How the Hell Did Mk.gee Get This Big?
The art-rock breakout is reshaping the slickest sounds of the ’80s into something startling and new.
Onstage at Manhattan’s Irving Plaza over the summer, Mk.gee looked like a shadow of a rock star. His guitar-wielding silhouette was almost completely backlit by two roving beams, as if he were turning away from a lighthouse’s promise of safe harbor. The music matched the mystery: gnomic songs dotted with underwater distortion, muted rhythms, and the occasional anguished shriek. The excitable crowd sang along to tracks from his debut album, Two Star & the Dream Police, even though, on record, the lyrics are often unintelligible. The effect of these sing-alongs was uncanny, like everyone was deeply communing with a phantom.
Mk.gee, aka singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer Michael Gordon, is one of 2024’s most unlikely new stars. Just a few months after selling out the 1,100-capacity Irving Plaza, he played two more New York gigs, to around 4,500 more people. He has upwards of 1.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify. According to a recent New York Times profile, Justin Bieber has enlisted Gordon for writing and recording sessions, making the prospect of Bieber’s forthcoming dad album a lot more intriguing.
While listening to Mk.gee’s slippery and unpredictable music, one can’t help but wonder: How did a guy hellbent on obscuring the typical trappings of popular music come to command such a widespread and ravenous audience? When most other songs would start to rev up, the ones on Two Star break down. Good luck telling where a synth begins and a guitar ends. Drum hits can sound like flicks of paper or a refrigerator slamming into a bank vault. There are laser noises that could be sourced from a “shredded” version of a lightsaber battle peppered in, too.
I’ve probably pressed play on the album more than a hundred times by now, and I still don’t feel like I’m able to grab it, to really know it. So I just keep listening. In our era of soul-obliterating puzzle-box music marketing—What is Taylor Swift trying to tell us about her next deluxe reissue in this Capital One commercial?!—the casual inscrutability of this project feels like sweet relief.
At least one thing is clear about Mk.gee: This music is expertly subverting the slickest pop sounds of the 1980s. Think Genesis and Phil Collins. Michael Bolton and Kenny G. Sting. Music that sounds expensive because it was recorded in state-of-the-art studios by musicians who were extremely proficient at singing and playing their instruments. But where so much of that music serves to smooth over the edges of everyday life, Gordon is using the same textures and tones to disorient and confound. The 28-year-old is fucking with familiar presets, drum beats, and melodies from before he was born, turning them inside-out or exploding them to dust. He’s making easy listening sound very uneasy.
This is by design. “The whole record was kind of a challenge to myself: I wanted it to feel like something so recognizable but at the same time there is no possible way there’s anything out like this today,” Gordon told the BBC, talking about Two Star. “There’s a strangeness to that, and a creepiness to that as well, that I’m really obsessed with.”
He has likened his sound to a liminal space, a concept involving empty, unsettling, oddly nostalgic locales that became popular amid the pandemic and its aftermath, when Gordon was making his album. The subreddit r/LiminalSpace had around 500 members at the start of 2020; now there are about 800,000 people in the same forum, sharing and getting weirded out by ominously lit photos of waterless swimming pools and motel hallways stuck in time. Gordon doubles down on this idea in his video for “Alesis,” where he yelps to no one inside a dim, outdated ballroom, the kind of forgotten place that could have hosted a wedding in 1988.
The impact of tapping into these liminal spaces, and the spectral feelings they bring up, is amplified by our especially lonely era; even with the trauma and isolation of the pandemic receding in the rearview, 25 percent of Americans are still lonelier now than they were before 2020. Mk.gee’s music acknowledges that solitude in its starkness, in the open spaces between notes. It also offers opportunities for communion—just look at all the people on TikTok and YouTube using the guitar and singing skills they learned during the pandemic to cover Mk.gee’s twisty tracks. Or the crowds singing back to the stage at shows, transforming this deeply insular music into a collective catharsis. Or the fact that a lot of this relatively strange album is pretty sexy—songs like the smoky “I Want,” which seems to come equipped with its own slow-moving disco ball, are ready and willing to soundtrack backseat make-out sessions from here to eternity.
Gordon also accentuates the unnerving quality of his songs by tweaking listeners’ musical subconscious. Take Two Star’s centerpiece, “Candy.” Keen-eared musical sleuths have noticed some striking melodic and chordal similarities between the song and early-’80s tracks like Genesis’ “Taking It All Too Hard” and the R&B group DeBarge’s twinkling ode to nourishing romance, “All This Love.” These callbacks read like both reclamation and criticism: Gordon draws from his inspirations’ unfiltered way with emotion as he simultaneously fragments those raw feelings through unexpected production and songwriting choices.
