Now, he’s made his long-awaited return to hip-hop, releasing his new Blog Era Boyz collaborative mixtape with his Lost Americana tourmate Wiz Khalifa that recaptures the sound and spirit of his 2000s and 2010s come-up as Machine Gun Kelly.
To get there, the man underneath the persona, Colson Baker, needed more than a new sound. He needed a total blackout.
“I was looking for a change that wasn't just a sound wave,” he reflects to Billboard Canada over the phone from Austin, Texas. “It had to be something physical.”
He looked in the mirror and saw the mishmash of tattoos all over his body. He had been inked and then inked back over with different designs, some reminding him of phases in his life he didn’t — or didn’t want to — remember. Seeing pictures, he sometimes didn’t recognize himself.
He was confronted by a question: “Who the f— am I?”
“I saw death and drugs in all these patterns that I was literally writing on my body,” he says. “There were happy tattoos, sad tattoos, holy tattoos, hellish tattoos. It was like my bipolarity was screaming off my skin.”
The same way he was reinventing his sound, he wanted to reinvent his body.
He found the solution in celebrity tattoo artist ROXX, who also shot this Billboard Canada cover with mgk. ROXX is known for huge, geometric pieces and coverwork, and when she showed him her initial design, he was in immediately. It was a massive “dark mode” tattoo that covered the vast majority of his arms, chest and stomach in ink.
There was just one problem. To execute a piece that monumental, it was going to take two years. But mgk didn’t have two years. He had two months.
“She warned me that it was going to be near impossible, even from a pain tolerance standpoint,” he says. “I said, ‘yeah, we got two months.’”
Instead of the recommended slow and steady process, building in breaks for healing, Baker started his own process. He’d wake up each morning, travel 15 minutes to her L.A. studio, and get under the needle.
“After the first week, we hit my lymph nodes around my armpits and shoulders, and I got really sick. My skin was turning yellow. I wasn’t able to sleep. I stopped being able to move certain parts of my upper body.”
But he pushed through. He saw it as both a physical and a metaphorical obstacle, something he had to overcome to get to where he needed to be both personally and professionally. He emerged a new man, less chaotic, clear-headed, and with his pen moving at 100 miles per hour.
“I came out the other side extremely inspired,” he affirms. “Not just because of what I had done, but because of what I had to overcome.”
mgk photographed by Roxx in Los Angeles in May 2026. Hair by Aaron King, grooming by Sonia Lee.
For mgk, this decade has been defined by constant reinvention.
In 2020, he adopted a larger-than-life rock star persona, picking up a guitar, spiking his hair like Jorge Herrera of The Casualties and linking up with producer and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. Tickets To My Downfall merged his hip-hop bounce with sounds that harken back to the 2000s commercial peak of pop-punk. The album peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Canadian Albums chart and U.S. Billboard 200, helping fuel a mainstream resurgence of the genre. Its follow-up, 2022’s Mainstream Sellout, was another hit, again reaching No. 1 in both countries.
Behind the scenes, though, Baker says he was going through dark times. He was privately grieving the 2020 death of his father, navigating his life with bipolar disorder and his struggles with drugs and alcohol. At the 2022 Billboard Music Awards, he performed a vulnerable stripped-back rendition of “Twin Flame” dedicated to his then-fiancée Megan Fox and their “unborn child,” which they revealed to be a lost pregnancy.
In 2023, around the time the couple called off their engagement, Baker went to rehab. By the time he started his tattoo, they were expecting their child, Saga Blade.
“At that time in my life, I was wearing a bunch of shame from personal mistakes I was making,” he reflects. “I was dealing with sobriety really heavy, having itches that I didn't know how to scratch. I was losing myself in obsessiveness with work, instead of prioritizing things that are actually much more important, which is family and self-worth that doesn't need to come from outside validation.”
Baker released Lost Americana in 2025, officially changing his name from Machine Gun Kelly to mgk. The album mixed in elements of pop and country, expanding his sound even more. He surprised fans with special pop-up underplay shows at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern and Sunrise Records at Square One in Mississauga, Ontario.
But that wasn’t the last of his surprises.
mgk photographed by Roxx in Los Angeles in May 2026. Hair by Aaron King, grooming by Sonia Lee.
“Do you got a second? Can you just stay with me on the phone?” Baker asks. “I just gotta do this throwback post real quick.”
A few minutes later, I see he’s posted on Instagram with the album cover of Blog Era Boyz, his new mixtape with Wiz Khalifa. It’s a new release — the day we’re talking is the day it came out — but it evokes all the spirit of the 2010s, when DatPiff mixtape downloads held more currency for hip-hop heads than Spotify streams, curators like Pigeons and Planes and 2 Dope Boyz could make a young rapper’s career and young artists like Wiz and Machine Gun Kelly (as he was then known) could break out on the back of a good feature.
