First Week Sales for Limp Bizkit’s Still Sucks Blow

Still Sucks, the first Limp Bizkit album in a decade, sold 3,500 units in its first week of release, landing at No. 155 on the Billboard 200 — the lowest-charting studio album of the band’s career. That includes 2005’s The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1).

According to Stream N’ Destroy, that number does NOT include on-demand streams of individual songs from Still Sucks, which usually are factored in these days. I’m not sure why that’s not the case here… although I also don’t know how much it would have helped in this case.

To give you a real perspective on just how far the mighty have fallen, that means Still Sucks sold fewer copies in its first week than than Kin, the new album from the deathcore band Whitechapel, and Bleed the Future, the latest offering from tech-death outfit Archspire. That is, in a word, BONKERS.

So what the heck went wrong here? Are Limp Bizkit really THAT unpopular now?

While nothing would make me happier than if 99% of the world did in fact say “Fuck it, we don’t care about Limp Bizkit anymore,” MetalSucks traffic stats for posts about the album and its first single, “Dad Vibes,” suggest that this is not the case. Noisecreep confirms as much, noting that sales of the bands’ songs doubled after a headline-grabbing set at Lollapalooza this summer, which included the debut (sort of) of the aforementioned “Dad Vibes.”

The culprit, in fact, seems to be the odd decision not to make Still Sucks available in any physical format — no CDs, no vinyls, no cassettes. Although we’ve been lead to believe that physical media is dead — and in “real world” terms, that’s mostly true — we know it still has value in the world of hard rock and metal. Case in point: 88% of the first week numbers for Whitechapel’s Kin came from physical sales. For Mastodon’s Hushed and Grim, that figure is 90%. Every Time I Die’s Radical, released a week earlier? 78.5%.

Of course, we can’t assume that Still Sucks would have added 80-90% to its first week stats if there had been physical copies available. But we can assume that it would have done something to bump the numbers… especially given the general age of your longtime Limp Bizkit fan.

Regardless, the numbers for Still Sucks don’t even provide that much schadenfreude value. Limp Bizkit don’t exactly need a hit album to book big shows. They’re a legacy band. As long as there are former frat dudes still willing to pay to hear “Nookie” and “Faith,” the band will be fine.