Dijon’s surprise sophomore album ‘Baby’ erupts like a live wire, fusing cinematic R&B, the “mania of domesticity,” and devotional love into a breathtaking emotional landscape that is as unfiltered as it is emboldened and alive. One of 2025’s best albums and a creative triumph, it cements Dijon as one of the most fearless visionaries shaping modern music – an artist operating in a league entirely his own.

Stream: “Baby!” – Dijon

“Here comes your baby!” he cries – breathless, trembling, radiant – and the whole world seems to crack open.

From its very first seconds, Dijon’s second album Baby arrives not as a collection of songs, but as an eruption: A cinematic, soul-soaked document of new life, new love, new responsibility, and the ecstatic terror that binds them all together.

There’s nothing cautious about it. Baby feels like standing too close to a house fire – heat on your neck, smoke in your lungs, heart pounding in real time – and realizing you don’t want to step back.

Active since 2017, singer, songwriter, and producer Dijon Duenas is a singularly stunning trailblazer; he established as much in his critically acclaimed 2021 debut Absolutely (which Atwood Magazine hailed as “beautiful, heart-wrenching, and unexpectedly fun”), and he reasserts that truth throughout his surprise-released sophomore album, captivating through dramatic and cinematic landscapes of bustling R&B-soaked wonder. Through the glitch, through the churn, there is his breathtaking voice – a vessel of charged emotion, of unbridled passion, of all-consuming catharsis and smoldering, seductive warmth. Baby lives in extremes: Tender and raw, explosive and intimate, unfiltered and unafraid.

Dijon made the album at home in near-isolation with his new family and longtime collaborators Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Michael Gordon (Mk.gee) – a tight-knit circle whose chemistry spills explosively out of every measure. Released August 15th via R&R / Warner Records, Baby is a love-drenched, pressure-cooked study of what Dijon calls the “mania of domesticity”: The ecstasy and tragedy that accompany life-altering change. In this case, that change is fatherhood – a gravitational shift that reframed his life, his body, his art, and ultimately his sound.

The stakes are immediate. “Went to chat with your mother, then the doctor came… ‘Here comes your baby!’” he sings on the title track and album opener “Baby!” – recounting the birth of his child with a clarity that borders on holy. The song feels like a home movie shot in trembling close-up: Warm, clumsy, reverent. Dijon narrates the moment with unguarded vulnerability – “If I could take your pain, you know I would” – and the intensity of it never lets go.

Where Absolutely captured the messy electricity of heartbreak and longing, Baby captures the transformational weight of arrival.

It’s joy and panic braided tightly together; love that feels like an open wound; devotion so overwhelming it burns.

By “Another Baby!” the temperature spikes. Industrial scrapes and kinetic percussion evoke Dangerous-era Michael Jackson, but Dijon twists that energy into something sweatier, freer, more reckless. The song is sexual, delirious, borderline unhinged, built around the fever-dream idea of expanding a family: “Let’s make a baby… Another baby!” he howls. Desire becomes comedy becomes mania becomes sincerity, all inside three minutes. It’s absurd. It’s sincere. It’s Dijon.

“HIGHER!” delivers one of the album’s most ecstatic breakthroughs – part gospel celebration, part love-drunk carousel spinning too fast to stop. “Gotta say, gotta say… Watching you blow up – ballooning!” he exclaims, the line vaulting upward on a rush of drums, distortion, and communal exaltation. “Just stay in my view, my love, ’cause you bring it all higher… It’s a miracle, you know? My love.” It’s delirious worship, sung by someone who can’t believe how much he has to lose.

Turn it in and watch it all pile up –
It’s a gallon!
Stacking it…
stylin’ on em one time
Yes, you bring the love
HIGHER

See it’s easy…
Two times…
Let it move right through you…
Cause it’s healing me,
This is a love
HIGHER

Baby isn’t a concept album in the traditional sense, but its world is unmistakably unified – a feverish domestic cosmos where love, lust, fear, delight, exhaustion, and awe coexist in the same breath.

Dijon keeps circling the same gravitational center: The shock of being needed, the weight of being seen, the desire to give more even when your body is spent. These songs feel like moments stolen between bottle feeds and midnight breaths, half-whispered vows and half-delirious confessions, each one blurring devotion with desire in a way only new parenthood can. It’s a portrait of intimacy in motion – chaotic, tender, erotic, mundane, miraculous – sketched out in sudden shouts, quiet revelations, and the raw physicality of two people trying to stay close while everything around them changes.

And within that shifting, intimate landscape, desire takes on countless shapes and temperatures. Songs like “Yamaha,” “Automatic,” and “FIRE!” stretch desire across new dimensions – sweaty, strange, erotic, domestic, devotional. Dijon builds intimacy the way others build universes: Through noise and touch, through overlapping shouts and whispered asides, through breath and glitch and grain. “Yamaha” carries a mix of glistening charm and churning grit, bringing a more soulful touch to the fore as he spills his heart against more industrial pulses and a glowing keyboard chorus that ebbs and sways with stunning clarity and dreamy warmth. When he hits the chorus – “Baby I’m in love with this particular emotion… You in this particular motion… You shouldn’t hide it, honey, you should own it and show it… Big loving, that’s my heart, and you own it” – the song becomes all-consuming, a full-bodied declaration of devotion. It’s a love song built like a heatwave, shimmering at the edges.

That heatwave becomes a burning flame on “FIRE!,” where he toggles between fragility and bravado (“Even when I’m not myself, she tells me that I’m fine… She loves me… now I’m on fire”), letting the contradictions define the emotional stakes. Later in the album, “Automatic” hits with startling force – a propulsive fever of a track, driven by frenetic passion and raw, rhythmic abandon, a piece of rush-hour lust that lands with earned bombast as he pleads, teases, and spirals deeper into desire’s gravitational pull.

And everywhere, there is the body: Sweating, shaking, laughing, collapsing, rising again. Baby is an album about physicality, about domestic chaos, about changing diapers at 4 a.m. and craving someone’s touch at 4:05. It’s about partnership as a living, breathing organism – one that evolves, frustrates, ignites, and saves. Its world is noisy and alive: Tires screech, breaths overlap, phantom voices interrupt, and footsteps land in the mix like shadows across a doorway. Sometimes the music feels like it’s slipping out of your hands even as it holds you tighter. Sometimes it feels like overhearing a fight in another room. Sometimes it feels like prayer.

But beneath the turmoil, Baby is ultimately a love album – a ferociously devoted one. In the final moments of “Kindalove,” Dijon returns to the heart of it all: “She took me back and gave me a sweet kind of love… knees buckling, the I cannot speak kind of love… Glad to have you by my side, good day + good night.” It’s simple. It’s huge. It’s the entire record distilled to its core: Love that remakes the self.

She took me back
And gave me a sweet kind of love
That honey
That make me complete kind of love
Knees buckling
The “I can not speak”
Kind of love
That oh man,
I feel I’m weak
Kind of love

When I had troubled mind
She made me feel peace kind of love
That oh my
A super elite kind of love
Oh! I’m jumping–
The hop-out-my-seat kind of love
That running–
That I feel I’m weak
Kind of love

Dijon could have chased the mythology of Absolutely – expanded it, replicated it, attempted to live up to it. Instead, he tore himself open and began again.

Baby is the sound of an artist who refuses to calcify, who refuses to repeat himself, who chooses love over lore, risk over comfort, and total vulnerability over prestige.

It’s soaked in passion, soaked in devotion, soaked in Dijon’s raw, fearless heart. It’s a dazzling, dizzying, spectacularly bold fever dream – the kind of record that doesn’t just follow a generational debut, but dares to redefine what comes next. And like new parenthood itself, it’s music you’ll never hear the same way twice.

— —

:: stream/purchase Baby! here ::

:: connect with Dijon here ::

— —

— — — —

Connect to Dijon on
Facebook, 𝕏, TikTok, Instagram

Discover new music on Atwood Magazine

 © Kristina Loggia

Baby

an album by Dijon