The 2020s File Feature
Cliche
Cliche — mgk Steps Into Softer TerritoryMachine Gun Kelly has never been an artist afraid of reinvention. He first broke through as a rapper, then pivoted ag…
01 The Story
Cliche — mgk Steps Into Softer Territory
Machine Gun Kelly has never been an artist afraid of reinvention. He first broke through as a rapper, then pivoted aggressively to pop-punk in a move that generated enormous commercial success and significant critical debate. By mid-2025, his Cliche represented another recalibration, reaching for something more classically pop in its emotional directness while retaining the confessional intensity that has always been his most consistent quality.
An Artist in Perpetual Transition
The career arc of Colson Baker, who performs as mgk, has been defined by willingness to antagonize expectations. When he released Tickets to My Downfall in 2020, many in the hip-hop community treated the genre pivot as a betrayal or a gimmick. The album's commercial success proved those dismissals premature. Subsequent work continued the pop-punk direction while gradually softening some of its harder edges, nudging toward a broader pop sensibility.
Cliche arrives in that context as something that does not entirely fit any of his previous phases. The song is slower, more melodic, more focused on emotional vulnerability than on the energy-driven delivery that characterized the pop-punk material. It draws on the confessional singer-songwriter tradition as much as anything from his catalog, which is itself an interesting indicator of where his creative instincts were pointing in 2025.
The Sound of Something Stripped Down
Production on Cliche is comparatively spare for an artist whose aesthetic has often leaned toward the maximalist. The arrangement does not overwhelm the lyric; it supports it. Guitar is present but not dominant in the way it is across the pop-punk catalog. The overall sonic texture suggests an artist deliberately creating space for emotional content to breathe rather than filling every second with sonic events.
That restraint is a risk for an artist whose brand identity is partly built on volume and energy. The bet is that the audience will follow him into a quieter room if the emotional content justifies the change of setting. Given that the song achieved genuine chart presence, it appears a meaningful portion of his fanbase accepted the invitation.
Six Weeks on the Hot 100
On June 7, 2025, Cliche debuted at number 62 on the Billboard Hot 100, spending six weeks on the chart across two distinct windows. The song charted from June 7 through June 28, fell out, then returned on August 23, suggesting renewed discovery, likely driven by playlist additions, sync placements, or a social media cycle bringing new listeners to the track months after release.
That pattern of returning to the chart after a gap is increasingly common in the streaming era and reflects the degree to which songs now have extended shelf lives beyond their initial release windows. Over 15.1 million YouTube views confirm that mgk's audience remained engaged with the track well into the summer and beyond.
What It Signals for His Legacy
Within mgk's broader catalog, Cliche represents the kind of track that often gets more appreciated over time than at release, when the artist's primary audience is still calibrating to a new direction. For listeners who come to his work later, the song will likely read as evidence of genuine range: an artist who could deliver pop-punk anthems and intimate emotional pop without either mode feeling like a pose.
The fact that he titled it Cliche is itself a kind of self-awareness: an artist acknowledging the perceived obviousness of his subject matter while arguing through the quality of execution that the obviousness is not a disqualification. Let it play and decide for yourself whether the argument holds.
“Cliche” — mgk's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Cliche — The Courage of the Obvious Feeling
The title is doing something interesting. Calling a love song Cliche is an act of preemptive self-awareness: the narrator knows that what they are feeling has been felt before, described before, made into a song before. They are saying it anyway. That acknowledgment of the familiar while choosing to speak from within it gives the song a specific kind of honesty that deflects the usual cynicism.
Owning the Obvious
There is a contemporary cultural pressure, particularly in artistic communities, to be original, to find the unexpected angle, to avoid the well-worn emotional territory. Cliche pushes back against that pressure gently but firmly. The lyrical stance is: yes, this feeling is familiar. Yes, these words have been said before. The experience of love, loss, and longing is universal precisely because it is shared, and the shared quality is not a diminishment but a connection.
mgk's emotional directness has been a consistent quality across his genre pivots. Whether rapping, playing pop-punk, or delivering something more understated, he tends toward the candid statement over the protected one. Cliche takes that quality and strips it down to its most essential form, a lyric that says the thing plainly and asks no apologies for the plainness.
Vulnerability and the Male Pop Artist
The song participates in a broader shift in popular music's treatment of male emotional expression. Across hip-hop, pop, and rock, the early 2020s saw significant cultural movement toward artists being willing to narrate grief, longing, and insecurity without the protective layers of irony or aggression that previous generations often required.
For mgk, who built his early image partly on an adversarial persona and the performance of toughness, Cliche represents a continued movement toward emotional openness. His willingness to inhabit vulnerability without qualification is genuinely notable, even if the subject matter is, by design, nothing new.
The Cliche as Emotional Truth
Philosophers and writers have long argued that the cliche became a cliche because it once captured something real so accurately that everyone reached for it. The worn phrase started as a living observation. Cliche implicitly makes this argument: the feelings it describes are familiar because they are actual, because they belong to everyone who has ever loved someone and found themselves unable to say anything new about it.
That framing makes the song a more thoughtful piece than its accessible surface might initially suggest. It is asking whether emotional originality is the right standard for judging the quality of a feeling, and quietly arguing that it is not.
Why It Found an Audience
The six-week chart presence and substantial YouTube traffic indicate a genuine audience connection, one built on recognition rather than novelty. Listeners who found Cliche found themselves in it. That is the oldest measure of a successful love song, and it turns out it still works perfectly well in 2025.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging