Columbia RecordsHarry Styles‘ self-titled debut album was only going in One Direction: straight to number one.
The critically acclaimed disc entered the Billboard album chart at #1 with 230,000 equivalent album units sold. Of those, 193,000 were traditional album sales. That means he’s just set a new record for the biggest debut sales week for a British male’s first full-length album since 1991, when Nielsen started keeping track of this stuff. The previous record-holder was Sam Smith, whose 2014 debut In the Lonely Hour sold 166,000 copies.
Harry’s also only the second British male artist to debut at #1 with a solo album. The first was his former bandmate Zayn Malik, whose debut Mind of Mine entered at #1 in 2016
One Direction is now one of the few groups to have more than one member score a solo #1 album. Other groups who have achieved this: Destiny’s Child, The Beatles and Blind Faith.
Elsewhere on the chart, Paramore‘s new album After Laughter enters at #6, and Machine Gun Kelly scores his third top 10 album with Bloom, debuting at #8.
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