It’s in the tight confines of a spare room in his Los Angeles home that singer-songwriter Dijon Duenas, known professionally as just Dijon, constructed his 2021 debut, Absolutely, a delicate patchwork of sonic vignettes, bursting at the seams with emotion. The record was suffused with the texture of the environment in which it was created — Dijon’s most popular videos on YouTube feature recreated sessions from the album where bandmates, surrounded by a maelstrom of drum machines, cables, and guitar pedals, shake and howl with the spiritual conviction of a Pentecostal church. Indeed, Absolutely was a project of divination, of spiritual conjuring. The stakes, as with all of Dijon’s output, centered on the question of what it means to love someone. The album would create a cult hero out of the now 33-year-old musician, not to mention serve as a springboard for the similarly transcendent guitarist Michael Gordon, aka Mk.Gee, who contributed his ethereal, otherworldly melodies on the record.
Even so, it’d take years for that cult popularity to cross into the mainstream. Last month, Justin Bieber released Swag, an album whose sound is very much indebted to both Dijon and Mk.Gee, who furnished the record with their now signature take on pop music. Songs like “Daisies” and “Devotion,” both produced by Dijon, have an elastic relationship to time and place, surfing between eras, genres, and moods, creating something as kaleidoscopic as it is familiar. Coming off this success, Dijon’s latest album, Baby, admirably elects to reinvent rather than capitalize on a sound only just now breaking through.
It’s fitting that the album’s opening three tracks are affixed with exclamation points (“Baby!”, “Another Baby!”, and “HIGHER!”) as all three announce themselves with Dijon’s roaring, emotive sensibility. The album’s central focus is Dijon’s growing family with his partner Joanie — the muse for most of his ouvré at this point — and the opening tracks explore the singer’s ecstatic feelings about fatherhood (“Let’s go make a baby! Another baby!” he howls unironically on “Another Baby!”) with an unflinching introspection. Lyrics here matter less than feeling, like on “HIGHER!” where samples comingle with Dijon’s guttural, impassioned vocals to the point of oblivion. The song finds the singer in awe of the domestic bliss he’s found with his partner, and rolls patiently through whipsawing vocal effects and enough reverb to make you question whether or not Dijon is in fact in the room with you right now — all building naturally into the patiently parenthetical “(Freak It),” where slinky guitar riffs give way to stuttering, syncopated drums that somehow dissipate into mist with each downbeat.
Throughout the album, fragments of sounds — fiery adlibs, Golden Age hip-hop samples, whizzing, inverted vocal riffs — all jut out like beams of light piercing through the pitch black of night. The shimmering pianos on “Yamaha” roll underneath a quiet arpeggio that gives the song a distinctly Eighties feeling. “I am in love with this particular emotion,” he sings sweetly in perhaps the most traditional hook on the entire album. By the end, we’re floating over trap-sounding drums as electronics slowly sublimate Dijon’s vocals into the rumbling bass of the next song, “FIRE!” which reintroduces those exclamations. Here, Dijon is in deeply existential territory, navigating the uncanny paranoia of an unconditional love. “Even when I’m not myself, she tells me that I’m fine,” he sings, almost as if he can’t believe it himself. On “Rewind,” he’s in similar terrain, at once in awe of the love he’s been lucky enough to find and deeply unsettled by it. “Is it all just patterns packed inside?” he muses with the impassioned howl that fans by now come to Dijon for. “Is it all braids and rewinds?/Is it all wind howling all the time?”
You might be able to compare Baby with Frank Ocean’s Endless, a similarly expansive record that eschewed the notions of R&B that fans had come to idolize Ocean for in favor of an emotive patchwork that never quite reveals itself entirely. On “Kindalove,” Dijon achieves a thesis statement for the entire album. The record is indeed best described by that all-encompassing word, experimental, but here Dijon occupies a space closer to traditional R&B, concluding the sonic excursion of the preceding half-hour with a thematic summation. “When I need it you shock me with your love!” he belts, having just done the same.
