Into The Music
Honey Dijon is a Chicago-born, New York-based DJ and producer who has been one of the most respected figures in house and dance music for two decades, and her album Nightlife, out April 17, is the project that brings that reputation to a mainstream pop audience more directly than anything she’s done before.
Her 2022 album Black Girl Magic was a statement of purpose: a Black trans woman making music explicitly in the house tradition while centering the voices and experiences that have been at the heart of that tradition since its Chicago origins in the 1980s. Nightlife expands the collaborator list to include Chlöe, Bree Runway, Greentea Peng, Mahalia, and Jacob Lusk from Gabriels, among others, building something that functions as a party record and as a document of who makes this music and why.
House music was born in Chicago’s Black and queer communities in the early 1980s, specifically in places like the Warehouse club where Frankie Knuckles was DJing. The music was made by and for communities that were being ignored or actively persecuted by mainstream culture. That history is embedded in the sound in ways that don’t always get acknowledged when the aesthetic gets absorbed into mainstream pop.
Honey Dijon acknowledges it explicitly, which is what makes her work more than competent dance music. She’s making the argument with every production choice about where this music comes from and who it belongs to.
Nightlife is out April 17.