On “Candy,” the mix is off-balance, like each element is tinkering in its own little room. The eighth-note bass line—which would usually be a driving force behind the rhythm—is deployed sparingly and quietly, as if it’s a ghost haunting the song. And rather than following a traditionally satisfying verse-chorus-verse structure, “Candy” mostly just keeps building up again and again—yet another liminal loop.
Meanwhile, the lead guitar plays a game of hide-and-seek with the listener. It pops up early, in an arena-rock tone worthy of Journey, only to quickly vanish, like it’s embarrassed by the intrusion. Then, about halfway through, when it feels like a proper guitar solo is about to descend from the heavens, the song hollows out, with only abstract shards filling the void. Finally, after eight bars of obfuscation, we get that lighter-ready solo, and the release it provides is that much more powerful because of the roundabout way Gordon got there. It’s the only moment on the entire album when he allows himself to indulge in such arena-ready theatrics. At Irving Plaza, Mk.gee played “Candy” twice, the second time as a victory-lap encore that also doubled as the night’s loudest sing-along: The crowd was happy to fill in the song’s gaps with their own voices.
To get even nerdier with it—and this is the type of music that welcomes, but does not beg for, interpretation—the story Gordon tells in the song jibes with its musical ambiguity. Like much of Two Star, “Candy” zeroes in on romantic frustration: loving someone and fucking things up and figuring out how many mistakes are too many. Candy, the character, seems determined to prove the song’s narrator has cheated on her, which he probably has, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s still the object of his fantasies. (Thematically, it almost reads like a sequel to Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town track “Candy’s Room,” in which a man longs for a much-desired woman—who may or may not be a sex worker—to fall for him; Gordon, a fellow son of New Jersey, is a huge Bruce fan.) It all adds up to music that luxuriates in an emotional purgatory as it wields references and nostalgia like a Michelin chef wields a carbon steel blade.
Gordon is not the first artist to complicate the legacy of the ’80s glossiest sounds. I was reminded of this at Irving Plaza, when I looked around the balcony and spotted the experimental producer Daniel Lopatin, best known for his work as Oneohtrix Point Never and his score for Uncut Gems, taking in the show. Around 2010, Lopatin started releasing secondhand oddities he called “eccojams,” in which he slowed down and cut up much-derided pop chaff like Chris de Burgh’s 1986 hit “The Lady in Red,” transforming it into an unnerving psychedelic mantra. (Very possibly relevant personal info: When I was growing up, my dad’s favorite song was “The Lady in Red,” and he was probably playing it on cassette while driving me to see one of my first-ever concerts—starring Kenny G.) In the years before Lopatin’s emergence, arch pranksters like Ariel Pink mined retro ephemera from the ’80s and beyond to make lo-fi hallucinations that spearheaded the self-consciously culty hypnagogic pop movement, giving the decade’s signatures another outlandish spin.
Mk.gee has some of Lopatin and Pink’s DNA in his murky sound, but it’s combined with the unabashed sincerity of another influential modern artist who has a history of incorporating once-questionable ’80s tones into his music: Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Gordon has toured with Bon Iver as part of his friend and collaborator Dijon’s band, and Vernon recently praised Gordon in the Times. “Mike is just a songbook,” he said. “Not only does he hear all the music that I hear, but he knows how to play it.”
That songbook includes ’80s adult-contemporary mainstays like Steve Winwood and Bruce Hornsby, which Vernon paid straight-faced tribute to on “Best/Rest,” the elegiac closer to Bon Iver’s self-titled 2011 album. When “Best/Rest” first came out, it caused a minor uproar among Gen X and elder millennial indie fans who came of age in the ironic ’90s that essentially boiled down to: Is he being serious right now? He was. Instead of serving as shorthand for “cheesy” and “gauche,” these styles could be heard as refreshingly sincere and straightforward amid indie music’s typically shrouded emotionalism.
Suddenly, a whole swath of ’80s sounds was fair game for alternative artists who would have likely balked at them before. Cue a song like the 1975’s “I Couldn’t Be More in Love,” from their 2018 album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, where frontman Matty Healy does his best Phil Collins impression atop keyboard and guitar tones beamed in from Genesis’ 1986 hit “In Too Deep.” When Healy pushes his voice on the hook—“What about these feelings I’ve got?”—there’s no question that he means it.
While Two Star probably wouldn’t exist as we know it without the work of pathfinders like Lopatin and Vernon, Mk.gee’s exploration into the depths of uneasy listening is unique. Coming a generation after those artists, Gordon and his Gen Z fans aren’t weighed down by the baggage of the ’80s and what it represents to people who lived through the decade: the chintziness, the greed, the conservatism. For Gordon, it’s another musical dreamworld to deconstruct—a swatch of bygone sounds unchained from time, ready to give life to his own reveries.
