When I came across PARTYNEXTDOOR’s “Lose My Mind” (stylized L o s e M y M i n d), I refused to post it on Instagram. I loved the song more than many others I had shared before. It is PARTY at his peak. The track opens with the closing of a door, combined with a female voice. He takes a few seconds of DMX’s “Party Up” to weave his high-pitched, stringy, and autotune-dominated vocals into counterparts that are low, deep, and sultry. Countering the norms of current music production, where samples are shoddily slapped on top of uninspired tracks, PARTY elevates the whole song. My streaming stats show I listened to “Lose My Mind” 17 times on the album’s release day. Regardless, I could not stomach endorsing the song to the world. A crass, shameful album cover stood in my way.
PARTYNEXTDOOR had delivered on his newest album’s death wish before anyone had heard a second of track one. The Mississauga native and R&B star—real name Jahron Anthony Brathwaite—had teased fans with his fourth studio album for over a year. Releasing a single every few months since January 2023, it was finally time for him to end the foreplay and announce his project, aptly named PARTYNEXTDOOR4. While announcing PND4’s release date of April 26, 2024, he shared the album artwork for the first time. A single, since-removed Instagram post left the R&B world in disbelief. Pictured is a Black woman, completely nude, gripping onto white bed sheets while her long braids stray across the top of the frame. Her face also rests on the sheets while she lifts her back in the air, doggystyle. Her legs to the top half of her buttocks are fully visible and bare. The only signage on the cover is a tattoo of the number 4 on her lower back. The photo cuts off at a point that, putting it kindly, stops the photo from being fully pornographic. I can put it more bluntly. The only thing you see is a naked woman about to have sex.
Many prayed the cover was a prank. The image was a steep pivot from PARTY’s previous three album covers, which solely featured long exposures of his face. With the unprecedentedly explicit nature of the cover and its release on April Fool’s Day, almost everyone was confident that he would show the true cover in due time. This would not be the case. He would confirm the artwork the next day by posting pre-orders for PND4 vinyls on his website, and nothing was a laughing matter anymore.
The disgusted vastly outnumbered the intrigued. Comments on the tweet–still up, likely thanks to X’s more lenient rules on sexual expression–condemned him as a heretic. Initially limited to PARTY fans but later expanding to other audiences, users came together to label him a freak and decry the upcoming work as a sex tape. Some published think pieces on how they miss the signature poses from R&B albums of old. Others lambasted the messaging, arguing that pornography has become too normalized. The degrees of despair varied, but the sentiment was the same: PARTY has gone too far, and once-excited consumers are far from happy. I once stood alongside these critics. The cover felt tacky: a shameless attempt to bait viewers into a rage to drive discourse and attention before the album’s release. It did not feel worth my time, and I quickly concluded that the actual body of work would also be unworthy.
The sheer quality of his past albums persuaded me to press play, even if I had to look over my shoulder every now and then to ensure no one could see my screen. I hated to admit it, but PND4 was painfully good. Listening to the project brought me back to my vicious cycle. I sat in an internal struggle for days. I shouted at him from my room many times. Why did he have to make loving his art so uncomfortable? Why did he latch music so smooth onto a cover so abrasive?
PND4 poses a fascinating question: if visual imagery appropriately serves as an extension of an album’s songs, will the music and the artwork evoke the same emotions in consumers? Far from it. Criticism may have overshadowed the album’s rollout, but it did not seem to matter. PND4 became PARTY’s third project to reach the top ten of the American Billboard 200 charts and became gold certified (500,000 units sold) in his home country of Canada. Robin Murray of CLASH finds that while PARTY “rarely eschew[s] his tried and tested formula”, the album is “supremely enjoyable.” If the tracks on PND4 follow the exact makeup of his previous works and are well-received, how can they coexist alongside a cover so controversial and groundbreaking?
