Earlier this month, Juice WRLD’s posthumous EP Legends Never Die dropped on July 10, quickly rocketing to number one on the Billboard 200 album chart. Since then, the late rapper’s album has not only had the biggest debut week of any 2020 album, but the largest week for any album this year, period. According to Billboard, Legends has earned “497,000 equivalent album units in the U.S.,†in addition to having the fourth biggest streaming week ever with 422.63 million streams.
Juice WRLD’s second number-one EP, following 2019’s Death Race for Love, Legends Never Die’s debut is also the biggest for a male artist or a hip-hop act since Travis Scott’s 2018 album Astroworld. In a tragic coda, Billboard notes Legends bumped the late Pop Smoke’s Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon out of the chart’s top spot, the first time two posthumous albums have opened at number one back-to-back. Juice WRLD, the stage name of Jarad Anthony Higgins, died at the age of 21 on December 8, 2019 of an accidental overdose, shortly after landing at Chicago’s Midway International Airport.