NEW YORK – Ariana Grande’s long-awaited new album, Eternal Sunshine, opens at the top of the latest Billboard chart – dated March 23 – with the biggest debut of 2024 so far, kicking off a season of expected blockbusters from Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa.
Eternal Sunshine, Grande’s seventh studio album and her first in almost four years, starts at No. 1 with the equivalent of 227,000 sales in the United States, including 195 million streams and 77,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.
Eternal Sunshine is the American singer’s sixth No. 1 album. All of Grande’s studio LPs have gone to the top except Dangerous Woman in 2016, which was held at No. 2 by that year’s juggernaut, Drake’s Views.
Since her last album, Positions (2020), Grande has been shooting an adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked, in which she will play Glinda the Good.
Production on the two-part Wicked film was delayed first by the Covid-19 pandemic and then by the 2023 strike by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The first Wicked film is set to be released in November.
Grande’s first-week numbers are the best for any new album in 2024 by a decent margin, topping Ye and Ty Dolla Sign’s Vultures 1 (148,000).
More big figures are on the horizon for Beyonce’s country pivot, Cowboy Carter, due at the end of March; Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department in April; and Lipa’s Radical Optimism in May.
Meanwhile, an eight-second video from Swift’s upcoming album that has no sound made it to the top of the iTunes Top Videos chart on March 18, reported American entertainment platform E! News.
The video, titled All’s Fair In Love And Poetry, did not have any vocals, but it featured a backdrop with a description that Swift revealed in February when she announced the upcoming album.
It is not the first time she is hitting the charts with static noise.
The 34-year-old singer topped the Canadian iTunes charts in 2014 when a technical glitch accidentally released eight seconds of static, titled Track 3, ahead of the release of her original 1989 album. NYTIMES
