This week’s pop charts are all about The Weeknd — and the Grammys

As expected, The Weeknd‘s new album Hurry Up Tomorrow debuts atop the Billboard 200 albums chart, while Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars‘ “Die With a Smile” holds off a new Morgan Wallen track to lead the Hot 100. Elsewhere, the Grammys’ grubby little fingerprints are all over Billboard‘s biggest charts, as the night’s breakout winners — Beyoncé, Chappell Roan, Doechii and others — post huge chart gains.

TOP ALBUMS

The Weeknd is one of the 21st century’s most reliable hitmakers, and he’s spent months rolling out singles from his new album, Hurry Up Tomorrow. So it’s no surprise that the record has had a dominant first week, as it enters this week’s Billboard 200 at No. 1. In fact, its streaming numbers alone would be enough to land it on top of the chart — and its sales numbers more than doubled its streaming numbers. It’s the biggest week an album has had since Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department last spring.

The Weeknd and his team worked hard to run up the score. Hurry Up Tomorrow was available in a variety of physical formats (CD, vinyl, cassette, deluxe box sets and signed editions) and deep-discounted digital versions. And this year The Weeknd ended his Grammys boycott — launched in the wake of the 2021 awards, in which he received zero nominations for one of 2020’s most successful albums — in order to perform a surprise medley of “Cry for Me” and “Timeless (feat. Playboi Carti)” during the telecast, just two days after Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s release.

The gambit clearly paid off: “Cry for Me” debuts on this week’s Hot 100 at No. 12, while “Timeless” leaps from No. 18 to No. 7. And Hurry Up Tomorrow is No. 1 by a wide margin, more than quintupling the combined sales-and-streaming numbers posted by the album at No. 2, Bad Bunny‘s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, which had held down the top spot as recently as last week.

All three of last week’s top 10 debuts — Teddy Swims‘ I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2), Kane Brown‘s The High Road and Central Cee‘s Can’t Rush Greatness — take big tumbles this time around, to No. 22, No. 32 and No. 49, respectively. Taking their place in the top 10 are The Weeknd and two other artists with strong presences on the Grammys telecast: best new artist winner Chappell Roan, whose The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess leaps from No. 14 to No. 6, and Taylor Swift, who didn’t win any awards but was an omnipresent face in the crowd. The Tortured Poets Department climbs from No. 11 to No. 9.

TOP SONGS

Last week, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ blockbuster duet “Die With a Smile” saw its four-week reign at No. 1 end, thanks to the chart-topping debut of “4X4,” by the rapper Travis Scott. This week, “Die With a Smile” returns to the top of the charts for a fifth now-nonconsecutive week, while “4X4” free-falls all the way to No. 57. Scott had had five songs hit No. 1 in his phenomenally successful career, but he’s never had one spend more than a single week at the top of the Hot 100.

Though it couldn’t quite crack the top spot, another debut replaces “4X4” in the top 10, and it’s by another chart heavyweight. Morgan Wallen’s new single “I’m the Problem,” the first single from a forthcoming album bearing the same name, debuts at No. 2. Wallen’s songs tend to stick around longer than Scott’s: The country singer still has three other songs in the top 30 (“Love Somebody,” the Post Malone collaboration “I Had Some Help” and “Smile”), so “I’m the Problem” seems destined to stick around for a while.

Usual suspects round out the top 10, including one extremely venerable song: Benson Boone‘s “Beautiful Things,” which leaps from No. 15 to No. 9 — in its 54th week on the Hot 100 — on the strength of his gymnastic performance at the Grammys. Speaking of which…

WORTH NOTING

It’s become a common refrain, every awards season, for someone or other to declare that entertainment-industry honors like the Grammys don’t matter. But, just as the Oscars can drive hundreds of millions of dollars in box office, the Grammys have a clear-cut impact on the cocktail of sales, airplay and streaming that drives the Billboard charts.

A few examples of the “Grammy bump” have already popped up above. The Weeknd would certainly have hit No. 1 with or without his Grammy-night medley — it certainly didn’t hurt — but would “Beautiful Things” be back in the top 10? The album that spawned it, Fireworks & Rollerblades, leaps from No. 49 to No. 23, too.

As noted above, Chappell Roan’s album returned to the top 10 on the strength of her Grammy performance — as well as her best new artist win and the viral speech that followed. “Pink Pony Club,” which she performed on the show, leaps from No. 45 to a new peak at No. 18, while “Good Luck, Babe!” rebounds from No. 30 to No. 23. Roan’s Grammy bump is undeniable.

Other Grammy standouts soared this week:

• Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” won record and song of the year, and now jumps from No. 29 to No. 15. (Next week, we’ll see how his songs perform on the charts in the wake of Lamar’s headlining performance in the Super Bowl halftime show.)
• Doechii, who won best rap album for Alligator Bites Never Heal, was one of the night’s viral performers, and the charts bear that out. Her song “Denial Is a River” leaps from No. 55 to a new peak at No. 27, while the album blazes from No. 62 to No. 14.
• Billie Eilish has already been floating around near the top of the charts for ages, but “Birds of a Feather” — the song she performed early in the telecast — climbs from No. 7 to No. 4.
• We’re many months removed from Brat Summer, but Charli xcx‘s album zips from No. 52 to No. 26 on the Billboard 200.
• Lady Gaga had to buy ad time to get the song heard on the Grammys’ telecast — she and Bruno Mars performed The Mamas and the Papas‘ “California Dreamin'” instead — but her new single, “Abracadabra,” debuts at No. 29.
• Finally, Beyoncé’s long-awaited, first-ever win for album of the year was bound to kick-start the chart run of Cowboy Carter, which had been hovering in the Billboard 200’s lower regions — and even slid off the chart entirely last week. This week, it re-enters at No. 19.