mk.gee, dijon, and more earthy, post-blonde sensitive boy r&b

ok now that they are all over the new justin bieber album it is time for a thread for mk.gee and dijon.

mk.gee is already an ilm favorite and made two star & the dream police, one of the best albums from last year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er3C8_FlQi4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxdKr5PmlPw

he got his start working behind the scenes, particularly as the producer and co-writer for the artist dijon, whose album absolutely is another personal favorite of mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEkOYs6aWIg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws5K_5G_xvI

these guys have an earthy and passionate sound and have inspired an avalanche of soundalikes, including, as mentioned earlier, justin bieber, who enlisted mk.gee to produce basically his whole new album (embarrassingly titled swag) and sings with dijon on "devotion"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpbDwr7HZdw

anyway, they are a big deal already and they and their imitators will probably become an even bigger deal in years to come. so let's discuss!

mk.gee is a genius and even with all his success I want more success for him

Wonder who played drums on that Bieber track

The mk.gee album was so big for me.

Just put on the Bieber album and it’s already sounding great haha. I do like how he’s now on a once a decade program of desperately and dramatically switching up his sound to catch a hot new trend and revive his flagging fortunes.

The mk.gee album was one of those rare musical experiences that felt genuinely new to me, like somebody hearing and making music in a new way. You can hear plenty of influences, but there's alchemy in the way he pulls them together. Not a Bieber fan but I'll give a listen for the sonics at least.

omg at “First Place” on the Bieber album.

Good thread! Thanks for the heads-up re: Mk.bieb--another addition to this thread IMO would be Dawuna: https://dawuna.bandcamp.com/album/glass-lit-dream-2

anyone who loved the mk.gee album should absolutely (har har) check out the dijon album. it’s special

100%--the live-off-the-floor/in-the-soundstage aspect of those Absolutely videos makes the Mk.gee solo FX guitar aesthetic click for me in a way that led to me then appreciating Two Star more than I might otherwise have (the drums and piano/synths on the Absolutely sessions are wildly captured too, though).

(Bon Iver, esp post-22, A Million-era, seems to of course be the other influence elephant in that room alongside Frank)

i think dijon worked on the recent bon iver album

ok so he was featured on one song and mk.gee is credited on two others

mk.gee live show is incredible, he really brings the contrasting textural elements of his music to the forefront in a way that makes it a distinct experience from the album — the spindly guitar lines being splintered by shards of noise and distortion, the airy melodies rubbing up against gut grinder bass. you feel the mistiness of the ballads, hanging there in the air. highly recommended… he was pretty heavily filming the nyc shows i saw months apart last year so still hopeful some sort of live film or album or something will come out eventually

the long tail of early 10s indie r&b experimentalism is definitely being felt with this stuff — andrew aged from inc/inc no world is the guitarist in mk.gee’s band and if i was gonna point to precedents for dijonwave i’d go to their debut album pretty quickly (classic of course). andrew also did some songs on the last blood orange album which was working in a similar space in terms of the guitar tones and playing. daniel aged did some of the post-blonde frank ocean loosies… i’m very happy their sound has lasted this long & is now having a bigger moment than ever. jim e stack who just did the whole lorde album cited mk.gee & dijon in a GQ interview recently

bon iver def but i’d say the justin vernon side project gayngs in particular — mk.gee ballads remind me a lot of “gaudy side of town”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dacEkNa9Kg

yeah the first (?) gayngs album for sure

Haha I remember how much lex hated gayngs, I wonder what he thinks of this whole sound

slugger, the new album by derby is a little hyperpop-ier than a lot of music in this vein, but definitely feels post mk.gee especially on songs like the below ("100º")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezaYa_6Rkug

bieber's "daisies," with both mk.gee and dijon in the credits, debuted at #2 on the hot 100 this week

Jam City's pre-Blonde Dream a Garden seems to be in the mix with some of this business.

Also, even more so, Kaleidoscope Dream.

for sure Miguel

Echo the comments upthread about how personally important the mk.gee album was for me. I'm an unabashed Bon Iver fan and absolutely think his influence on these guys is elemental.

dijon apparently has a small role in the upcoming paul thomas anderson film, what a world

Amanda Petrusich has an article called "Jersey Boy" about Mk.gee in the New Yorker with a focus on his 2 soldout shows at the relatively small Stone Pony in Asbury Park

Jam City's pre-Blonde Dream a Garden seems to be in the mix with some of this business.

