SAMPLEDOpen Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal finally made an album — DOOMED! is a breakup record with jokes
Two Project Blowed lifers, twenty years of friendship and fifteen songs about a relationship coming apart. Backwoodz calls it the world's first half-whimsical breakup album.
Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal have been in each other's orbit since they were both young transplants circling Project Blowed, the Los Angeles open-mic institution that shaped a generation of left-of-center rappers. They have traded beats and verses for close to twenty years. DOOMED! is the first time they have built a whole record together, and Backwoodz Studioz (opens in a new tab) frames it bluntly: fifteen songs, one collapsed five-year relationship, and a sense of humor that refuses to leave the room.
Why it took this long
By Mike's own account on the label page, Segal drew a line: no more one-or-two-beats-per-project cameos. If they were going to work, they were going to build something. Mike talked him into contributing to Neighborhood Gods Unlimited on the condition that a full collaboration came next. Then his relationship ended right as sessions began, which handed the record its subject.
Segal arrived from the opposite direction. He had just come off a run of collaborative albums that pushed well past rap orthodoxy — work with billy woods, K-the-I???, the jazz trio Human Error Club, and blues-leaning songwriter Benjamin Booker. That restlessness is audible here.
The shape of it
Mike describes the album in television terms: prestige TV, with the opener "Out To Lunch" as the pilot that introduces a man whose head is still stuck in yesterday. From there the episodes get specific in a way breakup albums usually avoid — an argument about the color of a rental car, a stick snapping while two people try to write their initials in wet concrete, a prayer for the strength not to open an ex's social media, and a character study built around an Adventure Time villain.
That specificity is the trick. Grief written at cloud level turns into wallpaper. Grief written at the level of a rental car turns into a scene.
Why it fits the label
Backwoodz has spent a decade releasing records where the writing carries the weight and the production refuses to sit still — see the label guide for the longer arc. DOOMED! is squarely in that lineage: an emotionally raw record that never becomes a pity party, produced by someone who treats each beat, in Mike's phrasing, like ore from a different comet.
Pre-orders, vinyl variants and streaming links live on the DOOMED! release page (opens in a new tab).