Brent Faiyaz to challenge for Billboard 200 top spot next week.
Brent Faiyaz is on pace to make Billboard 200 history with his latest album “Wasteland“. The second studio album which dropped last week is expected to debut at Billboard chart’s top spot with sales between 105,000 to 115,000 total equivalent units. The R&B star is challenging Bad Bunny for the #1 spot, and he would become the first independent artist since 2018 to achieve this feat.
Un Verano Sin Ti by Bad Bunny, which has been at the top of the chart for a fifth week, is also at No. 1, followed by Aespa at No. 3, Harry Styles at No. 4, and Morgan Wallen at No. 5. Drake, Future, Lil Durk, The Weeknd, and Chris Brown, at Nos. 6, 7, 8, and 9 respectively, make up the bottom half of the top 10.
.@brentfaiyaz’s ‘WASTELAND’ challenging @sanbenito‘s ‘Un Verano Sin Ti’ for #1 on this week’s US albums chart with 105-115K units. It would mark his first #1 album (via @HITSDD).
— chart data (@chartdata) July 9, 2022
If the Maryland singer tops the chart, he would become the first R&B singer to do it since Summer Walker’s “Still Over It” which dropped last year.
The new project is a follow-up to his 2017’s debut effort “Sonder Son”, with guest appearances from Alicia Keys, Drake, Tyler, The Creator and more.
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In a Vogue interview, Faiyaz discussed how the recording of Wasteland came about and how the album’s overall tone was influenced by movie soundtracks. “It was less of an album process and more of a life process. I just made a collection of songs and tied a story line together once I saw that they all kind of shared a similar theme. I didn’t really realize I was working on an album until I was maybe a little over halfway through. Then I realized, Wait a minute, this is a body of work,” he said about the album to Vogue.
“I was watching a lot of Tarantino films. I was watching Jackie Brown over and over again. I was also watching Vanilla Sky on repeat. I pulled a lot from that. But mostly I was inspired by the different people that I locked in with, from The Dream to Alicia Keys. I was just soaking up game from artists like Raphael Saadiq and No I.D., who have been doing this longer than I have.”
Update: A total of 88,000 equivalent album units were generated by the record in its first week, according to Billboard, comprising 6,000 album sales, 81,000 streaming equivalent album units (107.48 million on-demand streams of the tracks), and the remaining 12,000 track equivalent album units. His second studio album, WASTELAND, is his first to reach the top 10 of the charts since F*ck the World, his debut studio album, peaked at No. 20.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album as gold on November 30, 2022, indicating that it had sold over 500,000 units or album-equivalent units in the United States.
