Being #1 is nothing new to Chris Daughtry. Debuting there is. Back in 2006, his band's self-titled debut went to the top of the Billboard charts in its ninth week of release. The follow-up, Leave This Town, didn't bother waiting that long: It will bow at #1 right out of the gate. The album sold more than 269,000 copies to land atop the Billboard 200 albums chart, according to numbers provided by Nielsen SoundScan, giving the former "American Idol" contestant another line on his already impressive résumé.

Daughtry's first album was the fastest-selling rock debut in SoundScan history, placing five consecutive singles in the top five of the Adult Top 40 radio charts and selling more than 7 million copies worldwide. Sales of that debut also shot up more than 46 percent this week, as it moved from #100 all the way up to #65.

Paramore's third album is finished, and the group is chomping at the bit to play the new material -- even though most of it will stay on ice until the as-yet-untitled set is released this fall. "It's hard going back to your old stuff after we've been strictly focusing on new material for the past three months," drummer Zac Farro tells Billboard.com. "You're excited about (the album) 'cause it's done and you just want to go out and play those songs. But there's a lot that has to be done to set it up, so it doesn't come out for awhile and you're just going back and playing your other two records when you just want to play all the new stuff." Farro says that Paramore is including two songs from the new album -- the follow-up to 2007's platinum "Riot," recorded in Los Angeles with Rob Cavallo producing -- in its opening sets for No Doubt, including the likely first single "Ignorance." "A lot of people have told us that (the album) is a very mature sound," Farro says. "I don't think we were aiming to be just more mature or whatever, but that's really cool to hear. I think there's a lot of new directions on the record.

Amidst its involvement on the soundtrack for the new Transformers movie and a number of members' solo projects in the works, Linkin Park is hard at work on its fourth album, which will likely come out in 2010 according to co-frontman Mike Shinoda. "It's moving," Shinoda says. "I feel like we've been writing a lot. I'd say we've got about half the music done, though I shouldn't say halfway because who knows how long the next batch of songs will take. But all the material's just kind of coming together, and every week we meet up and assess the situation and for the rest of the week we just go and work on whatever we find exciting." Shinoda says the group has decided on a producer but is not revealing that yet. He expects "an interesting transition" in the sound from 2007's "Minutes to Midnight," especially since singer Chester Bennington's upcoming solo project, "Dead By Sunrise" -- due out this fall -- "is much more of a rock album," leaving the door open for Linkin Park to experiment with other approaches.