In music marketing, artists and their management are fond of cooking up stories to spark virality to create a wave of listening ears before a song or project. A very recent case was the Doja Cat and T-shirt guy situation that fans lapped up until their quick settlement allowed many to take the veil off their eyes. The buildup to the third studio album from Summer Walker, Finally Over It. This was the last project in the Over It Trilogy that began in 2019 was anything but that. The roll out to the album that followed Over it (2019) and Still Over it (2021) was anything but scandalous with her team prioritizing cinematic wedding aesthetics and the message of being “healed,” “settled,” “moving on” but what was to transpire next contradicted everything her label probably had planned.
The Voicemail That Broke The Pizza Hut
On November 20, a viral audio leaked where you could allegedly hear Summer Walker talking about wanting to continue sleeping with Rich the Kidd despite his baby mama and fiancé Tori Brix still being in his life. Summer claimed not to have an issue with Tori or Rich the Kidd still being with her. She laughed and called herself the sidechick, stating in some parts of the voicemail that he could get a “burner phone” and save her name as “Pizza Hut” to enable them to continue “playing around.”
What were the Expectations?
Having a controversy of that level spread like wildfire six days after dropping an album that negates the message spread in the leaked audio can work one of two ways. An album with guest acts like Doja Cat, Chris Brown, Bryson Tiller, Sexyy Red, Glorilla and 21 Savage amongst others would be expected to do great first week numbers, controversy or not, but the first week numbers of Finally Over It were the worst first week album numbers (77,000 units) Summer Walker has posted in the trilogy with a 54% drop from the last project.
For context though, Wale, who released his 8th solo album, everything is a lot, on the same day as Summer, similarly saw low first week numbers, moving just 22,000 units, though it came in slightly above his last album Folarin II, which only moved 20,000.
The Ghost of Numbers Past and Present
The effect of the controversy or lack of, was always going to be seen in week 2 onwards considering the leak was on the sixth day of the first week of tracking. According to Billboard, Finally over It joined it’s contemporaries to top the RnB/HipHop Albums chart and the 77,000 units sold was the most by a female RnB artist in a first week for 2025. After two full weeks of tracking, the album debuted number 2 in the albums chart just behind Taylor Swift’s The fate of Ophelia.
The numbers suggest she has topped expectations in the first two weeks for her album in comparison with her peers but is still far behind her personal best (54% drop). The most streamed songs on Spotify being the song with Doja Cat & Latto (“Go Girl”) followed by the Chris Brown feature (“Baby”) outlines that the huge streaming numbers are coming from featured artists fanbases. That aside, the recent scandal and reply by Tori Brixx hasn’t seemed to slow or propel Summer Walker judging by Spotify numbers. A further update on this will be provided once more numbers are released.
Finally
In some sense, the scandal has reframed the album rather than overshadow it. Summer Walker herself in interviews has leaned into the mess in album promotions claiming “it put the finishing touches” on the album, which might give a hint that it was planned after all? Whatever the case, Finally Over It is now being read not just as a concept about healing from old relationships, but as a commentary on the exact kind of chaos Summer Walker is still partially entangled in.
