Lucas’s Solo Debut Analytics Pale In Comparison To Other NCT Solos

Former NCT member Lucas made his highly controversial solo debut on April 1 with the single album Renegade, over three years since he was last active as an idol with WayV in March 2021. The lead-up to his debut saw a lot of arguing on social media regarding his scandalous history and why SM Entertainment decided to promote him as a solo artist, and many people were interested to see how well he would perform as a soloist despite his questionable reputation.

Now that it has been a week since the album came out, fans have been comparing the analytics of his debut with that of other NCT and SM artists, and the results are pretty telling.

On Spotify, the album had around 284,000 first-day streams and 1.53 million first-week streams. According to Hanteo, his first-day sales were around 5.4k units sold, and his first-week sales were 19.9k. For some artists from smaller labels, these numbers wouldn’t be too bad, but considering Lucas is still with SM Entertainment and compared to other artists at the same label, the results aren’t as great as some were probably hoping.

On a Reddit post about the topic, user u/mcfw31 compared these analytics with Taeyong‘s TAP and SHALALA albums as well as Ten‘s TEN album. The results can be seen here.

And if that data isn’t enough, they also gathered the first day and first week album sales through Hanteo for other solo releases by SM artists such as EXO and SHINee.

Perhaps most notable is how Lucas’s sales numbers compare to Chen‘s, who also went through a period of some people boycotting him due to his marriage. His lowest first-day sales number is around 40.0k, which is still double that of Lucas’s first-week sales.

Here’s how people are reacting to these numbers in the comments section of the Reddit post.

It will be interesting to see what SM Entertainment decides to do with Lucas next, now that this data has been calculated.