― Andy K, Friday, July 25, 2025 8:42 AM (four hours ago)

such a good album -- he was called up to the pop big leagues in a similar way as mk.gee & dijon but never had the sound co-opted as directly as they have now

the producer physical therapy put out a song called "coping mechanism" under his car culture moniker this year & it made me think instantly of the jam city album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrOCFDqP-rc

This line otm from the Petrusich review: "Gordon mimics then reconfigures Sting’s phrasing and lopped-off delivery, the particular way he backs off a note.)"

really liked both the car culture songs from this year

Really loving the Dijon album and wish I’d checked it out earlier. Some beautiful, classic-sounding songs on there like “The Dress”.

One of the nice/interesting things about the basic Bon Iver x Miguel arithmetic of this sound is that what is being picked up from those artists’ sounds is how each of them intensified aspects of John Martyn and Marvin Gaye respectively - two separate processes which in retrospect kinda mirror each other and were always ripe for fusion.

new dijon album coming this week. snippet on his website: https://www.dijondijon.com/

ok i guess i can say this bc its imminent. i got an advance and. aoty easily

hell yeah

Listening now. "Another Baby!" is fantastic.

Damn, this is top shelf. "Fire" and "Automatic" are early favorites.

sounds just like SWAG

????

idk one thing about swag that is at odds with both mk.gee and dijon despite their contributions is the production is very clean

"The Dress" is my keeper so far.

The more the album sounds like Bon Iver, the more I like it. The more Bon Iver sounds like Dijon, the less I like it lol

i like SWAG, wasn’t a negative comment

bon iver def but i’d say the justin vernon side project gayngs in particular — mk.gee ballads remind me a lot of “gaudy side of town”

gayngs was the project of ryan olson of the band polica, iver was on it but were a lot of ppl

xp i know!

Yeah this Dijon album is good! Listened thru once and put it right back on again. Prince-y obviously, but with these inventive contemporary sonics.

“another baby” def a highlight, very new jack

“automatic” too, which is kinda 1975-ish??

Dijon used to gig in little spots in Baltimore like The Crown with his old duo Abhi/Dijon, love to see what's happening with his career

Speaking of the 1975, are they involved with the title track bc they posted a link to it as an IG story and they usually never post anything non-1975 related on the band IG so

*it being the title track of the new album

nevermind, it’s a link to the album, my question stands

afaict, no they are not involved

he made this with the same people he made absolutely with, including mk.gee

Jenn from Wye Oak is on this???

Yeah this album is more fully realised than Absolute but defiantly unpolished, the songs seem to revel in clawing their way upwards out of muck and murk. I love it

he's so good at sending songs off the rails though!

wow that "big mike's" live video is incredible

Lol I was reading about the “big mike’s” live video in this thread and thought I’d share a cool performance of him and mk.gee I saw a couple years ago after watching that one and it turns out is the same Big Mike’s one.

Yeah it’s a great one.

was unable to snag pre-sale tickets for the December show in NY, they were gone quick.

i love the ending of "yamaha"

whenever my mind goes blank, i growl "my maaaan!" to myself

I dig this but am feeling very Frank Ocean “Orange” about it which is making me hesitant. Like maybe the production is doing too much work here

i think for dijon at least there is an intentional grounding in the aesthetics of indie rock that helps explains this.

yeah i was thinking the same thing. in fact the reason i didn’t pick up on what you’ve termed the “splintering shards of sound” the first time i listened to the album is… well, i’m so desensitized to that approach honestly. all of the music i most loved when i was a teenager does this specific thing, pretty much. i’m someone who needs it pointed out to me that random Cecil Tayor piano stabs in the middle of a pop song aren’t perfectly normal.

this feels like instead it is leaning in on the pendulum swing back toward disruption and unpredictability

i’m still not there, i have too much trouble reconciling the many opposing contexts and signifiers here (“middle aged svelte songfulness” etc), i’d rather not try and just surrender to the thing instead. if i was going to diagnose the moment through this album, the feeling i get is it’s all in play.

case in point:

dijon trojan horsing DEF JUX into the ilx hivemind is a great bit

anyway i have that cannibal ox album on now, it’s sounding great. one of my roommates who mostly listened to really grimy hardcore rap had the cd in 2004, and it sounded great then too.