Like the Fred Durst-featuring Limp Bizkit style rock (“Fix Ur Face”) and pop-punk interpolations of his previous albums, it’s ax throwback to the 2000s and 2010s — but this time it’s a throwback to the music he was actually making at the time.
“For the past four albums, I’ve tried to create something defiant, sonically, from whatever the previous project was,” he explains. “This one I'm just going back to straight house recording studio roots, rapping over classic beats. The only sonics that matter is if you can bop your head through it and the bars are hard.”
It’s a return to innocence for Baker, who has spent the last decade branching out musically but going through heavy times, personally.
What Baker values most about the blog era was the closeness artists were able to build with their fans because they were making music without expectations.
“There was no stakes,” he says. “There wasn't anything to lose. We were just making music 'cause we liked making it, and we all hoped that it would reach people. We didn't get strung along on overthought rollouts, or lose the identity of the artist through that label push.”
Many of the artists of that era became alienated from their fan bases, he theorizes, because they signed to major labels and were forced to reckon with higher stakes and more pressure. Artists began to overthink or overcompensate, and the music became less free. It became less fun. They were no longer doing it for the thrill of it.
As much as it was about himself, Baker says he made the tape because he was such a fan of Wiz Khalifa. He was able to A&R the project to recapture the classic period of his old friend, who he calls his favourite rapper of the blog era.
The first song they did together was “Girl Next Door,” a bright track that Baker compares to Wiz Khalifa’s 2009 classic “The Thrill” — a song that never charted because of its unlicensed Empire of the Sun sample (as was the case with many mixtape beats) but remains a streaming juggernaut. It was initially meant to be a one-off for the two soon-to-be tourmates, but that changed as soon as they played the song back.
“We were like, ‘Dude, we're about to go on a fun summer tour. We’re going to be outside with our fans. Let's give them the full experience, dude. Let's just fill the ashtrays up, and record until the tour buses are outside.’”
That turned out to be surprisingly literal. “MPH” was the final song the two did together, with Baker challenging Wiz to create a song where they both rap as fast as they used to. Their collaborators had already left for rehearsals, so they recorded over a beat Baker already had on his phone. The tape wasn’t finished until the day they left for tour.
“And then I found out that, to release something, it still costs a bunch of money,” he says. “You have to pay everybody. Videos don't shoot themselves for free. We had to rent a whole block to do that ‘Girl Next Door’ video.”
For Baker, though, it was worth it for the fans. So, he took $1 million out of the budget of his next album to make it happen.
That million dollar gamble isn’t just about his fans, though. It’s a claim on his legacy. Listening to the classics of the blog era, mgk realizes he was right there for most of it. He was one of the key figures. But, he feels, the industry often undervalues him or journalists undermine him — even while fans both old and new pack his shows. It’s not just about celebrating the sounds of the past, but the people who made them — some of whom are still very prolific, driving culture forward.
“Sometimes the industry overlooks what's actually needed in the game for what they think is new,” he says. “What I’m seeing is that they’re looking for something that has actually been in front of their eyes the whole time.”
But as much as recapturing a past era of music, it was about recapturing a lost feeling in himself — the Lost Americana of his youth, and of his current tour.
“It’s about burning CDs and playing our favourite music, scrounging up enough money to buy some shitty weed, poking 3 holes in an apple to smoke it, and skating and just laughing,” he says wistfully. “All these simple things have been lost in a day and age that's full of overconsumption, overstimulation, overthinking, overcriticizing. Back then, we didn't realize that simplicity was fleeting as you grow older.”
He sees that in his oldest daughter Casie, who is 16. Driving around with her, he’s often surprised by the music she chooses: 2010s R&B, Migos, even some blog era favourites like Mac Miller.
“Dude, she has the coldest playlist,” he says. “I always let her get the aux.”
Now, Baker has another daughter, Saga Blade, the one-year-old he co-parents with Megan Fox. He’s determined not to make the same mistakes twice.
“There were times when [Casie] was growing up where my eyes were physically open, but I was not there,” he says. “The only thing that you leave this earth with when you're getting ready to close your eyes for the final time, it’s the memories that you've made — and I'm done forgetting. My kids are the purest part of my existence. That’s what I want to remember.”
In the meantime, it’s summertime, what Baker calls “the ultimate nostalgia bait.” These are the times his young fans will look back on in a decade, and he wants to give them an experience they will remember. In a world that feels very heavy, he wants to create something for himself and for his fans that feels good.
“I’m just gonna have fun,” he declares. “I've lived a very tormented life. I don't need to wear that 24/7.”
