When he released his debut solo album, 2021’s Absolutely, Dijon Duenas put out an accompanying live video of him performing in what appears to be the room of a house. He and a small collective of musicians, including regular collaborator Michael Gordon, who performs as Mk.gee, orbit a dining table swarming with instruments, half-empty beer bottles, and coffee cups. At first, it seems like too minimal a setup to convey Dijon’s dense, abstracted soul music with any fidelity, but it works because, as filled with esoteric detail as his music can be, it is fundamentally homespun—something that can be made by a few people in a room. Of course, the camera pans back to reveal they’re playing on a set in a studio.

The songs on his new album, Baby, feel more like many rooms all at once. From one instant to the next, you find yourself in a completely different soundworld, a gentle sunlit environment giving way to a space painted entirely black and lit by piercing artificial lights. On Absolutely, this sort of contrast was only faintly gestured at, a dark cloud of whimsy and chaos framing the tender scenes of desire and longing within.

On Baby, surprise-released just months after his high-profile contributions to this year’s Justin Bieber record SWAG, the cloud has descended. Harsh staticky rifts split the world into chunks on which one can often only briefly gain purchase. Lyrics arrive in fragments too distorted to easily discern. (When you can hear them, they describe domesticity in what feel like chaotic outbursts: sex, having children, experiencing an enduring love that annihilates your insecurities despite it containing its own chaos and uncertainty.) Reverb is applied so generously that you are aware of every sound’s echo as well as its slow-motion decay, refracted thousands of times as if in a broken mirror. All of these elements present a vision of R&B that is pure collage: past, present, and future colliding in their most jagged configurations. If you can see the seams, the raw edges of each sound element pasted roughly onto the canvas of the record, that’s because the seams are the point.

As with his colleague mk.gee’s work, there is something figural and fugitive about Dijon’s songwriting, something that changes or disappears as soon as you begin to apprehend it. It can provide immediate pleasures, like lithe and funky rhythmic beds, or hooks that work their way into your memory even though they sometimes fight through several layers to get there. But all this deconstruction allows the songs on Baby to escape any predictable shape they may have otherwise taken. They leak out and pool and dissolve in such quick successive movements that it’s as if they were recorded in time-lapse.

This doesn’t break the spell of the music; far from it. It actually deepens it. It makes you wonder what exactly it is you’ve been smoking. The instrumentals sound pre-filtered through a weed haze, often arriving a beat later than expected. Sometimes the rhythms even seem to trip over themselves, as on “HIGHER!” which feels like it’s constantly having seconds added and subtracted from it. Even more organic instrumental elements, like the acoustic guitar that holds the title track together, are chopped up and blown out as possible, as if in order for the instrument to enter a Dijon record, it had to mutate a little. And in the record’s least finessed moments—in the overdriven frequencies that ripple through “FIRE!”, or the hi-hats that make the rhythm in “(Referee)” sound like shattering glass, or the endless delay applied to every drum hit in “(Freak It)”—it can feel like you are listening to the record from inside the speaker that’s playing it, feeling the vibration before hearing the sound.

This is bold, irreverent, exploratory music; it contrasts interestingly with Dijon’s contributions to the Bieber record, which tended to smooth Bieber out, make him palatable, and anchor him in somewhat human feelings and emotional melodies. Dijon, recording once more with his collaborators from Absolutely—Gordon, plus producers and multi-instrumentalists Andrew Sarlo and Henry Kwapis—needs no anchor for his work; there might not even be a bottom to this record for an anchor to hit.

The obvious antecedent to Baby is Frank Ocean, whose work, as his career progressed, increasingly collapsed into abstracted versions of itself, a constant searching that eventually led his songs to resemble art installations that prioritize space as much as songcraft. I can also hear Bilal’s more boundary-pushing records, where he tried to craft a futuristic funk-soul that never settled, just ventured outward at increasingly odd angles. There’s D’Angelo and the Soulquarians, specifically the more inwardly bent dimensions they explored on Common’s Like Water for Chocolate. And Bon Iver, with whom Dijon collaborated earlier this year, is audible in the vocal production throughout the record, whenever Dijon’s voice increases in volume and it sounds as if his feelings are boiling in his throat.

Of course, there is Prince, who haunts Baby throughout its runtime, specifically the Prince who recorded “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” to a faulty mixing console that had no high-end, making the entire track sound water-damaged and like it would sift apart if you touched it. It didn’t matter; he had too many ideas to care about them coming out “wrong.” And Dijon takes that a step further, pursues sounding “wrong” as a way of actually sounding right. R&B is so often a genre of precision, at times increasingly so as it’s become less played and more programmed over decades of development. Where can an artist go now but deeper into the error?

Which isn’t to say that Baby is wholly abrasive and unwieldy. “Yamaha” gleams semi-normally, like light reflecting on chrome as physically intended. It could be a lead single, if a lead single were something Baby was interested in. (No advance singles were released for the record.) And the record’s final track, “Kindalove,” is also its most accessible and straightforward, one of Dijon’s airy, sunlit and ethereal rooms, even though it too is gradually drowned in reverb, reverberating against itself, until Dijon sounds like he’s singing it to feel less lonely in a massive abandoned space that won’t stop returning the sounds he’s making. This is another error, a visible seam, something you can see the fray still hanging off of. And yet there’s a window through which we’re glimpsing it, a wall missing so the camera can zoom in and out of it. Baby is undeniably made in such a way that it uncannily emphasizes its making. That’s what makes it so real.