Tory Lanez has secured his third No. 1 album on the Billboard Top Rap Albums chart with his newly released The New Toronto 3. The mixtape debuted this week at the chart’s top-ranking spot with a reported 64,000 equivalent album units.
“It’s a mixtape, I don’t even know how!” Lanez told Billboard of his new accomplishment. “I didn’t promote it. I put the cover to it [out] like a week before it came out. I thought it was gonna sell like 10,000.”
The New Toronto 3 also sits at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, just below The Weeknd’s reigning After Hours. The tape marked Lanez’s last album with Interscope Records and fulfilled his contract with the record label. Looking ahead, Lanez revealed to Billboard that he’s not planning on signing with any new labels.
“To be 100 percent, there’s so many labels offering me so much money — like millions of dollars,” Lanez said. “I’ve gotten offers that are life-changing offers, but I don’t care. I already own my masters and publishing and everything. So I don’t see any reason to give that to somebody else.”
The New Toronto 3 sees two lone features, one from Mansa, who was Lanez’s first signee to his One Umbrella label imprint. Now that he’s an independent artist, Lanez is ready to nurture more up-and-coming talent.
“That kid is probably one of the most talented individuals that I know,” Lanez said of Mansa. “I think out of everybody, he was the first person that I did sign. That kid is a problem. He’s a real-life problem.”
He also wants to help young artists navigate the record label situations that he’s dealt with.
“When I went through these situations, I told myself there’s good things that came out of these situations and bad things,” he continued. “I never want an artist to feel how I felt. And because I have that [knowledge], that now gives me a better insight on what not to do and how to pay more attention. At the end of the day, you gotta go at things unselfishly.”
Revisit Lanez’s The New Toronto 3 below.