New York-based musician and satirist has been a fixture in the city’s comedy scene since 2014, launching his career as an improv-focused comedian on Brooklyn’s open mic circuit. He quickly found his niche by blending stand-up with musical parody, performing original songs that lampooned a wide range of popular genres and developing the character-driven style that would later define his viral online presence. He quickly began to gain traction on social media during the pandemic, after he started uploading clips of his characters onto TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, across which platforms he now has a combined following of nearly five million.

His musical breakthrough came in the summer of 2023 when he embodied the character in ‘Planet Of The Bass’ – a track that pokes fun at 90s Eurodance hits like ’s ‘Barbie Girl’, and has amassed tens of millions of views online. In the true spirit of the genre, the promotional content that led up to the single’s release involved a number of videos being posted that saw different actresses cast in the role of female vocalist . In doing this, Gordon cleverly riffs on a popular trend from that era, where the original female vocalist was often swapped out for a random model in the music videos.

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Following the track’s success, his debut album ‘Kyle Gordon Is Great’ landed in March 2024. The record hilariously covers a wide range of musical bases, from early noughties angsty pop punk and emo to the sleazy, lounge-inspired sounds of mid-sixties bossa nova. It not only showcases Gordon’s abilities as a comic, but also demonstrates his deep understanding of the musical conventions and subtle details that define each genre. A year later, in April 2025, he doubled down with his follow-up, ‘Kyle Gordon Is Wonderful’, where each track is introduced with a playful nod to classic VH1 chart countdown segments.

Having just taken the new project on the road across the United States for the first time—accompanied by the Cosmic Americana band —Kyle Gordon sits down with Clash, speaking via video call from his home in New York City. Reflecting gleefully on the excursion, Gordon states “This was my favourite tour I’ve ever done. It all went so well and the crowds were great. I’ve toured with the band before, but with this being the second album it was the first time that the crowds actually knew all the words, and were psyched to hear the songs.”

“The show has really evolved. I used to think of it as a comedy show with music. Now I see it as a funny concert. For example, a lot of the shows on the last tour were seated, and now they’re all standing. People are jumping up, dancing and moshing like they would at any gig, regardless of the fact that all the songs are parody songs.”

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Despite his enthusiasm, Gordon and his band decided to tell a very different story of the tour’s unfoldings on their social media. One video posted sees Gordon standing shirtless on stage, manically yelling “You fucking people don’t respect me! Why am I fucking here?!” at a booing crowd, before eventually being sheepishly led offstage by one of his bandmates.

Commenting on this, Gordon says “When we started the tour with the band, we were thinking about what could be a fun social media arc we could do throughout the tour. We decided to create this storyline where I was slowly losing my mind and becoming a huge asshole, which eventually culminated with this big fake meltdown onstage.”

He jokingly adds, “I still have family members reaching out to me, concerned that I’ve completely lost it!”

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As a comedian, Kyle Gordon is no stranger to touring and being on stage, but performing as a musician has proved to be a highly novel experience for the 32-year-old. Detailing this, he tells Clash: “Even when it was me and a guitar doing shows, my brain was still in full comedian mode. The show, and my performances were based around entertaining a bunch of people sitting down in a comedy club.”

“The biggest difference I’ve found with touring as a musician is the fact that, with live comedy, you want to perform a bunch of new stuff that the audience hasn’t heard. You want to surprise them with new jokes, you know? A comedian doesn’t ‘play their hits’ or anything like that. But with music, they’re waiting to hear the songs that they love, so the opposite is true.”

He continues, “The difference in performance style is pretty binary in that sense, so discovering that balance has taken some getting used to, but I feel like I’ve found a good sweet spot.”

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Prior to this, Gordon’s interviews with UK-based publications have been pretty scarce. Naturally, this meant that the first of his songs to be discussed was obviously going to be ‘Selekta.’ Released back in March as one of the album’s lead singles, the track sees Gordon step into the Adidas Gazelles of late 90s UK Garage MC , who hails from the fictitious town of Wellington Upon-Trent. While undeniably a banger, the song may appear—on the surface level at least—simply like an American mimicking the British accent. Upon closer inspection, however, the tune is packed from start to finish with quintessential Britishisms, including shoutouts to institutions like Greggs and Toby Carvery—references that would likely be completely foreign to most Americans. “It’s the track I’m most proud of, and it might be my favourite on the new album. It came about from a genuine love of UK garage and two-step, which I got into in college” says Gordon, “I genuinely love it. I listen to it when I’m going on runs and everything, but that particular sub-genre of dance and house music never really broke through here. It’s one of the few exclusively British sounds.”

He continues, “I did a short TikTok parody of a British rapper character back in 2020, and it was literally the first half a verse of that track. When I was writing the new album I decided to see if I could flesh it out and do a full song. So I was like alright, if I’m gonna do this, what is the joke going to be? Especially when the majority of my audience is American, what can I do that would be comprehensible to them? Then I decided that the only way to make it work is to have every single line be completely incomprehensible to Americans, and to have it be densely loaded with specific British references, and as much slang as possible. So essentially, to a US audience, this song is in another language!”

Asked whether UK audiences will soon get a chance to witness Albie Wobble in the flesh, Gordon reveals “I would love to bring the show to the UK. We’re working on it. I did three shows there in 2023 in London, Manchester and Glasgow, but I’d love to come back with this album, and go to Ireland too. I can’t wait!”

