Although music aficionados might see themselves as deep types, the appreciation of music is often linked to gossip. Even Dylanologists care who Dylan’s songs were about.
Over in the demimonde of nocturnal R&B, Drake protege PartyNextDoor (Jahron Brathwaite) spent March in an ugly social media storm. His ex, Kehlani – an R&B superstar-in-waiting – had been dating basketball celebrity Kyrie Irving. But a PND Instagram post placed Kehlani in the Canadian crooner’s bed. The online reaction was so vituperative, Kehlani reportedly attempted suicide. (Irving later clarified that the two had broken up.)
It continues to be impossible to separate PND from his all-conquering label boss. Drake has just spent 15 weeks at No 1 in the UK; he and PartyNextDoor have a symbiotic relationship, sharing producers, guesting on each other’s tracks. And it’s also very hard to hear PND3 in isolation from Brathwaite’s love life, long lived in public. In 2014, he released a song called Girl from Oakland (Kehlani is from Oakland); Kehlani’s Freestyle followed in 2015.
The songwriting on P3 probably predates March, locating PND at the broken-up stage. Tracks like the nagging Only U vibrate with lovelorn angst, enumerating the ways in which PND kept his girl satisfied. It’s not so much dancehall-inflected, as straight-up Caribbean – a Rihanna track, sung by a man. PND, of course, had a big writerly hand in Work, Rihanna’s smash hit; his vocal demo is quite illuminating.
Not Nice is another catchy slice of skeletal Caribbean pop. “Oh girl, you’re not nice, you’re rude,” sings Party, double-entendre-ing. “Look what you’re putting me through.” Spiteful, meanwhile, is a ticklish R&B track with a plangent rock guitar cutting through it. Normally, that might count as a lapse in taste, but the track is such a picture of male hurt, it makes perfect sense.
Brathwaite’s previous two albums have persuasively married two strands of loverman R&B: the old-school type, eyes-scrunched-up in love, and the 21st-century model, following the Weeknd: ultra-minimal, chasing diminishing sexual thrills (see PND2). Here, 1942 is a dark sulk about craving aged tequila, and Temptations semi-quotes Marvin Gaye (perhaps unwisely, given how litigious his estate is: “Sexual healing, oh what a feeling,” but against a doomy, woozy, genre-perfect backdrop.
The lead single, Come and See Me (feat Drake), has the production values of the latter, but the bent of the former. It sets out PND’s stall very well: most of the tracks on P3 skew its way.
Although PND’s hasty Instagram arguably nearly sparked a tragedy, the picture here is less of a cad than of a man wrestling with his feelings in an overfamiliar (if wildly successful) sonic bubble. PartyNextDoor is standing out in a crowded market, not so much for his sound, but for his circumstances.
