Stray Kids Become First Group to Debut at No. 1 on Billboard 200 With First Five Chart Entries
Written by Keith Caulfield on July 29, 2024
As Stray Kids’ new album ATE opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart (dated Aug. 3), they become the first group ever to debut at No. 1 with their first five charting albums.
Stray Kids previously debuted atop the chart with ODDINARY, MAXIDENT (both in 2022), ROCK-STAR and 5-STAR (both in 2023).
The only other act to debut at No. 1 with its first five chart entries was rapper DMX in 1998-2003 with It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998), Flesh of My Flesh Blood of My Blood (1999), …And Then There Was X (2000), The Great Depression (2001) and Grand Champ (2003).
The Billboard 200 chart ranks the most popular albums of the week in the U.S. based on multi-metric consumption as measured in equivalent album units, compiled by Luminate. Units comprise album sales, track equivalent albums (TEA) and streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Each unit equals one album sale, or 10 individual tracks sold from an album, or 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. The new Aug. 3, 2024-dated chart will be posted in full on Billboard’s website on July 30. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram.
ATE arrives with 232,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending July 25, according to Luminate. That’s the largest week of 2024 for any K-pop album, and the sixth-biggest debut for any album this year.
The Billboard 200 began publishing on a regular, weekly basis in March of 1956. For context, today it’s common for albums to debut at No. 1. However, before 1991, when the Billboard 200 began utilizing Luminate’s electronically monitored tracking information, only six albums debuted at No. 1.
