Friday (May 26) saw a litany of new album releases across all genres in the mainstream. Rappers Lil Durk and Kodak Black dropped new studio albums Almost Healed and Pistols & Pearls, respectively, while British pop/R&B singer Arlo Parks dropped her sophomore LP My Soft Machine.
Videos by American Songwriter
However, Tennessee rapper Moneybagg Yo did not put out his highly-anticipated mixtape Hard to Love, which was intended to arrive alongside the aforementioned projects. Instead, he delayed the tape one week to June 2, in hopes of not having his streams reduced and chart placements affected by the release of Taylor Swift’s Friday Til Dawn deluxe of her 2022 album Midnights.
While sharing this disappointing news with his fans, Moneybagg Yo uploaded a video of him singing Swift’s 2019 hit “Lover.”
“I just got the news my lil baby Taylor dropping tonight,” he said while listening to the Swift song in his car. “I ain’t gonna lie, y’all know how I feel about Taylor, man, so I think I’ma push Hard to Love back. Just a few days, y’all be patient with me, man. Let Taylor have this shit.”
The Midnight Til Dawn edition that Swift released Friday included new versions of songs from the original album, including “Karma” and “Snow On The Beach,” with updated contributions from Ice Spice and Lana Del Rey respectively. But, as many fans would expect that Swift tops the Billboard 200 this week with her deluxe, Apple Music’s charts showed Friday morning that Lil Durk’s Almost Healed had garnered the most streams of any album release thus far this weekend on their platform.
Moneybagg Yo’s most recent full-length release came in 2021 by way of A Gangsta’s Pain and its subsequent deluxe. Upon release, the LP reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200, his first-ever project to achieve this feat.
So, it’s easy to see why the Memphis emcee would not want to sacrifice his chance to go No. 1 again with Hard to Love, especially seeing that Swift and Durk will both be battling for the spot this week.
(Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images)
