A little over halfway through MIKE’s new album, Burning Desire, a recent moment of joy in the New York rapper’s life takes center stage. During an interlude that begins on the title track, TAKA, MIKE’s friend and IFE Radio partner, recalls a fond memory from this summer’s Young World festival. The event, curated by MIKE, strived to connect disparate parts of rap’s underground. That day in July, a storm threatened to cut the show short, forcing organizers to pause the celebration as they waited out gray clouds. Eventually, the music resumed, and the first song played was the title track of the then-unannounced album. The moment, small and inconsequential, could’ve passed without second thought. But as TAKA’s words bleed into “They Don’t Stop in the Rain,” it instead feels like a testament to the serendipitous connections MIKE has forged. The New York rapper’s music can make small blessings feel transformative and cathartic—incidental details turned into canon events.
Three months later, Burning Desire arrives, a clear-eyed record that builds on those musings about fate and happenstance. MIKE isn’t a volume shooter, but with his Wiki and the Alchemist collab Faith Is a Rock released just three weeks ago, Burning Desire makes the case that he could be. For most of the album, MIKE raps with the same hot-blooded urgency of December’s Beware of the Monkey. This time, however, he gives himself room to just bar out. When 10k labelmate Niontay and D.C. rapper El Cousteau join him on “Mussel Beach,” MIKE eases into a slippery flow to match their energy. Outside of rare side quests like Popstar Benny’s delirious “ATL Freestyle,” MIKE has seldom sounded this loose.
Burning Desire moves between chest-puffing bombast and MIKE’s characteristic rumination, sometimes within the same breath. While angst and grief remain recurring subjects, here he chooses to honor loved ones instead of framing past hardships as insurmountable. MIKE’s tone has moved in this dynamic and self-assured direction since 2021’s Disco!. The confidence in his voice is palpable across Burning Desire, especially on “Sixteens,” where he sounds like he climbed to the top of the Rocky steps moments before hitting record.
Under his producer alias dj blackpower, MIKE handles all but two of the album’s 24 tracks. (GAWD produced “African Sex Freak Fantasy,” while Laron is behind “Snake Charm.”) The beats range from misty loops that evoke the sentimentality of Count Bass D’s Dwight Spitz (“What U Say U Are,” “Let’s Have a Ball”) to cataclysmic landscapes (“plz don’t cut my wings,” “should be!”). Burning Desire illustrates MIKE’s evolution as a beatmaker, each song a tweezer-perfected terrarium of manipulated vocal samples, chunky loops, and rattling drums; the pockets of air MIKE finds within them make room for some of his most dexterous rapping yet. Take “Zap!”, where he bobs and weaves between brass stabs, or “African Sex Freak Fantasy,” where his words ricochet off walls of distorted bass like a rubber handball. The Liv.e and Venna-assisted “U think Maybe?” marks the first time that MIKE has incorporated live instrumentation in his production discography. After two minutes of wistful call-and-response, the London saxophonist’s somber performance and Liv.e’s aching voice melt into tranquil harmony.
As a prolific artist whose albums pull from a pool of familiar collaborators, MIKE’s music can sometimes feel insular, culled from an isolationist universe with little external influence. Burning Desire doesn’t quite crack his world open with shocking surprise twists—Earl Sweatshirt returns, while Crumb’s Lila Ramani and the mysterious London singer mark william lewis make for refreshing guests. But it does point toward potential expansion.
Earlier this year, MIKE told me that he and his manager planned to operate his career like a “mom-and-pop store,” aiming to stretch opportunities as far as possible while staying small. Even with sponsorships from Supreme, events like Young World demonstrate at least one form of commitment to that plan by prioritizing accessibility, intimacy, and community over self-gain. According to an Okayplayer interview, MIKE passed on a headline show and instead used the fees from SummerStage, the organization that funded Young World, to pay artists on his own self-curated lineup. Burning Desire feels similar: an adventure that preserves the homegrown spirit of MIKE’s music while taking a half-step toward something even more ambitious. “Thebe showed me Alc money/Still be hella proud ’bout all the shit I did without money,” he asserts on “Ho-Rizin.” On Burning Desire, MIKE proves he’s still discovering ways to sustain that pride.
Correction: A previous version of this review implied that Pepsi was also a sponsor of Young World. It is not.
