Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal announce DOOMED!, a 15-track breakup album out August 14 on Backwoodz, featuring billy woods and Hemlock Ernst
Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal have announced DOOMED!, a full collaborative album releasing August 14, 2026 via Backwoodz Studioz, the label run by billy woods. The project is 15 tracks and arrives alongside a lead single, “Unfinished Concrete Initials,” featuring Hemlock Ernst, the alias of Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands. This is not a beat tape with guest verses. This is a fully committed joint album, and the circumstances under which it was made are built directly into the record’s DNA.
The two have a long-standing creative relationship, with Segal contributing beats to several of Open Mike Eagle’s projects including Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, which appeared on multiple best-of-2025 lists, and Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering in 2023. But the full collaborative album they had planned was deferred each time Eagle needed a few Segal tracks for solo work. That arrangement finally ran its course. “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 said in a statement.
I was able to convince him to let me use a couple beats for Neighborhood Gods Unlimited with the caveat that we would focus on our thing next. Then my relationship fell apart right when we started working, and it was like, ‘Perfect, I have a lot to say about this“
What DOOMED! Actually Is and How It Was Built
The album’s official description, written by the artists themselves, is as precise and strange as the music it describes. It is, per their own framing, “five years in a blender,” “the world’s first half-whimsical break-up album,” “fifteen songs from iconoclastic rapper Mike Eagle and innovative producer Kenny Segal,” and also “LA.” That last detail is not incidental. Los Angeles runs through the record’s present tense, grounding the absurdist emotional architecture in a specific place and its specific pressures.
Open Mike Eagle described the production in terms that capture what a Kenny Segal beat actually does to a lyricist working at his level. “Each vision is a crashed airplane halfway on the border of dream and nightmare, bitter and sweet, sadness and freedom,” he said.
“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.” Lead single “Unfinished Concrete Initials” demonstrates that framework immediately. Herring, whose Future Islands catalog occupies its own corner of American emotional extremity, fits the Hemlock Ernst mode here precisely: conversationally dense, catching the tonal register of Eagle’s bars without mimicking them.
The Full Tracklist, the Guests, and the Context
The 15-track listing is as idiosyncratically titled as anything in Open Mike Eagle’s catalog, which is saying something. “Streets of Rage: Public Arguments Edition” features Gothic Tropic. “She Swear I’m Colorblind” features billy woods, whose Backwoodz label is releasing the project, adding another layer to a creative ecosystem that has become one of the most consistently excellent in underground hip-hop over the past five years. The tracklist also includes “Science Fiction/Fantasy,” “The Irredeemable Magic Man,” “Shrödinger’s Green Room (There But Uninvited),” and a closing track titled “Watching A Movie Called Freedom By Myself” that earns its placement before it has even been heard.
DOOMED! will be mastered by Daddy Kev, with cover art by Shane Ingersoll and layout by Ashes57. Additional instrumentation credits include Aaron Shaw on saxophone and flute, Jordan Katz on French horn and trombone, and Ryan Crosby on guitar and bass. For an album about a relationship ending in every possible universe, the production infrastructure behind it is unusually alive.
