What Happened
Billboard put out its weekly chart preview on Sunday, and by Tuesday afternoon in Seoul, Stray Kids had a statement ready. This & That, the group's tenth EP, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 dated Aug. 22, 2026. That is the ninth Stray Kids release to appear on the chart, and the ninth to arrive directly at the top. No K-pop act, and in fact no act of any kind, has opened a career that way before.
The underlying numbers are the group's biggest yet. This & That moved 369,000 equivalent album units in the United States during the tracking week ending Aug. 13, according to Luminate, a personal best that clears the group's previous peaks. The eight-track EP arrived on Aug. 7 with a title track of the same name, and JYP Entertainment described the record as an attempt to chase what the members actually want rather than what the format expects. The band had introduced it at a press conference in Seoul the day before release.
The streak now reads like a ledger: Oddinary and Maxident in 2022, 5-Star and Rock-Star in 2023, Ate and Hop in 2024, Karma and Do It in 2025, and now This & That. Nine entries, nine debuts at No. 1, no exceptions and no slow climbs. Billboard confirmed the placement in its chart-beat report.
What makes the run unusual is not only its length but its consistency of scale. Groups tend to peak, plateau, then slide. Stray Kids have instead posted their largest week on their ninth try, in their ninth year since debuting in 2018 — a symmetry the members themselves noticed.
Why It Matters
Nine No. 1 albums places Stray Kids second in the entire history of the Billboard 200, behind only The Beatles and their 19, and level with The Rolling Stones. Stated that plainly, it sounds like a category error. But the chart counts what it counts, and the group also now holds the record for the most No. 1 albums by a group in the 21st century, while tying Taylor Swift for the most chart-topping albums by any artist during the 2020s.
The mechanics behind those numbers deserve a clear-eyed look. Much of a K-pop album's opening week in the US comes from physical sales — multiple versions, photocard variants, fan-signing entries — and that structure inflates unit counts in a way pure streaming acts rarely match. Recognising this does not erase the achievement; it explains it. A fandom willing to buy at that volume is itself a form of cultural power, and Stray Kids have built one of the most durable ones in the business.
There is also a creative story underneath the commercial one. Stray Kids write and produce their own material through the internal unit 3RACHA, made up of Bang Chan, Changbin and Han. Self-production is common enough in K-pop marketing copy and rarer in practice, and it has given the group an identifiable sonic fingerprint — abrasive, percussive, deliberately unpolished — that fans can recognise within a bar or two. That identity is what turns repeat buyers into a nine-album habit.
For JYP Entertainment, the agency founded by Park Jin-young, the result lands at a useful moment. Korean labels have spent the last two years arguing that their groups are not a passing export but a permanent fixture of the global album market. A ninth consecutive No. 1 is a stronger argument than any earnings deck.
Reaction
The group responded through a statement issued by its agency and carried by The Korea Times. The members framed the timing as almost fated — "our ninth No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in our ninth year," as they put it — and singled out the 21st-century group record as the part that meant most to them.
They then did what they have done after every one of these announcements and handed the credit to Stay, the fandom that has carried each of those nine opening weeks. The members said the run existed because Stay had supported them without wavering, and promised to keep widening their musical range rather than settling into a formula that works. It is a familiar script, but the consistency of the message has become part of the group's appeal.
Online, the response leaned into the absurdity of the comparison. Being mentioned in the same sentence as The Rolling Stones is the kind of statistic that invites both celebration and eye-rolling, and both showed up in roughly equal measure. Rival fandoms pointed out the physical-sales caveat; Stay pointed out that the caveat has been available for four years and the streak has continued anyway.
What's Next
The chart news lands in the middle of a tour cycle. Stray Kids announced the RUN IT world tour alongside the album back in June, and the Seoul leg has already run at KSPO Dome, the arena in Olympic Park that has served as the launch pad for most of the group's recent runs. The Asia leg continues from there, with Tokyo dates at the end of August and a schedule that stretches into 2027. Forbes covered the initial announcement.
The more interesting question is what a tenth entry looks like. Nine consecutive No. 1 debuts create an expectation that is difficult to manage: anything short of the top now reads as a decline, regardless of how the music is received. Groups in this position usually respond either by tightening the release cadence or by loosening the sound, and Stray Kids have hinted at the second. Whether a wider palette holds the same buying audience is the real test ahead, and it will not be answered by the next chart week.
Closing Thoughts
Numbers this large tend to flatten the thing they describe. Nine No. 1 albums is a sentence you can read without picturing anything — a spreadsheet cell, not a career. But behind it sits a group that debuted through a survival show in 2018 with the premise that they would have to prove they deserved to exist, and that has spent the years since writing its own material and playing progressively larger rooms.
The Beatles comparison is a chart artifact and everyone involved knows it; album formats, distribution and fandom economics have changed beyond recognition since 1964. What is not an artifact is the audience. Nine times in nine years, enough people decided in a single week that they wanted this specific record, and that decision is the only part of the story that cannot be engineered. allkpop noted the Taylor Swift parallel, which may end up being the more meaningful of the two.
한글 요약
스트레이 키즈의 열 번째 미니앨범 This & That가 2026년 8월 22일자 빌보드 200 차트에서 1위로 데뷔했습니다. 루미네이트 집계 기준 8월 13일 마감 주간 미국 내 앨범 환산 판매량은 36만 9,000장으로, 그룹의 역대 최고 기록입니다. 이로써 스트레이 키즈는 빌보드 200에 진입한 아홉 장의 앨범을 모두 1위로 데뷔시킨 최초의 아티스트가 됐습니다.
누적 1위 아홉 장은 빌보드 200 역사상 비틀즈(19장)에 이은 두 번째 기록이며, 롤링 스톤스와 동률입니다. 21세기 그룹 최다 1위 기록이자 2020년대 아티스트 최다 1위(테일러 스위프트와 공동) 기록이기도 합니다. 그룹은 소속사 JYP엔터테인먼트를 통해 "데뷔 9년 차에 아홉 번째 1위"라는 우연을 언급하며, 팬덤 스테이에게 공을 돌렸습니다.
다만 K-팝 앨범 초동에서 실물 음반 비중이 크다는 구조적 요인은 함께 짚어볼 필요가 있습니다. 그럼에도 3RACHA(방찬·창빈·한)를 중심으로 한 자체 프로듀싱이 만들어낸 뚜렷한 음악적 색채가 반복 구매층을 유지해 온 것으로 보입니다. 그룹은 현재 월드투어 RUN IT을 진행 중이며, 서울 KSPO돔 공연에 이어 8월 말 도쿄 일정을 앞두고 있습니다. 투어는 2027년까지 이어집니다.