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

Rock and roll is alive and effectively 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, because of 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 because of 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 information by Ghost and Sleep Token have already hit No. 1 this 12 months, Breach scores the most important rock debut since Software‘s long-awaited Inoculum six years in the past.

Of Breach‘s 200,000 “equal album items” — 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 a success single: Solely one in every of 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 items, 51,000 of which come from gross sales. And, as we regularly word 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 if you happen to wanted one other knowledge level to display the significance of streaming, think about sombr‘s I Barely Know Her. The rising Gen Z star is not producing a lot in the way in which of gross sales 4 weeks into his debut album’s run, particularly on condition that bodily copies will not be obtainable till November. However with sturdy 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 “Peculiar” is, but once more, hovering helplessly at No. 2. And so forth. Apart from 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 largely 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 price 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 track, from Livid 7, topped the Scorching 100 for 12 weeks, although Taylor Swift most likely thinks its run ought to have been even longer.

It will be arduous for “Golden” to hit that 12-week benchmark, given the method 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 track 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 price 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 track’s run now spans 78 weeks, out of a record-shrapnelizing 109 weeks on the Scorching 100. It is nonetheless a success 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 protected 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 track be heard, supplied anybody is left to listen to it.

WORTH NOTING

It is grow to be fairly widespread for outdated songs to search out new chart life by way of TikTok virality. In January, Imogen Heap scored her first-ever Scorching 100 hit — extremely, “Cover 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 the moment sits at No. 100 because of a TikTok development. And, although it did not crack the Scorching 100, Connie Francis skilled a late-in-life profession surge earlier this 12 months because of TikTok customers’ embrace of “Fairly Little Child.”

The newest oldie to make its Scorching 100 debut belongs to Rihanna, whose 2007 track “Breakin’ Dishes” debuts at No. 86 this week, thanks largely to its reputation on TikTok. The track 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 worldwide resurgence, because it charts in additional than a dozen international locations.

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

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