Showing up on a great Bon Iver song, co-writing part of Justin Bieber’s best solo album, and landing a part in the next Paul Thomas Anderson movie is a good resumé—great, even. But what if you did all of that and made a revelatory R&B record, too? Dijon, the 33-year-old, Baltimore-bred singer and producer, has taken the slow road to stardom. In 2017, he sang on Brockhampton’s “Summer.” During COVID, he and Charli XCX wrote “Pink Diamond” together. He’s worked with Kanye West, Jim-E Stack, Matt Champion, and Miso Extra. His taste is affectionate and deep-pocketed; not only has he cited Little Feat, Chaka Khan, The Band, and Lucinda Williams as influences, but he even managed to get John C. Reilly, Tobias Jesso Jr., and Becky and the Birds on a cypher together five years ago. His best friend, Mk.gee, exploded last year, nabbing year-end accolades and a Saturday Night Live performance for his troubles. Now, it’s Dijon’s time to detonate, and Baby is his nuclear missile.
But Baby isn’t a breakthrough or a comeback, it’s a confirmation. Dijon skyrocketed into view with the audacious Absolutely, a debut album with not only a kinetic, kitchen-table personality that AI could never replicate, but the dirtiest, most-emotional and immersive experience since James Blake’s first record 14 years ago. “Many Times,” to me, made Dijon a star, thanks to his splendid delivery of sensual, mewling frustration and a laundry list of sensory pressure points (“Strawberry, raspberry, candlelight, satellite, television, X-ray vision, ah! What’s it gonna take for you to listen?”), and an infectious, “I don’t really wanna talk about it, so many times you hurt me so much” chorus turned into proverb by hypnotic conviction left me wanting more.
But to listen to Dijon is to make yourself present. His body of work, albeit small, begs listeners to not only step into the world where he makes it, but to step into it repeatedly. He crafts songs like he’s singing them live, in front of hundreds, if not thousands (see: Absolutely’s companion film), and a standalone single two years ago, “coogie,” affirmed this, in its balance of smoke-covered vocal rasp and smoke-covered instrumental rapture you could practically touch. If Absolutely’s homespun production and randomness (he chose his collaborators for “The Stranger” by putting names in a hat, after all) felt theatrical, gimmicky, or kitschy four years ago, Baby casts Dijon’s idiosyncrasies in a proper, perfect light. The album was made at his home, with the help of Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Mk.gee, and the isolation is certain, felt as songs spill through doorways and in Dijon’s vocal mix, which often sounds like it’s coming from another, far emptier room.
The domesticity riles and rejoices, as Dijon reckons with what his life looks like now that fatherhood and success are both woven into it. It’s a still-life record made in motion, beginning with him oscillating between a vocal that is part-Anderson .Paak and part-Smokey Robinson on “Baby!” He sings to his child about meeting their mother Joanie, getting her pregnant, and protecting her during a demanding, difficult labor. After lingering in a vocabulary of softness (“I touch your belly”; “Went to cherish your mother”; “Had a laugh with your mother”) and velvety grooves, he coos a gesture of safety: “I said, ‘If I could take your pain, you know I would.’” “Another Baby!” is a post-pregnancy, slinky, and wired detour communicating through an “If I Was Your Girlfriend” beat and “The Living Years” synths. “Struggling to keep composure the way you keep it hot,” he repeats in the intro, before evoking Miss Janet (“What are you, nasty?”) and hiding Pete Rock’s “It’s yours!” part from Nas’ “The World Is Yours” in a set-dressing of funk pleasures. Songs about sex oversaturated the market decades ago, but “Another Baby!” is an unusual yet necessary respite from R&B’s baby-making pantheon, adorned with “a little love and invention” and human connection. Above a fascinating stew of Luther Vandross’ warmth and J Dilla’s pull-apart bedroom production, you can practically see the mirror on the ceiling, and you don’t know whether you should twerk or cry in the reflection.
Baby is full of electronic mood swings and vocal stacking where guitars rambled on Absolutely. Dijon goes as far as manipulating his voice into an instrument, sampling himself over and over atop ecstatic ride grooves and noodly riffs until the phrasings are unrecognizable. Parenthetical interludes—the woozy “(Freak It)” and the tactile “(Referee)”—are blown-out, “testify, electrify” foils to typical middle passages that rest on ambient exercises. “FIRE!” is scorched-earth IDM unfurling in gospel acapella and brief, atonal crescendos, as Dijon jets through suicidal thoughts before collapsing under love, the great extinguisher (“Even when I’m by myself and I start to fantasize, I feel it in the pit of my chest: she loves me”). The plucked “Rewind” is momentarily freed from the album’s bells-and-whistles default before Dijon’s singing melts into harsh, metallic teases.
And Dijon does the dated stuff better than most, preserving the ‘80s and ‘90s in grains and textures rather than copying someone else’s image or attitude, and Baby is meteoric proof that his debut was star-making and his sound will command R&B’s next destiny without leaving any of its ancestry behind. “Automatic” crows in gloomy abundance, glides in physicality (“Just hold me like I’m dying with you”), and capstones with a sample of GZA’s “1991 Freestyle”; the vocals on “Yamaha,” which come in at every direction, boast a handsomeness not unlike prime D’Angelo; and the lower-case, acidic ballad “my man” lands among Dijon’s most awakened efforts: On the imminence of collapse, he raises his voice like Prince does in the “Honey I know, I know, I know times are changing” verse in “Purple Rain.”
Dijon is a chef with no regard for portion control, and his approach is chaotic and illegible (the glitchy, chopped-up gospel circuitry in “HIGHER!”), questionably experimental (the clip of a barking dog mutated into a chaser of noise in “loyal & marie”), and collage-y (the cresting, contrasting synth programming, manipulated pitches, choral tangents, and Top 40 piano drama coagulating in “Yamaha”). For some, that might make for a frustrating listen. For me, it makes writing down whatever hyphenated genres have been swirling around Dijon’s output feel less corny. Alt-R&B, post-pop, anti-Americana, and nu-jungle are all ludicrous descriptors but apropos. His best song, the smooth and rattling “Kindalove,” is four or five songs at once—a product of somebody who’s not just an expert at pop songwriting and curious, offbeat production, but is radically disinterested in being linear or logical. I especially like what Brady Brickner-Wood wrote in The New Yorker this weekend, that Baby’s brilliance is “contingent on its inelegance.” Dijon’s style is psychedelic and full of difference, and none of these songs make much sense when you try to deconstruct them. Your best bet is to fall into each one and let its unlikeliness wash right over you.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
