Honey Dijon is a bit of an astronaut — a veteran of queer Chicago disco who has moved between Berlin and New York over a 30 year career. Her third album is fun, funky and varied; the kind of thing that comes and goes in a club, drifting through a fashion party, or muttering at you in a posh-but-hip shop. It lives between these spaces. It is liminal.
It’s also immaculate, guest-heavy, and rooted in house music’s lineage. This is smooth, curated dance music and, while that’s part of its appeal, it can also be faintly alienating, like admiring something beautiful behind glass.
I Like It Hot is the album at its most hypnotic, with Greentea Peng coasting over a bassline that feels engineered for repetition rather than release. It’s all pulse and texture, and locks you into a groove without ever quite letting you escape it. It’s seductive, but deliberately cool to the touch.
By contrast, Slight Werk injects more personality, Bree Runway’s swagger cutting cleanly through the industrial textures. There’s a welcome sense of bite here, a reminder that house music has teeth (and hips).
The emotional centre arrives with Just Friends, where Adi Oasis and Danielle Ponder elevate what could have been a functional disco cut into something more layered, its quiet dismissal dressed up as euphoria. It’s one of the few moments where the album feels like it’s reaching beyond the floor and into something a bit less quantised.
Elsewhere, Dijon’s commitment to vocal collaboration is both strength and limitation. The revolving door of voices keeps things dynamic, but also reinforces that slightly detached quality — a perfectly assembled world that rarely threatens to come undone.
Still, there’s no questioning the craft. The production is pristine, the references are worn lightly, and the whole thing moves with effortless confidence. It’s just that, for all its surface pleasure, ‘The Nightlife’ sometimes feels more observed than lived. Which, in fairness, is perhaps the point. Like the best clubs, fashion parties or high-end shops, it’s less about intimacy than it is about atmosphere.
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