Luke Bryan’s Kill the Lights has debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 200 album chart with more than 345,000 copies sold, according to Billboard. The collection, Luke’s fifth studio album, is the third-largest week of 2015 for album sales (the only one’s larger are the debuts of Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late at 535,000 in overall units and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly at 363,000 units).
Kill The Lights’ is also the largest sales week for a country album in three years — since Luke’s last full album, Crash My Party, which bowed at No. 1 with 528,000 in August of 2013. This is Luke’s third consecutive album to debut at #1 on the Billboard Top 200.
Kill the Lights was produced by Jeff Stevens and Jody Stevens and contains 13 songs, six of which were co-written by Luke including the title track.
Luke’s latest single, “Strip It Down,” is climbing the country charts.
Audio / Luke Bryan says he started working on Kill the Lights even before Crash My Party.
DownloadLuke Bryan (Kill the Lights album) OC: …an album. 1:35
“What’s funny about Kill the Lights is I had some ideas that are on Kill the Lights, song ideas that we wrote so I almost started some songs on Kill the Lights before I made Crash My Party. And I mean like, yeah, that happens. When did I start preparing for Kill the Lights or getting my thoughts around it? I don’t know. Probably before Crash My Party. You never know when an old song that you’ve been working on if you sit back down and work with it if it will be something that makes an album and that was – we had that happen on this album. My producer, Jeff [Stevens], is constantly taking meetings and letting songwriters know ‘Hey! This is where we’re at’ and we’re real vocal with all that. So, we start finding songs and you put them on hold and then you put them in a little file in your computer. I will make a little file that says ‘next album,’ and I’ll start dragging those songs over into it and listening to them. So, we start that – I don’t know if we ever stop it. I don’t think you can ever be truly prepared enough going into an album. I’ve always tried to make my albums to where the label can single anything they want to whether if they need to, but obviously I have a lot of control in that. So, that’s the main thing. I mean, we get ready for our albums the same way, listen to as many songs as we can, write as many songs as we can, come up with great ideas to push the envelope on stuff and there you have it and then you have an album.”