Drake and 21 Savage’s Her Loss Debuts at No. 1, Dethrones Taylor Swift’s Midnights

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Drake and 21 Savage’s new joint LP Her Loss has rocketed to the top of the Billboard 200 albums chart, as Billboard reports. The record debuted at No. 1 on the chart, with the year’s biggest week for a hip-hop/R&B album and the fourth-largest streaming week for any album ever. Her Loss also dethroned Taylor Swift’s Midnights, which topped the chart shortly after its release on October 21. The new LP marks Drake’s 12th album to debut at No. 1, following the June release of Honestly, Nevermind.

Her Loss debuted with 404,000 equivalent album units, as well as 513.56 million on-demand official streams of its 16 songs. In addition to driving the largest week for any R&B/hip-hop album in 2022, Her Loss has had the largest week in that category since Drake’s own Certified Lover Boy debuted at No. 1 in September of last year.

Drake now has the third-most No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200—ranking under JAY-Z (with 14) and the Beatles (with 19). Only three other artists—Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, and Taylor Swift—have had more than 10 No. 1 LPs on the chart.

Drake and 21 Savage first announced Her Loss in a video for their Honestly, Nevermind track “Jimmy Cooks.” The LP was originally due October 28, however it was postponed to November 4 after Drake’s producer Noah “40” Shebib contracted COVID-19 while mixing and mastering the album.

After releasing Her Loss, Megan Thee Stallion wrote a series of tweets that appeared to criticize Drake for suggesting she lied about being shot by Tory Lanez, though she did not name anyone directly. Her Loss contains a song called “Circo Loco,” in which Drake raps, “This bitch lie about getting shots, but she still a stallion/She don’t even get the joke but she still smiling.”

Following that controversy, Drake and 21 Savage were sued by the publisher of Vogue for posting and distributing a mocked-up Vogue cover as part of their Her Loss promotion campaign. (Condé Nast and Vogue’s parent company, Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., formally filed the lawsuit. Pitchfork is also owned by Condé Nast and Advance.)