How Did Twenty One Pilots Score Its Biggest First Week Ever With ‘Breach’?

In the mid-’10s, Twenty One Pilots became one of the biggest crossover acts in pop music, scoring a trio of top five hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the Billboard 200 with its Blurryface album. A decade later, the Pilots hadn’t matched that crossover success on either chart, with no additional top five singles and a number of top five albums, but no subsequent number ones.

That is, until this week. On the Billboard 200 dated Sept. 27, the duo’s latest set Breach — marking the apparently final entry in the decade-long narrative the group started with Blurryface bows at No. 1. The set posts 200k in first-week units, not only besting even its Blurryface total from 2015, but also bettering the debut number from any other rock album yet this decade.

How did the duo manage this perfo