Hot 100 First-Timers: Wet & Sadie Jean Debut With Rod Wave Collaborations

Wet and Sadie Jean both score their first-ever appearances on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (dated Sept. 30), thanks to collaborations with Rod Wave on his new album, Nostalgia.

The set debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 137,000 equivalent album units earned in its opening week (Sept. 15-21), according to Luminate. It earns Rod Wave his third leader, after 2021’s SoulFly and 2022’s Beautiful Mind. He joins Taylor Swift as the only acts with new No. 1s on the chart in each of the last three years.

Brooklyn-based indie pop trio Wet debuts at No. 40 on the Hot 100 with its Rod Wave collab “Nostalgia.” The title track and opening song on the new LP enters with 11.1 million official U.S. streams in its opening week. It also begins at No. 13 on Hot Rap Songs and No. 15 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

Wet first appeared on a Billboard chart in 2016 with its debut full-length LP, Don’t You, released on Columbia Records. The set reached No. 76 on the Billboard 200, as well as No. 3 on Vinyl Albums, No. 7 on Alternative Albums and No. 11 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums.

The trio is comprised of Marty Sulkow, Joe Valle and Kelly Zutrau, who met when Valle and Sulkow were students at New York University and Zutrau was at Cooper Union. The act has released two additional albums: Still Run in 2018 (also through Columbia) and Letter Blue in 2021 (via AWAL). Most recently, the group released its seven-song EP Pink Room in July 2022. Along with Rod Wave, Wet has also collaborated with Blood Orange (“Bound”), D’Angelo (“Cruisin’ ”), Fred Again.. (“Kelly [End of a Nightmare]”), Jim-E Stack (“Old Bone”) and Toro y Moi (“Monte Carlo”), among others.

Sadie Jean lands on the Hot 100 for the first time thanks to her Rod Wave team-up “2018.” The song, which samples Jean’s breakthrough 2021 track “WYD Now?,” debuts at No. 61 with 8.9 million U.S. streams. It also starts at No. 21 on Hot Rap Songs and No. 25 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

The pop singer-songwriter had appeared on one ranking before this week: She reached No. 35 on the Emerging Artists chart in December 2021, when she was a sophomore at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. She debuted on the strength of “WYD Now?,” as the track went viral on TikTok ahead of its release at the time, thanks to a snippet she posted on her account. The song continued to grow when Jean issued an “open verse challenge” encouraging users to duet the video with their own verse. The track has since been used in over 112,000 clips on the platform to date. (Activity on TikTok is not included in Billboard‘s charts except for the newly launched TikTok & Billboard Top 50.)

Outside of “WYD Now?,” for which Jean also released a remix with Zai1k and Zakhar last year, she has served up three other solo songs: “Locksmith” in October 2022, “Just Because” this May and “16” in August. She has also collaborated with Wrabel on “Hurts Like Hell,” released in August 2022.

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