Ghost Floats Hard Rock Back to Top of Billboard 200 for First Time in 4 Years

Skeletá yields Ghost’s best week ever by both equivalent album units and traditional album sales. The album earned 86,000 units in the United States in the week ending May 1, according to Luminate, with traditional album sales powering 77,000 of that sum. The latter figure was bolstered by its availability across more than 15 vinyl variants, three CD variants and four cassette variants (all containing the same tracklist, but in collectible packaging).

The act’s previous high in both metrics came in the debut week of Impera (March 26, 2022), which earned 70,000 units (of which nearly 63,000 were album sales).

Ghost also lands the biggest week of 2025, by either equivalent album units or traditional album sales, for any rock, hard rock or alternative album. (Rock and alternative albums are defined as those that are eligible for, or have charted on, Billboard’s Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums charts, respectively.)

Skeletá garners the largest streaming week ever for a Ghost album, as it tallied 12.45 million on-demand official streams for its songs in the U.S. during the tracking week.

Of Skeletá’s first-week album sales, vinyl purchases comprised just over 44,000 copies. That’s not just the largest sales week on vinyl for Ghost, but the biggest week for a hard rock album on vinyl in the modern era (since Luminate began tracking data in 1991). It’s also the third-largest sales week on vinyl in the modern era for any rock album, trailing only the opening weeks of blink-182’s One More Time… (49,000; 2023) and boygenius’ The Record (45,000; 2023).

Skeletá is the first hard rock album to lead the Billboard 200 in over four years, and the only rock, hard rock or alternative album to be No. 1 in 2025. The last hard rock album at No. 1 was AC/DC’s Power Up, which premiered at No. 1 on the Nov. 28, 2020, chart and spent one week at No. 1. The last rock, or alternative, album to lead the tally was Coldplay’s Moon Music, when it debuted at No. 1 on the Oct. 19, 2024, chart (spending one week at No. 1).

In the last 10 years, just eight hard rock albums have been No. 1 on the Billboard 200: Skeletá, Power Up, Tool’s Fear Inoculum (Sept. 14, 2019 chart), Slipknot’s We Are Not Your Kind (Aug. 24, 2019), Foo Fighters’ Concrete and Gold (Oct. 7, 2017), Metallica’s Hardwired… To Self-Destruct (Dec. 10, 2016), Disturbed’s Immortalized (Sept. 12, 2015) and Breaking Benjamin’s Dark Before Dawn (July 11, 2015).