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. Explore See latest videos, charts and news 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 performance? And what other rock acts could rival that number in the years to come? Billboard writers answer these questions and more below. 1. Twenty One Pilots’ Breach debuts atop the Billboard 200 with a career-best 200,000 first-week units. On a scale of 1-10, how excited should Twenty One Pilots be about that performance? Kyle Denis: 10. I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t be over the moon after pulling off a career-best opening week, especially when they debuted 16 years ago. In 2025, cracking 200k first-week is nothing to scoff at for pretty much anyone. And it’s incredibly impressive that Twenty One Pilots did this as a rock act without a current crossover hit. Gil Kaufman: 10. For a group that — as they noted at their tour kick-off in Cincinnati last week — has been around for more than 15 years and never knows if its new music will hit, this is a huge deal. Whether you believe the perpetual “rock is dead” mantra or not, rock has been largely missing from the top of the 200 as of late. Landing the biggest debut for any rock LP in six years is a monumental feat for a group whose chart success hasn’t always matched its steady, and still-growing, live appeal. Jason Lipshutz: A 10. This is a statement opening week — a veteran artist returning with a ton of excitement and a physical-product promo blitz, scoring a notably huge debut number, and reasserting their commercial power unequivocally. Twenty One Pilots have been earning top 5 album debuts for over a decade, but Breach becoming their first chart-topper since Blurryface — which was their mainstream breakthrough in 2015, with their career-best first-week total — is the type of accomplishment that can re-frame the legacy of a group for those who hadn’t been paying close attention. More artists wish they could notch a game-changing No. 1 debut like this one. Andrew Unterberger: Gotta be a 10, right? A number even half as big would’ve still been pretty impressive for the duo at this point in its career, but 200k with no major hits or pop-cultural momentum behind it? That’s a jaw-dropping number, and one that shows how successfully Twenty One Pilots has tended to its fanbase over the years, making sure that even at times when not many new fans were jumping on that no one old was ever jumping off, and continuing to slowly-but-surely grow the core audience to where it is today. Christine Werthman: A No. 1 album and some career-best numbers? No-brainer: That should register as a big 10 on the excitement meter. On top of that, this is the biggest debut for a rock album since Tool’s Fear Inoculum in 2019. Does this thing go to 11? 2. That 200k number is going to be an eye-opener for a lot of people who assumed that the duo’s popularity had declined with its radio dominance. What do you think is the biggest reason the Pilots were able to have such an impressive debut for Breach? Kyle Denis: I think there were several factors at play. First, Breach had the luxury of arriving as the final installment in a decade-long album series consisting of Blurryface (2015), Trench (2018) and Sealed and Icy (2021). That hype from fans who have patiently followed the series and unpacked the band’s lore is priceless; it also helps that the duo started dropping teases for Breach during the final dates of the Clancy World Tour. Moreover, Breach was available across 15+ vinyl variants, three deluxe CDs and various streaming platforms, giving fans ample opportunity to collect different versions of the record, some of which house bonus tracks or alternative cover art. Finally, 21P’s Josh Dun has been a hot topic across socials, particularly TikTok, thanks to the news of him and wife Debby Ryan (a Disney Channel icon for mid-late Gen Z) expecting their first child. Even if the Breach singles weren’t necessarily crossing over à la “Ride” or “Stressed Out,” the band’s celebrity certainly did. Gil Kaufman: The proof is in the band’s live draw. This just-launched tour opened with a 21,000-capacity sell-out of a soccer stadium, with the feeling that it could have been even bigger. This band’s die-hard fans, the Skeleton Clique, not only buy merch in fistfuls, but they came with their own home-brewed gear, knew every lyric to all of the new songs from an album out less than a week, and ride or die for the duo, in an emo-Swiftian fashion. Jason Lipshutz: A combination of in-demand physical releases — including 15 vinyl variants, which contributed 72,000 copies to that 200,000 total — and music that continues to connect. In addition to Breach wrapping up the multi-album Clancy arc for hardcore fans, the album also included another alternative radio smash in “The Contract,” and set up another arena tour for the duo. While this No. 1 debut is much bigger than expected, Twenty One Pilots is still a very popular band, with a catalog of hits and lots of industry support for their new music. Andrew Unterberger: Everybody loves a happy ending, right? Can’t say I
