In early 2013, PARTYNEXTDOOR's music found its way to OVO. "I'm eternally interested and curious and looking for that new hit, to feel something that I've never felt," says the label's co-founder Oliver El-Khatib, over the phone from Toronto. He first received Party's music from frequent Drake producer Boi-1da, who sent some songs over from an email address El-Khatib didn't recognize at first. "I'll just listen to anything," El-Khatib says. "I give my email address to anybody. I was getting these emails from a random address, and I started listening, and it was crazy. So I hit back like, 'Send me more, I need to hear more,' because that's how I gauge how consistent it is. Is it two flukes? Or is this like a sound, is this cohesive? He kept sending me more, and I started to get really into it and playing it for 40 and for the boy."

"Oliver called me back in the morning," Boi-1da remembers. "When you get a call from Oliver, it's serious. Then Drake hit me back like two days later, like, 'Yo, that Party kid's nice!'" Party says his first meeting with the OVO camp took place in the back of El-Khatib's Range Rover, "on some random street" in Toronto. Now, El-Khatib tells me that it's Party's uncompromising vision that makes him OVO's secret weapon. "He's the rare breed that writes, produces, engineers, performs, sings—all in one artist. He's pulling all of the strings, he's doing everything, so you hear his final production exactly the way he envisions it," he says. "That is a privilege for any artist. You look at the only other artists that are able to manipulate like that, and it's Kanye West."

Party produced the entirety of his self- titled debut, its follow-up TWO, and 2014's PNDCOLOURS (on the latter, one song was co-produced, by Cardo). He also produced three standouts on Drake's If You're Reading This It's Too Late: "Legend," "Preach," and "Wednesday Night Interlude," the one song on the mixtape that does not feature Drake. (This honor had been bestowed just once before, to Kendrick Lamar.) Even as a member of the OVO crew, Party is making all of these beats strictly on his own. "I haven't gone to the studio with anybody, not enough to learn from them," he says. "Not 40, nobody. Me and Drake are hardly ever in the studio working." He loves to experiment with his own voice, and takes pride in the fact that different songs of his sound like they belong to different singers. Live, Party sings without any special effects, but he makes no apologies for his continued use of Auto-Tune on his records. "The first time I heard Auto-Tune, it was not via T-Pain," he says. "It was via people I listened to with my cousins, cultural shit like Vybz Kartel and Mavado, who would scream and belt the hardest shit out."