As expected, Lady Gaga's Mayhem storms to a No. 1 debut on the Billboard albums chart, displacing Kendrick Lamar's GNX from the top spot. But Lamar's "Luther (feat. SZA)" remains at No. 1 on the Hot 100 singles chart for a fourth consecutive week — the longest run of the rapper's career. And Doechii pulls off a rare feat, as she lands two versions of her song "Anxiety" on the Hot 100 — and scores the highest-charting hit of her career in the process.
TOP ALBUMS
Last week, just one album debuted in the top 50 of the Billboard albums chart — LISA's Alter Ego, which premiered at No. 7 — amid the ongoing dominance of Kendrick Lamar's GNX at No. 1. This time around, GNX is displaced by one of the year's most hotly anticipated albums: Lady Gaga's Mayhem, which enters the chart at the top spot after a long windup that's included three top 40 singles (including the chart-topping Bruno Mars duet "Die With a Smile").
Gaga has kept busy in the five years since her last full-blown pop album, Chromatica, in 2020: She starred in a doomed Joker sequel, released two underperforming Joker spinoff albums (Harlequin and an official soundtrack, released a week apart), got nominated for an Oscar (for "Hold My Hand," from Top Gun: Maverick), released another Grammy-winning album of duets with Tony Bennett and more. All of that work has served to both keep Gaga in the public eye and ramp up anticipation for her return to maximalist pop form.
The result is her 11th album to hit the top 10 dating back to her debut album, The Fame, in 2008 — and her seventh album to hit No. 1. Mayhem's streaming numbers are the biggest of the superstar's career so far, which bodes well for the album's chances of sticking around on the charts for a while, even as heavy-hitting competition looms.
Speaking of competition, yet another member of BLACKPINK dropped a solo album the same day Mayhem came out; this week, JENNIE's Ruby debuts at No. 7. Coincidentally enough, a different BLACKPINK member debuted at No. 7 last week, but LISA's Alter Ego drops from No. 7 to No. 62 as JENNIE's album enters the picture.
Next week, the last member of BLACKPINK without a solo chart hit in the U.S., JISOO, looks to join JENNIE, LISA and ROSÉ (whose solo debut rosie peaked at No. 3 this past December) on the Billboard albums chart. JISOO's debut EP, AMORTAGE, received a physical release this past Friday.
If Lady Gaga hopes to hold at No. 1 for a second week, she'll have to overcome stiffer competition than just the members of BLACKPINK. On Friday, the rapper Playboi Carti surprise-dropped MUSIC, which promises to be one of 2025's biggest hip-hop records. With a whopping 30 tracks, it's already cleared one milestone: the biggest individual streaming day on Spotify of any album this year so far.
TOP SONGS
The arrival of Mayhem has also shaken up the Hot 100 singles chart, but not enough to bring upheaval to the top 10: "Die With a Smile," her duet with Bruno Mars, holds at No. 2, but that song has been riding high alongside Kendrick Lamar for months now. "Abracadabra" does leap from No. 29 to No. 19; after that, Mayhem's next-highest-charting song doesn't turn up until "Garden of Eden," which debuts at No. 52.
Without a huge Gaga surge, the top 10 contains the exact same songs as last week's chart, with Lamar's "Luther (feat. SZA)" holding at No. 1 for a fourth consecutive week. That's the longest any Lamar song — or any SZA song, for that matter — has ever held down the top spot, surpassing both "Not Like Us" (three nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1) and "Like That" (his collaboration with Future and Metro Boomin, which topped the chart for three weeks last year).
The milestones don't stop there. The Billboard Hot 100 dates back to 1958, and in that time nine artists have landed three or more songs in the top five simultaneously: Ariana Grande and 21 Savage (once each); Sabrina Carpenter and 50 Cent (twice each); Taylor Swift (three times); and Justin Bieber (five times) all reside on that list, as do The Beatles, who hold the record with eight. This week, Kendrick Lamar has risen on that list; he's now posted six weeks with three songs in the top 5, as "Luther" is joined by "Not Like Us" (which holds at No. 3) and "TV Off (feat. Lefty Gunplay)," which slips from No. 4 to No. 5. The other artist to land three songs in the top five the same week on six different occasions? That'd be Kendrick Lamar's nemesis, Drake.
WORTH NOTING
Rapper Doechii pulls off a rare feat this week, as the Hot 100 contains two different versions of her song "Anxiety." Typically, different versions of a song get combined for the purposes of Billboard chart metrics — which is how, for example, Sabrina Carpenter's "Please Please Please" enjoyed a chart boost with the release of a version featuring Dolly Parton. But Billboard keeps versions separate on the rare occasions when they're billed to different lead artists, which is what's happened with "Anxiety."
The story of "Anxiety" begins in 2019, when Doechii released it via YouTube. The song received a second life in 2023, when another rapper — Brooklyn's Sleepy Hallow — used its hook in his own song, which is titled (and stylized as) "A N X I E T Y." Still, Sleepy Hallow's track didn't chart until last week, when it received a boost from a TikTok trend in which users play the song over an archival clip from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Last week, "A N X I E T Y" by Sleepy Hallow (featuring Doechii) debuted at No. 45; this week, it slides to No. 59.
Sensing the opportunity provided by TikTok, Doechii — whose recent album Alligator Bites Never Heal still sits at No. 15 on the Billboard 200 — finally released "Anxiety" to streaming services and online retailers on March 4. This week, the song's six-year shelf life (an inauspicious debut on YouTube, the Sleepy Hallow interpolation, the strange secret sauce of TikTok) finally adds up to… the best chart performance of any song in Doechii's career. "Anxiety" enters this week's Hot 100 at No. 13.
Oh, and there's one more postscript. All of this chart success is good news for the Belgian-born Australian singer-songwriter Gotye, who's best known — by far — for the 2011 smash "Somebody That I Used to Know (feat. Kimbra)." Gotye has largely receded from public view since that song dominated worldwide radio playlists in 2011 and 2012. But the Doechii song interpolates "Somebody That I Used to Know" — and the Sleepy Hallow song is a veritable Russian nesting doll of interpolations, since it's interpolating an interpolation.
Gotye has been teasing a new album for years now — he hasn't released one since Making Mirrors in 2011 — so consider this his long-awaited opening. Where have you gone, Gotye? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Copyright 2025 NPR
