Seattle-based electronic artist US3R (pronounced “User”) returns with a bang on his gripping new album ‘DOPAM1NE’. A kaleidoscopic blend of synthwave, industrial pop, and alt-electronica that feels as immediate as a dopamine hit and as complex as the emotions that drive it.
Known for his genre-bending approach and introspective lyricism, US3R brings his sharpest vision yet to ‘DOPAM1NE’, crafting a world of pulse-pounding rhythms, icy synths, and unfiltered vulnerability. On the title track and lead single ‘Dopamine’, he weaves shimmering textures with haunting vocals, reflecting the paradox of modern pleasure: thrilling, addictive, and never quite enough.
“Lyrically, ‘DOPAM1NE’ is my commentary on the sick state of the world today. Sonically, it is soaking wet with ear candy – I wanted to make your ears and your brain dance throughout the whole experience. It feels like the ups and downs of addiction – a total mind fuck when you’re feeling excitement and despair at the same time.”
The album is a mirror to the chaos of contemporary life, rooted in US3R’s experience living in Seattle, a city of contrasts where wealth and despair exist block by block. These extremes are echoed in the record’s highs and lows: shimmering moments of pop euphoria crash into brooding waves of darkwave and industrial grit. At every turn, ‘’DOPAM1NE’’ blurs the line between bliss and burnout.
Other standout tracks include ‘Angel’, which offers a darker, more sensual take, laced with warped vocal treatments and swirling synths. It’s intoxicating and unpredictable, a track that lingers long after it ends. Elsewhere on the album, layers of distorted melody, thunderous low-end, and razor-sharp hooks create a sprawling emotional landscape, equal parts intimate confession and futuristic dancefloor catharsis.
With ‘’DOPAM1NE’’, US3R has created a digital fever dream, a warning shot, and a soundtrack for the overstimulated soul. Fans of pop, dance, dark electronica, and synth-driven storytelling will find themselves pulled into his world, one pulse at a time.
Check out our other features with US3R HERE.
Q&A
You say that ‘DOPAM1NE’ is your reflection on the sick state of the world. What was the one thing you saw that made you think, “Ok, it’s time to write an album”?
To be honest, I never stop writing. All year long, I am writing music and packing away little snippets of ideas – hundreds of them just sitting idly on my computer. Depending on what is going on in my life and what is happening in the news, sometimes I find more inspiration and start fleshing out those concepts and working towards creating a cohesive album.
But, to give some backstory, my third album “Dreams and Nightmares” – I wrote that while in quarantine in Seattle from 2020-2021. I was fresh off a US Tour in Feb 2020 and ended up traveling from NYC straight to Seattle, into quarantine for 18 months. I wrote about 1 song a month during that whole period and eventually realized I had accidentally created an autobiographical timeline of my lived experience of the pandemic in downtown Seattle.
And then around the start of 2025, there was a massive political shift in the world, and I felt like we were reopening the book of what 2020 felt like, except now we are so much further down the rabbit hole of social media, addictive things, hate and division, sex, misinformation, etc.. There was just so much to write about. So that feeling kick-started this new chapter of writing for me. At that point, the momentum swept me up.
Inside your LP, there are as many highs as there are lows. Did you originally plan for the album to have emotions come and go like the peaks and troughs of big waves, or was it something that just sort of happened?
This is kinda the headspace I live in day to day. I’m very functional, very jokey and upbeat, but I often find myself thinking about the big picture and just like where are we headed in the world – and these are real feelings that are in me all the time – so even when I’m trying to write peppy upbeat music, it rarely comes out that way. So there is a lot of emotionality to the music, whether I want it or not 🙂. Also, since I have so much partially written music that I can pull from, I do try to stitch together lots of ideas and create a journey for the listener. So the end result is a lot of highs and lows, and just “moments” everywhere.
What was it inside the compelling “Angel” that you did to the vocals?
On nearly all of the album, I recorded all of the vocals at least 4x to layer things up and pan them around. The Beach Boys famously used to record many layers for each vocal part just to thicken them up. Nowadays, this type of thing is very central to other styles, like shoegaze music, for example. On top of all the layering, I also loved adding lots of short ambient reverbs and routing my voice into an old tape echo machine to do a bit of call and response with myself at various points in the record. When it all comes together, it just sounds so wet and saucy – it feels wide, wet, somewhat ghostly. And depending on how you’re delivering the lines themselves, it can create a super interesting vibe.
What type of synths did you gravitate towards in this album?
I use a combination of hardware synths like Moog Subsequent 32, Korg Prologue, Prophet 10, and I layer them up with my own custom patches built on software synths like Arturia and Serum. There are also a lot of layered real guitars and basses in there, where I pass them through all sorts of weird effects and then mix them in alongside samples, vocals, echoes, drones, etc., to create these really strange textures that feel somewhat ambiguous. I love it when the musical elements are hard to identify – because then it’s not so much about the gear, but more about the idea and the feeling you’re getting from it.
Overall, ‘DOPAM1NE’ has a gravity, life-like vividness… Do you have any advice for other musicians on how to achieve such a monumental, cohesive sonic collage (no matter the genre)?
