Dijon Duenas has one of those voices that’s meant for televised singing competitions and gospel choirs, swooning ballads and achy slow jams. It preens and jilts, wails and whimpers, often stretching and straining into strange, improbable territory. It’s curious, then, that Dijon, a thirty-three-year-old songwriter, so casually tempers this talent, tucking his voice into lo-fi, experimental arrangements. When Dijon began releasing solo material, in 2017, his songs knit Frank Ocean-inspired R. & B. into Americana and folk, his singing raw and dreamy, his compositions mostly limited to guitar and gentle percussion. His early singles and EPs felt oddly untethered from time or place, tradition or lineage—they were tepid and a touch uncertain, the work of a gifted twentysomething making genre-obscuring music with little more than a guitar and a laptop.
As a child, Dijon never lived anywhere for more than a few years; his home was whatever military base his mom or dad was stationed at, whether that be in Germany, Hawaii, or Iowa. His father is from Guam, and his mother is from the American South, ethnically “a mixed bag—Black, Native, white,” he told Pitchfork in 2022. Dijon’s music, perhaps as a result, bears the markings of a wanderer, a seeker, someone who’s never fit neatly into any box. On the 2020 EP “How Do You Feel About Getting Married?,” he achieved a creaky, ragged indie-pop sound that seemed to draw its primary inspiration from Prince and Ocean, but also from Animal Collective, Bill Callahan, Jodeci, and Arthur Russell. The songs were still scrappy and homespun, a set of dignified demos, but their magic was unmistakable. Maybe it was that voice of his supplying these tracks with their gravitas; maybe it was his ethic of exploration, his relentless pursuit for a sound that he could call, without hesitation, his own.
Dijon’s début studio album, “Absolutely,” from 2021, subtly, almost imperceptibly, reimagined what contemporary pop music could sound like. (The record didn’t chart, nor did it garner widespread critical acclaim, but, in the intervening years, Dijon has gone on to collaborate with Justin Bieber and Bon Iver, and has spawned any number of imitators.) “Absolutely” rejects the premise that perfection is the highest form of sonic pleasure, that glossy, digitized production and tight song structure lead to more meaningful music than loose, free-form improvisation. Dijon made much of the project in a spare room in his home, he and his friends riffing off one another in competitive, virtuosic fashion, chatting and hollering and harmonizing as they laid down takes on an omnidirectional microphone. You can almost sense the sweat, the crushed beer cans, the sunrise peeking through the blinds. (A magnificent live performance of the record re-creates this dizzying, delightful experience.) Michael Gordon, the singer and guitarist better known as Mk.gee, whose 2024 album “Two Star & the Dream Police” minted him a cult superstar, helped Dijon arrive at this new, impassioned sound. “We were both trying to just find a new wheel to invent, separately, and kind of questioning why nobody else was as feverishly, or embarrassingly, reaching,” Dijon told the Times last September. “Then we were both like, let’s see how far we can push each other.”
On Dijon’s second full-length album, “Baby,” which was released on Friday, he reaches even further, pushing his creative partnership with Mk.gee and others to new heights. Alongside collaborators like Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and BJ Burton, Dijon retains the freewheeling, analog approach that he adopted on “Absolutely,” while, once again, expanding the potential parameters of popular music. Distorted drum samples smash against twinkling synth keys; piano is re-amped and fried into fragments; warm electric-guitar licks dissolve into noisy FX, FM-radio rips, and the odd Wu-Tang Clan sample. The use of samples here is a particular innovation: on “Baby,” it’s often impossible to differentiate between a sample and a recorded instrument, to parse the authentic from the manipulated. Vocals are sped up into squiggles, instruments are reversed and gated, percussion smacks you in the face and then suddenly vanishes. The song “Another Baby!,” for instance, is frenetic in its construction, with quirky synth stabs and alien shrieks inserted into an otherwise bombastic pop song, one that sounds like it could have been released at any point in the past forty years. As Dijon howls about having a second child with his partner—“Let’s go make a baby! Another baby!”—his screeching vocals clip into silence and split into pieces. There’s not a single moment, it seems, where he pauses to catch his breath.
“Baby” ’s frantic, unruly nature aims to communicate the madness of living with big, overwhelming feelings—emotions that are difficult to process and to hold to the light. Significance is met with distress, exuberance bleeds into impatience, longing is blurred with desperation. Even clean, quiet moments are disrupted with intrusive thoughts, a pang of anxiety appearing when one least expects it. This is why Dijon’s language works best as sound, not narrative—his rangy, raspy voice seethes and triumphs, mocks and threatens; there’s no world in which his polygonal perspective can be discerned from a lyric sheet. There’s a fiery mania teeming throughout “Baby,” a paranoia underpinning every insight: “Is it all just patterns packed inside? / Is it all braids and rewinds? / Is it all wind howling all the time?” he sings on “Rewind.” The record is an ode to his partner, Joanie, who’s long been a central character in his catalogue, and the domestic life they’ve built together. It’s a celebration of their love, a totem to their expanding family, and yet an unease still haunts the project, a terror creeping into their connection. “Even if I killed myself right now / Well, the last laugh’s all on me,” Dijon groans on “FIRE!,” which boasts an I.D.M. drumbeat redolent of Radiohead’s “Idioteque.” Is this appeal to suicidality earnest, or for effect? I suppose the only answer is yes, the truth residing somewhere in the chaos.
Uncertainty and incongruence infect every inch of “Baby.” On “Automatic,” a Prince-evoking barn burner, the beat never sits still, refashioning itself around glistening synths and club-ready percussive breakdowns, as Dijon wields his voice with wild abandon. He’s horny, he’s sad, he feels tomorrow’s responsibilities caving in on him—so he goes “automatic,” becomes one with his staunchest desires. The most intoxicating aspect of the album is indeed this subconscious thrust, Dijon’s instinct to follow truth and beauty no matter where they take him. It’s this approach to songcraft and emotionality that makes “Baby” a thrilling, demanding listen. Take “my man,” which sounds like a 112 or Soul for Real song played through a defective tape deck, the cassette skipping and the speakers blown out. “Would it shock you if I’ve given up? Would it ease your little mind?” Dijon belts, his singing sounding more like sobbing, a self-obliteration in his tone that’s too physical to fake.
In an age of A.I.-aggregated mood playlists, where collections of anonymous-sounding songs are categorized as “sad,” “happy,” or “sexy,” Dijon’s music emerges as a radical, uncompromising example of what the German composer Richard Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total art work.” There is no single or clear emotional truth that one can derive from “Baby”; it is an album rife with contradiction and collision, its brilliance contingent on its inelegance. As with all of Dijon’s music, “Baby” is stacked with radio hits that feel dislodged from linear time, Top Forty singles made by an artist with a kaleidoscopic, postmodernist mind. It’s this flair for abstraction and juxtaposition that makes Dijon’s rendition of pop music so arresting. He’s unafraid to make a mess, to scream until his voice gives out. ♦
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