Rock and roll is alive and well atop the Billboard 200 albums chart this week, as Twenty One Pilots' Breach racks up humongous sales en route to a No. 1 debut. Elsewhere on the charts, HUNTR/X's "Golden" keeps on topping the Hot 100 singles chart, while a Rihanna deep cut crashes the charts 18 years into its existence, thanks to TikTok.
TOP ALBUMS
Last week, the summer's great left-field pop-culture juggernaut — that'd be the Netflix film KPop Demon Hunters — finally landed its soundtrack atop the Billboard 200 after a long, steady climb up the charts. This week, it falls back to No. 2 thanks to a genre that's inspired many premature obituaries: rock and roll.
Your new No. 1 album, the proggy and hip-hop-inflected Breach, is by Twenty One Pilots, who last topped the albums chart more than a decade ago, with 2015's Blurryface. Though rock records by Ghost and Sleep Token have already hit No. 1 this year, Breach scores the biggest rock debut since Tool's long-awaited Inoculum six years ago.
Of Breach's 200,000 "equivalent album units" — that's the cocktail of sales and streaming that informs the Billboard 200 rankings — 169,000 came from sales, with 72,000 of those on vinyl. Those are terrific numbers in 2025, but Breach also had Twenty One Pilots' best-ever streaming week and debuts at No. 8 on the streaming chart. All it's missing is a hit single: Only one of its songs, "City Walls," hits this week's Hot 100, debuting at No. 83.
The top 10's other debut, Ed Sheeran's Play, has experienced a softer launch: The album debuts at No. 5 with 71,000 equivalent album units, 51,000 of which come from sales. And, as we often note around these parts, sales are vastly harder to sustain than streaming, which suggests that both debuts may be set for short runs in the top 10.
As if you needed another data point to demonstrate the importance of streaming, consider sombr's I Barely Know Her. The rising Gen Z star isn't generating much in the way of sales four weeks into his debut album's run, especially given that physical copies won't be available until November. But with robust streaming numbers, I Barely Know Her holds at No. 10.
TOP SONGS
Once again, there isn't a ton of movement near the top of the Hot 100 singles chart. The KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack continues to lock down four songs in the top 10, led by "Golden" at No. 1 for a sixth nonconsecutive week. Alex Warren's "Ordinary" is, yet again, hovering helplessly at No. 2. And so on. Aside from an expected drop for Sabrina Carpenter's "Tears" — the streaming numbers for her new album Man's Best Friend are dipping in its third week on the chart, while Carpenter's airplay numbers are mostly going to "Manchild," which holds at No. 3 — this week's chart isn't much different from last week's.
There's still a handful of milestones worth noting, though. "Golden" has now posted the longest run at No. 1 for a soundtrack hit since Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again (feat. Charlie Puth)" in 2015. That song, from Furious 7, topped the Hot 100 for 12 weeks, though Taylor Swift probably thinks its run should have been even longer.
It'll be hard for "Golden" to hit that 12-week benchmark, given the approach of Swift's "The Fate of Ophelia" — the first single from The Life of a Showgirl, which, like the album itself, drops Oct. 3 — and the usual flurry of holiday perennials. But the airplay numbers for "Golden" go up, up, up another 16% this week, and the song has officially surpassed Encanto's "We Don't Talk About Bruno" (which spent five weeks at No. 1), not to mention a decade's worth of soundtrack smashes.
Oh, and it's with a heavy heart that we must report the return of Teddy Swims' "Lose Control" to the top 10. The song's run now spans 78 weeks, out of a record-shrapnelizing 109 weeks on the Hot 100. It's still a hit on the streaming charts, still gobbling up loads of radio airplay, still clogging our collective cultural bloodstream like so many microplastics. At this point, it's safe to assume that "Lose Control" won't biodegrade from the charts until our children's children's children's children have perished from the earth. Only then can another song be heard, provided anyone is left to hear it.
WORTH NOTING
It's become reasonably common for old songs to find new chart life via TikTok virality. In January, Imogen Heap scored her first-ever Hot 100 hit — incredibly, "Hide and Seek" never cracked that chart — with "Headlock," 20 years after its release. Radiohead's "Let Down," from 1997's OK Computer, currently sits at No. 100 thanks to a TikTok trend. And, though it didn't crack the Hot 100, Connie Francis experienced a late-in-life career surge earlier this year thanks to TikTok users' embrace of "Pretty Little Baby."
The latest oldie to make its Hot 100 debut belongs to Rihanna, whose 2007 song "Breakin' Dishes" debuts at No. 86 this week, thanks largely to its popularity on TikTok. The song spent months on Billboard's Dance Club Songs chart in 2008 and 2009, yet it didn't crack the Hot 100 until this week. It's in the midst of a global resurgence, as it charts in more than a dozen countries.
Rihanna's most recent full-length album, Anti, came out in 2016, and she's released singles only sporadically — "Lift Me Up," from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, was nominated for an Oscar in 2023 — in the years since.
This year, she dropped a song called "Friend of Mine" as part of her involvement in this summer's Smurfs movie and soundtrack, but it failed to chart. Still, the success of "Breakin' Dishes" suggests an ongoing hunger for non-Smurf-adjacent Rihanna music. Here's hoping this wills some into the universe.
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