This week's pop charts don't offer much in the way of new faces, as Kendrick Lamar tops both the Billboard 200 albums chart (with GNX) and the Hot 100 singles chart (with his SZA collaboration "Luther"). But there is one debut worth noting: LISA, a member of the blockbuster K-pop girl group BLACKPINK, enters the Billboard 200 at No. 7 with her new solo album, Alter Ego.
TOP ALBUMS
In recent weeks, we've seen No. 1 debuts by big-name stars in pop, hip-hop, Latin music and R&B, as albums by Tate McRae, Drake & PARTYNEXTDOOR, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny and Lil Baby have all entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1 since 2025 dawned. But in weeks when a world-beater doesn't enter the marketplace, things can get prettttttty slow on the ol' charts.
With Lady Gaga's new album, Mayhem, set to make its presence felt next week, the pre-storm calm sees only one album debut in the top 50: That'd be Alter Ego by LISA of the K-pop group BLACKPINK, as well as the latest season of The White Lotus; it bows at No. 7. (More on LISA, and the great BLACKPINK diaspora, in a moment.) Otherwise, we get a shuffling of pre-existing powerhouses, as Kendrick Lamar's GNX returns to No. 1 and switches spots with McRae's So Close to What, which drops to No. 3 in its second week.
The remaining albums in the top five, and much of the top 10, hold at the spots they occupied last week, including Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR's $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, which is proving durable at No. 2. But, using the metric by which the Billboard 200 is ranked — a cocktail, dubbed "equivalent album units," that combines sales and streaming numbers — it's a down week across the board.
Besides Alter Ego, the only other album to debut in the top 100 is Fridayy's Some Days I'm Good, Some Days I'm Not, which debuts at No. 51. Fridayy, a Philly-based R&B singer, has already scored hits with Lil Baby and DJ Khaled, so he's not new to the charts. But this week does mark his introduction to the Billboard 200 as a headliner after his self-titled debut, from 2023, failed to crack the chart. He's clearly ascendant, however Some Days I'm Good performs in the weeks to come.
TOP SONGS
Sometimes, the Billboard charts are a study in incrementalism: When faced with a logjam near the top, you look for borderline-imperceptible shifts from week to week that, over time, hint at larger trends. Because, if you don't seek out those shifts, the charts can resemble… well, this week's Hot 100, which looks an awful lot like last week's Hot 100.
How static is this week's top 10? Well, the top nine songs reside in the exact positions they occupied last week. Kendrick Lamar's "Luther (feat. SZA)" holds at No. 1 for a third straight week, followed by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars' indomitable "Die With a Smile" and two more Lamar tracks — "Not Like Us" and "TV Off (feat. Lefty Gunplay)" — at Nos. 3 and 4, respectively. The first bit of chart movement finds Drake's "Nokia" ticking up a spot to No. 10 and displacing Lamar's "Squabble Up"; in the year-old beef between the two rappers, this would qualify as the tiniest of victories.
But, in the spirit of incremental signs that point to larger growth, the song holding at No. 8 — Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club" — does top this week's Digital Song Sales chart, marking the first time the singer has ever hit No. 1 via that particular metric. Sales are finicky from week to week, but it does suggest that "Pink Pony Club" (perhaps with an assist from no less a light than Rick Astley) is still reaching new audiences a year and a half after the release of Roan's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. And, with her new single "The Giver" dropping Thursday night, she looks likely to receive another chart boost in the near future.
For those who haven't followed Roan's slow-then-fast rise to superstardom, "Pink Pony Club" is far older than the album that contains it. The singer first released the track via a different major label all the way back in April 2020, only to get dropped; after she reacquired the rights to the song, she included it on what became her breakthrough album. So the rise of "Pink Pony Club" to this week's pinnacle — the top-selling song in America, with about 6,000 digital sales — has taken only five years. Don't worry; not much else has happened in that time.
WORTH NOTING
As mentioned above, the only album to debut in this week's top 50 belongs to LISA, one of four members of BLACKPINK. The K-pop girl-group juggernaut has been quiet for a little while now — its last album, the chart-topping global phenomenon Born Pink, came out in 2022 — in order to allow its members a bit of space to launch solo projects. And all four have done well for themselves, with more news to follow when JENNIE's solo album (which came out last Friday, just one week after LISA's Alter Ego) inevitably turns up on next week's charts.
Let's run down the BLACKPINK solo stats as they currently stand:
- ROSÉ has found the widest success in the U.S. so far, at least as far as the pop charts are concerned. Her debut solo album, rosie, entered the Billboard 200 at No. 3 in December — and, most notably, spawned the colossal hit "APT.," her earworm with Bruno Mars. That song holds at No. 6 on this week's Hot 100 and has been a mainstay on the chart for months now. (As for rosie, it sits at No. 41 in its 13th week on the Billboard 200.)
- LISA just became the second BLACKPINK member to notch a top 10 album, as Alter Ego enters this week's chart at No. 7. Its songs haven't yet caught on in a major way here — her only Hot 100 hit this week, "Born Again (feat. Doja Cat and RAYE)," re-enters the chart at No. 96, though three of her songs cracked the chart's lower regions last year — but she's made waves in the TV and movie worlds in recent weeks. Not only does she appear on the new season of The White Lotus, but she also performed Wings' "Live and Let Die" on the Academy Awards telecast earlier this month. She'll need a boost from streaming if she wants Alter Ego to have a long chart life (though it's this week's top seller, its streaming numbers aren't out of this world), but she's already carved out a far-reaching pop-cultural presence this year.
- JENNIE is set to hit next week's Billboard 200, after Ruby dropped last Friday. Like LISA, JENNIE has worked as an actress; she turned up in the misbegotten HBO series The Idol a couple years ago. And, though her chart success as a solo artist in the U.S. has been limited thus far — three songs from Ruby have popped up near the bottom of the Hot 100 in recent months — she's had massive solo success overseas. Next week will tell the story of how much her solo work has taken hold here.
- JISOO has been slower to take off in the U.S. than her BLACKPINK cohorts, though her recent digital EP, AMORTAGE, will get a boost with a physical release this Friday. Though she hasn't yet cracked the U.S. pop charts as a solo artist, songs like "Flower" and "Earthquake" have been huge hits overseas. And, like her counterparts, she's taken acting and modeling roles along the way.
Then, of course, there's BLACKPINK itself, which topped the Billboard 200 with its last album (Born Pink) and is set to kick off a world tour in July. Between BLACKPINK's many solo offshoots and the inevitable return of BTS, to say nothing of surefire future chart-toppers from other acts (Stray Kids, anyone?), K-pop promises to be one of the biggest stories in music this year.
Copyright 2025 NPR
