DORIS - Ultimate Love Songs Collection - Review

A 2024 record I didn't fully grasp until 2025, Ultimate Love Songs Collection, the diaristic fifty-song SoundCloud dump from visual artist/rapper DORIS, was not so slept-on by the world at large; its insular space of sound, feeling and reference has been noted. Pitchfork gave it a nod for Best New Music, but it took me until December to start to get it. I heard of it through several texts across the frenzied, doomed-feeling autumn from Modern Folk band-artist Chris Foster-Baril, entreating me to listen to this album – I think he had been turned on to it by Landis Wine of the wonderful Richmond, VA dark/electronic/pop band Opin. I put it on in the background of life a couple times and I was intrigued. There was a strangely processed voice and I thought I heard a couple out-there samples. I went to listen to it closely and it had been removed from streaming services entirely – then I was really intrigued. I wanted what I suddenly couldn’t have. Underground hip-hop like this seems removed from the preciousness of Bandcamp, physical formats and Spotify boycotts, so I was unsure I’d be able to get at it again in any way that matched my modes of listening.

A few days later, Chris texted me again – “DORIS is back” – so I cued it up in the car. I was now able to get lost in the wash of these fifty minute-or-so long songs, each one built on not much more than a simple loop. There are plenty of dusty, time-slipped soul grooves here, but the breadth of these samples drives home the point that beat-makers no longer dig crates, they dig YouTube. A sped-up trimming from The Cardigans’ “Love Fool,” an un-moored bit of the chorus of Sugar Ray’s “Every Morning,” the intro from The Sunday’s “You’re Not the Only One I Know” looped into an infinity of maudlin stoned goth rain music. I was in love with this production and no longer curious why it had been briefly removed from streaming; assuming there had been clearance issues, the kind that don’t happen on SoundCloud. There isn’t the same level of obsessive collage here as on a J Dilla beat, but there is the uncanny knack for spotting the beginning and end of a loop, taking a small part of something that exists and making it feel like something new, the art of recontextualization. Over this stream-of-consciousness music, which sounds like DORIS ran an XLR cable from his head to his recording interface and dumped his interior collection of daily earworms into Logic, are stream-of-consciousness flows, short statements on mental health, drug consumption, and romantic connections, addressed to friends and lovers or to himself. The sound of his voice is as intimate as the subject matter. Super close mic’d, autotuned, pitched up and down, taking the techniques rappers like Future and Playboi Carti have used to create a signature vocal imprint almost past their logical conclusion, including breath, smacks, catches and hesitations – while coming across with a joyous, red-eyed, no-fucks-left-to-give kind of confidence.

Ultimate Love Songs Collection reminded me of another record I loved this year, Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. They are both long, wide-ranging collections of short form ideas, the artists exorcising from their heads all the music they cannot stop hearing. Both are personal, both feel timeless. However, where Diamond Jubilee is a showcase for musicianship and studio technique, even if it at times hits as lo-fi, Ultimate Love Songs Collection is truly lo-fi, clearly the product of late nights alone with a laptop, a bunch of weed and a microphone. Cindy Lee achieves timelessness through a deep study of the past 60 years of pop music, using their skill as a guitarist and songwriter to create songs that function as simulacra and as brand-new beautiful, evergreen wholes. “Baby Blue” from Diamond Jubilee could have come out in 1966 or been beamed back from 2026. DORIS achieves timelessness through the scope of the references and half-felt associations in each of these fifty loops, ambient music in the sense of music that is diegetic to our actual lives, floating along with us and past us, and with the 2 AM immediacy of his heavily processed missives – because this record might sound like 2025 but when have people not been laying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, feeling fucked in the head while the radio plays kind of low?

Music this simple and universal is the Ultimate inspiration. As an artist myself, I love a record that gives me this feeling like “damn, I need to get back to work.” DORIS took a limited toolkit – soul and Top 40 music from YouTube, some software and a microphone, and created something no one had ever dreamed of but him. Few things excite me more than a record that stands as a document of that feat.