Drake Breaks the Temptations' Record With 18th No. 1 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums

Some records feel permanent until the week they are not. Billboard reported on Oct. 14, via The Source and DancehallMag, that Drake's HABIBTI jumped from No. 35 to No. 1 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart dated Oct. 17. It is his 18th No. 1 on that chart — a new all-time record, surpassing Future and The Temptations, who stood at 17 each.

The Temptations half of that sentence carries the history. Per the reporting, The Temptations had held or shared the record since July 1966, when Gettin' Ready became their third chart-topper. They pushed their total to 17 with A Song For You in May 1975. That means the mark Drake just passed was built in the Motown era, completed half a century ago, and then defended — by standing still at the summit of the record book — through every subsequent generation of R&B and the entire rise of hip-hop. This week, a streaming-powered surge finally moved it.

The surge, in numbers, is dramatic. In the tracking week ending Oct. 8, HABIBTI earned 71,000 equivalent album units in the United States, up 506 percent, with roughly 70,000 of those units coming from streaming, per DancehallMag's Billboard reporting. A more than fivefold jump for an album already months into its life is not organic drift. Something specific happened to this record, and the reporting identifies it clearly.

That something was HABIBTI (FOMO), a deluxe edition that added four songs from Drake's FOMO film to streaming. The additions are "Solar Eclipse" with Don Toliver — which reworks Ella Langley's "Choosin' Texas" — "Cold Shoulder" with Toliver and Yebba, "Quebec," and "Classic PT2." With them, the album now runs to 15 tracks. The deluxe did what deluxe editions are designed to do, but at an unusual scale: it turned a catalog week for a May album into a record-breaking chart week in October.

The context of the release makes the story richer. Per the reporting, Drake announced HABIBTI and MAID OF HONOUR during his ICEMAN livestream, and released all three albums on May 15 — his first solo albums since For All The Dogs in 2023. Three albums arriving on the same day was always going to be a chart experiment as much as a creative one: would they cannibalize each other, or would each find its own lane and its own moment?

This week delivered the experiment's most elegant result. HABIBTI replaced Drake's own ICEMAN at No. 1 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums — a self-replacement, the first on the chart since Future and Metro Boomin in May 2024, per the reporting. An artist knocking himself out of the top spot with another one of his own albums is the purest possible evidence that the three-album strategy did not split his audience. It multiplied his presence.

The Billboard 200 tells the same story from a second angle. HABIBTI sits at No. 2 on the all-genre album chart this week, while ICEMAN is No. 11 and Take Care — a catalog album from deep in his discography — is No. 22, per chart reports. Three Drake albums in the top 25 of the Billboard 200 in the same week, spanning a brand-new deluxe-driven surge, a same-day companion release, and a long-standing catalog staple, is a picture of an artist occupying multiple eras of his own career at once.

It is worth pausing on what the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums record actually measures. It is not a singles record, and it is not a one-week sales record. Eighteen No. 1 albums requires eighteen separate projects that each, at some point, became the most-consumed R&B/hip-hop album in the country. Longevity at that level is a different skill from a spectacular debut. Future reaching 17 shows the mark was being actively chased by a contemporary. The Temptations holding a share of it into 2026 shows how high the bar was set by the genre's founders.

Drake clearing it with a deluxe-driven jump from No. 35 also says something honest about how records fall in the streaming era. The album that broke the record was not new this week. Its new edition — four songs, drawn from his FOMO film, sequenced onto a 15-track album — was enough to multiply its consumption by five and lift it over every other album in the genre. The Temptations built their 17 in an era when an album's chart life was largely fixed at release. Drake built his 18 in an era when an album can be reopened, expanded and relaunched — and the chart counts it all the same.

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None of that diminishes the headline. Eighteen No. 1 albums on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums is now Drake's record alone. Future and The Temptations stand at 17. And with three albums currently sitting inside the Billboard 200's top 25 — and a demonstrated willingness to expand a record months later and send it back to the top — the artist most likely to extend the new record is the one who just set it.