V’s ‘Layover’ achieves biggest debut week sales for K-pop soloist

The debut solo album by V, a member of K-pop supergroup BTS, has set the biggest first-week sales record for an album by a K-pop soloist with 2.1 million copies sold, data showed Friday.

According to the data from Hanteo Chart, a leading local tracker of physical album sales, “Layover” had sold 2,101,974 copies as of the previous day.

This made V the first K-pop solo artist to surpass 2 million copies in the first week of an album’s release since Hanteo began filing sales data.

The first-week sales number is considered an important standard for measuring an artist’s popularity and the size of its fandom.

Only five soloists have passed the 1 million threshold in the first week of an album’s sales so far, with V’s bandmates Jimin and Suga rounding out the top three positions with “Face” (1.45 million copies) and “D-Day” (1.28 million copies), respectively.

“Layover” is expected to rank highly on the Billboard 200 main albums chart for this week, which will be unveiled as early as Sunday (U.S. local time).

The album’s title literally means a period of time when one takes a break from traveling during a journey.

It has six tracks, including the lead single, “Slow Dancing,” as well as the pre-released tracks “Rainy Days” and “Love Me Again.” The album also features the songs “Blue,” “For Us” and a piano version of “Slow Dancing.”