Dear Dea // Doria's Daydream (Seafoam Green)

https://deardea.bandcamp.com/album/dorias-daydream

Doria’s Daydream is an album born out of life's momentum, curiosity, and the quiet upheaval of a woman in her thirties. Written over a concentrated 6-8 month period between late 2023 and early 2024, the debut album by Dear Dea took shape during a time of deep creative focus, sparked in part by two songwriting courses with the LA-based School of Song, led by Kimbra and Adrianne Lenker. Blending alternative pop with soulful and jazzy atmospheric elements, the record, that mostly began as homework prompts, reflects discipline, spontaneity, and vulnerability.

The album follows Dear Dea’s 2024 debut EP When You Go Home Again, which received early support from Spotify (editorial playlist placements: Uuden suomalaisen musiikin lista & Suomi-indie tänään) BBC 6 Music, Rinse FM, Jazz FM, as well as Clash Magazine and Somewhere Soul. That EP introduced Dea’s emotionally direct songwriting and genre-fluid approach, blending jazz, pop, and Latin influences rooted in her multicultural background.

On Doria’s Daydream, those ideas expand and deepen. The album drifts through themes of longing and imagined escape, anxiety and shame, relationships in your thirties, and the strange weight of time. It reflects on the monotony of everyday routines and the ache of still missing New York after leaving the city in 2019, while also grappling with distance, immigration, and family. A life-affirming trip to her father’s home country, Ecuador, further shaped the emotional core of the record, most notably on “The Internet,” a song about family living so far away that the only place you see them is online.

Influenced by artists such as Ravyn Lenae, Nathy Peluso, Fabiana Palladino, and Mk.gee, as well as the stark emotional realism of Annie Proulx’s short stories, Doria’s Daydream balances soulful intimacy with melodic experimentation. The title comes from an almost-name, one her parents considered before she was born. It’s fitting for a record that lives between reality and imagination, between who you are and who you might have been.