DOOMED! is Open Mike Eagle losing the same argument in fifteen universes

Open Mike Eagle has already made a record about a relationship ending, and it was very good, and he clearly did not want to make it twice.

Anime, Trauma and Divorce landed in October 2020 on his own Auto Reverse label, after a year in which his fourteen-year marriage collapsed, his Comedy Central show went away and several friendships went with it. That album is raw in the way a person is raw when they are still inside the event. The jokes are load-bearing. You can hear him using comedy the way you use a hand to stop a door.

DOOMED! is the same subject handled by somebody who has learned what he is like in a breakup. This time the relationship, five years of it, fell apart while he and Kenny Segal were starting the record. Instead of narrating it, he built a physics for it.

The multiverse is not a bit

Read the track titles and the design shows up immediately. "Don't Go Look (Battleworld Focus Prayer)". "Schrödinger's Green Room (There but Uninvited)". "It Happens in Every Universe". "Infinity War Spoilers". The full title of the record is DOOMED!: Rap Songs About a Relationship That Ends in Every Possible Universe, and Backwoodz billed it as five years in a blender, an absurdist black comedy stretched across a mini-series.

Comics fans will file the framing as fan service. It isn't. The thing your brain does after a long relationship ends is run counterfactuals: the version where you said the better sentence, the version where you left in year two, the version where you both stayed. A multiverse is the exact shape of that compulsion, and the joke Mike builds the album on is that every branch resolves the same way. There is no timeline where this works. Given the Battleworld prayer sitting at track five, the Doom in that title is Marvel's rather than Daniel Dumile's, and it fits: Doom is the character who keeps rebuilding reality and keeps ending up alone inside it.

The Guardian's Will Pritchard gave it three stars and complained that the verses never quite reach catharsis. He heard the record correctly and then marked it down for its own premise. Catharsis requires the argument to end. The record's whole argument is that it doesn't.

Segal brought a band

Segal produced and mixed all fifteen tracks, and this is the part most reviews have underplayed. Jon Negroni at Slant praised the dusty loops and worn-down samples that make the album feel lived in rather than merely produced, which is true and also slightly off, because a lot of that dust is being played rather than sampled. Mekala Session is on drums. Diego Gaeta plays Rhodes. Aaron Shaw covers saxophone and flute, Jordan Katz handles french horn and trombone, and Ryan Crosby and Mike Parvizi split guitar and bass. Daddy Kev mastered it, which puts a straight line back to the Low End Theory room where most of these people first met each other.

If you know Segal at all, you know him from the billy woods records.

Hiding Places in 2019 was the one that made his name outside Los Angeles: beats built out of collapse, silence used as an instrument, woods rapping in a hallway you can hear the size of. Four years later they made Maps, a warmer and funnier road album, and between them the pair set the terms for what an abstract rap record could sound like this decade.

He is not new to Mike either. Segal has credits on Brick Body Kids Still Daydream back in 2017, which remains the best thing Mike has made and one of the few American concept albums about public housing that treats its subject as a place people loved.

The guests do actual work

Hemlock Ernst turns up on "Unfinished Concrete Initials". That is Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands, who has been rapping under that name for years and who made Back at the House with Segal in 2019 for R.A.P. Ferreira's Ruby Yacht imprint. He sounds like a man reading someone else's diary out loud and getting upset halfway through.

billy woods appears on "She Swear I'm Colorblind", and the placement is not casual: woods runs Backwoodz, this is Mike's first album on the label after years of self-releasing, and the verse functions as a handshake in public. Gothic Tropic, the Los Angeles guitarist Cecilia Della Peruti, who has played for Beck and for Charli xcx, sings on "Streets of Rage: Public Arguments Edition", a song named after a Sega beat-em-up about walking down a street hitting people. Nobody involved is doing a favour. Every feature is cast for what it does to the argument.

Where it lands

The reviews have been strong and slightly nervous, which is usually the sign of a record that will age well. Metacritic has it at 83 across nine reviews. Pitchfork gave 7.8, Anthony Fantano an 8, Slant four and a half stars, AllMusic four and called it Mike's most relatable work. The Guardian is the outlier at three.

My own read: it is his most controlled album and not his best one. Brick Body still holds that, because it had a subject bigger than the man singing about it. But DOOMED! does something the confessional rap tradition mostly refuses to do. It declines to name the other person, declines to assign blame, and declines to arrive anywhere. Compare it with the records in our guide to the breakup albums that name names, which get their charge from a verdict. Mike withholds the verdict on purpose, and then spends forty-one minutes proving the verdict wouldn't have helped.

Forty-one minutes is also the right length. His last few albums have run a little loose. This one is edited by somebody who wanted it to hurt efficiently.

Rate it, and tell me whether the multiverse framing reads as a shield or as the most honest thing on the record. I have gone back and forth twice this week.