Stray Kids at the 40th Golden Disc Awards in January 2026.
Stray Kids at the 40th Golden Disc Awards in January 2026.
Stray Kids This & That is released on 7 August, and it arrives carrying a statistic that no other act in the Billboard 200’s history has matched. Every single one of the group’s eight entries on that chart has debuted at number one. Not most of them. All of them.
That is the context for what would otherwise be a routine summer comeback from a JYP Entertainment group. The eight-member act are not defending a good run of form. They are defending a perfect one, on the biggest album chart in the United States.
What Arrives on 7 August
The new release is the group’s tenth mini album, titled THIS & THAT and led by a title track of the same name. Forbes’ K-pop columnist Jeff Benjamin lists it among the third quarter’s headline releases, alongside comebacks from several of K-pop’s biggest names. It lands at 1 p.m. Korean time and is their first EP since the SKZ IT TAPE release “Do It” last November.
The record runs to eight tracks. Beyond the title song and the pre-release single “Run It”, the tracklist takes in “After You”, “Farming”, “I Do” and “That Day”, closing with a festival version of the title track that reads as a deliberate nod to the touring year ahead.
The rollout has been unusually playful. The tracklist was revealed through a coffee-tasting concept, presenting each song as a coffee blend complete with tasting notes and roast levels. It is a small thing, but it tells you the group are treating a high-pressure release as something to have fun with rather than protect.
Fans have already had two tasters. “Run It” landed on 24 June and appears on the EP, and a B-side compilation, SKZ-REPLAY 2026 Pt.1, followed on 31 July.
Eight Entries, Eight Debuts at the Summit
The record that makes this comeback worth watching was set last December. When the SKZ IT TAPE release “Do It” opened at number one on the chart dated 6 December, Stray Kids became the only act in Billboard history to debut at number one with its first eight entries on the Billboard 200.
Plenty of acts have scored eight number ones. What no one else has done is go eight-for-eight from a standing start, without a single entry that opened at number two or lower along the way. The group also holds the record for the most Billboard 200 number ones by any group worldwide this century, moving clear of a three-way tie on six.
“Do It” was not a narrow win either. It earned 295,000 equivalent album units in the United States in its opening week, 286,000 of which came from traditional album sales, and it displaced an album that had spent seven straight weeks at number one.
How the Streak Was Actually Built
The run started with Oddinary in March 2022 and has not broken since: Maxident later that year, 5-STAR and Rock-Star in 2023, ATE and HOP in 2024, then KARMA in June 2025 and “Do It” that December.
What stands out in that list is the variety of release formats. Full-length albums, EPs, a special album and a mixtape project all debuted at the top, which suggests the result is driven less by any single blockbuster and more by a purchasing base that turns out for whatever the group puts in front of it. The physical-sales share of that “Do It” week, close to 97 per cent of its units, points the same way.
It is a different commercial shape from the one built by the K-pop acts who broke through before them, whose peaks were driven far more by radio-facing crossover singles. Stray Kids sell albums, as objects, in enormous quantities, and they do it on a schedule.
3Racha’s Fingerprints Are on All Eight Tracks
The other constant is who makes the music. 3Racha, the in-house production unit of Bang Chan, Changbin and Han, is credited on every one of the eight tracks, continuing a self-production model that has defined the group since their debut.
That matters commercially as well as creatively. A group that writes and produces its own output can move at this pace without waiting on outside writers, which is part of how they have sustained multiple releases a year without the quality collapse that schedule usually produces. It also means the sound stays recognisable across formats, so a mixtape and a full album pull from the same audience rather than confusing it.
Run It Puts Them Back on the Road
The EP comes attached to a new world tour, announced in June alongside the comeback. The cycle it follows was already enormous: their last run took in 56 shows across 35 cities before wrapping in October 2025.
The new tour opens in Seoul before expanding across Asia, with further legs still to be detailed. Around it sit two of the year’s larger festival bookings: the group headlined Governors Ball in New York on 6 June, and they are scheduled for Rock in Rio in Brazil in September. That festival version of the title track suddenly looks less like a bonus and more like a setlist decision made months in advance.
The Early Numbers Are Already Loud
Pre-release indicators point in one direction. By 12 July the EP sat fourth on Spotify’s Global Countdowns chart with roughly 766,900 pre-saves, and the album trailer had held the top position on YouTube’s worldwide music video trending chart for four consecutive days.
Those are engagement signals rather than sales, and the two do not always move together. A pre-save costs nothing, and a trending trailer measures curiosity as much as commitment. But they establish that attention is not the constraint here, and for a group whose chart results are built on physical purchases, a large and mobilised pre-release audience is the closest available proxy for opening-week intent. If the streak ends, it will not be because people were not paying attention.
Why the Ninth Test Is Not a Formality
A streak like this gets harder to extend, not easier. Chart weeks are decided by whatever else is released alongside you, and an eight-for-eight record means there is no upside left to chase and a large amount of downside available. A number two would be a perfectly strong result for almost any act on earth and would still read, for this one, as the end of something.
There is also the question of format fatigue. Releasing a B-side compilation on 31 July and an EP on 7 August splits fan spending across two products in eight days. Whether that lifts the total or divides it is exactly what the opening week will answer.
The first meaningful number will be the physical-sales figure rather than the streaming one. Stray Kids This & That will follow a pattern in which the overwhelming majority of first-week units come from albums people actually buy, and that is the metric most exposed to a soft week. The second is the tour: routing announced this early, off the back of a 56-show cycle that only ended last October, is a bet on demand holding across a second consecutive touring year. If both land, the group extends a record with no precedent in the chart’s history. If either wobbles, it will be the first time in more than four years that the question has even been open.
This article was AI-assisted and edited for accuracy.
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