Frank Dorrey makes music the same way he pieces together his warped, uncanny digital collages: as an attempt to make dreaming a conscious process, reconstructing memories out of images that are immediately available. The distorted, fragmentary tracks he posts to SoundCloud as DORIS aim to capture that strangely touching sense of déjà vu that arises when you rediscover a favorite song via radio or Instagram Reels pull. Inspired by Dean Blunt’s minimalist approach to sampling, he carves up low-bitrate rips of recognizable pop songs, then briefly sings along or raps a cryptic stanza, all under the protective shield of heavy Auto-Tune and chipmunked pitch-shifting. The result holds a constant tension: the uncomfortable intimacy of catching someone getting too into their music at a red light pitted against the detachment of a glitchy video call about to drop.
Even at a staggering 50 tracks, DORIS’ 2024 Ultimate Love Songs Collection clocked in at a traditional 48-minute album runtime. Each song, plucked directly from Dorrey’s SoundCloud, stuck around for about a minute, composed with the economy of an Imagist poem or a Guided by Voices deep cut: The snippets lasted just long enough to elicit feeling, leaving the impression of something greater. While much of his new 45-track compilation, Everything Else, follows the same structure, it’s padded out by lengthy suites. The most ambitious of these—the nine-minute “D Presents Notes from Heaven”—opens the record, gluing mixtape-like sequences together with Mortal Kombat voice clips and dream logic. The song plays out like letting a friend with a short attention span control the aux while you drive. He’s flipping from highlight to highlight, reminiscing on hearing BlocBoy JB for the first time while a slowed version of “Caramelldansen” coos in the backdrop, then cranking up the Counting Crows song from Shrek 2 as he toasts his boys. The constant shifting from one idea to the next feels overwhelming at first, but becomes hypnotic as your dopamine receptors adjust to the influx of novelty.
Because these longer pieces—whose titles all start with “D Presents”—comprise so many beat switches and disparate whims, they function as distinct dramatic setpieces within the album, encouraging the listener to consider each beat switch or tonal shift as part of an overarching narrative. “D Presents Jackets” opens with a woman’s ruminations about her inability to stop worrying as MIDI strings create a maudlin atmosphere. When an off-kilter baile funk beat pops out of the ether, her self-consciousness fades, eventually giving way to cute, crunchy muzak and romantic dialogue that sounds lifted from a Persona game. It’s a charming depiction of catharsis via clubbing, presented in a way that highlights the comfort rather than the euphoria of this release.
The story arcs within these longer tracks aren’t always fleshed out and—in the case of “Jackets,” at least—feel a bit more grounded compared to the surreal ambiguity of Ultimate Love Songs’ best moments. But the intense feelings of introspection and, eventually, presence in the moment cut through the static. Everything Else hits hardest when DORIS fuses club-centric subgenres, using his voice as sample material for danceable beats. “I’ve met sorry before” uses the most yearning section of Gigi D’Agostino’s Euro-trance classic “La Passion” to set a scene that resembles the album’s cover art: You’re wedged beside Dorrey on a crowded dance floor as he tries to grab your attention. Whatever he’s trying to tell you gets swallowed by the bass, but the pangs of nostalgia still get across.
Overall, the biggest stylistic leap between Ultimate Love Songs and Everything Else is DORIS’ ability to weave together uncanny, low-fidelity instrumentals that still thump hard enough to function as legit dance music. “Delirious<3” and “singin” use intentionally chintzy keyboard fonts to merge the retrofuturistic aesthetic of mid-aughts Sims games with dancehall and Milwaukee lowend, while “something i’ve been meaning to do for awhile” sounds like Drake’s “Houstatlantavegas” undergoing entropy, stretching and splitting until threads of data cling between beats like a digital cheese pull. The music shares an embrace of bitcrushed textures and stream-of-consciousness structures with the most exciting club artists to emerge from SoundCloud this decade—think Luci4’s “krushclub” acolytes or fried Jersey Club cyphers—but conjures an atmosphere that’s warmer and more meditative. Everything Else feels like cozying up into your own mind when you’re overwhelmed, getting lost in thought as the function gets wild all around you. There’s comfort in being a wallflower.
