Dijon’s 2021 debut, Absolutely, was the kind of breakthrough that had some really good ideas on it you just knew were the beginning of something new happening to redesign music culture. At that point, it’d been a hot minute since we’d heard anything ultra modern-sounding entangling the veins of R&B, pop and alternative that was doing more than just living off the remnants of Frank Ocean in his elusive absence or tailgating the lane of contempo casual cool SZA was driving through. The Baltimore songwriter was pushing the needle forward beyond kaleidoscopic beats, bleary synesthesia, and honeysuckled soul samples, and into a current that was humanly electric. And with that as a bonus, we were presented with one of our earliest introductions to the alt-pop-rock fashions of Dijon’s consummate co-writing collaborator Michael Todd Gordon, b.n.a. Mk.gee.

Since then, Dijon Duenas has appeared on Bon Iver albums, spent an entire summer opening for boygenius while making Bartees Strange wish he could be that good, and more recently, becoming the stylistic template which the biggest pop stars on the planet are bringing on board as a songwriter in order to set them apart from the mainstream peers. It’s clear now that with Dijon’s follow-up, Baby, he is now the idea others are looking to replicate. But even so, his sophomore effort is so idiosyncratic that it’s more of a case of “catch me if you can” rather than “here’s how to do me.”

What pops most is that Baby feels like a listen that’s wholly alive rather than one best experienced when stuffed into a headphones headspace. Clustering guitar-pop distortion through a haze of psychedelia, the color of the air changes prismatically and its gravity gets defies direction. At times, his own voice blurs amorphously into disintegrating synths and instruments, and yet, its drum, bass ,and thumping piano lines pump blood like the circuitry of a heartbeat, making for a listen that in its fresh chemical peel on soul-glowing R&B is one best experienced in the flesh, much like Prince intended regardless of what the digital world demanded. It’s impossible to box in any of it into one frame of mind or another, just as opening track “Baby!” transcends sex-jammed lust into a wholesomely-conceived love all in one sitting while then going roundabout with it all moment later on “Another Baby!”

The rest of what follows is an eclectic mood board of ’80s and ’90s pop-rock reconstructions and ahead-of-the-trend free-wheeling that thrives in the now. Just looking at dude on the album’s cover art, upside down there on a pile of limbs in the pit, it’s clear that’s the intent. It’s giving modern hardcore energy, and with his B’More upbringing, it wouldn’t be completely surprising to find him turning up at shows for boundary-pushers in their own right like Turnstile and Angel Du$t (the fact bands from that same scene follow him intently on their socials suggests that creative love is reciprocal.) The Venn diagram overlap between Dijon’s alternative pop, neo-soul, underground rock, and punk-melding ambitions is more or less the whole circle.

Producer Andrew Sarlo’s résumé being almost completely comprised of credits for Big Thief and Adrianne Lenker albums makes it all the more bonkers. Yet, that’s what makes Dijon a jack-of-all-trades in the matter of genre — or is it post-genre? — who can seamlessly shape-shift from one musical emotive form to another. It’s hard to copy the blueprint when the creator’s design is always in flux. Best you can do is just show up for the moment with him.

Highlights: “Baby!”, “HIGHER!”, “Yamaha”

Dijon’s Baby is available now on R&R / Warner Records.

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