Gunna’s ‘a Gift & a Curse’ Set to Have Best First Week Sales for Any Rap Album Without Features Since 2021

Mired in controversy, Gunna’s brand new studio album a Gift & a Curse is overcoming it all.

On Tuesday (June 20), HitsDailyDouble announced that a Gift & a Curse will likely debut at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with an estimated 78,000 units sold, behind Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time which has held onto No. 1 for 13 weeks. Although this will see Gunna experience a decrease of over 70,000 albums sold since his chart-topping January 2022 album DS4, it still sees the Atlanta rapper achieve an honorable feat.

a Gift & a Curse will end up having the best first-week debut of any rap album with zero feature guests since NBA YoungBoy’s September 2021 Sincerely, Kentrell. Along with its sales numbers looking stellar, Gunna’s album also dominated Spotify and Apple Music’s charts over the weekend.

Since the LP’s release last Friday (June 16), hit songs like “back to the moon” and “fukumean” have both occupied the No. 1 spot on Apple Music’s Top Songs chart. Additionally, while the album landed at No. 1 on Spotify’s Top Albums Debut chart globally and in the U.S., it also took up eight of the top 10 slots on Spotify’s Top Songs Debut chart in the U.S. Again, for emphasis, the album did not contain a single guest appearance.

One of the primary reasons Gunna, who typically includes tons of features on his albums such as Young Thug and Lil Baby, decided to not have any is because of his ongoing murky situation with his label Young Stoner Life. After he, the label’s founder Young Thug, and many other members of the imprint were arrested last May for violating the RICO Act in Georgia, Gunna entered a plea deal that earned him his freedom with probation.

Some fans and fellow rappers believed this plea would put Young Thug at greater risk for prison time since Gunna admitted to the court during his plea statement that YSL is a street gang. As Thug currently sits in prison and potentially preps a new album from behind bars, hip-hop acts like Lil Durk and Wheezy have voiced their disapproval of Gunna’s legal decision. On top of these two detesters, many other rappers in the industry have seemingly decided to distance themselves from Gunna, even though he voiced his love and support for Thug on a Gift & a Curse.

Regardless, even with many in the hip-hop industry now having contempt for Gunna, he still managed to attract mass audiences with his new album, which lasts 42 minutes and is chock full of impressive flows and tantalizing production.

Photo by Kevin Mazur/MG22/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue