HARI In-House Blog

Submitted by djbobbydrake on
Concert Review: PartyNextDoor

Last month, we were lucky enough to catch PartyNextDoor’s soldout first solo show in Boston.

For those of you who don’t know, PartyNextDoor is a Canadian R&B artist, best known for being the first signee to Drake’s OVO Sound label. The show was at the Middle East, a venue with a club atmosphere which has hosted many up and coming hiphop acts on their first tours, including Kendrick Lamar in 2011 and Schoolboy Q in 2012.

The concert had an intimate feel; it’s clear that he made deliberate choices in creating his stage presence, which led to an engaging show. Party’s confidence in his abilities was apparent in his nearly perfect vocal performance. He seemed to almost be held back by the size of the venue – he would have thrived in a larger space such as the House of Blues. He performed almost all of his most well known songs, encompassing much of his debut PartyNextDoor, and almost all of his latest release, PartyNextDoor Two.

Boston was epic, PARTYNEXTDOOR feat. Boston type epic.

— PARTYNEXTDOOR (@PARTYOMO) October 22, 2014

It was very much a fan-oriented concert; after the show he posted the above tweet, expressing his appreciation. It felt much more like a hiphop concert – the crowd was much more hype than your average R&B audience. Oftentimes, their collective voice overwhelmed Party’s singing. We can see in this the melding between hiphop and R&B that is really being spearheaded by Drake’s emerging empire (a topic we will be exploring separately in a forthcoming blog post).

Our only qualm with the concert is that we didn’t get enough. Although he showed up promptly at his set time, the performance only lasted a total of 45 minutes. He performed shortened versions of most of his songs, not getting past the first or second verses. We, as fans familiar with all of the songs, were quite disappointed by the shorten segments. Part of the reason must be attributed to the fact that he is a new artist with limited performance experience, who therefore didn’t want to overextend himself. It could also be that he underestimated the depth of knowledge of his fans, and wanted to cover a wider variety of songs for those who were new to his catalogue.

PartyNextDoor seems to really have what it takes to reach stardom. His start, sound, and performance style are very similar to the Weeknd, and so we can definitely see him following a similar trajectory. His content is definitely more accessible, and paired with more performances like this he seems poised to achieve mainstream success very soon.


Nafisa is a senior who has been working at the Archive since the fall of 2014. She loves everything Kanye and 2 Chainz and generally embraces the full conscious-ratchet spectrum wholeheartedly. Drew Scott is a Senior at Harvard College, studying Neurobiology. When she is not watch YouTube videos of HipHop dancing children superstars, she’s probably laughing at her own jokes or watching copious amounts of anything Shonda has touched. Til’ the next episode, peace.