At a June event commemorating Anysia Kym’s Truest, DORIS rasped breathily over his own floor-rumbling tracks: a curious spectacle, considering that his “floor-rumbling tracks” are woozy bedroom ballads, less Mike Dean than Dean Blunt. Take “Usher,” the airy one-off single he dropped via MIKE’s 10k label three years ago. A languid Enchantment loop longs for “Gloria, my Gloria” while DORIS dawdles through the mix, chirping about weed—listen closely and you can hear him choking on the smoke. It’s beautiful in an unpolished way, like early Ariel Pink or R. Stevie Moore sending heartfelt prayers through hissing mics. Now picture him onstage, swaddled in feedback, speaker rattles, and the bitcrush of his own cranked-up backing track, no longer whispering but screaming through songs that lend themselves to silent weeping. Raw passion permeates even his breeziest, most distant dreamscapes. “Real and straight up,” he said in a recent interview: “That’s what I want to be, 100 percent of the time.”
DORIS is Frank Dorrey, a Jersey-raised multi-hyphenate who first came to public attention as a visual artist whose uncanny portraits have adorned album sleeves and limited-edition skate decks. His few press appearances portray him as a cerebral recluse, happier to speak from a SoundCloud account than a soapbox. The statements he made from said SoundCloud account were surreal—fleeting fever dreams that rode the same psychedelic highs as his eerie, amorphous Picsart prints. He chose the name DORIS partly as an homage to Earl Sweatshirt: an artsy young introvert resonating with the mastermind behind I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside.
Dorrey is still somewhat shy, but he’s stepping out more often. (Pitchfork caught up with him earlier this year at the opening of a joint art exhibition with Brayan Ramales.) He’s also gotten far more comfortable in his own voice—comfortable enough to drop a sprawling 50-track opus without stumbling across the same idea twice. Last month, he independently released Ultimate Love Songs Collection, a glut of lo-fi demos largely ripped from his SoundCloud. It scans a lot like other ambitious hard drive clean-outs, à la Roaches 2012-2019 or Sent From My Telephone, but manages to remain intimate—and wildly fun—where the “longform idea dump” genre so runs aground. Ultimate Love Songs Collection doesn’t feel low-effort or self-aggrandizing—it shares the cathartic release of singing in the shower. “I’m just riding on the beat, I just like the way it sounds,” a giddy DORIS admits on “Baby reign,” audibly lost in the sauce. Unlike much of underground rap’s young vanguard, he isn’t cosplaying his influences so much as performing simple passions: his own company, the songs he’s stoked on, and the weed he’s smoking while trying to loop his favorite parts. Deep as it sits within his universe, the music is familiar enough to nestle comfortably within ours.
Here’s the scene: DORIS hunched over a laptop long after midnight, tangled in wires from a mic, a charger, a pair of headphones, and a Focusrite. The only light source is his screen, and if he doesn’t close all those YouTube-to-MP3 tabs, it might just go out. Ultimate Love Songs Collection has the drowsy fuck-it affect of a savant on his last sip of Celsius. Dorrey’s phlegmy whisper bridges the gap between Whole Lotta Red’s rage-rasp and The Unseen’s quirky up-pitch, like an imaginary friend with something stuck in their throat. His appetite for samples expands on the air of red-eyed curiosity, revisiting traces of soul music heard through parents’ crackly radios, alt-rock earworms playing from cracked iPhones, and young-adult angst drowned out by airy hypnagogic pop. One second, he’s chipmunk-squeaking over the Cardigans’ “Lovefool”; the next, he’s coughing out congested romance epics, regaling weed over melodies more famous for regaling girls from Ipanema. All the while, he’s endearingly candid, like a kid who got one of those T-Pain mics for Christmas—bedroom or studio, he just wants to say the first thing that comes to mind.
What makes Ultimate Love Songs Collection so rewarding, even relatable, is the way it wears this bare, ragtag enthusiasm on its sleeves—stripping away pretense so all that’s left is a snapshot of the moment DORIS decided he fucked with a certain song. Today’s underground hip-hop is less interested in consistency than radical, relentless knob-pushing: dialing up the echo, amplifying the distortion, kindling flames of anarchy and fetching gasoline. DORIS shares his contemporaries’ knack for frenzied creation, but he also doesn’t move like there’s anything especially shocking or marketable behind his madness. No occult poses, no indie sleaze revival, no punk aesthetic rehashed for a new generation: He just wants to wail his own love songs over the ones stuck in head.
