You can hear it in MIKE’s husky voice: the weight of loss, the weight of the every day. MIKE has always been a rapper whose work has been therapeutic, aiding him in times of need. From his breakthrough mixtape May God Bless Your Hustle, which he released at 17 years old, to his acclaimed Tears of Joy, MIKE has always vented into the microphone with a lethargic tone, sulking across spattering, abstract beats about growth: how to grow through the loss of his mother in 2019 and how to grow through an isolating pandemic. On his newest record, Disco!, the weight of his songs is not just more apparent than before; it’s more distinct, its presence entirely reinvented.
Disco! sees the innovative, underground rapper breaking the traditions of his work, altering his sampling techniques and method of rhyme while maintaining the qualities that have made his past albums endearing to hip-hop’s close listeners.
The new album features MIKE’s signature rhythms and syntax. On “Aww (Zaza),” he strings together disjointed stanzas, occasionally allowing for eighth-note pauses to emphasize his lyrical flow: “Loss/I know this life and what comes with it/all/ Lot of despise, I be crumbling.” His words, simple and blunt, read like confused, impressionistic notes sprawled across a journal, but MIKE’s rhymes now hold a greater weight, with each line feeling like an open venture into his scrambled psyche. Throughout the song, MIKE copes with the loss of those who have left his side but still intrude on his thoughts. However, instead of feeding into regret, he moves through it, seeking and welcoming change.
MIKE’s past three full-length projects—2019’s Tears of Joy, 2020’s Weight of the World and 2021’s Disco!—were all released on June 21, the date of the summer solstice. While MIKE sticks to patterns, the yearlong interval between each project allows the prolific rapper to develop and experiment, and, as a result, the record’s atmosphere is more jubilant and lively, like the first sniff of an inner-city summer, than any other in his already lengthy discography.
The first half of Disco! is a briskly moving sound collage full of low-end beats that thump steadily and lo-fi drum kits that—due to MIKE’s tasteful use of reverb—linger. The two-bar phrase of “Big Love” features multiple chops and splits in the sample and is accompanied by blistering sirens, sounding like an ode to legendary hip-hop producer J Dilla. The record owes a lot to his influence, as even the chopping technique used on the third track, “Leaders of Tomorrow,” pays tribute to Dilla’s opus “Don’t Cry,” the seminal song from Donuts, a masterclass in instrumental hip-hop.
On Disco!, MIKE is more ambitious with his sample choices: each song stitches numerous half-second fragments into repeating phrases, each beat more varied and structured. “Airdrop,” for instance, has three parts: the intro, the main loop and the outro. The song begins with a rapidly descending keyboard solo, resting atop a Rhodes piano chord progression that disappears after the intro. After only five seconds, the keyboard solo ascends up a scale into the song’s six-second, repeating melody that MIKE raps over. He begins his verse mumbling, “I sent my love, let me know if you get it,” as the instrumental drops out to leave a grainy, half-second pause, allowing for his new songs to retain the open spaces of Weight of the World while adding variation and flair. MIKE lets the beat linger, giving his words time to settle. He uses the contents of the melody to create a flowing movement absent in a lot of sample-based rap music. MIKE is creating an arrangement rather than merely playing loops extracted from other songs, sewing a quilt of subtle sounds by attaching patterns, melodies and rhythm into a product with shape.
MIKE is currently on tour promoting Disco! alongside co-headliner Liv.e, Texas’s experimental R&B singer who combines woozy samples with her raspy, hypnotic vocal style. The “Small World, Big Love” tour will stop at the Cat’s Cradle Backroom on Saturday, October 16.
