Kris Wu is a Canadian-Chinese singer, actor and model. You may know him from his boyband days in Kpop group Exo or acting in the star studded film xXx: Return of Xander starring Vin Diesel. Now he’s back with the release of his debut album Antares to take over the western music scene.

With features like Travis Scott on Deserve, Jhené Aiko on Freedom and Rich the Kid on Coupe, Wu can be seen putting in the work to cross the bridge into the West. Wu explains in an interview on Open Late with Peter Rosenberg that the album name Antares comes from one of the brightest stars in the galaxy. In the west it represents the heart of a scorpio which reflects his star sign of scorpio and in China it’s the heart of the dragon.

Upon release of his album on November 2nd 2018, there was controversy over his sales. His tracks had reached the top of the iTunes charts resulting in accusations of fraud such as using bots to get him there. Among those involved were Scooter Braun and Ariana Grande as this was happening around the release of Thank U, Next.  Variety reports a representative for Nielsen Music stated sales of Antares could not be verified. This is also because majority of Wu’s fans are based in China who tried buying or streaming on U.S. iTunes, Spotify etc to help boost numbers even though they don’t live in the U.S. and these platforms are not accessible in China. At the end of the day, Antares debuted at No. 100 on the Billboard charts. However, this does raise issues around exactly what statistics should be counted especially for Chinese artists where their fans do not have access to the platforms that Western artists would be using to collect sales statistics from.

Nevertheless, this brought attention on Kris Wu in the music industry and he can only go up from here. My personal favorites on the album are Deserve, Like That, November Rain and Antares.

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