Nobody expected the numbers to move this quickly, least of all the team behind the record.
What makes it worth paying attention to is less the result than the method. The approach runs against most of the received wisdom about how a project like this is supposed to be built, and it has worked anyway.
What it means
Placed against the wider picture in Artist Interviews, this is not an isolated case. Several projects over the past eighteen months have followed a comparable path, and the pattern is becoming difficult to dismiss as coincidence.
The plan was never to move fast. The plan was to still be here in ten years.
Whether it holds through the rest of the year is the open question. For now, the trajectory is pointing in one direction.
