Lil Uzi Vert’s ‘Eternal Atake’: By The Numbers

Earlier this month, Lil Uzi Vert’s sophomore LP, Eternal Atake, finally arrived after nearly two years of no-shows, and the long wait paid off. The Philly rapper’s latest effort broke streaming records — and earned the backing of the Backstreet Boys members, whose 1999 hit, “I Want It That Way,” he sampled on “That Way.” 

While Uzi might’ve lost out on a Hayley Williams feature and faced plagiarism accusations for his “That Way” cover art, March turned out to be a huge month for the hitmaker. The original version of EA dropped with a sole feature by Syd across the one-hour run-time, but a deluxe edition arrived a week later, adding the likes of Young Thug, Chief Keef, and Gunna.  

The road to the eventual release was paved in song leaks and label drama. In January 2018, Uzi tweeted: “if you do sign to a major [label] don’t sign to a rapper or a DJ. It’s just easier when the time come for the fake sh*t.” The rapper Nav backed his claim that Generation Now was blocking the release, while label head DJ Drama insisted Uzi was free to drop the album. Despite the behind-the-scenes issues, the long-delayed LP emerged on March 6, marking his first album since 2017’s Luv Is Rage 2.

After EA took over the charts this month, let’s take a closer look at some of the most important numbers tied to his record-breaking album:

2: How many weeks Eternal Atake spent at the top of the Billboard 200 so far. The LP was overtaken by The Weeknd’s After Hours in the week ending on March 26, and Uzi’s latest currently sits at No. 2 on the chart. 

8: The number of months that “P2” producer TM88 estimates leaks push back a project’s release. Ahead of the album drop, EA was plagued with leaks, and The Fader reported that hackers were selling unreleased tracks over Discord. “Leaks slow everybody up. Future and [Young] Thug are doing 10 songs a night,” the “XO TOUR Llif3” producer told Rolling Stone. “Uzi really takes a lot of time on his songs. If a fan leaks one or two songs, that’s pushing his album back another eight months.”

14: The additional tracks that appeared on the deluxe edition of EA, which he dropped a mere week after the original version arrived. The new songs aided the LP’s reign atop the Billboard 200 for a second-consecutive time in the week ending on March 19. (The chart combines all versions of the album for tracking purposes.) 

45 minutes: The amount of time it took for TM88 to make the “P2” beat. “I really just took the ‘XO’ drums and put the new melody over it,” the producer told Genius. “I wanted the new melody to kind of like speak to people when they hear it, put them in a trance.”

July 17, 2018: The day Uzi cryptically announced the album title over Twitter, drawing speculation that a project was on its way. “Eternal means forever,” he wrote. “Atake means 2 overtake.” It ended up taking close to two years before the long-delayed work went live. 

9,000: The amount of first-week album sales earned by Uzi’s sophomore album. 

23.8 million: The YouTube views “Futsal Shuffle 2020” racked up after the video was uploaded in December. (The Billboard 200 chart started counting video views in January, and Uzi conveniently uploaded all EA tracks to the video-sharing platform.)

400 million: The number of on-demand streams that EA racked up in its debut week across 18 tracks. According to Billboard, Uzi earned the fourth-largest streaming week ever as well as the biggest streaming week since Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter V accumulated 433 million streams in one week.