MIKE deploys a drifting, hazy baritone delivery alongside oneiric productions he crafts himself, steering rap toward increasingly exploratory realms. Near the tail end of the 2010s he began reaching wider audiences via a steady stream of mixtapes, partnerships with Earl Sweatshirt, and widespread praise for the dense, elegiac 2019 album Tears of Joy. Subsequent releases—2020’s Weight of the World, 2021’s Disco!, 2023’s Burning Desire, plus the 2023 collaborative Faith Is a Rock with Wiki and the Alchemist and the 2024 joint Pinball with Tony Seltzer—have likewise drawn strong acclaim.
Born Michael Jordan Bonema in New Jersey in 1998, MIKE spent part of his youth in London after relocating there with his mother. While abroad he absorbed the local grime scene, and upon returning to the United States as a young teenager he began folding those influences into his own work. He fashions abstract beats that serve as fitting canvases for introspective lyrics and detached flows. Starting to circulate tracks around 2015, he issued several modest EPs and singles before the 2017 mixtape May God Bless Your Hustle garnered broader national notice; its gritty samples and fragmented rhymes shaped an especially prolific 2018 in which he dropped four projects, among them the widely lauded War in My Pen and Renaissance Man. Earl Sweatshirt’s late-2018 album Some Rap Songs echoed the similarly fractured production aesthetic MIKE had already developed.
In 2019 he issued Tears of Joy, an album shaped by the loss of his mother. Roughly a year afterward came Weight of the World, which blended his signature self-made beats with contributions from KeiyaA, Darryl Johnson, and Red Lee alongside guest spots from Earl Sweatshirt and Jadasea. He resurfaced in 2021 with Disco! and joined Wiki and the Alchemist for the three-song EP One More in 2022, released weeks before the full-length Beware of the Monkey. One More foreshadowed Faith Is a Rock, further evidence of the potent rapport between MIKE, Wiki, and the Alchemist’s measured, sample-driven sound. Only weeks after that September 2023 album, MIKE returned with the solo Burning Desire, spotlighting the Earl Sweatshirt collaboration “plz don’t cut my wings.” Another shared cut with Earl, “On God,” ranked among the highlights of 2024’s Pinball, recorded with the rising New York producer Tony Seltzer.
