In his recent spate of music videos, Dijon Duenas looks like an utterly unselfconscious performer, a guy reporting live and direct from the depths of his bruised and bloody heart.
The whole thing looks off-the-cuff and effortless, sprinkled with just enough Springsteenian gold dust. But, as is often the case with Dijon, the reality is not so simple. Hunched in a stiff chair at a restaurant in brownstone Brooklyn, the year-old is quiet and unassumingโfar from the bellowing firestarter seen in the videos. Dijon is lactose intolerant. As he leans in and takes a quick puff from a vape pen, there are also hints of a coiled intensity within. Layered in a navy hoodie underneath a bright orange jacket, he can be both boldly ambitious and self-deprecating, sometimes in the same breath.
Which brings us back to those videos. To this end, in a meta twist Charlie Kaufman could appreciate, several of the clips turn the camera around to show that the band is actually not in a rustic house, but a cavernous rehearsal space meticulously dressed to look like one of the lowkey locales where Dijon and his friends recorded his recent debut album, Absolutely. Even that self-imposed concept flattens the complexity on display, though.
Absolutely is far from an arch exercise in boorish satire. It oozes empathy. After a while, its streaming numbers started to shoot up. A lot. He grew up listening to album-centric visionaries like OutKast and Joni Mitchellโpeople who put in the work. He started getting invites to recording sessions in L.
But nothing stuck, and it all felt so transactional and uninspiring to him. Then came a string of live shows in that made him feel even more uncomfortable with his newfound notoriety.
