Sam Hunt’s sophomore album, Southside, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart.
The 12-song set moved 46,000 equivalent units, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, which was also good enough for No. 5 on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart.
Southside, which features Sam’s recent No. 1 hit, “Kinfolks,” and new single, “Hard to Forget,” also includes his 2017 smash hit, “Body Like a Back Road,” and 2018 Top 20 hit, “Downtown’s Dead.” Southside follows Sam’s 2014 debut album, Montevallo, which spawned No. 1 hits “Leave the Night On,” “Take Your Time,” “House Party” and more.
“[The break] gave me some time to reflect on the two, three years prior,” said Sam to Kix Brooks of American Country Countdown. “It gave me some time to think about how I wanted to approach the next two, three, four, five, 10 years. It gave me some time to reconnect with the girl who I ended up getting married to, and kind of—I guess for lack of a better way to put it—put some roots down. Coming from a world where it was either put roots down now or probably never put roots down, it was a pretty big fork in the road for me, so I just wanted to make sure to get it right, and I took some time to do that.”
Sam’s new single, “Hard to Forget,” which samples Webb Pierce’s 1953 hit, “There Stands the Glass,” was co-penned by Sam, Luke Laird, Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne and Ashley Gorley, as well as “There Stands the Glass” songwriters Audrey Grisham, Russ Hull and Mary Jean Shurtz.
