Two Star & The Dream Police is an ambitious debut album. Mike Gordon’s desire as Mk.gee is to reinvent pop and guitar music, and even before his 2024 breakthrough, he was influential behind the scenes, releasing a handful of EPs while collaborating with the likes of Omar Apollo, Charlotte Day Wilson, and Dijon. With his first LP in mind, he distills not just his career, but everything that came before it into an excitingly new concoction.
As guitar and synth timbres stutter out of leftfield, they bring to mind the experiments of James Ferraro or George Clanton, though Mk.gee is smashing hypnagogic pop into judderingly lucid pieces, its gauzy psychedelia and smooth, funky pop aesthetics slathered with a liberally compressed production punch and splashes of redlined distortion. He creates with a freeform, internet raised attitude, his songs flashing in ephemeral movements from one feeling to the next. Yet, through each numerous turn, wildly autotuned yet organic vocal run, whirring detail and squiggle of saxophone emerging from the backdrop, there’s a cleverly accessible throughline linking all of these parts together. With his virtuosic riffing, tumbling jaunty melodies, and lyrical hooks aplenty, Mk.gee combines the character of a garage rock or synthpop tune from aeons ago with the sensation of a bedroom pop anthem blowing up out of nowhere.
Yes, many sounds here are reminiscent of the 70s and 80s canon of western pop, but that’s really where all similarities end: this is an arrestingly modern album, nostalgialess as Mk.gee rejects what he considers the tired tenets of pop and rock in favour of something new. He’s completely self assured that people will get it, risks and loftiness and all, and with Two Star & The Dream Police taking both fans and fellow artists in the music world by storm, it looks like he’s right
Track List:
Side A
- New Low
- How Many Miles
- Are You Looking Up
- DNM
- You Got It
- Rylee & I
Side B
- Candy
- I Want
- Alesis
- Breakthespell
- Little Bit More
- Dream Police
