Chance the Rapper‘s new album Star Line is not projected to make a big splash on the Billboard 200.
According to midweek estimates, the project is only tracking to sneak into the top 20 in its debut week.
Star Line is also projecting to shift just 22,000 equivalent units in its first week on sale.
The figures are a steep fall off from Chance’s last album, 2019’s The Big Day, which debuted at number two and sold 108,000 equivalent units in its first week.
As well as dropping his first album in six years, Chance has taken aim at Donald Trump’s ICE raids which have been taking place across much of the country in recent months.
Speaking on The Cruz Show, the Chicago rapper did not hide his feelings about the highly controversial raids conducted by ICE.
He said: “It’s disgusting. I think we’re just in a space where people are afraid to, I guess, really fight the system. Like, this is a country that’s actually built on bloody revolutions and radical thought and self-determination, and sometimes I think we make that such a historic thing or such a in-the-past kind of thing that we forget that, like, we’re a country built on fighting the system and fighting the power.”
Chance added: “I think we’re just in a place where people sometimes feel helpless and they don’t know how to fight. My voice and my pen is my gift, you know? And then on the other side there’s my physical body, and one day I’m going to have to give my physical body to the revolution. I hope it’s not soon. I got young kids.”
He continued: “It’s late in the game. We’re at the fall of empire right now. So, you know, I would say being in Chicago and growing up in those after-school programs. We were 14 years old, rocking keffiyehs and saying ‘Free Palestine.’ That’s how we grew up. Like, we are radical children that just happen to be in our 30s now. And so when it comes time for each one of us to put out a body of work, especially at this time, we have to use our heavenly gifts. And when the time comes, everybody’s going to have to use their bodies.”
