Open Mike Eagle teams up with producer Kenny Segal to deliver a jazz-infused examination on breakups, ultimately concluding that relationships are DOOMED!.
Release date: August 14, 2026 | Backwoodz Studioz | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp | YouTube
Rapper and streamer Open Mike Eagle went through a breakup with a romantic partner. He teamed up with long time collaborator Kenny Segal, one of the more brilliant hip hop producers in existence right now, and together they made an album about breakups and relationships called DOOMED!: Rap Songs About A Relationship That Ends In Every Possible Universe. Now, the world has yet another breakup album to consider when going through that mess, but Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal‘s collective creativity makes something greater than sad boi clichés typically offer, despite the album’s subtitle fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of multiverse/multi-dimensional hypotheses. Hearing the theme of the album did not inspire confidence, as I tend to find breakup and romance-themed albums tiresome, but my faith in the talents behind DOOMED! outweighed my skepticism of well-tread themes.
This isn’t even Mike’s first album to touch on the subject. The indie-rap veteran has like 13 other albums that cover a crazy amount of thematic territory, but 2020’s Anime, Trauma, and Divorce stands out as the most obvious example. On that album, however, OME diffused his pain through more abstract writing and touched on other ideas with his usual art-meets-nerd rap lens. On DOOMED!, his rhetoric feels more personal than any album I have heard from him to date. In all fairness, I am not intimately familiar with all of OME‘s projects. I am a latecomer to being a fan of his music. I appreciated Brick Body Kids Still Daydream back in 2017, but his style didn’t really click for me until last year’s Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, which I was a big fan of as well as his group project Previous Industries with Video Dave and STILL RIFT from 2024. This all coincided with my appreciation for his YouTube channel which sees the MC giving incredibly practical and down-to-earth takes on current events in hip hop as well as sharing his lifelong love of the genre. I’m new to Open Mike Eagle‘s world, but it often fits like a well-broken-in pair of jeans.
While there are many kinds of relationships, DOOMED! focuses on romantic relationships, however my own relationship with OME is becoming increasingly parasocial. It is as if Mike’s voice pops in my head whenever I have to break down and consider a situation that seems ridiculous (usually regarding hip hop news and the internet’s response to it). To complicate matters for this review, Open Mike Eagle started reviewing YouTube reviews of DOOMED! on his own YouTube channel. I generally avoid other critics’ takes on something I am reviewing, but wound up watching Mike review Anthony Fantano‘s review of DOOMED! in some kind of meta-para-social self-flagellation of words and opinions that by my own rules I shouldn’t be engaging with in this specific instance. Fortunately, my often weed-addled brain is quick to forget, and after some time I have come to remember that I watched it, but the content itself was able to slip away besides OME saying that no review has understood the meaning of the first track, “Out To Lunch”.
‘Don’t let me make your day if you can’t make mine,’ he sings over Segal’s bass-heavy and synth-woozy production before the first verse begins to break down the break up as if it is from the disembodied perspective one feels sorting though the muck that lead to the breakup in the first place. He defends himself by declaring erratic behaviors that make him unpredictable like that justifies the breakup, the bargaining part of loss. I love the line, ‘Fought so hard for myself, I’m a Perfect Blue and Black Swan,’ because it not only declares the importance of standing up for oneself in a relationship but also references Satoshi Kon‘s anime film Perfect Blue about a pop star who seeks an acting career and finds that her self-advocacy has deeply psychological and physical consequences. Black Swan, a live action psychological thriller by Darren Aronofsky (which borrows heavily from Perfect Blue) is about a ballerina who advocates for herself and her success again to a detrimental and surreal level. This undermines all of the posturing that he is presenting as if it in itself is a confession that his self-advocacy went too far. The bridge declares, ‘You’ll get sad, but them bonds was insecure/you seem certain, but me, I’m not so sure,’ further getting into the spiraling questions and answers that a broken heart feeds the brain. The final verse is a description of the malaise and sadness that leads to this disembodied state of endless questions with no definite answers. ‘It’s fucked up songs on repeat,’ he says at one point, a sort of declaration of what’s to come on DOOMED!. I could be wrong, though.
