What does the underground revolutionary Talleyrand in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another have in common with one of the producers on Justin Bieber’s last album? Both roles were played by Dijon Duenas – a US singer and knockout R&B auteur.
Outside music circles, the artist is known for his cameo in Anderson’s film as the radical who vouches for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character as he struggles to remember codewords. (“This is a goddamn war hero,” he tells a particularly pedantic comrade). The director reportedly enlarged the role during filming.
In February, we’ll find out if Dijon’s influence on Bieber’s best-reviewed album in years, Swag (2025) – and its afterparty, Swag II – will earn him a Grammy. Dijon also guested on Bon Iver’s Sable, Fable album last year, on the track Day One. But tonight – at he start of his European tour in Dublin – is all about Dijon’s own work, which outshines all the above.
Dijon is hard to categorise; he sounds a little like a glitchy, latter-day Bon Iver playing Prince covers, or a lovelorn Frank Ocean throwing recording equipment down the stairs. The influence of the R&B great D’Angelo is palpable in Dijon’s loved-up intensity. Live, he performs songs with scrunchy-faced soulfulness, most often with at least one hand on an instrument.
Last summer, Dijon released his second album, Baby, a dazzling record stuffed full of unruly textures and untrammelled emotion. The title plays on the affectionate pet name ubiquitous in pop, soul and R&B, as well as the child, named Baby, he and his partner had as the album was being made.
The bass is so penetrating it dislodges old confetti from somewhere in the rafters
The bass is so penetrating it dislodges old confetti from somewhere in the rafters
The album’s second track, Another Baby!, is all about Dijon’s enthusiasm for procreation. “Baby, we got all we need to expand this collection,” he sings with frisky gusto. (The couple are now expecting their second child.)
If Baby had a theme, it was the pressure of Dijon’s rocketing profile since his first album – the critically acclaimed Absolutely – and the intensity of new parenthood. Other subplots include his love for his wife, as well as the complicated status of existing family ties and the vexed double helix of nature and nurture.
Dijon is not exactly a well kept secret, but neither is he a household name; he is still bubbling under the mainstream. So witnessing this performance in the relatively human-sized spaces of Dublin’s storied 3Olympia theatre is a privilege. The venues are only going to get bigger.
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The task tonight for the singer and his band is to translate the giddy crunch of his studio-heavy music into live performance. There is an awful lot of gear on stage: Dijon ping-pongs between keyboards, guitar and consoles; his guitarist, Mike Haldeman, sits on a stool, sundry electronics arrayed like sunbeams around him. A mighty drummer, Henry Kwapis, and bassist Daniel Aged here provide funk and wallop in physical form, but bits of electronic sound also whiz past at speed.
Distinctive on both Baby and Absolutely are the multitracked vocals that Dijon layers around his own singing. Tonight, two backing vocalists – twins Marshall and Parker Mulherin – provide heavenly harmonies.
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Dijon plays fast and loose with his tunes: at one point, Haldeman unexpectedly whips out clarinet, which he runs through effects units until its sound is abstracted. The song is Rodeo Clown, one of the most romantically harrowing from Dijon’s first album. “I still wear the T-shirt that you gave me,” he yells.
We are witnessing much of the musician’s back catalogue being reworked in real time. Everything is unstable, with new elements, or fewer parts – or more.
(Referee) – a notably stark, lo-fi soul cut – tonight becomes a headbanger monster. The outro features keening guitar and atmospherics, a reverie that leads into a huge track, Rewind, which asks hard questions about Dijon’s role as a son and father.
Talk Down, from Absolutely, was originally a rattling pop song that namechecked Gillian Welch, Liz Phair and the Band. (Dijon has very wide-ranging tastes.) This evening’s version is markedly heavier, with an epic slow-burn guitar part from Haldeman and bass so penetrating it dislodges old confetti from somewhere in the rafters.
“I refuse for my music to be viable as a background thing,” Dijon recently told the US website Pitchfork. There’s no risk of that here. His music demands his full presence. It repays the listener’s too.
Photograph by Eamonn Smyth for The Observer