by Parker Bennett (@parkertoal)
Open Mike Eagle can’t help being unserious. It might just be his lyrical superpower, never without his trusty utility belt of in-jokes and observational wisecracks. DOOMED!, the 45 year-old rapper’s collab effort with producer Kenny Segal, is as clever as ever. Hooks allegorize Street Fighter combos, allusions to Austrian physicists, and sardonic interpolations of Instagram lingo—few have mastered the winking sincerity of internet-hipsterdom quite so deftly. What sets the record apart, however, is the painful intimacy with which that same wittiness is employed. DOOMED! is a break-up album, plain and simple, about a union so ill-fated, it never even had a chance in the multiverse.
Romantic woes are hardly new territory for Open Mike’s music. 2020’s Anime, Trauma, and Divorce discussed the dissolution of his marriage with grim humor and self-effacement. Six years later, his perspective has grown to a state of pessimistic clarity, able to recognize the litany of little deaths that cursed the relationship from the very beginning. Each verse is scattered with snapshots of a love in decline: month to month leases, sushi dates under bad lighting, and unfinished initials in wet concrete. “This shit is ass,” he states candidly on the third track. “This break-up shit is ass.”
It’s an ethos only enhanced by the presence of Kenny Segal’s production. An established beatmaker best known for his collaborations with billy woods (see Maps from 2023), his homemade sample loops and rambling drum patterns add a layer of DIY-messiness to the album’s diaristic approach. A low-fidelity haze hangs over every synth-pad and saxophone; obscured but never wholly enveloped. Even for someone as prolifically collaborative, finally hearing him paired with Open Mike Eagle is a rap snob’s dream come true.
That’s the magic of DOOMED!, in a nutshell. At no point does the record break all bounds of its creators’ back-catalogs—it simply hones in on what each of them does best, and does that. Opener “Out to Lunch” toes the line between melancholic and unsettling, its refrain both a threat and a plea: “Don’t let me make your day if you can’t make mine.” The title track expands the divorce’s zone of impact, agonizing over even having to cut ties with one’s primary care physician. “Science Fiction / Fantasy” compares the wormhole-messaging of Matthew McConaughey’s character in Interstellar to the things Mike wishes he could say to his past self. The song ends at a point of such cynicism, he’s not even sure if love can even exist beyond the confines of a bookshelf.
Even at his most biting, however, Mike remains fully, crippingly, aware of his own shortcomings. On “The Many Hustles of my Lonely Time Traveling Uncle,” he paints himself as a neighborhood Rick Sanchez, flipping vintage CDs to afford next month’s garage-tenancy. “The Irredeemable Magic Man” hides its protagonist in plain sight, depicting an emotionally-unavailable scoundrel who curiously bears a bit of resemblance to the rapper himself.
A handful of frequent collaborators and Backwoodz Studioz scenesters (rapper billy woods’ increasingly influential indie-rap label) stop by to pepper the tracklist with their own tales of heartbreak. Hemlock Ernst, the rap alias of Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring (yes, really) offers his unmistakable cadence for a condensed saga of cold feet and prenups. More surprising is an appearance from indie-pop singer Gothic Tropic, who raps her own story of mutual shortcomings (“Whatever left unsaid uncovered like an artifact”). And finally, billy woods himself makes an appearance on “She Swear I’m Colorblind,” capturing the frigidness of a break-up with a poeticism most living authors should envy.
The album’s closing track, “Watching a Movie Called Freedom By Myself,” restates the overall thesis with the efficacy of an AP-level term paper. Finally unencumbered, Mike is free to arrive at the theater when he wants, call the Uber when he wants, and avoid/look up every spoiler he wants. And, now that he’s unencumbered, he also has no one to whisper to, no one to squabble with, and no one to wake him up when the credits roll. It’s a contradictory coda to a contradictory album, wishing that what never should have started never has to come to an end.