Mk.gee's Two Star & the Dream Police: The Guitar Record the Year Needed

I heard Two Star & the Dream Police for the first time in a car in March 2024, driving across the Blue Mountains after a wedding. My friend Sami, who had put the record on, was the only person I knew at that point who had been paying specific attention to Mike Gordon, the New Jersey songwriter who records and performs as Mk.gee. He had shown me some of the earlier EPs. He had shown me the specific YouTube video of Mk.gee performing “Are You Looking Up” on an outdoor stage somewhere, guitar plugged into something unreasonable, voice pushed low against a specifically filtered microphone, the whole performance sounding like a soul ballad being played back through an answering machine.

The album, which had dropped on Mk.gee’s own R&R Digital imprint in February 2024, was the first full-length. I want to write about it because it is, to my mind, still the strangest guitar record a twenty-something American songwriter released last year, and because the specific thing the record does has been absorbed, unevenly and in pieces, by a large chunk of what pop and pop-adjacent guitar has started sounding like in the eighteen months since.

What the record is

Eleven tracks. Running time thirty-six minutes. All instruments, including the guitar, the drum programming, the synth textures, and the vocal arrangements, performed or programmed by Gordon, with mixing and specific production contributions from Andrew Aged (a frequent collaborator). The record was recorded across 2022 and 2023, substantially in Gordon’s home studio in New Jersey, with additional sessions in Los Angeles.

The guitar is, unambiguously, the record’s central instrument, and the specific guitar tone is the record’s specific signature. What Gordon is doing with the guitar is hard to describe if you have not heard it. It sounds like a guitar that has been run through a specifically failing signal chain, the gain pushed to a specific breakup point that is not traditional distortion but is also not clean, the harmonics pulled out at specific frequencies that should not, in normal guitar practice, be foregrounded. The amplification sounds like it has been processed through something built for a voice rather than a guitar, which is, according to Gordon’s own interviews, partly accurate: he has spoken about running guitar signal through vocal processors to produce the specific midrange compression the record is built on.

The result is a guitar sound that is recognisably a guitar and recognisably not a guitar at the same time. It is the specific sonic centre of Two Star, and it is the thing that has been the most imitated.

The songs themselves

The record is not, principally, a song-oriented record. The songs are structurally loose. Verses do not always return. Choruses, when they occur, are often absorbed into the ambient texture of the track rather than delivered as the conventional song-pop payoff. Gordon’s vocal is consistently low in the mix, often processed to the point of semi-intelligibility, and the lyrics are, across most of the record, fragmentary rather than sustained.

But the specific songs that emerge from the atmospheric register are doing specific emotional work. “Alesis,” the record’s opening, is a love song to a specific drum machine that reads, accurately, as a love song. “Are You Looking Up” is the record’s most conventional songwriting moment, and it is the track that has converted most of the record’s broader audience. “Rockman” is a specifically slow crawl through a specifically private emotional landscape. “How Many Miles” is the closest thing the record has to a radio single, and it is still, specifically, strange.

What Gordon is writing about, across the record, is a specific kind of young-male emotional isolation that has been, historically, handled by pop songwriters with either more sentimentality or more cynicism than Gordon allows himself. The record is, at its lyrical core, about the specific experience of being in your twenties and not knowing what to do with your own inner life, and it is conducted at a register that is neither self-pitying nor defensive. The register is rare. Frank Ocean’s Blonde, which has been the critical reference point most frequently invoked in discussion of Two Star, operates in a similar emotional zone but at a different formal tempo. Gordon’s record is more compressed, more monochrome, more guitar-forward.

The live context

I saw Mk.gee live in Sydney in November 2024, at the Enmore Theatre, as part of the record’s international touring. The live show is a specific extension of the record’s formal concerns rather than a rendering of it. The arrangements are reassembled. The songs are extended. The guitar is louder and stranger. Gordon’s stage presence is, specifically, uninterested in audience management: he spends most of the show with his back substantially turned to the crowd, focused on his pedals and his specific amp configuration, occasionally glancing up to nod at his three-piece backing band.

This staging is, I think, part of what the record is doing. The music is built to be heard in a specific conditions of intimacy, the car, the bedroom, the headphones, and the live show is translating those conditions to a room full of people without pretending the live event is a different kind of object. You are, at the live show, watching someone play the record in front of you, which is a specifically honest live-performance mode and one that a substantial segment of the contemporary live-music industry has moved away from.

The influence problem

In the eighteen months since Two Star dropped, the record’s specific guitar and production signatures have been, at minimum, cited across a large chunk of the pop-and-adjacent guitar moment. The specific tone Gordon is producing has been imitated, with variable success, on records by specific well-resourced pop artists (including, reportedly, contributions Gordon has made to Justin Bieber’s recent sessions), and the record has been credited by multiple songwriters of Gordon’s own generation as a specific opening of new possibilities in what a guitar sound can be.

This is, specifically, how these things go. A record with a distinctive signature produces imitation. The imitation circulates. The signature becomes genre. Two Star’s specific sound, which was a specific individual discovery in 2023, is, by 2025, the default register for a specifically identifiable slice of young-songwriter bedroom-pop. The specific Mk.gee tone is now a preset in plug-ins. The imitation is mostly not as good as the original, because the original was arrived at through specific trial and specific error and the imitators are reverse-engineering the surface.

Gordon himself, to his credit, does not appear to be bothered by this. He has been, in interviews, specifically generous about the artists who have cited him, and specifically focused on his own next record, which he has indicated is being written at a different formal register from Two Star.

What the record leaves

Two Star & the Dream Police is a record that, for me, has kept yielding on repeat listens across 2024 and 2025. It is a grower rather than a gripper, and it rewards the specific kind of attention that most contemporary records do not survive.

What I want to name, as a specific critical claim, is that Gordon has produced the American indie-guitar record of the decade so far. The peers are few. Blonde is the referent, and Two Star is operating at a comparable level of formal specificity. Adrianne Lenker’s recent work is the closest contemporary parallel in a different register. The Alex G catalogue is another specific reference point. Two Star sits inside this small group, and it is, inside the group, doing a specifically new thing with guitar that nobody else is quite doing.

Listen to it on a car stereo first. Listen to it on headphones second. Do not listen to it on an average laptop speaker, because the specific midrange compression the record is built on will not survive the transfer. Start with “Are You Looking Up.” Let Gordon’s specific guitar sound into your ear. The record is asking a specific kind of attention, and it will, if you give it, reward the attention specifically.