Nine albums have now taken Stray Kids to the top of the Billboard 200, and the ninth put them alongside a band that started charting in the 1960s. THIS & THAT debuted at No. 1 on the chart dated 22 August, and with it the group tied the Rolling Stones for the second-most Billboard 200 chart-toppers by any group since the survey began publishing regularly in 1956.
Only the Beatles sit above them, with 19. That is the company a group formed in 2017 is now keeping.
The Numbers Behind the Debut
The album earned 369,000 equivalent album units in the United States in its opening week, according to Billboard’s chart report, drawing on Luminate data for the 7-13 August tracking week. That is the group’s biggest week by units to date.
The composition of that figure is the more revealing part. Traditional album sales accounted for 357,000 of the 369,000 — also a personal best — meaning roughly 97 per cent of the opening week came from people buying a copy rather than from streaming activity converted into units.
That ratio is close to inverted for most acts at the top of the Billboard 200, where streaming equivalents typically dominate and pure sales are a minority. It is the single clearest statistical signature of how this group’s audience behaves.
Why the Sales-Heavy Split Matters
An album that arrives on the back of physical purchases is being bought by an audience that has decided in advance to buy it. There is no discovery mechanism involved and very little passive listening; the units are the product of a committed fanbase acting on a release date.
That produces enormous first weeks and steeper declines afterwards, which is why chart records of this kind get scrutinised. It also means the number is a measure of mobilisation rather than of reach, and the two are genuinely different things.
The comparison with the Rolling Stones is instructive precisely because the mechanics are so unalike. Their chart-toppers accumulated across decades in an era when an album’s sales were its only real currency and radio drove discovery. Stray Kids reached the same total in under a decade through a model built on pre-orders, physical variants and a fanbase organised well enough to concentrate purchasing into a single tracking week.
The Hot 100 Result Is the Genuine Milestone
Alongside the album, the title track debuted at No. 38 on the Hot 100 — the group’s first entry inside the top 40 of that chart.
For a group with nine No. 1 albums, a first top-40 single reads oddly until the two charts are separated properly. The Billboard 200 rewards concentrated buying. The Hot 100 is weighted heavily toward radio airplay and broad streaming, both of which require reaching listeners outside an existing fanbase.
The song opened with 4.3 million official US streams and 23,000 sold across physical and digital formats. That sales-to-streams ratio is again unusual for a Hot 100 entry, and it shows the same audience doing the same work on a different chart.
Crossing into the top 40 is therefore a more meaningful signal than a ninth No. 1 album. It suggests the group is beginning to register with an audience that has not already committed to buying everything they release.
What the Group Said
Felix framed the album’s arrival at No. 1 in terms of the audience rather than the record: “We’d like to cherish this moment together with you and with everyone, everywhere all around the world.”
Seungmin’s response worked the title into the thanks: “Thank you for enjoying all our different sides, from this to that.”
That reading of the album title is worth taking at face value. THIS & THAT is presented as a record of range rather than of a single direction, which is consistent with how the group has operated since the beginning — self-producing much of their material through the internal 3RACHA unit and moving between abrasive hip-hop-leaning tracks and straightforward pop within the same release.
The Chart Company They Now Keep
Nine Billboard 200 No. 1s places them level with a band whose catalogue has been in print for sixty years. Below them sit dozens of groups with far longer runs and only a handful of chart-toppers each, because the metric rewards a very particular kind of release cadence: frequent albums, each landing with a concentrated audience.
Stray Kids have released consistently and frequently, and each release has arrived to an audience prepared for it. The result is a chart record accumulated at a pace that would have been arithmetically impossible under the older album cycle, where two or three years between releases was normal.
None of that diminishes the achievement, but it does describe what the achievement is. It is a record of sustained commercial mobilisation across nine releases, not a claim about cultural footprint. Those often align eventually; the Hot 100 result suggests this one is starting to.
How a Group Reaches Nine in Under a Decade
Debuting in 2017 and reaching nine chart-toppers by 2026 requires a release schedule most Western acts no longer attempt. The modern major-label album cycle assumes eighteen months to three years between records, built around touring windows and radio campaigns that take months to develop.
The K-pop release model runs on a different clock. Full albums, mini-albums and repackaged editions arrive within the same year, each treated as a distinct campaign with its own concept, artwork and promotional run. An act operating that way can accumulate chart entries at three or four times the rate of one on a conventional cycle, and the Billboard 200 counts each of them equally.
The physical release strategy compounds it further. Albums are typically issued in multiple versions with different photobooks and inclusions, and the chart counts each purchase. That is entirely legitimate under the rules and is also the main reason first-week figures in this genre look the way they do.
What separates Stray Kids from others using the same model is that the material has held up across the run. Nine No. 1s would be unremarkable as a purely structural result if the records were interchangeable, and the group’s writing and production being handled substantially in-house through 3RACHA is the part that has kept the releases distinguishable from one another.
Where the Ceiling Sits
Nineteen No. 1s is a long way above nine, and the Beatles’ total was accumulated under chart conditions that no longer exist. Whether Stray Kids continue closing that gap depends less on their fanbase, which is clearly capable of delivering a No. 1 on demand, and more on whether the general audience keeps growing.
The 369,000-unit week proves the first. The No. 38 debut is the early evidence for the second, and it is the number worth tracking on the next release. A second and third top-40 single would say more about the group’s trajectory than a tenth chart-topping album.
There is also the question of what the record does after week one. A debut built on 357,000 physical sales has, by definition, already reached most of the people who intended to buy it, so the second-week decline will be steep in a way a streaming-led album’s would not be. That is not a weakness of the release, it is arithmetic, and it is why chart watchers reading these figures should treat the opening number as a measure of a single moment rather than of an album’s life.
The more durable indicator will be whether the title track holds its Hot 100 position or climbs. Songs that enter on fan-driven sales typically fall quickly; songs that pick up radio support after entering tend to rise for several weeks. Which of those two shapes this one takes will say more about the group’s reach in the United States than the album’s placement ever could.
Chart durability comes in more than one shape. Our piece on how Dai Dai debuted at 166 and was still No. 1 fifteen weeks later covers the opposite pattern entirely.
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