Though the songs may be thematically fucked-up, Open Mike Eagle is too nerdy, charismatic, and funny to let anything get abysmally dark. “Streets of Rage: Public Argument Edition” lightens the mood immediately, though lyrically OME and guest Gothic Tropic narrate scenarios around a couple arguing in public while the chorus likens the situation to a fighting video game. This is heavy content told through a surface-level experience, at once giving the point of views of the arguing parties while also abstracting the scenario to an easily digestible outsider’s viewpoint. “DOOMED!” follows with a punchier jazz-meets-boom-bap beat as OME lists various breakups with barbers and therapists posturing like this particular breakup isn’t that big of a deal until the end when he declares ‘this breakup shit is ass.‘ This track carries weight, but again has a sense of fun and humor to it. By now, I am sold that this may be a breakup album, but it is also still a dope rap record with all of the sly and wry quirkiness that OME has built his career on.
“Unfinished Concrete Initials” follows with one of the catchiest beats on the album, a chorus sample that lilts and sighs over soulful guitars and one of the catchiest choruses I’ve heard from Mike. Lyrically, the coldness of Chicago winters prevent wet concrete initials, a metaphor for frigid moments in a relationship preventing permanence and the coldness one has to take with their own memories to keep functioning, even the therapist is cold. Hemlock Ernst offers a guest verse, winding rhymes through different positions on the beat like a high-concept seasoned veteran rapper, and I just learned that this dude raps. Hemlock Ernst is Sam Herrig, famous for being the frontman of Future Islands, and until this album I had no idea that he was a rapper as well, let alone a very, very good one. Over a wandering organ melody-driven beat “Don’t Go Look (Battleworld Focus Prayer)” focuses on not looking at the ex’s socials while “She Swear I’m Colorblind” really breaks down arguments in a relationship as two people trying to get to the bottom of the disagreement and hurting each other along the way as Mike and billy woods get into their deeper headspaces.
“Science Fiction Fantasy” pulls a weird trick where Kenny Segal‘s beat samples a piano part that feels familiar to the point that I spend the song focusing on that instead of the vocals which OME delivers softly enough to get swallowed by my own distraction. The piano sample is not from The Muppet Show skit that I thought it was. That’s how distracting the piano is, but despite this, the song and beat are good. “The Irredeemable Magic Man” uses an Adventure Time reference to further the plot, while “The Many Hustles Of My Loony Time Traveling Uncle” gives us a brief detour from relationships with people ending to remind us that earning money isn’t as easy as it once was. This point of the album detours from the theme somewhat, though in a wider sense these songs are about relationships and breakups as OME touches on the music industry (“Trying To Remember What I Aimed At”) and his place in it, among fans, peers, and critics (“Schrodinger’s Green Room (There but Uninvited)”), the latter featuring the hardest beat on the album.
The final tracks return to the breakup theme more directly, an interlude describing breakups via two women discussing practical elements of breakups leading us to “Sweetheart Jail” (another hard beat) and the jazzy “Infinity War Spoilers” painting OME as one half of the world being deleted. Finally, “Watching A Movie Called Freedom By Myself” summarizes the melancholic feeling of freedom outside of choice filtered through the experience of watching movies. Couples watch movies together, but watching a movie by yourself when that other person is no longer there is a different experience. The metaphor is almost passé, but Segal’s ethereal beat and Open Mike Eagle‘s way of being specific in his details while sounding collected and pragmatic gives this track a depth that outshines Hollywood movie scripts or pop punk albums or whatever that share the topic.
DOOMED! turns processing a breakup into one of the highlights of hip hop this year. This album has sad moments, sure, but it is also filled with the clever wordplay, obscure references to other forms of entertainment, and the occasionally self-effacing, often humorous voice that Open Mike Eagle carries as his signature contribution to hip hop. No one else sounds quite like he does or is able to pull from a galaxy of references quite like him. After many years in the game, DOOMED! is easily his most mature-sounding album, but he hasn’t sacrificed his unique personality to get here. Kenny Segal, meanwhile, presents jazz-inspired beats that manage to sound fun and intriguing while matching Mike’s ventures from the bleak to the whimsical. These two artists are a perfect match for an album about separation, and I hope they don’t break up, in any universe.
