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.