words @killer.solo.music
A year after our first conversation, Ocean of Another’s Dorian Pavlović comes back talking AI, empathy, cruelty, music, Manntra and what the hell happened to all of us.
There are interviews.
Then there are conversations where you accidentally wander into the philosophical equivalent of a burning building and decide to stay for another hour.
This was the latter.
About a year after Dorian Pavlović and I first sat down to talk about Loneliness of My Kin, mental health, trauma and the strange bastard called loneliness, the Ocean of Another vocalist was back.
A lot has changed.
Ocean of Another are heading toward their debut album, I Need To Shed This Skin. Dorian has been running between Ocean and Croatian metal machine Manntra, recording, touring, playing Wacken, working on videos and generally refusing to sit still long enough for the universe to catch him.
But the conversation quickly went somewhere much bigger than music.
AI came up.
And Dorian did not exactly bring flowers.
He talked about the environmental cost, the relentless push to shove AI into everything imaginable and what happens when convenience starts replacing human creativity.
At one point, he put it rather bluntly:
“AI is fucking trampling down on the human spirit.”
And honestly, fuck.
That opened the door.
We got into whether technology is making us lazier, whether we’re slowly accepting lower standards, and whether the weird imperfections that make human art actually matter are being polished out of existence.
Then things got even more uncomfortable.
Cruelty.
Is it something we’re born with?
Or is it something somebody teaches us?
Dorian’s answer was pretty fucking simple.
“Cruelty is learned.”
From there we went down the rabbit hole into empathy, connection, power, kindness and whether people can actually unlearn the shit they’ve been taught.
His answer?
Yes.
Continuously.
Which sounds ridiculously simple until you realise how difficult it is to actually live that way.
We also got into Manntra, Ocean of Another, the completely different lessons each band has taught him, recording I Need To Shed This Skin themselves, working with Andy Cizek, Leiya from GreyNoise, the new single A Strangling Fruit, touring Europe with Baby Lasagna, Slipknot, Taylor Swift, Star Trek, kangaroos and enough other bullshit to make this one hell of a conversation.
But underneath all of it was something I noticed before Dorian even said it.
He’s different.
More confident.
More comfortable in his own skin.
Which is pretty fucking ironic considering the album is called I Need To Shed This Skin.
Toward the end, Dorian said he’s rediscovered why he’s doing all of this.
He feels more like himself.
And that’s probably the bit that stuck with me.
Because somewhere between the AI apocalypse, the existential questions, the metal and the absolute nonsense, this wasn’t really an interview anymore.
It was two mates talking about why we’re still bothering.
Make something human.
Make something that’s yours.
Show up.
Keep moving.
And maybe, while we’re at it, stop teaching each other how to be assholes.
“If you’re not enjoying it, it’s not worth it.”
Ocean of Another’s debut album I Need To Shed This Skin arrives November 13, 2026.
The conversation with Dorian is available now right here.
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers.
Killer.
