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

Or it's an instantiation of grab bag scrolling/information overload/attention deficit aesthetics, but that's less interesting.

Haha I mean I think that might be the same thing .. the pull deeper into the scroll because of encroaching numbness to keep the action happening and the “putting your phone down because a bird pooped on the screen” both are attempts to escape the numbing inertia I suppose

The former is more the creator experience the latter the listener experience … this is the ludacris debate transported

oh dear lord no

Well I think the truth is that the rhythms of this album are really knowable only to the guy who created it but fun narrative angles for onlookers in any direction

NO, bad deej, lol

Im joking!!

idk what ya'll are on about, but I do love this shit!

lol

Thank you to this thread for reminding me that I’ve gotta take the album for a spin

i've wanted someone to commit to 'noise r&b' for so long and i'm really glad it works out so well here

I’ve listed to the album like 5 times today. I could live in this soundscape atm

I'm sure there's a think piece to be written (or already written) about why/how this "sounds like 2025," but I'm just going to assert it without bothering to unpack it. It sounds like 2025.

I would like a Dijon / Fiona Apple collab

Not that but this is produced by Rostam with some Dijon backing vocals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNPPJCtb8nc

upset that Mk.gee has come to town like four times in the past two years but I just got into his music bc of this thread and Dijon (my first exposure to him was his SNL performances which did nothing for me, wonder what changed)

Anyway the Dijon tour presale code is “baby” for those of you who like me hasn’t gotten a code yet but want to go

Don’t remember the last time I signed up for a presale where I got the code in time and didn’t have to trawl Reddit/Twitter for the code instead

I liked the sound of the first Dijon album, but it didnt flow all the way through for me
like the new one does. Sometimes Dijon makes me feel underdressed or not sexy enough.
Sometimes I swing right along. Maybe I'm just not used to enjoying pop in my older age.
I played that mk.gee way too much in 2024, and luckily still enjoy it once in a while.
I love the spacy, daydreamy vibe it puts me in.

Could be wrong as there are infinite ways to distort drums, but it sounds to me like Dijon really likes the Decapitator plugin

i don't think i'd say that the dissonance in dijon's music is "the point" but i do think it's *a* point -- mk.gee's album is comparatively more streamlined but there's still a similar ethos of introducing noise, momentarily splintering these glimmering pop and R&B melodies w/ shards of sound. i think for dijon at least there is an intentional grounding in the aesthetics of indie rock that helps explains this. as ivy mentions in her review if you go back to the way that 'absolutely' was presented, he filmed a long performance video on a set mocked up like a living room. i'll just post the clip of "big mike's" (w/ a pre-shroud mk.gee on guitar) -- there's gear boxes all over the table, bottles of pacifico and modelo strewn about, wires everywhere, guitars propped up in the corner of the room. the song melodically is grounded in R&B but the visual is very "dirtbag indie band jamming on its day off from tour." you don't see any of the aesthetic signifiers that you would expect from, like, an R&B unplugged performance. there is an emotional connection to the idea of the ramshackle indie rock band that is threaded thru the recordings

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

all that having been said, i hear two R&B artists a lot here that haven't been mentioned itt

d'angelo, esp 'black messiah' -- there's a very similar feeling of prince-y falsetto being bathed in grime and muck, like a baby duck emerging from an oil spill. you could put "ain't that easy" or "prayer" on this album and they wouldn't sound out of place. given how much of a prince devotee d'angelo was and how intentionally he bent his music towards a beautiful sort of muddiness, heightening it further on 'black messiah,' almost at times positioning his vocals as just one part of an overall sound collage, i think you could place dijon pretty comfortably w/in that lineage

the other is lewis taylor, specifically his s/t album, which in its own way got to this notion of dissonant neo-soul before even d'angelo. his version is more like 90s style alt rock guitar stacking and feedback on songs like "bittersweet" "track" and "song," but you get a similar effect of the guitar being used as this like unwieldy counterpoint to the smoothness of the vocals. and like dijon's music the lewis taylor album builds up a perpetual windstorm of noise in order to wring power from the moments where the sun breaks through the clouds and you get those momentarily blasts of pure R&B/soul melody

I also hear this in Dijon but obviously filthier:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV5NLQW4l3c

holy shit @ that Big Mike's clip

yeah i recommend watching the whole absolutely film, it's really beautifully staged

it's 2021 so of course silly me watches and thinks, "No masks, boys?"

the absolutely film is what turned me into a fan, and convinced me to run that album back over and over again

I can think of one more reference point no one mentioned ITT ....

I agree. Rlly its just messy, I was stoked on fantastic damage by el p fwiw-the mess was exciting n optimistic. Simple devotional tunes over lots of sounds was the puzzle. The more “experimental” shit got removed because it felt cyncial for the themes tbh. thanks 4 peepin it!

— Dijon (@dijondijon_) August 20, 2025

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

Haha, nice. Well if that's his reference for post-Bomb Squad distorted breakbeat shit, great.

oh that's really funny, earlier I was listening to Baby and thinking it kind of reminded me of unfashionable early 00s choppy beat stuff like Prefuse 73 or even FlyLo or Dilla but without the analog fetishism. I couldn't convince myself that made sense, but El-P really does

specifically the last 20 secs of "Baby!" was the trigger

After all this time I still struggle a bit with 'Fantastic Damage' but I'm just gonna pretend he meant 'The Cold Vein'.

Dilla and Def Jux are "unfashionable" because...some of the rapping is corny?

Bad wording on my part. Dilla isn’t unfashionable, that was only meant to refer to Prefuse

d'angelo, esp 'black messiah' -- there's a very similar feeling of prince-y falsetto being bathed in grime and muck, like a baby duck emerging from an oil spill. you could put "ain't that easy" or "prayer" on this album and they wouldn't sound out of place. given how much of a prince devotee d'angelo was and how intentionally he bent his music towards a beautiful sort of muddiness, heightening it further on 'black messiah,' almost at times positioning his vocals as just one part of an overall sound collage, i think you could place dijon pretty comfortably w/in that lineage

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, August 20, 2025 11:56 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes! Good call.

I've listened through a few times and am finding myself in love with about half the tracks (favs are "HIGHER!", "Yamaha", "my man", "Automatic", and "Kindalove") but occasionally annoyed by the intentional messiness; it's not so much the noise, which is clearly elemental to what he's doing. A good example is the outro to "Yamaha" which seems intent on sending one of the album's more straightforward pop songs off the rails and would be better off ending about 15-20 seconds earlier. I very much appreciate that the album ends on a quieter, prettier note.

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