Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers have come awfully close to hitting number one on the Billboard Hot 100 charts before, even reaching the runner-up slot with 2010’s Mojo. But now the band finally tops the charts with 131,000 in first-week sales of Hypnotic Eye — an album our critic called “a prototypical clutch of reactionary attitudes” (which means he liked it).
Petty’s closest competition this week came from Eric Clapton, whose newest release, The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale, sold fewer than half the copies than Eye did. Other entries this week included Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour (30,000 copies; No. 7) and a top 10 debut from Jenny Lewis’ The Voyager, which sold 24,000 copies to land at No. 9.
The band will celebrate its accomplishment at this weekend’s Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco, where Petty and his Heartbreakers will close out Saturday night’s festivities. Petty himself got into a bit of controversy last week when he criticized the EDM community, calling all electronic festivals “drug parties” and claiming that he couldn’t be paid to attend one of them.
