Mk.gee, The Reluctant Virtuoso and His Dream Police
- Ben Preece
- May 31
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 24
A Waxx Lyrical Record Of The Month Deep Dive
Mk.gee – Two Star & The Dream Police
Released February 2024
Mk.gee: The Reluctant Virtuoso
Michael Todd Gordon didn’t exactly burst onto the scene — he slipped in through the side door, quietly building one of the most idiosyncratic and emotionally resonant discographies in recent memory. Born in 1996 in the coastal town of Somers Point, New Jersey, he was raised on piano lessons and curiosity. By eleven, he’d picked up a guitar and started dismantling everything he thought he knew about music.
He didn’t follow the rulebook. Instead of mimicking heroes or chasing technique, he fell into Pandora wormholes, building a personal canon that veered from Clapton to Grouper, Sly Stone to Julianna Barwick. Genre didn’t matter — it was all about feeling.
After high school, Gordon moved to Los Angeles to study at USC’s Thornton School of Music — but the structure didn’t stick. He dropped out and carved his own path, one that would come to define his sound: blurry, raw, hard to pin down. A little lo-fi, a little R&B, a little indie — always on its own frequency.
His early EPs Pronounced McGee and Fool (both 2018) hinted at his eclectic range. 2020’s A Museum of Contradiction cracked the door wider. But it wasn’t until Two Star & The Dream Police that the full vision crystallised: not just a bedroom tinkerer, but a serious voice in experimental pop with emotional weight to match.
Mk.gee has said he wants the music to speak for itself — no image, no myth-making. Just perfect songs, or something close. And in a world addicted to personality over substance, that might be his most radical act yet.
A New Kind Of Guitar Hero?
Mk.gee isn’t your typical guitar hero. No fireworks. No flexing. Just sound — bent, melted, made emotional. His playing feels more like a voice cracking than a riff peacocking. It slips through tracks like molten metal, rarely taking the spotlight but reshaping everything around it.
He’s worked with big names — Omar Apollo, Fred Again, Bon Iver, Kacy Hill — but his creative link with Dijon has proven most formative. Both lean into imperfection as beauty. Their shared approach favours instinct, texture, and emotional immediacy over technicality, and Two Star & The Dream Police — co-produced by the pair — is soaked in that ethos.
His guitar work, foundational to the record, was shaped by learning from an upright bass player — a choice made specifically to avoid traditional technique. These days, he favours a baritone-strung Fender Jaguar. It’s not about solos. It’s about mood, fragmentation, atmosphere. Think Prince at his strangest, or even Andy Summers of The Police — where tone, space, and unexpected chord shape
s do more than speed or volume ever could. The guitar becomes a character, not a centrepiece.
Even Eric Clapton took notice. In 2024, he named Mk.gee as one of the most exciting players working today, comparing his innovation to “when Prince came on the scene.” Not bad for a guy who once said he didn’t want to be known as a guitarist.
Cult Status, No Hype Machine (Sort Of)
Mk.gee’s ascent has been steady, unconventional, and quietly unstoppable. He’s sidestepped the typical hype cycle: no viral gimmicks, no PR saturation, no desperate grab for playlist placements. Just a cult-level following that grew from curiosity into obsession.
Still, calling it “no hype” would be wrong. It’s just a different kind — one built on texture, patience, and trust. Two Star & The Dream Police doesn’t sound like anything else. It’s strange. Raw. Mournful. Melodic. Songs like ‘Candy’ and ‘How Many Miles’ float through timelines because they feel different — ghosted vocals, warped fidelity, cracked emotion.
And TikTok? It helped, but not by design. Mk.gee’s tracks spread not because they chased trends, but because they disrupted them. Add to that years of collaboration with Dijon, a credit on Drake’s ‘Fair Trade’, and an undeniable influence on alt-R&B’s current shape — the buzz may be low-frequency, but it’s been there all along.
His performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! was the moment it all clicked — a jolt for new fans, a reward for long-time believers. No polish, no posturing — just Mk.gee and his band tearing through ‘Alesis’ and ‘Candy’ with real feral beauty. It wasn’t an arrival. It was a signal.
And like everything Mk.gee does, it felt entirely on his own terms. In 2025, that's rebellion!
