Three wildly different artists crack the top 10 for the first time

Familiar faces top this week’s Billboard charts, as Playboi Carti‘s MUSIC returns to No. 1 and Kendrick Lamar‘s “Luther (feat. SZA)” sits atop the Hot 100 singles chart for an eighth consecutive week. But surprises nevertheless abound in the top 10, as a vinyl reissue lands a cult singer-songwriter on the Billboard 200 for the first time ever and two artists experience their first-ever top 10 singles.

TOP ALBUMS

There are slow weeks on the charts, and then there are slooooooow weeks on the charts. Right now, the top album in the country — Playboi Carti’s MUSIC, which returns to No. 1 for a third nonconsecutive week, as Ariana Grande‘s deluxe reissue of Eternal Sunshine slides to No. 2 — has the smallest number of “equivalent album units” (the cocktail of sales and streaming that determines where albums rank on the Billboard 200) since January of last year. In a typical week, the album at No. 1 will have accumulated somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 equivalent album units, while a blockbuster title can rack up a few hundred thousand, especially in its first week or two on the charts. This week, MUSIC has roughly 64,000 equivalent album units.

Still, slow weeks on the Billboard charts can yield fascinating anomalies.

With numbers depressed across the board, two albums debut in the top 10 this week. One is Who Believes in Angels? by veteran chart stalwarts Elton John and Brandi Carlile. (John alone has now landed an astonishing 22 albums in the top 10.) But the other new top 10 title is a 3-year-old debut album by an artist who’d never so much as cracked the Billboard 200 until this week.

How did this happen? Well, it’s worth remembering that there are several tried-and-true methods to giving old albums a chart boost. One is the deluxe reissue, in which works are expanded to include never-before-heard songs; just last week, Ariana Grande used that exact playbook to propel her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine from No. 87 all the way back to No. 1. (See also: SZA’s 2022 album SOS, which still sits at No. 4 nearly four months after it received the deluxe-reissue treatment.)

Another trick involves releasing physical editions of albums that had only been available digitally. Last September, Travis Scott shipped all of the pre-ordered vinyl copies of his mixtape Days Before Rodeo at the same time, which sent the album rocketing from No. 106 all the way to No. 1. (It disappeared from the Billboard 200 the following week.) Tyler, The Creator pulled off a similar trick with his album Call Me If You Get Lost in 2022 — and yielded a virtually identical result, as the album surged from No. 120 to No. 1 on the strength of a vinyl release. In the coming weeks (or months, or years), look for Playboi Carti to pull the same move, as MUSIC‘s physical releases haven’t shipped yet.

Well, vinyl reissues aren’t just for A-list rappers. On April 4, the singer-songwriter Ethel Cain released a long-awaited physical edition of her 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter. An epic concept album about family trauma — Cain, the trans daughter of a Baptist deacon, grew up homeschooled in Tallahassee, Fla. — Preacher’s Daughter draws on ambient music and assorted Gothic influences. It’s a challenging but gorgeous record (and an NPR Music favorite), but it’s not the typical stuff of the Billboard top 10. And yet here we are, with Preacher’s Daughter making its Billboard bow at No. 10.

If nothing else, it’s a good sign for Cain’s next album. The artist released an experimental set of guitar drones titled Perverts at the beginning of the year; not surprisingly, it didn’t chart. But an official follow-up to Preacher’s Daughter — titled Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You — is due out in August.

TOP SONGS

As with the Billboard albums chart, the action on the Hot 100 isn’t at the top of the chart, where Kendrick Lamar’s “Luther (feat. SZA)” holds at No. 1 for an eighth consecutive week. It’s not at No. 2, where Drake‘s “Nokia” climbs from No. 3 to a new chart peak — thanks, at least in part, to an official video release. It’s not even in the fact that Kendrick Lamar and Drake had never sat together at No. 1 and No. 2 until this week.

No, what jumps out this week is the arrival of two artists who’d never hit the top 10 until now. Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” leaps from No. 14 to No. 7 — for more on Warren’s rise, see last week’s charts column — to become his first-ever top 10 hit. And debuting at No. 4 is BigXthaPlug‘s “All the Way (feat. Bailey Zimmerman).” Zimmerman, a fast-rising country singer, had hit the top 10 once before: “Rock and a Hard Place” peaked at No. 10 in 2023. But BigXthaPlug, a rapper, had never seen his success on the albums chart translate to a top 10 hit, until now.

Warren’s song has been on a massive upward trajectory for several months now, with momentum — sure to be juiced by the arrival of wedding season — that’s likely to make “Ordinary” a legitimate “song of the summer” contender for 2025. But the future of “All the Way” seems trickier to game out. BigXthaPlug and Zimmerman both have substantial followings, and heaven knows hip-hop/country crossovers have burned up the charts in recent years: In fact, the two longest runs at No. 1 in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 belong to songs that fit that description: Lil Nas X‘s “Old Town Road (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)” and Shaboozey‘s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” topped the Hot 100 for 19 weeks apiece in 2019 and 2024, respectively.

There’s no rule that says a given year’s unofficial “song of the summer” has to be brand-new; after all, Kate Bush‘s “Running Up That Hill” was a colossal song-of-the-summer staple three years ago, boosted by an appearance in the TV show Stranger Things, and that song dates all the way back to 1985. But, as songs sit on the charts for longer and longer runs — Teddy Swims‘ Lose Control,” which still sits at No. 8, has now logged 86 weeks in the Hot 100 — it’s worth noting which new bangers are gaining momentum. With Alex Warren and BigXthaPlug suddenly in the top 10, and Morgan Wallen‘s I’m the Problem due out May 16, we’re starting to get a sense of where the leading song-of-the-summer contenders are most likely to materialize.

WORTH NOTING

How hard is it to break into the Hot 100’s top 10? Consider this: We’re halfway through April, and Alex Warren and BigXthaPlug are the second and third acts this year to break into the top 10 for the first time. (The first was Doechii, whose “Anxiety” grazed the top 10 a few weeks ago.) It’s not just that the same songs stick around for months on end — Benson Boone‘s “Beautiful Things,” which came out in January 2024, just reentered the top 10 yet again — but also that the same artists hit the top 10 over and over, crowding out most newcomers.

This has been an issue for a while now. Last year, a grand total of 14 acts scored their first-ever top 10 hits: 4Batz, Gracie Abrams, Benson Boone, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Dody6, Noah Kahan, Rich the Kid, Sexyy Red, Tommy Richman, ROSÉ, Shaboozey, Teddy Swims and Tyler, The Creator.

Many of those hitmakers spent 2024 crowding out other newcomers, whether with a single song that sat in the top 10 for months — “Beautiful Things,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control,” Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby,” ROSÉ’s “APT.” — or, in the case of Carpenter, three songs that sat in the top 10 for months.

Now that several of those 14 acts have become reliable hitmakers in their own right — Roan has seen two more of her songs enter the top 10 in recent weeks — newcomers are facing that much more competition for limited chart real estate. No matter how long Alex Warren and BigXthaPlug reside in the top 10, both had to have an awful lot go right just to reach the milestones they achieved this week.