Billboard announced that Kendrick Lamar’s new album, Untitled Unmastered, has landed at the top of the “Billboard 200” chart. Lamar released the album, a series of riffs and b-sides that didn’t make it into 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, online on March 3 without any warning. In the following week, the album accrued 178,000 equivalent “album sales” — Billboard counts 10 individual track sales or 1500 track streams as a single “album” sold. Of that, 142,000 records were full record sales.
The record is Lamar’s second album to debut at the top of the chart in the last 12 months. To Pimp a Butterfly earned 363,000 “albums,” including 324,000 album sales, in its first week on sale in March 2015.
Lamar is now the third artist to release multiple chart-topping albums in a 12-month span. Drake and Future both released two top-selling albums in 2015, including their collaboration, What a Time to be Alive. As Billboard pointed out, Future put out three albums in a seven month span — August, 2015 to February, 2016 — which have all debuted at number one.
Untitled Unmastered appeared in stores on CD Friday, and a vinyl edition is expected to ship May 27.