“He’s ascended to the auteur ranks of pre-MAGA Kanye- and Beyoncé-level fan support,†Gary Suarez wrote in his Vulture review of Bad Bunny’s El Último Tour del Mundo last week. “Those fans are here to walk the journey with him step-by-step, or otherwise be carried. What remains to be seen is whether the industry will catch up.†Well, if the industry needed any more concrete evidence that they should break into a dead sprint at this point, Billboard announced Sunday that the Puerto Rican rapper’s new album has debuted at number one, the first all-Spanish album to reach No. 1 in the 64-year history of the Billboard 200 chart.
According to Billboard, El Último Tour del Mundo premiered with 116,000 equivalent album units. As you might recall, an album recorded entirely in Spanish premiered at No. 2 earlier this year following a late February release: Bad Bunny’s own YHLQMDLG. Prior to this year, only two all-Spanish albums came within a few spots of a No. 1: Shakira’s Fijación Oral in 2005 and Mana’s Amar es Cabatir in 2006, which both reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Selena’s 1995 album Dreaming of You and Il Divo’s 2006 album Ancora also reached No. 1, Billboard notes, but both featured English-language tracks as well as Spanish.