Dylan Sinclair released his debut album FOR THE BOY IN ME on September 27, 2024, through Five Stone Records and The Orchard, a 12-track record with no guest features that the Toronto singer built to be read as one long, honest conversation about love. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Dylan Sinclair For The Boy In Me record matters now because it is the moment his two earlier projects stopped being promise and became a foundation.
Sinclair himself draws the line clearly. He calls Proverb from 2020 and No Longer in the Suburbs from 2022 EPs, projects where he was still finding his voice, and this one the first real album. He was 23 at release, a Filipino-Guyanese singer raised in a musical, church-going Toronto household, and the record draws openly on his Guyanese and Filipino roots and on the classic sounds of 90s and early 2000s pop, R&B and gospel. It was developed over several years in writing sessions across Toronto, the Muskokas, Los Angeles and New York, and it was executive produced by Five Stone Records co-founder Jordon Manswell alongside Sinclair himself.
Dylan Sinclair For The Boy In Me Refuses To Hide
The album’s stated position arrived with its announcement. Sinclair said in the release materials:
“In a world where men are not encouraged to be vulnerable, this album FOR THE BOY IN ME disregards that, choosing to tell it like it is.”
That is the record’s working method across all 12 songs: the joys of having a truly supportive partner, the work of sustaining a loving relationship, and the personal growth that comes out of both, written from inside the relationship rather than about it from a safe distance. Where No Longer in the Suburbs narrated a young man leaving the family home, this album narrates what he built after he left, and the boy in the title is the younger self the songs keep reporting back to.
The production bench stayed deliberately small and trusted: Manswell, Zachary Simmonds, Bryan Allen and Alex “ACE G” Ernewein anchor the sound, the same Toronto circle that has been around Sinclair since the Proverb sessions. The continuity is audible. Nothing on the album chases a trend; the tempos are quicker than the EPs in places and the songwriting reaches for full structures, bridges included, a challenge Sinclair set himself on purpose after two projects of shorter statements.
Three Singles, Three Temperatures
“LEMON TREES,” released June 14, 2024, is the album’s warm front and, by Sinclair’s own account, its oldest song, written just before No Longer in the Suburbs came out. It is the track he has said he would play first for someone who had never heard him, a windows-down record about love in good weather. “I LO<3 MY EX,” released July 24, 2024, is the complication, its title alone admitting the kind of feeling the vulnerability pledge requires: affection that survives the breakup it is supposed to have ended.
“FOREVER,” released August 14, 2024 alongside the album announcement, is the pledge itself. Sinclair explained the song at release:
“FOREVER is about defying all odds, standing strong together despite external pressures, and cherishing an unbreakable bond; a celebration of a love that is defiant, loyal, and everlasting.”
Its official lyric video, above, stages that defiance starkly: Sinclair alone on a lit glass structure in the dark, singing the promise into empty space. Around those three singles the album fills in the private weather: “Slo Mo” slows into intimacy, and “IMY” lands as the longing ballad, a song about missing a partner’s physical presence that plays like the distance entry in a diary the rest of the album writes from home.
What The Debut Set Up
The industry reading was immediate. FOR THE BOY IN ME earned Sinclair a Juno nomination for Contemporary R&B Recording of the Year, adding to a run that already included his 2023 Juno win for “Last One,” his duet with Savannah Ré, and the Polaris longlist place No Longer in the Suburbs had taken the year before. For a singer whose first nomination came from an EP recorded with a small Toronto team, a debut album nomination in a headline R&B category confirmed the scale had changed without the method changing.
The album also quietly reorganised his catalogue. Heard in sequence, Proverb is the testimony, No Longer in the Suburbs is the move out, and FOR THE BOY IN ME is the first record of the life after, which is why its title points backwards while its sound points forward. The follow-up work, including the Motherland Sessions live EP in 2025, where he reached into his Filipino heritage on record, grows directly out of the roots this album named in its credits and its choruses.
How To Hear It Now
Play FOR THE BOY IN ME after iimiTV’s revisit of No Longer in the Suburbs and listen for the address change: the suburb is behind him, the partner is beside him, and the boy in the title is the one being reported to, track by track. Released September 27, 2024, FOR THE BOY IN ME is Dylan Sinclair’s debut album in his own accounting, and Toronto R&B is still measuring what he has done since against the standard it set.
