Noah Kahan Earns First No. 1 Album With ‘The Great Divide’
Noah Kahan performs onstage for Spotify Presents Noah Kahan: ‘The Great Divide’ at Pioneer Works on April 22, 2026, in New York City.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Spotify
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Noah Kahan has officially earned his first No. 1 album.
The 29-year-old singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album, The Great Divide, has landed atop the Billboard 200, the magazine announced Sunday. One of the most hotly anticipated albums of 2026, The Great Divide earned 389,000 equivalent album units in its first week, Billboard reports. That’s the third biggest week for an album this year.
The Great Divide had healthy physical sales, around 175,000; however, streaming led the Vermont native’s ascent to the top — streaming units comprised 212,000 of the total 389,000 first week equivalent album units. The album marks the biggest streaming week of any album in 2026, Kahan’s largest streaming week and the biggest week for a rock album since Billboard began measuring by units in 2014.
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The Great Divide serves as the follow-up to Kahan’s breakthrough hit album, Stick Season, which helped transform the Vermont native from a club act to a stadium headliner. The 29-year-old announced the album in late January and dropped the music video for its first single, the titular track, during a commercial break of the 2026 Grammy Awards.
Less than 24 hours after the release of the 17-track album, Kahan surprise dropped an extended version, The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs. The expanded version of the album featured four new tracks — “Lighthouse,” “Staying Still,” “A Few of Our Own” and “Orbiter” — bringing the final number of tracks up to 21.
Leading up to The Great Divide’s release, Kahan dropped two pre-release singles, “The Great Divide” and “Porch Light.” The singer previously told The Hollywood Reporter that he and his team had many long conversations about why the titular track should be the first released off the album. “We realized that we wanted to make sure we led with the storytelling first. The Great Divide is really emblematic of the storytelling on the rest of the record, in my opinion,” Kahan said.
“It’s the best entryway into the record from a storytelling and sonic perspective. I think it offers something a little bit different from a lot of the stuff on Stick Season,” he continued. “There’s a little bit more going on musically, it’s a little bit more rocking, and I think that is really fun because that’s the direction I want to go in.”
Last month, Kahan released a Netflix documentary, Noah Kahan: Out of Body. The 90-minute film, directed by Nick Sweeney, follows the singer as he prepares to make The Great Divide, standing at the crossroads of what to do in the wake of a smash hit. “I don’t want to be stuck in one way. It was these fears that just rattled around in my head that made it so hard for me to write it all that eventually I just had to let him go,” the singer told THR.
“We really wanted to capture the feeling of Vermont in this album. Vermont has so many quiet, beautiful moments that you really just need to hear to experience,” he later added. “Some of the songs were recorded in ways that really capture that feeling.”
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