MIKE

With a floating, woozy baritone flow and dreamlike self-produced beats, rapper MIKE continues pushing rap in more experimental directions. He began reaching more listeners near the end of the 2010s, frequently releasing mixtapes, collaborating with Earl Sweatshirt, and finding critical acclaim with his heavy, grieving 2019 album Tears of Joy, its 2020 follow-up Weight of the World, 2021′s Disco!, and more.
MIKE was born Michael Jordan Bonema in New Jersey in 1998 and relocated with his mother to London for part of his youth. While in London, he discovered the grime scene and upon returning to the States as a young teenager, he began applying that influence to his own music. As a rapper, MIKE created his own abstract beats as a perfect backdrop for his often introspective lyrics and distant flows. He began sharing his songs around 2015, releasing several smaller EPs and singles before his 2017 mixtape May God Bless Your Hustle attracted more wide-scale national attention. That project’s grainy samples and disconnected rapping set the pace for a very productive 2018 for MIKE. In that year alone, the rapper released four mixtapes, including critically acclaimed collections War in My Pen and Renaissance Man. MIKE’s friend and sometimes collaborator Earl Sweatshirt’s late-2018 album Some Rap Songs worked in a similarly disjointed production style as MIKE’s work.
In 2019, he released Tears of Joy, an emotionally moving album he made in sorrowful reaction to his mother’s death. About a year after the release of Tears of Joy, MIKE issued the LP Weight of the World. In addition to MIKE’s own increasingly recognizable signature beats, the record featured production from KeiyaA, Darryl Johnson, and Red Lee as well as guest features from Earl Sweatshirt and Jadasea. He returned in 2021 with the album Disco! and collaborated with Wiki and the Alchemist on 2022′s three-song EP One More, released weeks before his next full-length, Beware of the Monkey. ~ Fred Thomas