MIKE is striving for sincerity

The title of MIKE’s latest album suggests four-on-the-floor rhythms and bodies loaded with amyl nitrite, swivelling their hips under colourful lights – a perfectly understandable image to conjure given its creator resides in the New York borough that brought us the infamous 2001 Odyssey club and Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night. But Disco! is no boogie wonderland.

The name came to the Brooklyn rapper as he watched a documentary on spirituality. He found himself strangely moved by the image of two ceramic artefacts, one sitting on top of the other, held together by a decorative snake. Inspired by these two mirroring spheres, MIKE saw the potential of a disco ball representing an alternate reality. “I’d been thinking of it for a long time,” he tells me from his home studio. “The world keeps spinning, but there are times, at least for me, when shit is a little different. The world was being portrayed in a different way. It should be like a disco ball.”

The album cover sees MIKE holding up a glitter ball like a precious orb – or a god holding a planet in his hands. This world is jazzy, chromatic and psychedelic. Entirely self-produced by MIKE under his moniker dj blackpower, the gripping Disco! features heady samples and trippy textures. As ever, the 23-year-old’s rapping is heavy and meandering. Recorded during various phases of Covid-19 restrictions, its creator believes both the loneliness of lockdown and the “graciousness” of being let outside again slipped into its grooves.

“I was working on all these tracks at different times between 2020 and 2021,” MIKE explains. “It wasn’t necessarily the main theme. I feel like with a lot of my music, the theme creates itself at the end when it’s all together.” If this sounds like a laissez-faire approach to album making, it’s reflected back in the music. MIKE’s records can sound casually constructed, sometimes to the point of being ramshackle. There’s the hissing of the samples, and the volume of MIKE’s vocals can change from track to track, his blunt voice sometimes sounding like it’s bumping up against the music. The first time you hear a MIKE song, you might fear the file has been corrupted.

Take the Disco! track World Market (Mo’ Money). With the beat on repeat all day and some failed takes under his belt, MIKE declared to friends sitting in on the session that his next take would be the one. Inevitably, he felt he didn’t quite nail it, but an assertion is an assertion. Consequently, that’s the recording you hear on the album. I guess you can call him the anti-Dre, an artist who has cultivated a reputation for sonic perfection, sometimes to the point of feeling sterile. “Whatever I make, I always want it to feel sincere,” MIKE says. “I be fucking up. Even in real life, I’m not a perfectionist. I think it’s better to express that rather than try to pretend to be this clean, sharp person through the music.”

Like his regional forefathers, MIKE’s production is heavily built on sampling. But unlike DJ Premier and Q-Tip, he’s no cratedigger, and instead drifts through YouTube looking for decent loops. Whether it’s soul, funk, jazz or sophistipop, MIKE skins a sample like a tanner skins animal hide. Evil Eyefeatures a prominent extract of John Lee & Gerry Brown’s silky Talkin’ ‘Bout the Right One. The second half of Leaders of Tomorrow (Intro) rides a high-pitched wailing vocal, showcasing the beatmaker’s ability to harness sounds most would probably pass on.

“I really just fuck with anything that sounds good,” says MIKE. “Really I just be trying to capture pretty sounds and pretty voices. I fuck with R&B, soul and funk, but recently I’ve been fucking with a lot of bossa nova.” MIKE’s style is to spill pockets of words like they’re being teased out of his subconscious, and as a result, his writing frequently veers into the issues of mental health, trauma and grief. But Disco! offers light in the face of darkness: over the upbeat keys of Aww (Zaza), he joyfully declares, “Struggling? Hmm, nah/ But I’m recovering.” It’s startlingly direct, though MIKE admits that it couldn’t be any other way. “I’m not really a person that can do mad tricks with their lyrics. My shit does be very literal. I think people be like, ‘Damn, he’s just gonna say it like that.’ Mad people be talking about their depression and drug use to get over feelings, that shit is hella permanent in hip-hop. People sometimes don’t want to accept reality.”

MIKE’s approach has ignited a distinct strand of contemporary New York hip-hop. In this vision of the city, his Californian mentor Earl Sweatshirt is as strong an influence as Rakim or Q-Tip. Among those following MIKE’s stylistic lead are members of the crew slUms, like Adé Hakim, as well as Slauson Malone, Caleb Giles and others. These rappers contort elements of classic East Coast hip-hop, such as prominent samples and a deft focus on lyricism, into their own murky, Dadaist vision.

“I definitely peep some influence,” says MIKE. Ultimately, though, he talks down the idea of him being the chief inspiration to a new wave of artists. “The sounds come from so many different places. I think sometimes someone who’s influenced by the people around me.”

Funnily enough, MIKE doesn’t necessarily see himself in the New York rap canon. Born in New Jersey in 1998, he spent ages five to 12 living in London, and first started rapping after watching TV station Channel U, which focused on grime music. “One day I heard this one dude rapping, then I ran upstairs to my sister and just started freestyling and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m trying to be a rapper!’ and from there I just kept going. The UK definitely influenced me.” In following the London to New York pipeline, he’s part of a proud transatlantic heritage. New York rappers with London roots have been altering hip-hop’s DNA for decades. Whether it’s his intention or not, MIKE’s style is giving us a vision of Gotham through his own unique prism.

“I always think about the MF Doom, Slick Rick, London to New York lineage. I can’t lie, I’m low-key part of that,” he sheepishly laughs, as if to appear humble. “The few who lived here all their lives, this really y’all city. I’ll just hold down that travel route – from New York to London.”