Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal have been circling each other for almost twenty years, two LA transplants who found their footing in the Project Blowed orbit without ever locking in on a full-length together. That changes with DOOMED!, a fifteen-track breakup record that arrives via Backwoodz Studioz and feels like the inevitable collision of two distinct sensibilities finally given room to breathe.
We have been OME fans since 2014’s excellent Dark Comedy, with Brick Body Kids Still Daydream (2017) remaining our favorite OME album. His catalog is excellent overall, and 2025’s Neighborhood Gods Unlimited landed comfortably on our best of 2025 list. DOOMED! tops that album for us. This is not just because of how OME makes the themes land, but also because of the instrumentals Kenny Segal provides, which perfectly complement the lyrical content. Segal has a track record of elevating every project he touches. Even for billy woods, who has no weak albums, Segal’s work on Hiding Places (2019) makes it our absolute favorite billy woods album. The same alchemy happens here: Segal lays the foundation for a near-perfect OME record.
The premise sounds simple on paper. Five years of relationship wreckage funneled into forty-one minutes of absurdist but heartfelt rap. In practice, DOOMED! plays like a breakup album that keeps expanding its definition of what breaking up means. OME starts with romantic separation and ends up documenting the collapse of a shared reality. Friend groups fracture. Career momentum stalls. Even the therapist gets fired. The title track rattles off a list of breakups like a dark punchline, and the joke lands because it is not really a joke. Once your primary attachment dissolves, everything else starts to feel provisional.
Segal’s production sets the tone from the opening seconds of “Out to Lunch.” The beat is woozy and tape-saturated, a dusty loop that sounds like it has been lived in for years. There are no huge switches or dramatic pivots. The music stays restrained, almost stubbornly so, while OME’s thoughts spiral. This approach holds across the record. Even when the lyrics reach for the fantastical, the instrumentals remain grounded in muted jazz textures, worn-down samples, and live drum inflections that give each track a human pulse. Members of improv trio Human Error Club slip in and out of the arrangements, adding to the sense that these songs were recorded in a room where people were actually present.
“Streets of Rage: Public Arguments Edition” brings Gothic Tropic into the frame, their post-punk textures coloring a track that turns everyday disputes into something mythic. The song references the media rituals and private language that couples build over time, the inside jokes and shared playlists that become landmines after the split. “She Swear I’m Colorblind” features billy woods, Backwoodz’s founder, delivering a standout verse over a beat that feels like it was pulled from the same sessions that produced Hiding Places. The track focuses on arguments over minor things, like the color of a rental car, the kind of petty fights that take on outsized meaning when the relationship is already on life support.
“Unfinished Concrete Initials” brings Hemlock Ernst, aka Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, into the mix. The song is bluesy and bruised, built around an image of a stick breaking as the couple tries to carve their initials into wet concrete. Memory becomes stubbornly physical here. Objects outlive relationships. OME even says, “We should have taken more photos,” capturing the terrifying realization that the happiest moments have already begun slipping from his memory. The line lands with a quiet devastation that runs through much of the record.
OME’s humor is still present, but it is almost always dark and self-deprecating. On “Don’t Go Look (Battleworld Focus Prayer),” he proclaims that he would rather tongue kiss a bug zapper than check his ex’s social media. The joke works because the impulse behind it is so recognizable. Anyone who has tried to resist the pull of digital stalking knows exactly where he is coming from. Elsewhere, he focuses on details like watching his former partner’s favorite shows, or anime series he bailed on post-breakup. These small specifics give the album its texture. The pain is in the routines.
“Science Fiction/Fantasy” and “Infinity War Spoilers” reference the media that couples consume together, the shared language of Marvel movies and genre fiction that becomes a way of processing real-world heartbreak. The Marvel reference is particularly sharp. The Avengers scramble to prevent their universe from disappearing, and at first, things do not work out for the superheroes. Or for Mike. The song asks how you continue existing after the person you imagined your future with is gone. It is a question that echoes through the entire record.
The album gets particularly brutal during its final stretch. “It Happens in Every Universe (Interlude)” discusses the pros and cons of continuing to live with a partner post-breakup, then “Sweetheart Jail” firmly likens the situation to turning one’s home into a prison. “Infinity War Spoilers” deals with isolation as well as physical and emotional pain. The funereal closer “Watching a Movie Called Freedom by Myself” represents the point when both partners are completely exhausted, there is nothing left to say, and there is no other option than splitting up. The song rejects the fantasy that every ending is secretly a beginning, settling instead for the quieter truth that some stories simply conclude. It is extraordinary for how it reaches for acceptance of incompleteness in place of closure.
For anyone who has had to deal with a hard breakup, DOOMED! is easily OME’s most relatable work. It takes an experience that is painful, confusing, and torturously ordinary and turns it into something you would immediately replay. OME brings everything in his toolbox to the record: whimsical raps, social commentary, vulnerability, and sharp humor in some of his best work yet. Segal’s production paints vivid settings for the stories OME tells. The result is a rollercoaster of a record that is heartfelt, devastating, funny, and at all times intriguing.
9/10
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