Dijon’s ‘Baby’ is a Kaleidoscope of Emotion, a Mosaic of Style
September 27, 2025 | Evan Dale
Jesper Damsgaard Lund
It’s easy to listen to Baby – the latest project from the indefinable music mosaic that is Dijon – and connect the dots backwards in the direction of Absolutely. The 2021 project was technically the LA-by-way-of-Maryland artist’s debut album. But Baby is a culminative effort texturally tethered even further to the past where his deepest musical roots and layering of pop-soulful collisions culminated in his 2019 7-track EP, Sci-Fi 1. Led to it by the Electro-Soul leanings of his prior collaborative work as one half of the experimental duo, Abhi/Dijon, many of his earliest fans will feel at home in the multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and producer’s 2025 return to an R&B driven, folk-tinged grey area that defines so much of what is – when compared to any other works by any other artists – at most a vaguely reminiscent sonic space. Dijon is at his best when he’s vibrantly experimental, blooming upwards from his R&B origins towards a sound that only he seems capable of layering. Popping with moments of stylistically half-rigid motifs that pulsate outward that eclectic confluence, those moments keep Baby grounded – albeit certainly not firmly – in both his roots, and in the stylistic nuances his exploratory meanderings imbibe most.
A track like HIGHER! nudges its way through a spiderweb of acoustically born and digitally distorted keystrokes. Like much of the album, the track – undeniably experimental true to Dijon’s signature – is kept headwind towards a hyper-emotional pop-soul sphere by his vocals. Unmistakably pitched, distorted, and utilized as a true instrument of the song’s greater arrangement, they are perhaps what makes Dijon’s auditory aesthetic one the most distinctive in the modern music landscape. His register is also – as for any songwriter – a vector for worldbuilding and storytelling. But his lyrics read more angularly poetic than most artists, and his instrumental risk-taking pushes his music even further towards something less instantly comparable, and ultimately impressionistic.
Though if any track of the album’s dozen is most grounded in its definitive Neo-Soul nuance – if any song feels as though it could be included in some sweeping genre-based playlist – Yamaha is an R&B stroke of genius. Apropos to the album’s title, it earns the babymaker stamp as one of those sultry, immersive joints that will stand the sensual test of time. Ooey-gooey in all the right places, it’s sensitively composed and romantically inclined without feeling forced or cheesy. Explosions of unpredictable keystrokes and scratchy layers of production break ground for those unmistakable Dijon vocals to ring into one of his most catchy, addicting hooks to date.
Dijon
Other tracks still breathe more of the folksy, acoustically arranged sounds that have always been in orbit of Dijon’s larger auditory amalgam. Rewind rewinds the tape to the oft-acoustic spaces of Absolutely, of course, but also a time – even prior to How Do You Feel About Getting Married and Sci Fi 1 – when Dijon projected organic instrumentation into the sensitive inclinations of the bedroom pop movement for emotionally comforting singles still vocally rich in his soulful roots. Skin, Wild, and Nico’s Red Truck all emerged in 2018. Rewind’s mellow guitar riff and downtempo, emotionally immersive depth feel as though they could have, too.
Through the kaleidoscope of stylistic changes of pace – from a spectrum of emotive spaces best brought to life in vocals born from Neo-Soul and R&B, introspective relatability tethered to the acoustic world, and the digital unpredictability of chaotic layering and sonic distortions – Dijon continues his record of undefining the musical worlds he navigates with chaos in tow. Unspooling genre rigidity, he instead paints a landscape so emotionally vivid and intense that it connects broadly with wide swaths of listeners and their own emotionally complicated selves.