
“With pop and with music, timing is everything,” she said. “So right now, I’m just letting it live,” she told Hourihane, reminding him that she’s a show-er not a “grower,” alluding to the 14 weeks it took for “About Damn Time” to find its audience. “I’m not afraid of failure anymore because I’ve already won,” Lizzo said. “That’s something that the general public may not believe or understand about me … once they hold people to this standard like, ‘you just have to keep doing it like you did it and if you don’t break the Beatles’ record then you are not a real pop artist.’”
In the lead-up to the album’s release, Lizzo lamented in a May 12 TikTok that some haters were already coming at her saying, “‘Oh, she’s just mad she’s flopping,’” while claiming that real people in the music industry were thanking her for speaking out about the current state of social media music marketing.
“The algorithm-based way that social media functions now is destroying the music industry,” she told her followers. “If your algorithm is super serving you things out of order of when they’re happening, then the general public has no idea when music is actually coming out. Back in the day, which was maybe even just five years ago, we used to get things [on our feeds] chronologically. Music marketing relies heavily on social media, but now, ever since the algorithm has been showing us things out of order, there’s actually no way to successfully promote an album where everyone knows your album is coming.”
Lizzo, though, said she’s not looking to break anyone else’s chart peaks, as she’s focused on competing only with herself and trying to reach her core lesbian audience — the “Lizzies” — and her other day ones, citing Taylor Swift’s hardcore fandom as an inspiration. “I always talk bout Taylor for doing that for such a long time,” she said of her belief that Swift did not purposely set out to create a global Swiftie army, but rather built it organically. “And I just think that it was so genius and so smart to have that force.”
She also gave props to SZA for reaching out to her with words of wisdom and support during a trying time. “She just called me and was like, ‘you’re on my mind. I was like, [crying] ‘am I a failure???’ and she was like, ‘Oh my God, no! … She’s so sweet.” At present, Lizzo has just one show on her touring roster this summer, a July 7 gig at the Filene Center in Vienna, Va.