I thought of this album after hearing two '80s tracks on oldies radio today — "The Reflex" and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" — that both have kind of jarring bits of electro-noise in them, which I guess also connects to the Art of Noise mentions above. Weird "computer noises" and electronic squeals were a thing in New Wave era pop. Not in the same way Dijon is using them, but there are precedents.

i’m still not there, i have too much trouble reconciling the many opposing contexts and signifiers here (“middle aged svelte songfulness” etc

I mean, this is an R&B album. Svelte songfulness is the status quo. That even in this context there is a shift is symbolic of the wider shift it’s not supposed to be its most extreme example

Fillmore Silver Spring near DC general admission pre-sale tickets went too quick the other day. All standing spots on the big floor are gone, this annoying Live Nation venue wants $205 for upper level spots, and while I like this guy's Prince influenced sound, I don't like it $200 plus worth

i like the dijon album

listening to the new nourished by time and thinking about how although he's definitely "earthy, post-blonde sensitive boy r&b" he doesn't really belong on this thread right? the musical influences are too different i think

though there is a song called BABY BABY on there

dijon and nourished by time played some of the same places in baltimore when they were getting started, there's prob some shared reference points and mutual friends

i've loved basically everything nourished by time has done. he's got his own thread here: nourished by time

I ran into a 2024 album by Bricknasty that gave me these vibes.
It's short and has a rough demo feel to it, but I like the variety, and
really enjoy at least 5 or 6 songs on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQEQ2BUMp4s

Huge dijon / mk.gee vibes on the new album from Ruel, a local Australian pop star, only the sound and songwriting is more cleaned-up even than on Swag - imagine Baby crossed with One Direction's Four.

say less...

Watch me grow.

Also he’s very good looking

I can’t stop playing this album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqZkzM4Fgp8

listening to videos from dijon's live show has made me realise how much scritti politti is in these songs

love the moment at the start where he plays a couple notes on his guitar and it has a crazy tone and you can hear someone in the audience say "what the hell"

That Ruel album is quite nice.
Next year Dijon will play live in Portugal and I would love to see him, but not on the mood for the festival setting.

i forgot that andrew sarlo who produced the first four big thief albums, has a production credit on most of baby, it's totally not a place i would have expected him to show up but it's very welcome

Good catch, ufo. The Scriti of White Bread Black Beer.

the new album from andrew aged has some great songs, i’m so happy the ageds are getting this platform. “crown for you” is instantly one of my fav songs of the year? love this performance video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc3_gk9oxs0

"The Road" is basically an unreleased song from Two Star, wouldn't be surprised if it was originally for that album, love it

yeah “the road” is awesome

excited to see Dijon on SNL this week

yeah I saw him last week, great show although a bit pissed that he played here two nights and the night after mine he brought out Feist

The Andrew Aged EP is v. pretty

saw him live last week, really fun show. i wasn’t aware of how popular he was, played in a huge venue packed with real deal fans singing along. i was a bit bored by some of the songs from absolutely (prob just be due to lack of familiarity) but everything from baby sounded fantastic. only negative think i’d say is that his limitations of his voice are more apparent live. more of a “shouter” than a singer

he sounded similar enough live to his albums, which is to say he's not exactly hitting the high notes on his recorded material either

(also he said on his IG stories that he was feeling a bit ill so it might be that as well)

saw him live last week, really fun show. i wasn’t aware of how popular he was, played in a huge venue packed with real deal fans singing along. i was a bit bored by some of the songs from absolutely (prob just be due to lack of familiarity) but everything from baby sounded fantastic. only negative think i’d say is that his limitations of his voice are more apparent live. more of a “shouter” than a singer

― flopson, Saturday, December 6, 2025 10:30 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I saw him last night and would generally agree with everything you wrote. I would note that he has a 5-piece band and 3 back-up vocalists, and they're all busy up there, either making relatively restrained music or thunderous, clattering noise. Some of my favorite moments were curtesy of the back-up vocalists who were able to add some rich harmonic texture to a number of his songs that I don't know if I always catch on the recordings. Really cool stage set up and lights, too.

he got Pitchfork's Artist of the Year and the accompanying story is well worth reading

also, while we're talking about his live show, I'm still thinking about his live version of alley-oop":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5acEMvnZw4

I mean I’ve been jamming “Baby” (and prev Dijon albums) for some time but it’s really striking me on a relisten this week (prompted by the SNL show) that this is one of those once-in-a-decade “changing the game in how albums are produced” kind of records—

