Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal – ‘DOOMED!’

“This breakup shit is ass, it’s truly ass.” Open Mike Eagle drops the line halfway through DOOMED!, and it lands like a thesis statement stripped of all poetic armor. That bluntness—part punchline, part confession—carries the album, his first full-length collaboration with producer Kenny Segal.

Where 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce unpacked the dissolution of his marriage, this new project zooms in on the smaller, weirder details. The day after the split feeling like a hangover. An argument about rental car colors. The grim scroll through an ex’s social media. Cutting ties not just with a person but with an entire ecosystem: barber, therapist, primary care doctor. The album’s plainspoken misery never begs for sympathy. It’s too busy finding the absurdity.

Segal’s production wraps these vignettes in a slurred, surreal warmth that recalls his work on billy woods’ Maps. The beats feel bleary but intentional, giving Mike room to toggle between punchlines and painful clarity. “I saw the Fantastic Four movie by myself,” he raps on the title track, the superhero reference deflating into something genuinely lonely. The music doesn’t dramatize. It documents.

Their partnership isn’t new—the two first crossed paths on 2012’s “Cobra Commander” and have collaborated sporadically since—but DOOMED! benefits from a longer, more focused arc. The result is a breakup album that treats everyday humiliation as a legitimate subject, without reaching for catharsis or grand statements. Sometimes it’s just ass.