SZA is starting the new year off with a bang. Her latest project, SOS, is sitting atop of the Billboard Top 200 for the third consecutive week, making it the first No. 1 album of 2023. It’s also the first R&B album by a woman to spend its first three weeks leading the charts since Beyoncé did it in 2013 with her self-titled project.
According to Billboard, the Top Dawg release went down 29 percent from last week. But, the 128,000 album-equivalent sold in the week ending on Dec. 29 is still enough to take the top spot.
Of the album-equivalent units earned; 126,500 were streaming-equivalent, totaling 168.73 million on-demand official streams, which also dropped 29 percent from the previous week. Her album sales sit at 1,000, which is a 20 percent decrease and her track-equivalent album sales are at 500, which is a three percent increase.
SZA dropped SOS on Dec. 9, and the 23-track body of work features Don Toliver, Phoebe Bridgers, Travis Scott and the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The project received a ton of success before the arrival. Prior to the release, three singles debuted on the Billboard Hot 100: “Good Days,” “Shirt” and “I Hate U.” The streams from those songs alone made SOS eligible for Gold certification.
SOS is the Top Dawg Entertainment artist’s second studio album and first-ever to debut at No. 1. The chart-topping project also broke records in its opening week. According to Chart Data, the R&B singer’s 318,000 album-equivalent units moved in the U.S. in the week ending Dec. 15 accumulated the most streams ever in a debut week for an R&B album and was the third-largest streamed effort of all 2022. SOS also had the second-largest streaming week ever for an album by a female artist.
SZA’s new LP comes more than five years after her June 2017 release of Ctrl, which debuted and peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. It earned 3.9 million album-equivalent units and has yet to leave the weekly Billboard 200.