It’s hard to describe, but the live manipulation of “everything” feels like a prophecy come to fruition, like decades of watching loopop gear reviews and dolefully spending your money on modules have finally yielded something that justifies it all—

I am hoping this gets “open source” (Dijon and crew get hyper specific on how the live show is presented)— less perhaps for my own usage but because I’d love to see more shows like this, where there’s an onstage mixer as well as a FOH mixer

somewhat skeptical of this thread and what it's marking, but feel like elujay's recent album a constant charade fits the vibe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s1qhzUcX9E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap89yVzPP2k

Loving the elujay

i think elujay probably precedes this trend but yeah the new album is really great

rewatched one battle after another last night and hadn't realized dijon was in it (probably didn't know who he was the first time i watched it) - he's one of the french 75

fgti, are you referring more to the album or the live show? For the album, I have no idea how it was actually made but I heard it as very DAW-based, lots of automation and edits and just highly processing every little bit. In a way that could be very hands-on with controllers or meticulously drawn in and pieced together, or both. But that could be because that's how I approach things (it's easy for me to imagine laboring over those tracks in the DAW, but I'm at sea when it comes to hardware and how to reproduce it live).

I mean, I'm always interested in "how this shit is made". When, for example, I was cowed by "Shaking The Habitual", I asked Johannes Berglund "how did they do that" and he said "meticulous bar-by-bar automation in the DAW" and I said "that's reassuring and a little disappointing to hear". Reassuring because I know that a song like "Full Of Fire" can be made with, you know, some time invested; disappointing because it wasn't the result of a brilliant new generative method or something along those lines.

Elektron's Octatrack has kinda existed in my brain-area since it came out-- I've bought one, worked with it, gotten frustrated, sold it; and this pattern repeated at least five, maybe six times over the years. Fundamentally it should be "the best thing ever" for live audio manipulation-- and live looping!-- but I've always felt like it's missing several key ingredients that would actually make it useful to me. (What it's missing: AD/DA conversion that doesn't sound like shit, real-time sequencing of I/O levels that doesn't require a MIDI loopback, actually good sounding reverbs, any sort of reasonable internal memory). I love the box in theory but hate it in practice, and have had certain colleagues just say "fuck that thing" because of their own frustrations with regards to its limitations. And I'm very, very familiar with its particular "sound", which (to my ears) is highly prominent in the production of "Baby", and you can hear Octatrack (or Octatrack-style) live manipulation happening on all the videos I've seen of Dijon's live show.

I have googled what's been recorded of "the gear the live show is using" and peeped photos from sound check and so on and it does seem to be "all live" but also "all manipulated"-- and the sound palette is really very-much-in-line with the things that EZBot does with the Octatrack. Famously Panda Bear was using 2xOctatrack for a while but there was nothing going on onstage that would indicate that the boxes were being "used to their full potential", they were just replicating the 2xSP-404 situation he was previously using. With Dijon's live set, though, it really does feel like he (or somebody in his team) has cracked the code and successfully integrated a "live onstage audio manipulation" role, and it really sounds "Octatrack-coded" to my ears. I haven't seen the show (but I've watched lots of videos) and it does seem to be like almost entirely live, very little sampling, but with every element being grab-able and effect-able and mute-able.

That makes sense, thank you!

I sometimes wonder if live fx manipulation was actually perfected in the Kaoss pads, and also why there hasn't been a hi-fi next gen version (seems like there's so much that they could add and combine now).

Oh totally the Kaoss pad. The feature that Elektron introduced on the Octatrack is the "scene" fader, whereby you can scroll from "one audio configuration" to "another audio configuration" using a DJ-mixer style horizontal knob. Elektron hasn't brought that back on any boxes it's made in the past fifteen years-- nor has it brought back any manner of 4x4 I/O live processing, and similarly-featured devices (the 1010 BlueBox, for example) are kinda designed for other purposes. But yeah: Kaoss pad.

i didn't know about Dijon until I saw him on SNL (lol me old) but I thought those performances were incredible.

https://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/dijon-artist-of-the-year/

this piece goes into the making of the album a bit - a lot of it was stitched together from fragments of unfinished songs but many of the mixes were first-take live mixes rather than meticulous automation

Ok I'll watch the Pomplamoose dude talking to Dijon's producer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Uf4rVpMo4

finally tracked down the vinyl bonus track "nu diamond" and it's absolutely wild but also very much for the best that it was a bonus track