The 2020s File Feature
Believe It
Believe It: PARTYNEXTDOOR and Rihanna's Pandemic-Era Debut at Number 23 When "Believe It" by PARTYNEXTDOOR and Rihanna arrived on the Billboard Hot 100 on Ap…
01 The Story
Believe It: PARTYNEXTDOOR and Rihanna's Pandemic-Era Debut at Number 23
When "Believe It" by PARTYNEXTDOOR and Rihanna arrived on the Billboard Hot 100 on April 11, 2020, debuting at number 23, it represented one of the first major chart events of the COVID-19 pandemic era and demonstrated that Rihanna's commercial power had not diminished despite her extended absence from music releases. The debut at number 23 was the highest chart position the track would reach, a strong opening performance driven by the surprise of the release and the combined star power of the two collaborators, both of whom were signed to OVO Sound and Def Jam respectively and both of whom were major figures in the Toronto-adjacent R&B and dancehall-influenced pop landscape that had been reshaping the sound of mainstream music since the mid-2010s.
PARTYNEXTDOOR, born Jahron Brathwaite on July 3, 1993, in Mississauga, Ontario, had built his reputation as one of the most influential figures in the Toronto music scene, both as a performer and as a songwriter and producer for other artists. His work behind the scenes, particularly his songwriting contributions to Drake's catalog and his work with Rihanna on tracks including "Work," had established him as a creative force whose impact on the sound of contemporary R&B extended well beyond his own recordings. His solo catalog, released through OVO Sound and Warner Records, had developed a loyal following drawn to his distinctive approach to atmospheric R&B, which combined elements of Toronto's specific urban sound with Jamaican and Caribbean musical influences.
Rihanna's participation in "Believe It" was significant for reasons beyond the song's own merits. By early 2020, she had not released music in approximately four years, with her last album, Anti, having arrived in January 2016. Her extended absence from music, during which she had built the Fenty Beauty cosmetics empire and the Savage X Fenty lingerie line, had created an enormous anticipation around any musical project she might undertake. The announcement that she had recorded with PARTYNEXTDOOR generated substantial media attention, and the song's release was accompanied by the kind of speculative excitement about what Rihanna's next musical direction might be that few other artists could generate.
"Believe It" was released on April 4, 2020, as a single from PARTYNEXTDOOR's album PARTYMOBILE. The album debuted at number 11 on the Billboard 200 the week following the single's chart entry, a performance that reflected the boost provided by Rihanna's involvement and the genuine strength of PARTYNEXTDOOR's own fanbase. The fourteen-week Hot 100 run of "Believe It" was substantial for a single that received limited mainstream radio play, reflecting the combination of streaming activity from both artists' fan communities and the genuine interest in the track's sonics.
The production of "Believe It" drew on the atmospheric R&B sound that PARTYNEXTDOOR had been developing throughout his career, combining slow-burn rhythmic elements with layered synth textures and a production style that owed something to dancehall's rhythmic vocabulary while remaining firmly in the R&B tradition. The sonic environment created space for both voices, Rihanna's recognizable timbre and PARTYNEXTDOOR's more subdued but emotionally textured vocal approach. The contrast between the two vocal personalities was one of the track's pleasures, and it demonstrated why Rihanna had chosen this particular collaborator for a return to recorded music after such a long absence.
The chart trajectory of "Believe It" followed a pattern of rapid ascent and sustained decline that was characteristic of tracks driven primarily by release-week streaming activity. From its peak of 23 the week of April 11, 2020, it fell to 58 the following week, then to 61, 75, and 69 in subsequent weeks, before falling further and eventually exiting the chart after fourteen weeks. This pattern reflected the mechanics of streaming-driven chart performance: an enormous amount of activity in the first week generated by the promotional push and by the genuine excitement around the track, followed by a gradual normalization as the audience dispersed and as the algorithm's promotional emphasis shifted to other releases.
The April 2020 context gave the song an unusual backdrop. Cities across the United States and Canada were in various stages of lockdown as the pandemic's first major wave was being managed, and the social isolation of that period shaped how people were consuming music. The atmospheric, emotionally intimate quality of "Believe It" aligned well with the mood of an audience that was spending extraordinary amounts of time in enclosed domestic spaces and was seeking music that could inhabit those spaces meaningfully. The track's streaming numbers from April 2020 reflected a listening context very different from the club and party environments that much contemporary R&B was designed for.
PARTYNEXTDOOR's broader trajectory as a recording artist had been characterized by critical appreciation and commercial success that sometimes fell below the scale one might expect given the breadth of his influence as a songwriter and producer. "Believe It" represented his strongest commercial performance in years, and the Rihanna feature was central to that performance. The collaboration demonstrated his ability to work at the highest level of commercial pop, confirming what his songwriting credits had long suggested about his capacity to function effectively within the most commercially demanding creative contexts.