Yes absolutely. I think of it in multiple ways: part of it is the production process itself, part of it is in the attitude and opinionated choices, and part of it is the arrangements. So on the production side, I find it important to layer synthetic elements with real-world elements to give it depth. So, for example, on Prayer, I recorded layers of electric guitar and panned them wide, but then I also unplugged my electric guitar and put a microphone over the fingerboard, and then layered that on top of it. So it has this subtle 3D texture to it, like you’re sitting in the room with me. I do funky stuff like that all the time.
Now as far as the “vibe” goes, I think just having a strong opinion in the musical choices you make comes through to the listener. You have to make bold choices, stand firm on them, and send the listener on a journey somewhere. I feel like when I hear music that lacks a strong opinion tends to feel like more bland music, because the attitude IS the sound. At the end of the day, you have to focus on the vibe, meaning, and impact of the song and then let your musical choices bring it to life.
Then, finally, there are the arrangements, like what is happening in the journey of the song. I like to include lots of interesting moments, experiences, and ideas in a song.
To me, songwriting is about sharing your taste in music and your worldview as a person, so the best thing is to just let your ideas run wild and stop trying to be anything specific. It’s like “What does Radiohead sound like?” – they sound like Radiohead. They are just unequivocally themselves – they sound like them. It’s raw, unfiltered ideas, vibes, and they just let it flow, and the production is there to support their vision, not the other way around.
You feature other artists on this album (Rapid Tap, Wolf Pet). What was the collaborative process like?
Collaborating is an interesting challenge because sometimes it feels easy, and sometimes it is really hard. For context, I have been playing instruments since I was about 10 years old, and I have been in a lot of different kinds of bands over the years. And in today’s modern music scene, I don’t know that many people who are jammy-writers anymore – maybe because modern music is more programmed nowadays? IDK. Common musical skillsets and tastes have evolved over the years. I have the most fun when I can sit next to someone and we play instruments together, like we are thinking out loud with our instruments. Depending on what their musical style is, sometimes you can smash together multiple styles even if they don’t seem like they would work together. But in the end, songwriting is you sharing your musical taste with the world, right? So like… whatever you make, if you commit to the bit, then you might pull off something rad. Or it could not work out. But either way, we’re here to have fun, right? 🙂
Not being super musical isn’t a deal-breaker, though, because having a strong vision can easily become the more important thing. Some of my most successful collaborations happened when an artist came to me with a small snippet recording of something and a strong idea, and then I just constructed a song around it. I have really broad musical tastes, and I’m pretty much down for anything. I also really enjoy the challenge of writing for other artists. I’ve done it a lot over the years.
There are many moments in this LP. Unexpected elements like gritty drums combine with melodic piano, synths, and soulful vocal lines… What instrument do you usually start with when composing, and how do you get contrasting timbres and ideas to gel so well?
Sometimes those gritty elements are the last things to be added to a song, so they were purpose-built to fill a particular rhythmic or sonic space. For example, on Dopam1ne, I recorded a lot of rhythmic textures around the November / December timeframe by finger-drumming on a pile of Christmas presents. I just set up a microphone, routed it through a distortion pedal, and fiddled with an echo box. Those rhythms were just me kinda vibing out to the dominant beat – I just started grooving and in the end it sounded so sick!!
Doing stuff like this is fun, but there can be a point where you’ve overfilled the song with junk in the sound spectrum, and the sonic spectrum gets clogged with too much overlapping information. I’ve been guilty of this many times in past works. So to fight this urge, I try to record a simple song first, I try to put the complex sounds in mono, and then I try to deliberately pan them around the stereo space, aggressively removing frequencies from some layers so that they fit nicely together. Otherwise, there is just way too much clashing sonic information. Once you’ve arrived at an amount of layering that sounds pleasing to the ear, the actual storytelling part of the song becomes the first class citizen – so I pan it directly center, and make it prominent. This gives the listeners’ ears something to anchor to while the rest of the textures can tingle around in their imagination!
Last (but not least), why did you choose to title your album ‘DOPAM1NE’?
Over the years, I had already written about 10 other songs but hadn’t yet mentally processed how they were all interconnected to each other. When I wrote the single ”‘’DOPAM1NE’” – which had a cautious energy – it’s a song about addiction. All of a sudden, my brain clicked, and I realized all the other songs made sense together. I was like “Holy shit! I need to finish this album right now!” Once that idea happened, all these creative realizations started coming to me, and this is such a precious feeling for a creator because now you can ride that wave into the shore. The inspiration will unlock a crazy amount of momentum inside you. So, once that happened, I decided to make the album itself called Dopam1ne – because it was the theme that tied all these songs together. I started staying up late at night, constantly rewriting pieces of the album until it all worked together perfectly. When I thought I was done, I still came back, rewrote things some more, and just spun on that for a couple more months. In some sense, the album name became a self-fulfilling prophecy because I was getting a ‘DOPAM1NE’ hit just working on this music. 🙂
LINKS:
https://www.instagram.com/imTheUs3r
https://www.facebook.com/imTheUs3r
https://www.tiktok.com/@imtheus3r
