Lana Del Rey Dethrones All Female Artists in 2014 With Huge Album Sales

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Lana Del Rey performs at the Sweetlife Music and Food Festival on May 10 in Columbia, Maryland.

Image: Taylor Hill/Getty Images/Associated Press

By Brian Anthony Hernandez2014-06-26 18:57:23 UTC

Lana Del Rey nabbed the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart this week with her third studio album, Ultraviolence, which dropped on June 13. It beat out fellow album premieres from Sam Smith, Linkin Park, Willie Nelson, Jennifer Lopez and Deadmau5.

The 28-year-old artist sold 182,000 copies from June 17 to 22, according to the latest data from Nielsen SoundScan. Billboard notes this is the largest album sales week for a female artist in 2014 and the biggest since Beyoncé's surprise visual album dropped in December 2013.

Del Rey premiered "West Coast" from Ultraviolence at Coachella in April, helping her become the most-mentioned artist on Twitter during the festival's first weekend.

Del Rey's chart-topping album is a chill, emotional effort filled with songs touching on the subject of sadness, love and violence. You can listen to it in full right here:

Her chart success coincides with a media frenzy about her recent death wish statement ("I wish I was dead already") in an interview with The Guardian , which incited Frances Bean Cobain, the daughter of the late Kurt Cobain, to fire back on Twitter in a series of tweets:

Del Rey has said that her death statement was taken out of context, going so far as to blame the reporter who published it.

I regret trusting The Guardian. I didn't want to do an interview, but the journalist was persistent. [He] was masked as a fan, but was hiding sinister ambitions and angles. Maybe he's actually the boring one looking for something interesting to write about.

In response, The Guardian published a recording of the Del Rey interview:

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