The Wild Story of How Fans Provoked Dom Dolla and MK Into Releasing “Rhyme Dust”

by Michael Ryan · Published February 24, 2023

Fans went as far as hiring a pilot to skywrite a message urging Dom Dolla and MK to release the long-awaited house track.

We all know TikTok is a virtual hellhole where dignity goes to die—but sometimes it can conjure magic.

Apparently when the infantile birdbrains of TikTok aren't snorting condoms and inserting pennies into live electrical sockets (yes, those were two real "challenges"), they're pushing great music. Just ask Dom Dolla and MK, whose new single "Rhyme Dust" is the byproduct of a wild chain reaction that emanated from the madcap engines of EDM TikTok.

"Rhyme Dust" was originally slated to release in mid-2023. But after Dolla posted a preview on TikTok in December, the audio went haywire, leading to 10 million organic uses on the platform, his team tells EDM.com. Dolla and MK's loyal fans intensified the song's hype to a fever pitch—and relentlessly urged them to release it.

But in the words of Rachel McAdams in The Notebook, "It's not that simple." Side note: please do not judge us for quoting The Notebook.

It all started on New Year's Day, when Dolla playfully directed his fans to "abuse" his manager, James Fava, by hounding him on social media to schedule the song's release. Fava's inbox was fuller than a clown car at a circus.

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From there, things were looking up. You'll get that pun in a moment.

As the TikTok audio took off, so did an Australian pilot, who was hired by fans to write "Release Rhyme Dust" in the sky over the sun-kissed Sydney Harbour.

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Believe it or not, the stunt was actually the second time "Rhyme Dust" took to the skies. Back in November 2022, Dolla rinsed the track under the dark, illusory clouds of Belgrade, Serbia during his "Selected Sessions" DJ set.

Fast-forward months later, when "Rhyme Dust" crashed to Earth and found a home on SoundCloud, thanks to a fan who had ripped it from the Selected stream before uploading the audio to the platform. Lo and behold, the song quickly soared to the top five in SoundCloud's Australia chart.

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At this point, the hype bubbled over. "Drop the song before I end up on the news," wrote one fan. "Why is this track being held hostage??!!" pleaded another.

As Dolla was chugging through a festival run in Australia—a sequence his team calls "peak 'Rhyme Dust' era"—he showed up for a spontaneous, unannounced show at Revs, a popular clubbing destination in Melbourne. Starting at 7am on a Sunday, he threw down for four hours at "one of the sweatiest gigs of [his] life."

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Despite jam-packed release schedules with rollouts that extended deep into 2023, Dolla and MK had no choice but to push and prioritize the release of "Rhyme Dust," which samples "Breathe and Stop," a turn-of-the-century single from fabled hip-hop artist Q-Tip. That was one of the trickiest aspects of the scramble, according to Dolla, who said his team had to clear the sample with the iconic A Tribe Called Quest co-founder, one of his favorite rappers.

One aircraft and thousands of exasperated TikTok comments later, "Rhyme Dust" has now hit streaming platforms. And now that it's finally out, Dolla and MK can sit pretty as the track inevitably climbs the global house music charts.

"I'm so relieved, oh my god," Dolla said. "This has been a very interesting journey for myself and MK."