Childish Gambino has been plagued by sluggish first-week sales in recent years, and that trend looks set to continue with his latest album Bando Stone & The New World.
According to HITS Daily Double, the rapper/actor’s fifth LP is projected to earn 35,000 album-equivalent units in its opening week, including 3,000 in pure sales.
That figure means Bando Stone & The New World will miss out on a top 10 debut on the Billboard 200 chart, entering at No. 15.
Eminem‘s The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), meanwhile, is expected to move an additional 82,000 equivalent units in its second week, sliding to No. 2 after debuting in the top spot with over 280,000 sales.
Childish Gambino has struggled to match the impressive first-week figures that he posted in the 2010s.
His 2013 album Because the Internet debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 with 96,000 first-week copies before Billboard began counting streams towards album sales.
Three years later, the soul and funk-inspired “Awaken, My Love!” did even better by earning 101,000 units in its opening week, cracking the top five on the chart.
Bino’s follow-up project 3.15.20, however, represented a sharp commercial decline, posting just 25,000 equivalent units in its first seven days. (The album has since been removed from streaming services and reissued under the name Atavista.)
Its performance perhaps wasn’t helped by the lack of a traditional promotional rollout (it was released by surprise on Donald Glover’s website before being removed 12 hours later and uploaded to streaming services), as well as its cryptic album and song titles and blank white cover.
Reflecting on its release and impact in a 2023 interview with Complex, the Georgia native said: “I think people are right. It would have garnered a different [response]. My wife’s always been like, ‘If you do punk things, you get punk results.’ And it was definitely a punk thing.”
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He added: “I took that approach because I guess that’s what I was going through. People are always going to want what they want, but I have to express what I’m going through.
“I had just lost my father, I had just had a kid, and I was going through a lot. I was having a lot of different new experiences and that’s what I expressed.”
Bando Stone & The New World‘s sales forecast also places it far behind recent releases from Gambino’s peers like Future and Metro Boomin (We Don’t Trust You, 251,000), Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign (Vultures 1, 148,000), 21 Savage (American Dream, 133,000), J. Cole (Might Delete Later, 115,000) and Gunna (One of Wun, 91,000).
Glover is unlikely to turn this trend around — at least under his rap moniker — having announced that Bando Stone is his last album under the name Childish Gambino.
“It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done,’” he told The New York Times of the moment he realized he no longer felt connected to the name. “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.”
Despite his first-week sales struggles, Gambino has still earned a string of gold and platinum plaques in recent years, not to mention several Grammy Awards.
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