As expected, country superstar Morgan Wallen has the week's No. 1 album, as I'm the Problem debuts atop the Billboard 200. All but one of its 37 songs land in the Hot 100, while his new single, the Tate McRae duet "What I Want," debuts atop the chart. Elsewhere, the underperformance of two household names demonstrates the fickle nature of fame — and the difficulty of cracking the charts at all in 2025.
TOP ALBUMS
Last week, the English rock band Sleep Token notched its first-ever No. 1 album, as Even in Arcadia debuted atop the Billboard 200 albums chart. This week, Even in Arcadia slides to No. 6, while the new No. 1 is a debut everyone saw coming: With the biggest streaming numbers of 2025 and strong sales to boot, Morgan Wallen's I'm the Problem is the chart-topper it had always seemed destined to become.
With 493,000 "equivalent album units" — that's the cocktail of sales and streaming that goes into assembling the Billboard 200 each week — I'm the Problem had the biggest week of any album this year. But its streaming numbers are lagging a bit behind those posted by its predecessor, 2023's One Thing at a Time, and it hasn't yet produced a surefire "song of the summer" contender to match 2023's "Last Night" (or 2024's "I Had Some Help," the Post Malone song on which Wallen featured as a guest).
Still, blockbuster numbers are blockbuster numbers, and Wallen's presence is felt all over the Hot 100 singles chart (see below). It's a huge debut for an album that promises to remain a presence for months — and, let's face it, years — to come, given that One Thing at a Time still sits at No. 4, while 2021's Dangerous: The Double Album resides at No. 12.
Think about that for a second: I'm the Problem has 37 songs, all but one of which rank among the week's top 100 songs. (Technically, he's got 37 on the chart, because "I Had Some Help" sits at No. 19.) Even after releasing all those new songs, fans still streamed One Thing at a Time (which has 36 tracks) and Dangerous: The Double Album (which began with 30 songs and subsequently expanded to include 33) enough to keep them both in the top 12. That's a lot of Morgan Wallen to go around — and his debut album, If I Know Me, is still sitting around at No. 75.
There's one other debut worth noting, as BTS's Jin enters the Billboard 200 at No. 3. Echo is Jin's highest-charting solo album to date, after Happy debuted (and peaked) at No. 4 last fall.
TOP SONGS
Last week, Kendrick Lamar's "Luther (feat. SZA)" extended its run at No. 1 to an impressive 13 weeks, though Alex Warren's "Ordinary" looked primed to take over the top spot. This week, "Ordinary" finally overtakes "Luther" — just in time to get swamped by the Morgan Wallen onslaught. With Wallen locking down the top three songs, "Ordinary" slips from No. 2 to No. 4 and "Luther" slides from No. 1 to No. 5.
Wallen released eight songs in the run-up to I'm the Problem's release — six of them cracked the top 10 — but none of those topped this week's chart. That honor belongs to "What I Want," a trap-tinged single Wallen recorded with Canadian pop star Tate McRae. It's McRae's first-ever No. 1 single (her hit "Greedy" reached No. 3), and it looks as well-positioned as any Wallen track to contend for 2025's "song of the summer" sweepstakes.
All but one of I'm the Problem's songs land in this week's Hot 100, and six of them crowd the top 10. And the one I'm the Problem track to miss the Hot 100 this week most likely did so on a technicality: "Lies Lies Lies" peaked at No. 7 last July, and the bar for old songs re-entering the chart is higher than the bar for debuts. To re-enter the Hot 100, "Lies Lies Lies" would have had to crack the top 50, and because it didn't, it missed the cut.
And in case you've breathlessly anticipated an update on the all-time records posted by unkillable hits, Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" drops from No. 4 to No. 9 — ending, at least for now, its record-setting run of 45 weeks in the top five — while Teddy Swims' "Lose Control" has now posted an all-time-record 92 weeks on the Hot 100, surpassing Glass Animals' unforgivable 2020 hit "Heat Waves." Pushed down by Morgan Wallen's surge, "Lose Control" dips from No. 7 to No. 11, but now belongs to the record books.
WORTH NOTING
Charts, by their very nature, contain only a finite number of titles. Which means that for observers, it can be easy to miss when a notable work fails to chart altogether.
Last week marked the first week of chart eligibility for new albums by two major artists: country-turned-pop singer Maren Morris (D R E A M S I C L E) and alt-rock band Arcade Fire (Pink Elephant). But neither album cracked the Billboard 200 in its first week, and neither rallies to enter this week's chart. For both, that's a steep drop-off from their past chart performance.
Morris hit No. 5 with 2016's Hero, No. 4 with 2019's Girl and No. 21 with 2022's Humble Quest. But as the singer has attempted to transition from country to pop, she seems to have found a home with neither camp; D R E A M S I C L E hit No. 28 on Billboard's top album sales chart last week, but without an accompanying streaming boom, sales weren't enough to land it among the week's 200 most popular albums overall.
For Arcade Fire, the fall was even more catastrophic — especially given that the band enjoyed a high-profile spot as a Saturday Night Live musical guest the day after Pink Elephant's release. After peaking at No. 123 with its breakthrough classic Funeral, the band landed five straight albums in the top 10: 2007's Neon Bible (No. 2), 2010's The Suburbs (No. 1), 2013's Reflektor (No. 1), 2017's Everything Now (No. 1) and 2022's We (No. 6). But Pink Elephant — surely hurt, at least in part, by sexual-abuse allegations against singer Win Butler — debuted at No. 12 on the sales chart and missed the Billboard 200 entirely.
The underperformance of both albums speaks to the fickle nature of fame, just as it speaks to the dominance of streaming that last week's 12th-biggest seller couldn't crack the Billboard 200. But it also illustrates just how hard it is to crack the Billboard 200 at all in 2025, as venerated hits crowd the rankings for years on end thanks to streaming. These days, newness and name recognition aren't enough on their own.
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