Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal Share New Music – ‘Unfinished Concrete Initials’ ft. Hemlock Ernst + Announce New Album. – New hip hop from Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal

Rapper, screenwriter, comedian, and polymath Open Mike Eagle returns alongside innovative producer Kenny Segal to announce their new collaborative album DOOMED!, due out August 14 via Backwoodz, with worldwide physical distribution by Rhymesayers / Secretly. Alongside the announcement, the duo have shared the album’s first single, “Unfinished Concrete Initials” featuring Hemlock Ernst.

 

 

DOOMED! is fifteen songs from iconoclastic rapper Open Mike Eagle and innovative producer Kenny Segal. It is five years in a blender. It is every troublesome misunderstanding of a half-decade relationship distorted and stretched into an absurdist black comedy mini-series on wax. It is the sound of every fight playing simultaneously. It is several consecutive voice notes you did not listen to, and instead read the transcription. It is the world’s first half-whimsical break-up album.

It is also Los Angeles. Maybe not first and foremost, but LA runs deep in this record’s present and its lineage. The story of any big city is also one of transplants. Mike and Kenny both arrived in LA as young, aspiring artists drawn to the scene around groundbreaking rap crew Project Blowed. They have been friends, and occasional collaborators, for nearly twenty years. Despite that history, DOOMED! marks the first time the two have built a full body of work together. Mike, fresh off a string of multi-producer records and processing the end of a tumultuous relationship, was in need of creative catharsis. Kenny, meanwhile, had locked in on his next challenge after a recent run of critically acclaimed collaborations with artists including billy woods, K-the-I???, Human Error Club, and Benjamin Booker. Everything happens in its time, and fate brought them together at the exact moment that allowed the duo to create something extraordinary.

“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 explains. “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.’”

If DOOMED! is prestige TV, Mike describes “Out To Lunch” as the pilot, where we meet a man who is not all there because his head is still in yesterday. From there, the album moves through arguments about the color of a rental car, a prayer for the strength not to look at an ex’s social media, a song about trying to write lovers’ initials in wet concrete before the stick breaks, and an Adventure Time character who is, in Mike’s words, “a piece of shit that I identify with.”

“Each vision is a crashed airplane halfway on the border of dream and nightmare, bitter and sweet, sadness and freedom,” Mike says. “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.”