Another era he takes aim at on the new record is the 2010–2015 wave of indie-folk—think hipsters in fedoras with banjos and ukuleles, dressed head-to-toe in Urban Outfitters. At its peak, this style of music was inescapable. It showed up everywhere: in coming-of-age films, car adverts, and the background of every Starbucks. The internet later aptly rebranded it as “stomp-clap-hey!” music.

In the track ‘We Will Never Die’, credited to American Idol season 10 quarter-finalist , Gordon perfectly skewers every hallmark of the genre. From the hyper-positive lyrics, to the anthemic choruses, to the overly earnest instrumentation, it’s a dead-on send-up of acts like , ., , , and their ilk. Asked about the track, Gordon reveals We’re about ten to fifteen years out from the peak of that stuff, and I think it doesn’t matter what genre it is, the most cringe time period for any genre is ten to fifteen years after its peak.”

“Naturally I feel like right now is the exact time for us to pick it apart and be like ‘what the fuck were we listening to?’ I was in college around the time when that stuff peaked popularity-wise, and I have very visceral memories of not being able to avoid it. My life was dominated by that shit, so I maybe took a bit too much relish in taking the piss out of it.”

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The track exploded online, surpassing eight million views within a week of its initial upload on Instagram and TikTok. It also became the soundtrack of the popular ‘millennial burger’ trend on social media. This pokes fun at a specific type of industrially decorated, overpriced restaurant, often founded by ‘two guys with a crazy idea,’ where quirkily dressed waiters serve £30 burgers on chopping boards or in cardboard bowls, justifying it all with “farm-to-table”-esque buzzwords.

Still, while he delights in ridiculing that era, Gordon is also quick to acknowledge that tastes and trends are never static. As nostalgia cycles through generations, he predicts a revival is inevitable: “I bet that in another ten years, there will be a generation below me that will re-evaluate all of that, and then it will end up becoming ‘cool’ again. I bet that The Lumineers adoration will reappear in a decade or so. In the same way that we’re seeing now. There’s a Limp Bizkit tour that’s selling out stadiums all over the world, and yet ten years ago there was no genre more reviled than nu-metal! Now it’s being re-discovered, re-embraced, and re-interpreted by Gen-Z.”

He continues, “And that’s a good thing! I think in my song ‘Crawl To Me’ you can hear a lot of love for that genre. I genuinely think a lot of that stuff is so fun. Even if it’s stupid, it’s really, really fun.”

The single in question, another huge hit from the new record, sees Gordon uncannily embracing the aesthetics of the early 2000s craze, this time posing as Stool Sample. Given the celebrated, hyper-masculine ridiculousness of some of the acts that made a name for themselves within that field, the track genuinely sounds like something that could have been a smash hit among nu-metal audiences. The song’s angsty lyrics hurl shameless abuse at MTV, and boy bands like NSYNC and 98 Degrees, while the music video features the band clad in snapbacks and oversized jerseys in a graffitied concrete setting. The cherry on top is the inclusion of a scratchy “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” sample in the track’s outro.

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While the songs themselves may be tongue-in-cheek, it’s clear that Gordon is very passionate about his music, and committed to going the distance, making sure he gets it right. “With musical comedy there are two things I’m mainly looking at. For one thing – it’s a song, so it ought to be worth listening to, you know? As someone who loves music, I’m trying to make the quintessential version of a song in a particular genre I’m parodying, but I also want it to be a great song. If it doesn’t actually sound good then why even bother doing music in the first place?”

He explains, “But in order to create a faithful parody, I also try to think about what sort of choices this character would make if they were a real musician in that era. I often ask myself “If this was a real character writing this song, what kind of creative choices would he or she make?”

“I think a lot of the time musical comedy suffers when the humour in the lyrics is unrelated to the music being satirised. At its worst, musical comedy is a half-baked joke just set to music in the hope that nobody will realise that the jokes aren’t that good. So what I always try to do is make sure that the lyrics and the humour can’t work on their own, without the music.”

Further breaking down his writing process, Kyle tells Clash: “There’s a lot of trial and error. A lot of songs get left on the cutting room floor if I can’t quite figure out what the lyrical or comedic hook will be. With the ones that make it past that stage, I then usually mess around on my guitar and expand the lyrics. Once I’ve got a rough outline of the song with the chords, lyrics, melody and structure then I team up with my good friend , who is both a great musician in his own right and a writer on so he can understand the comedic instincts but also the musical ones. Then we’ll put a demo together, which I’ll then work on turning into a full song with my producer who makes it sound professional. It’s really important to me for the music to sound accurate and precise, and ideally like a real song in the genre. A lot of that is down to Jamie being an extremely talented producer.”

He concludes by revealing his influences within the venn diagram intersection of music and comedy. “My hero is (writer and director: This Is Spinal Tap, The Mighty Wind, Best In Show). These mockumentaries are centred around musicians, and he would write all of the music for them.”

“That really inspired me because the satirised music is so precise, to the point where you kind of have to squint to hear the parody in it. Also, the music comes from these characters that you get to know throughout the films, who are so accurate yet equally ridiculous. I love the way in which he manages to integrate all the music so seamlessly into the comedy.”

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‘Kyle Gordon Is Wonderful’ is out now.

Words: Fin Harrison

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