The-Dream Hunted Down the Same Microphone Nineteen Years Later

Released in December 2007, Love/Hate landed at a moment when ringtone rap and pop-R&B ruled the radio, and it played like a correction: widescreen, synth-drenched, sexually charged R&B with Prince’s auteur ambition and hip-hop’s scrappy energy. “Shawty Is the Shit” and “I Luv Your Girl” both hit No. 3 on the R&B charts, while “Falsetto” became a slow-burn classic that cemented Terius “The-Dream” Gesteelde-Diamant as one of the genre’s most distinctive voices.

On July 10, he released Love/Hate II — a direct sequel to that record, and his first major-label solo album in thirteen years, since 2013's IV Play. The 17-track album came out via his own Dreamboy Records in partnership with Republic Records.

To recreate the sound world of 2007, he went track by track through his own signal chain. “I wanted my vocal chain to be the same. That’s from mic to preamp,” he told Variety. “I was shaving off these new plugins. I was like, go back to '06 and give me the same plugins that I was using back then. Find out which mic I recorded on.” But the nostalgic process didn’t produce a nostalgic result — some songs date back to 2018, and he’s been explicit about avoiding repetition: “I didn’t want to repeat a thing. I didn’t want that snare to be just like the snare on 'Fast Car.'”

The featured cast includes Usher on “Tampa,” produced by Pharrell Williams — his first collaboration with The-Dream since Usher’s 2024 track “Cold Blooded” — plus Rick Ross closing the album on “Perfect,” Pusha T and Swizz Beatz together on “Powder Coat,” and T.I. on “Be My Lady.”

The strangest credit belongs to “Papi Te Ama,” where Kelly Rowland appears not under her own name but as “Kelly 'Dria' Rowland.” Dria is short for Kelendria, her given first name. In a May appearance on the We Sound Crazy podcast, The-Dream revealed that Dria is Rowland’s alter ego — and that she has an entire album recorded under that name, still unreleased.