The Guitar Without the Guitar Album
Most guitar-forward albums today come in one of two flavors. There is the retro revivalist mode, where every choice gestures backward to something classic. Then there is the maximalist indie-adjacent mode, where the guitar gets layered into ambient textures until it becomes more of a mood than an instrument.
Mk.gee's Two Star and the Dream Police is neither. It is one of those rare records where you cannot quite figure out what the guitar is doing or why it sounds that way, and that confusion is generative rather than frustrating.
The Texture Question
The easiest comparison people reach for is Bill Frisell or early Robert Fripp, that school of guitar where the instrument gets deconstructed until it barely sounds like itself. But Mk.gee is not doing that either. The guitar on Two Star still sounds like a guitar. It has attack and sustain and all the recognizable physical qualities of a plucked string.
What changes is the context it gets placed in. The production creates this strange middle space where the guitar feels both intimate and distant at the same time. You can hear his fingers on the strings. You can hear the room. But the notes seem to arrive from somewhere just outside the room, like a transmission that has lost a little signal in transit.
That quality of slight displacement is not accidental. It takes real craft to make something sound effortful and effortless in equal measure. The guitar work on tracks like Are You Looking Up feels practiced to the point of total ease, which is why it catches you off guard when a phrase turns slightly wrong, or stays on a note just a beat too long.
R&B Without the Safety Net
The album sits in an R&B adjacent space but refuses the genre's comfort zones. R&B in 2024 had settled into a certain production language: the trap hi-hats, the falsetto vulnerability, the confessional lyrics about relationships in various states of dissolution.
Mk.gee keeps some of that. The vulnerability is real. But the arrangement choices undercut the expected emotional payoffs. Where the genre template would give you a build and a release, Two Star often just holds the tension. It moves sideways when you expect it to move up.
That is a risky move. It can read as withholding. But on repeated listens it starts to feel like honesty. Like someone who knows what emotions you want them to perform and has decided to show you what it actually feels like instead.
What the Instrumentals Do
The instrumental passages on Two Star are where the album earns its reputation among guitar players. There is a clarity of intention that is rare. Every note is doing something. The choice to leave space rather than fill it, to let a phrase breathe, suggests someone who has listened to a lot of Bill Evans and understood that what you do not play is as important as what you do.
But this is not jazz guitar. The scales are wrong for that, or right in the wrong ways. There is more of a modal quality, like someone who grew up listening to early-80s Eno and then picked up a guitar and started asking what that sensibility would sound like with a fretboard.
The answer, on Two Star, is something that feels genuinely new. Not loudly new. Not new in a way that needs to explain itself. Just quietly different from what came before in ways that take time to locate.
