This last year was a great year for R&B and rap music with plenty of large albums releasing. These included albums such as incredibly successful “After Hours,” album, the highly anticipated “Eternal Atake,” and tons of other albums from big artists such as Lil Baby, Metro Boomin, and Gunna, amongst many others, but I feel that PARTYNEXTDOOR’s album really went under the radar. 

PARTYNEXTDOOR released his third album Partymobile at the end of March but got very little recognition for his quality music. PARTYNEXTDOOR came to fame after releasing many songs with Drake and becoming the first person to be signed to Drake’s label, OVO. Since then, he has written a lot of good music, most notably songs with Drake such as “Come and See Me,” and “Recognize,” amongst others. He started to stray away from Drake in his music, still producing good music but losing some popularity in the process. 

PARTYNEXTDOOR is known mainly for his voice and lyrics, and he did not disappoint. I feel that this type of music is music you can drive late at night to and that stayed consistent with this album. My three favorite solo tracks on the album were “Trauma,” “Another Day,” and “Eye on it.“ These songs are catchy every second and had me bopping my head from the first note to the last. They have the classic nighttime vibe that PARTYNEXTDOOR accomplishes so well and the songs are extremely good.

In addition, the feature songs were not ones to be ignored. Drake features in the song “LOYAL” and Rihanna features in the song “BELIEVE IT.” These are huge features to have, especially the Rihanna feature as she had been away from music for a while. These huge features plus 12 solid solo tracks make for a really stellar, underrated R&B album.

My biggest criticism of this album is it feels that some of the songs drag on and become a bit boring. The songs weren’t bad by any means, but a few felt a little too long, such as “Nothing Left,” “The News,” and especially “Showing You.” Some songs felt a bit static at times and they weren’t bad but also weren’t anything to rave about.

Overall, while this album wasn’t perfect, I feel it got far less attention than it deserved. The songs are very catchy, contain gripping lyrics and quality production. This album was one of my favorite R&B albums of 2020 and many people wouldn’t put it in their top five.