Dorian’s “RECONNECTED” Is An Honest Conversation Between Generations

If you miss the emotional honesty of early-2000s R&B, Dorian’s RECONNECTED might be right up your alley, a record about opening up, healing, and finding your confidence along the way. Artists like Brian McKnight and Usher have long understood how to turn heartbreak and yearning into something almost comforting and easily digestible, something you could listen to alone and somehow feel less alone. Dorian finds an interesting point between the music of yesterday and R&B artists today.

The first track, INTRO, immediately sets the mood. There’s something old-school about his sound that almost instantaneously takes you back to when you probably got your first iPod, back when making personalized mixtapes or burning CDs were still a thing. There’s a quiet nostalgia woven in the production, and it feels like an attempt to revisit a feeling we thought we had outgrown.

The R&B of the 2000s gave the kind of music that often leaves enough ambiguity for listeners to decide how they interpreted or personified a song—to organically find bits and pieces of their own experiences and to project yourself onto a lyric.

Meanwhile, the newer generation has explored the multidimensional space of emotional openness. Songs can feel like overhearing a confession, a secret that is only meant to be decoded by the writer or muse. Artists like Giveon and Daniel Caesar managed to successfully carve out their identities through sound, unafraid to expose their Achilles’ heel by creating music that feels more intimate in sound and lyricism. Now, there is significantly less distance between the artist and the listener, and this is where Dorian finds himself as well.

Dorian, too, does not wish to confine his sound solely to R&B. With over four thousand listeners on Spotify alone, and hundreds of plays across records like Reign Love, Just To Know, and Waiting, he is steadily carving out a space for himself. RECONNECTED suggests that Dorian understands a key point about making music: it was never meant to stay in one room.

The album drifts with a certain genre fluidity, allowing itself to exist in its own space. As a listener, you will find yourself asking, “What does this song sound like?” rather than immediately trying to ascertain which specific genre the record belongs to; and Dorian’s refusal to be caged within a particular sonic identity is perhaps one of the album’s more compelling qualities.

Perhaps that is precisely why RECONNECTED’s fluidity also makes the entire listening experience seem like a conversation between generations.

Songs like WAKE ME and LOVE LETTER pull you into a force field of warmth and slow grandeur—a sentimental take on an earnest love and yearning and is almost cinematic, the kind that makes you want to secretly write someone’s name in the margins of a notebook, or when you catch yourself unconsciously reacting whenever someone mentions their name.

But just when you thought you know where the album is taking you, OOO and WHEN YOU’RE WITH ME amps up the tempo. Suddenly, you are transported into a club, letting yourself loose as the bass and beats course through your body. At last, sentimentality gives way to rhythm, and you are reminded that vulnerability does not always have to be slow-paced. Sometimes, it also sounds like getting to the dance floor and just letting it all go.

There are times, though, when the most sentimental songs mask themselves behind a fast tempo. RECONNECTED’s ability to make the listener move between tenderness and soulful release is what makes it feel alive. It is not pretentious. It’s not a record that moves in a straight line, nor does it hide behind fake bravado. Instead, the record allows itself to be vulnerable and playful at the same time.