Mk.gee
Michael Gordon, a New Jersey guitarist and home producer whose debut Two Star & the Dream Police (2024) made him one of the year's most praised new artists, and who has co-written for Dijon, Bon Iver and Justin Bieber.
From Linwood to Los Angeles
Michael Todd Gordon was born in Somers Point, New Jersey, on September 27, 1996 (MusicBrainz says 1997), grew up in Linwood and went to Mainland Regional High School. He started piano at six or seven and guitar by 11, and studied at the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles but dropped out. His first single as Mk.gee, "I Know How You Get", came in 2017, then the EPs Pronounced McGee (May 18, 2018) and Fool (November 2018). He signed to IAMSOUND and Interscope in 2019, opened for Omar Apollo and Wallows, and made his festival debut at Pitchfork Music Festival Paris. The mixtape A Museum of Contradiction followed on May 22, 2020.
Between 2020 and 2022 he worked with other artists: he co-produced Omar Apollo's Apolonio (2020), co-wrote and co-produced Dijon's Absolutely (2021), co-wrote Charlotte Day Wilson's "Mountains", which Drake and Travis Scott sampled in "Fair Trade", and toured in Dijon's band in spring 2022. In 2025 he is credited as a co-writer on Bon Iver's "From", Justin Bieber's "Daisies" and "Love Song", and on Dijon's Baby. He plays a Fender Jaguar strung as a baritone and a Roland GK-2A pickup into a Roland VG-8, and uses a Tascam Portastudio 424 as a preamp for cassette-style distortion; Wikipedia states that everything he has released is home-produced by himself.
Two Star & the Dream Police
The double A-side "Candy" and "How Many Miles" arrived on August 11, 2023, followed by "Are You Looking Up" and "You Got It", and then "Dream Police" on January 19, 2024. Two Star & the Dream Police came out on February 9, 2024 on R&R, 12 tracks and 33:18, produced by Gordon and Dijon Duenas; it was his first charting album, at 12 in Scotland and 8 on the UK Independent chart. Metacritic scored it 83; Pitchfork gave it 7.8, calling it a magnificent debut album, the Guardian five stars, Clash 8 out of 10 and Rolling Stone four stars. Clash and Dazed made it their number one album of 2024, and Pitchfork ranks it 91 on its 100 best albums of the 2020s so far.
He played Jimmy Kimmel Live on April 10, 2024, with Sam Gendel on saxophone and Andrew Aged on guitar, and Saturday Night Live on November 9, 2024. Eric Clapton told a YouTuber in May 2024 that it's unique, and that he has found things to do on the guitar that are like nobody else. After a sold-out show at Irving Plaza, about 4,500 more people attended two further New York shows, and he toured North America from April to May 2024 and the world from September to December. His live band includes Aged and the drummer Zack Sekoff. The BBC Sound of 2025 list nominated him.
Albums
Songs
- Candy Two Star & the Dream Police · 2023
Track seven of Two Star & the Dream Police, a funk-leaning lo-fi jam first released as a double A-side with "How Many Miles" in 2023.
Sources
- Mk.gee, Wikipedia
- Two Star & the Dream Police, Wikipedia
- Eric Clapton raves about Mk.gee, Stereogum (2024-05-25)
- How the hell did Mk.gee get this big?, Hearing Things (2024-10-13)