Dijon is coming to Australia for the first time – five shows across four cities in December, arriving off the back of a year that’s reshaped what people expect from him. 

Presented by Handsome Tours, Astral People and triple j, Dijon will be making his Australian festival debut at Meredith’s Supernatural Amphitheatre, and headline shows at Margaret Court Arena in Naarm/Melbourne on December 9, the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall in Eora/Sydney on December 12 & 13 and Meanjin/Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on December 15. 

It’s been a hell of a year for Dijon. He turned up on Bon Iver‘s SABLE, fABLE. He co-wrote, produced, and sang alongside Justin Bieber on SWAG standout ‘DEVOTION’, a partnership that carried him onstage at Coachella and, this past February, to two Grammy nominations – Album of the Year and Producer of the Year. He showed up in the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another, standing next to Leonardo DiCaprio like it was nothing. And in the middle of all of it, four years after he all but vanished from public view to start a family, he put out Baby – the long-rumoured follow-up to a debut that never really left rotation.

Absolutely, released in 2021, was the kind of first album that makes a ‘sophomore record’ a loaded phrase. The FADER, i-D, and NPR all named it among the year’s best, but the accompanying visual work – the Absolutely film, a hushed dining-room performance of the record, a rendition of ‘Big Mike’s’ on The Tonight Show – did as much to define Dijon as the songs themselves, resetting expectations for what a live performance from a recording artist could look like. Then he disappeared, and the mythology around what would come next did what mythology does: it grew.

Baby was built at home, largely in isolation, with his new family close by and a small circle of collaborators – Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Michael Gordon (Mk.gee) – filling in the rest. There were no advance singles, no rollout in the traditional sense, just a cryptic tracklist screenshot and a countdown clock on his website. The album itself keeps the interior, unresolved quality that’s become his signature, but points it somewhere new: new fatherhood, and the disorientation of a life reordered overnight. Across its twelve songs – ‘Baby!‘, ‘Another Baby!‘, ‘HIGHER!‘, ‘(Freak It)‘, ‘Yamaha‘, ‘FIRE!‘, ‘(Referee)‘, ‘Rewind‘, ‘my man‘, ‘loyal & marie‘, ‘Automatic‘, ‘Kindalove‘ – Baby moves between euphoria and something closer to grief, often within the same verse, tracking the mania that comes with everything changing at once.

Dijon brings a six-piece band on the road with him, the same line-up that’s carried his sets through Outside Lands, Sziget, All Points East, and Forwards Festival Bristol this year. Australian audiences will get their first look at it in December.