Ghost Score First #1 Album, Break Hard Rock Vinyl Sales Record

Never underestimate American's appetite for hard-rock theatricality. Swedish cape-swishers Ghost have been around for well over a decade, and they've truly tapped into a market hungry for dry ice and candelabras. A week and a half ago, Ghost released their new LP SKELETÁ. As of right now, that LP is the band's first #1 hit in America, and it's broken a hard-rock vinyl sales record in the process.

Billboard reports that Ghost's SKELETÁ moved 86,000 album equivalent units in its first week -- good enough to temporarily dislodge SZA and Kendrick Lamar from the top spots. The vast majority of Ghosts album-equivalent units are traditional sales, which move the needle way more than streaming numbers. The Ghost album actually sold 77,000 copies, and 44,000 of those sales were vinyl. Ghost released many collective variants of the vinyl (Stereogum counted 20) which probably boosted those numbers.

According to Billboard, that gives Ghost the biggest week of vinyl record sales for a hard rock act since the 1991 advent of Soundscan. That doesn't mean that Molly Hatchet weren't selling that many records per week in 1978 or whatever, but in this very limited category, Ghost are killing it. Only two rock bands have had records with bigger vinyl-sales weeks -- Blink-182 and boygenius, both in 2023. Ghost previously went to #2 with their last album, 2022's IMPERA. They're now the first hard rock act to get a #1 hit on the Billboard album chart since AC/DC's Power Up in 2020.

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