Two Star & The Dream Police
Mk.gee doesn’t echo the past — he distorts it. On Two Star & The Dream Police, he draws from the bones of ‘80s pop, R&B, and soft rock, only to dissolve them into something warped and dreamlike. You can hear the ghost of Phil Collins, the silhouette of Prince, maybe a flicker of MJ — but it’s never clear. He twists nostalgia until it flickers.
Pitchfork called it a “mangled mix of pop, rock, and soul... made of scrap metal and polished with sandpaper,” and that’s not far off. The guitars contort, the vocals vanish and return, the drums crackle like static. It’s all jagged, but never careless.
Beneath the blur, though, is melodic instinct so strong it feels carved. Its opening 'New Low' is almost a sabotage, like it's daring you to listen no further and switch it off. But beyond that, songs take over—'Are You Looking Up', ‘How Many Miles’ and ‘Alesis’ truly stick with you. And even the downtempo moments linger — ‘I Want’ is downtrodden and gorgeous, then blindsides you with thunderous drums and power chords that arrive like an emotional ambush. By album's end, you feel a part of its world, you don't necessarily walk away holding onto one song, though the favourite will indeed move around with repeated listens as new details are noticed. It’s utterly bewildering. And somehow perfect.
Critics got it. Two Star landed on best-of-2024 lists from Clash, Dazed, The New York Times, and Pitchfork dubbed it the best on their mid-decade roundup. It also marked his first chart success — peaking at #12 in Scotland and #8 on the UK Independent Albums Chart.
It’s not just a debut. It’s a world! And it's fully realised.
The Live Show
From the moment Two Star & The Dream Police landed, it felt big — but seeing Mk.gee live gave it a whole new shape. Backlit and shrouded in smoke for most of the set, he looked more apparition than frontman. And yet, the presence was undeniable. There was a looseness, a tension, a kind of generational electricity in the air — like early Cobain bootlegs or hearing Channel Orange played start-to-finish in a small club for the first time.
His performances aren’t slick. They’re volatile. Loud. Songs unravel and reassemble in real time: guitar lines stretch and snap back, vocals bleed raw without the studio haze, and no arrangement is ever quite what it is on record. That tension — the sense that anything could fall apart or break into something new — is the magic.
For those who caught his 2024 tour, the whole picture came into view. Every night felt different. Every set reshaped the record. If Two Star & The Dream Police is a beautifully broken studio world, the live show is where it breathes, sweats, and mutates into something even stranger.
Postscript: 'ROCKMAN' and 'The Lonely Fight'
If Two Star introduced the world to Mk.gee’s sonic language, the two singles that followed — ‘The Lonely Fight’ and ‘ROCKMAN’ — showed he’s only just beginning to speak fluently.
‘The Lonely Fight’ arrived first, quietly devastating. It feels like an emotional aftershock to the album — delicate, sparse, and utterly exposed. Mk.gee strips away the filters and lets the vocal tremble in full view. The arrangement barely holds itself together: a few drifting synths, some spectral guitar, the tension of unspoken words. If ‘I Want’ was heartache behind frosted glass, ‘The Lonely Fight’ breaks it open. It’s his finest ballad to date.
Then came ‘ROCKMAN’ — wild, erratic, and impossible to predict. A first listen might conjure Sting, or even The Police at their weirdest, but this is all Mk.gee: distorted guitar chaos, whistling weirdness, and a swagger that somehow feels both chaotic and controlled. It might be his most unhinged track — and, ironically, his most radio-friendly and his most playful. The crossover moment may already be happening, whether he wants it or not.
Both tracks fleshed out the world Two Star built — not to escape it, but to stretch its edges. Together, they suggest the next phase won’t be a repeat, but a rupture. Stranger. Riskier. Sharper.
Whatever Mk.gee is chasing, he’s not slowing down. And he’s dragging us — wide-eyed and willing — wherever it leads.
What makes Mk.gee so compelling isn’t just his sound — it’s the sense that he’s figuring it out as he goes, and letting us hear the process in real time. Two Star & The Dream Police doesn’t feel like a debut looking for approval. It feels like a transmission — one we’re only just beginning to decode.
Where he goes next is anyone’s guess. But it won’t be safe, and it won’t be simple. And that’s exactly why we’ll be listening.
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