The Toronto Sound and Rihanna's Musical Orbit
The collaboration between PARTYNEXTDOOR and Rihanna was not their first. Their creative history included PARTYNEXTDOOR's songwriting contribution to "Work," Rihanna's massive 2016 single that had reached number 1 on the Hot 100 and had become one of the defining tracks of the decade's dancehall-influenced pop moment. The "Believe It" collaboration built on that established creative relationship, with both artists bringing the understanding of each other's aesthetic preferences that comes from previous successful creative engagement.
The Barbadian roots of Rihanna's musical identity and the Caribbean influences in PARTYNEXTDOOR's Toronto upbringing created a shared cultural reference point that gave their collaboration a sonic specificity beyond what either might have achieved with a partner from a different background. The Caribbean rhythmic DNA that both artists carry, expressed differently through their respective artistic identities, gave "Believe It" a particular groove that connected it to a tradition of Atlantic diaspora music that was distinct from the American R&B mainstream while remaining commercially legible to audiences familiar with that mainstream.
02 Song Meaning
Trust, Vulnerability, and the Slow Burn of "Believe It"
"Believe It" occupies the specific emotional territory of a relationship that is moving toward trust but has not yet arrived there fully. The thematic content describes the process of convincing a partner that the connection is real, that the feeling being expressed is genuine rather than performative, and that the commitment being offered will be honored. This is not the confident assertion of the standard romantic declaration but rather the careful, qualified language of someone who is aware that trust must be earned through demonstration rather than simply claimed.
PARTYNEXTDOOR's approach to romantic subject matter has consistently engaged with the complexity and ambiguity of modern relationships in ways that distinguish his work from more straightforwardly celebratory or confrontational romantic music. His songs tend to inhabit the uncertain middle ground between connection and disconnection, exploring the states between commitment and withdrawal that characterize a great deal of actual intimate experience. "Believe It" fits this pattern, addressing a moment in a relationship where the outcome is still genuinely uncertain and where the speaker's goal is to shift the balance toward connection through persuasion and demonstration rather than through demand.
Rihanna's vocal contribution adds a specific dimension to the song's meaning. Her presence transforms what might have been a solo artist's romantic appeal into a dialogue, giving the song a quality of genuine exchange rather than one-directional declaration. Her vocal timbre, which carries an authority and self-possession that is distinctive and instantly recognizable, communicates that the object of the appeal is not passive but engaged, evaluating what is being offered and reaching her own assessment. The interaction between the two vocal personalities creates a relational dynamic that makes the song feel like an encounter rather than a monologue.
The production's atmospheric quality, its use of slow tempos and layered synthesizer textures, creates an emotional environment of suspended time, the sense of being in a moment of importance where normal rhythms have slowed to accommodate the weight of what is happening. This production choice is itself a form of meaning, suggesting that the emotional stakes of the conversation being depicted are high enough to require this kind of special temporal attention. The slow burn of the music matches the gradual, careful process of building trust that the song describes thematically.
The Caribbean rhythmic influences in the production add a cultural dimension to the song's meaning that connects it to a specific tradition of diasporic Atlantic music. The rhythmic vocabulary derived from dancehall and related Caribbean forms carries associations of pleasure, embodiment, and a particular relationship to time and movement that differs from the more angular rhythms of American hip-hop. In "Believe It," this Caribbean rhythmic inheritance creates a quality of physical ease within the emotional complexity of the lyrical content, suggesting that the intimacy being described is also sensory and embodied, not merely psychological.
The song's title and its central gesture of asking to be believed carries an interesting relationship to power. To ask someone to believe you is to acknowledge that you do not have the power to compel that belief, that you are dependent on the other person's willingness to be persuaded. This is a vulnerable position, and the fact that the song inhabits it without seeking to escape through defensive posturing or compensatory aggression is one of its more distinctive qualities. The emotional openness that PARTYNEXTDOOR brings to the song, and that Rihanna matches in her contribution, gives it a relational quality that more defended romantic music cannot achieve.
In the context of April 2020, with the pandemic reshaping the conditions of intimacy and relationship, the song's themes carried an added resonance. The question of whether to believe someone, whether to invest trust in the possibility of connection, took on additional weight in an environment where the normal mechanisms for establishing and deepening intimacy, shared physical space, social activity, the accumulated texture of daily life together, had been significantly disrupted. Belief in the possibility of genuine connection required more active faith in a moment when the evidence that usually supports such belief was harder to accumulate.
The extended presence of Rihanna in the cultural imagination, despite her years of absence from music, gave "Believe It" a particular kind of meaning for her fanbase. The song arrived as evidence that she was still present as a musical artist, still capable of the kind of vocal performance and collaborative creativity that had defined her earlier career. For listeners who had been waiting years for new Rihanna music, "Believe It" functioned not just as a song but as a signal, a demonstration that the musical voice they had valued was still active and available even if a full album had not yet materialized. In that context, the song's central request, to be believed, took on an ironic secondary meaning as an artist asking her audience to believe in her continued artistic presence.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging