Twenty One Pilots show rock’s not useless atop the ‘Billboard’ albums chart : NPR

Rock and roll is alive and properly atop the Billboard 200 albums chart this week, as Twenty One Pilots‘ Breach racks up humongous gross sales en path to a No. 1 debut. Elsewhere on the charts, HUNTR/X’s “Golden” retains on topping the Scorching 100 singles chart, whereas a Rihanna deep lower crashes the charts 18 years into its existence, due to TikTok.

TOP ALBUMS

Final week, the summer time’s nice left-field pop-culture juggernaut — that’d be the Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters — lastly landed its soundtrack atop the Billboard 200 after an extended, regular climb up the charts. This week, it falls again to No. 2 due to a style that is impressed many untimely obituaries: rock and roll.

Your new No. 1 album, the proggy and hip-hop-inflected Breach, is by Twenty One Pilots, who final topped the albums chart greater than a decade in the past, with 2015’s Blurryface. Although rock data by Ghost and Sleep Token have already hit No. 1 this 12 months, Breach scores the largest rock debut since Device‘s long-awaited Inoculum six years in the past.

Of Breach‘s 200,000 “equal album models” — that is the cocktail of gross sales and streaming that informs the Billboard 200 rankings — 169,000 got here from gross sales, with 72,000 of these on vinyl. These are terrific numbers in 2025, however Breach additionally had Twenty One Pilots’ best-ever streaming week and debuts at No. 8 on the streaming chart. All it is lacking is successful single: Solely one among its songs, “Metropolis Partitions,” hits this week’s Scorching 100, debuting at No. 83.

The highest 10’s different debut, Ed Sheeran‘s Play, has skilled a softer launch: The album debuts at No. 5 with 71,000 equal album models, 51,000 of which come from gross sales. And, as we frequently observe round these components, gross sales are vastly tougher to maintain than streaming, which means that each debuts could also be set for brief runs within the high 10.

As when you wanted one other information level to reveal the significance of streaming, contemplate sombr‘s I Barely Know Her. The rising Gen Z star is not producing a lot in the best way of gross sales 4 weeks into his debut album’s run, particularly on condition that bodily copies will not be accessible till November. However with strong streaming numbers, I Barely Know Her holds at No. 10.

TOP SONGS

As soon as once more, there is not a ton of motion close to the highest of the Scorching 100 singles chart. The KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack continues to lock down 4 songs within the high 10, led by “Golden” at No. 1 for a sixth nonconsecutive week. Alex Warren‘s “Unusual” is, but once more, hovering helplessly at No. 2. And so forth. Except for an anticipated drop for Sabrina Carpenter‘s “Tears” — the streaming numbers for her new album Man’s Finest Pal are dipping in its third week on the chart, whereas Carpenter’s airplay numbers are principally going to “Manchild,” which holds at No. 3 — this week’s chart is not a lot totally different from final week’s.

There’s nonetheless a handful of milestones value noting, although. “Golden” has now posted the longest run at No. 1 for a soundtrack hit since Wiz Khalifa‘s “See You Once more (feat. Charlie Puth)” in 2015. That music, from Livid 7, topped the Scorching 100 for 12 weeks, although Taylor Swift in all probability thinks its run ought to have been even longer.

It will be arduous for “Golden” to hit that 12-week benchmark, given the strategy of Swift’s “The Destiny of Ophelia” — the primary single from The Lifetime of a Showgirl, which, just like the album itself, drops Oct. 3 — and the same old flurry of vacation perennials. However the airplay numbers for “Golden” go up, up, up one other 16% this week, and the music has formally surpassed Encanto‘s “We Do not Discuss About Bruno” (which spent 5 weeks at No. 1), to not point out a decade’s value of soundtrack smashes.

Oh, and it is with a heavy coronary heart that we should report the return of Teddy Swims‘ “Lose Management” to the highest 10. The music’s run now spans 78 weeks, out of a record-shrapnelizing 109 weeks on the Scorching 100. It is nonetheless successful on the streaming charts, nonetheless gobbling up a great deal of radio airplay, nonetheless clogging our collective cultural bloodstream like so many microplastics. At this level, it is secure to imagine that “Lose Management” will not biodegrade from the charts till our kids’s kids’s kids’s kids have perished from the earth. Solely then can one other music be heard, offered anybody is left to listen to it.

WORTH NOTING

It is turn out to be moderately widespread for previous songs to search out new chart life through TikTok virality. In January, Imogen Heap scored her first-ever Scorching 100 hit — extremely, “Disguise and Search” by no means cracked that chart — with “Headlock,” 20 years after its launch. Radiohead‘s “Let Down,” from 1997’s OK Pc, at present sits at No. 100 due to a TikTok pattern. And, although it did not crack the Scorching 100, Connie Francis skilled a late-in-life profession surge earlier this 12 months due to TikTok customers’ embrace of “Fairly Little Child.”

The most recent oldie to make its Scorching 100 debut belongs to Rihanna, whose 2007 music “Breakin’ Dishes” debuts at No. 86 this week, thanks largely to its recognition on TikTok. The music spent months on Billboard‘s Dance Membership Songs chart in 2008 and 2009, but it did not crack the Scorching 100 till this week. It is within the midst of a world resurgence, because it charts in additional than a dozen nations.

Rihanna’s most up-to-date full-length album, Anti, got here out in 2016, and he or she’s launched singles solely sporadically — “Carry Me Up,” from Black Panther: Wakanda Perpetually, was nominated for an Oscar in 2023 — within the years since.

This 12 months, she dropped a music known as “Pal of Mine” as a part of her involvement on this summer time’s Smurfs film and soundtrack, nevertheless it didn’t chart. Nonetheless, the success of “Breakin’ Dishes” suggests an ongoing starvation for non-Smurf-adjacent Rihanna music. This is hoping this wills some into the universe.