Two friends of nearly 20 years finally built something whole together. Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal announce their first full collaborative album ‘DOOMED!,’ out August 14 via Backwoodz, with worldwide physical distribution through Rhymesayers / Secretly. The duo shared the first single, “Unfinished Concrete Initials” featuring Hemlock Ernst, alongside the news.
The record runs 15 songs and lands somewhere none of us have been before, what the duo calls the world’s first half-whimsical breakup album. It’s five years in a blender, every misunderstanding of a long relationship stretched into an absurdist black comedy on wax, the sound of every fight playing at once.
It’s also Los Angeles. Both Mike and Kenny arrived in the city as young, aspiring artists pulled toward the scene around the groundbreaking rap crew Project Blowed, and they’ve been friends and occasional collaborators ever since. ‘DOOMED!’ marks the first time they’ve built a full body of work together, and the timing made it click. Mike was processing the end of a turbulent relationship and hungry for catharsis. Kenny, fresh off acclaimed collaborations with billy woods, K-the-I???, Human Error Club, and Benjamin Booker, was looking for his next challenge.
“In recent years, Kenny made it very clear that he wasn’t trying to keep having one or two beats on my projects; he wanted to build something,” Open Mike Eagle explains. “Then my relationship fell apart right when we started working, and it was like, ‘Perfect, I have a lot to say about this.'”
Mike frames the album like prestige TV. “Out To Lunch” is the pilot, introducing a man whose head is still stuck in yesterday. From there it moves through fights about the color of a rental car, a prayer for the strength not to check an ex’s social media, a doomed attempt to carve lovers’ initials into wet concrete, and an Adventure Time character he describes as someone he uncomfortably identifies with.
The writing is vivid and strange in the best way. “Each vision is a crashed airplane halfway on the border of dream and nightmare, bitter and sweet, sadness and freedom,” Mike says. “Every one of Kenny’s beats is a chunk of ore from a different comet. I used each one as a canvas to paint my impression of a dead world.”
DOOMED! Tracklisting:
- Out to Lunch
- Streets of Rage: Public Arguments Edition feat. Gothic Tropic
- DOOMED!
- Unfinished Concrete Initials feat. Hemlock Ernst
- Don’t Go Look (Battleworld Focus Prayer)
- She Swear I’m Colorblind feat. billy woods
- Science Fiction/Fantasy
- The Irredeemable Magic Man
- The Many Hustles of my Lonely Time Traveling Uncle
- Trying to Remember What I Aimed At
- Shrodinger’s Green Room (There but Uninvited)
- It Happens in Every Universe (interlude)
- Sweetheart Jail
- Infinity War Spoliers
- Watching a Movie Called Freedom By Myself