On Sunday (Jan. 21), Billboard reported that 21 Savage’s american dream album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The achievement marked his fourth No. 1 overall, following 2018’s I Am > I Was, 2020’s Savage Mode II with Metro Boomin, and 2022’s Her Loss with Drake.
american dream sold 133,000 album-equivalent units during its first week of release, which included 169.53 million on-demand official streams. Said figure is 21 Savage’s biggest as a solo artist thus far. The surprise drop contained 15 songs with additional features from Doja Cat, Young Thug, Lil Durk, Travis Scott, Summer Walker, Brent Faiyaz, Burna Boy, and more.
To date, american dream spawned one single, the London on da Track-produced “redrum,” along with a matching video that showed 21 back in the United Kingdom. Fans were also able to check out a trailer for a biopic — also titled american dream — that stars Donald Glover, Caleb McLaughlin, Jabari Banks, Natasha Lyonne, and Drew “Druski” Desbordes.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, 21 explained how the lyrics found within his music are “fiction as hell.” “I just think of it in my head,” he said to the publication. “Some of it be based off of real life, but a lot of it be creative stories.” He also admitted that he’d only recently begun celebrating his birthday after experiencing so much trauma during the special occasion in the past.
“I got shot on my birthday and I got into a car accident with my mama on my other birthday,” he revealed. “So I always felt like my birthday was cursed or some s**t. I just used to sit in the house on my birthday every year.”
If you missed it, you can enjoy 21 Savage’s american dream album in its entirety here.