After over a decade of honing his style, PARTY has mastered musical hypnosis. He effortlessly places his listeners in a sensual trance. Normally, glaring degrees of lust become indistinguishable, and his sex-ridden lyrics become muddled in the ears of the listener. In the album’s very first verse, he sings, “Take off your clothes / Who’s in control? / Come on, lay down, down, down / Let’s get to it, let’s skip all the small talk / I really wanna sex you up /I really wanna sex you up.” Mirroring his cover, PARTY has no interest in subtlety or waiting around—he wants to get straight to business. Yet, he is slow and sensual. He lets the instrumental play for almost a full minute before speaking a single word. His vocals are far from raw – he has intricately merged autotune into his sound. The beat is pushed almost all the way up to his voice, allowing the mesmerizing snare drum pattern to take center stage. The lyrics and artworks share identical energies, but his delivery creates a chasm of distance. His core auditory aesthetics directly counter the bluntness of the song’s words and visuals. This collision is disturbing in theory, but PARTY has crafted the combination so well that listeners are left unbothered and unsurprised in practice. Until the cover forces them to recognize his uncompromising sexual desire, that is.
Any shame PARTY left behind when creating PND4 shifted to his listeners. On platforms like Spotify Wrapped or Apple Music Replay, listeners curate their year-end stats with care, wary of how their music taste will appear to friends online—and PND4, with its widely disdained album cover art, seems unlikely to earn a spot in public-facing playlists This performance and surveillance (whether by one’s self or others) of music listening happens frequently: when you are in the car with friends and the driver tells you that “you got aux,” time freezes and the pressure is more than tangible. Online, many proclaim they cannot share the album solely because of the cover and that they fear for whoever is listening to these songs in public. Twitter users laugh together, commenting that the “album cover is crazy, I already feel embarrassed for whoever got Apple Car Play” and that people “better have the phone face down too when you [are] in public […].” In effect, PARTY has limited his album’s reach, deterring listeners from consuming and sharing PND4 to its maximum potential.
In an era where visual language is more closely connected to music than ever before, PND4 is proof that a cover can shape —and even sabotage—an album’s fate. The music itself is not taboo; PARTY’s polished sound prevents the raw sexual longing potent in his lyrics from fully breaking the surface. His cover however—which on some streaming services animates and expands to cover a phone’s whole display—introduces the threat of public humiliation. He forces fans to choose: proudly consume and share his art and face potential heaps of embarrassment, or listen by yourself in the dark. It seems like a decision no artist should make for their fans. I beg to differ. Engulfed by a musical world where safety and conformity are king, PARTY is happy to be the jester. He has gone into the studio, crafted another R&B classic, and pushed his accompanying visuals to a level that threatens to compromise his “actual” craft. Except, the music is not any more legitimate than the cover. They exist side by side and are of equal importance. If you want to listen to sex music, you are going to have to stomach seeing a sex cover. This creative provocation cuts against every convention – why shouldn’t we praise him for it?
That isn’t to say the cover is progressive. It is far from it. Sure: the lighting’s focus on the female subject’s stretch marks pushes away from the conventional beauty standards in mainstream media. It is refreshing, but this is as far as the revolution goes. He does not grant women any new form of sexual autonomy. The cover does not illustrate women reclaiming sex and pleasure for themselves. From a close look at his lyrics, it is clear that the female performances of sex he sings about still center him. At the end of the first track, two girls close out the song by deliberating whether to have a ménage á trois with PARTY:
“Girl, this nigga over here talking about a threesome
And you know I had one with that other dude before?
He said I owe him one
Should never told him I like bitches
Well, fuck, bitch, just give him one,
With who? You know you the only bitch that fuck with this nigga
I mean, just don’t tell my nigga I’m seeing now and we good.”
PARTY may invite female dialogue onto many of PND4’s tracks, but he still roots the content and messaging in fantasies and sexual settings tailored for the straight man. Even in writing this defense, I caught myself looking over my shoulder, looping tracks and pulling up lyrics in the library on a massive monitor. I showed my friends the artwork and saw them wince in real-time. On the day of PND4’s release, I was forced to either share my excitement or break my tradition and keep his art to myself. After some consideration, I knew I was happy to face the consequences. I reopened Instagram, posted the story, and walked away, waiting for my next subject of obsession to find me.
