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It was a big week for debut albums all around, but the crown (or for these two, solid gold helmets) goes to Daft Punk.
The French duo’s Random Access Memories has snagged the top spot in the Billboard 200 albums chart, with Nielsen SoundScan reporting a whopping 339,000 copies sold. This marks the second biggest debut week of the year, beaten only by Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience.
Billboard notes that 65% of Daft Punk’s sales came from digital downloads, which comes to 221,000 — making it the second biggest digital-sales debut album after (yep) The 20/20 Experience. (On the other end of the tech spectrum, they also had the year’s best sales to date in vinyl, hitting near the 10,000 mark.)
All this is to say that Daft Punk has scored its biggest chart week in its history. Their previous peak came from their Tron: Legacy soundtrack back in 2011, which debuted at No. 4. Before that, their 2001 breakout album Discovery topped out at No. 44, while 2005′s Human After All debuted at No. 98. So far, Random Access Memories has already sold more than twice the amount that Human After All has sold to date.
Despite all that, there were actually other debuts this week. Darius Rucker’s True Believers scored a No. 2 spot in its first frame, with 83,000 copies. Brooklyn-via-Ohio indie-rockers the National debuted at No. 3 on the strength of Trouble Will Find, with a career-high 75,000, while NYC rapper French Montana landed at No. 4 with Excuse My French, which moved 56,000 in its first week.
