Drake had a solid run, but his streak with Billboard No. 1 album debuts has officially ended.
Hits Daily Double announced the final numbers for the first week of Drizzy’s Dark Lane Demo Tapes on Friday (May 8), and for the first time ever, The Boy will arrive on the Billboard 200 at No. 2 with 226,000 equivalent units sold. Both taking the No. 1 spot and ending Drake’s nine-album, decade-long streak of No. 1 debuts, country singer Kenny Chesney’s Here And Now album will arrive at the top.
Drake ends a decade long streak of #1 album debuts in the US. He had sent nine new projects in a row to the top spot.
— chart data (@chartdata) May 8, 2020
.@Drake's 'Dark Lane Demo Tapes' will debut at #2 on the US albums chart with 226K sold, according to @HITSDD.
— chart data (@chartdata) May 8, 2020
Dark Lane Demo Tapes was released on May 1 as a surprise project amid the COVID-19 quarantine, and does not stand as an official studio album in the OVO rapper’s catalogue. Announced just hours before it dropped, the 14-track tape is a mix of previously leaked songs, loosies that Drake has thrown out on SoundCloud in the past and a few unheard cuts that feature Chris Brown, Future, Playboi Carti and more.
The project also features Drake’s new single “Toosie Slide,” which almost immediately made TikTok history as it garnered over one billion views in just two days on the social platform. The song also helped Drake tie Mariah Carey’s record of most No. 1 debuts on the Billboard Hot 100 as it became his seventh one to top the chart, but not everyone is a fan. On an April episode of his Brilliant Idiots podcast with co-host Andrew Schulz, Charlamagne Tha God expressed his disdain for a song he says is just a product of Drake “chasing trends.”
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“I think it’s wack and I think it’s beneath Drake,” Charlamagne said. “I think that when you’re the biggest artist in the world, when you’re the biggest rapper in the world, I don’t like to see you chasing trends. It’s like, why be a surfer when you’re a fucking wave? I just didn’t respect it.”