DOOMED! turns the end of the world into a scheduling problem
Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal pack 15 tracks of comic dread into 41 minutes. The title is the thesis.
BY JOLT Staff · AUG 14 2026 · 2 min readThe new album from Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal arrives August 14 via Backwoodz Studioz, but the title is not a surrender. The duo has assembled a 15-track record that treats the end of the world as a scheduling problem, a series of small rooms with bad wifi and worse company. The joke is in the names: Streets of Rage: Public Arguments Edition, Schrödinger's Green Room (There but Uninvited), The Many Hustles of my Lonely Time Traveling Uncle. This is comedy as serious work.
The construction is efficient: 41 minutes, most tracks between two and three and a half minutes, one interlude, one closer that doubles the average length. The features are not ringers; Gothic Tropic, Hemlock Ernst and billy woods are placed in the middle and late stretch, which keeps the project from becoming a one-man monologue. The specificity is the weapon. These are not generic anxiety titles. They have coordinates: a video game, a meme war, a scheduling dispute, an MCU argument, a relative's lonely timeline.
The density costs something. At 15 tracks, the record can feel like a pile of punchlines waiting for verses, or verses waiting for punchlines. Don't Go Look and Infinity War Spoilers are short enough to read as sketches, and the stretch from Science Fiction/Fantasy through The Many Hustles of my Lonely Time Traveling Uncle blurs into a single register: clever, anxious, hermetic. Only It Happens in Every Universe offers a formal break. The title track is right there at track three, but the record keeps moving before the idea can land.
The long closer, Watching a Movie Called Freedom By Myself, does the heavy lifting. At 5:53 it is more than twice the average track length, which reads as a deliberate landing point: after all the noise, someone alone with a screen, trying to find meaning. It is a smart beat to end on, even if the record has to wade through its own clutter to get there. The album earns its gloom and its laughs in roughly equal measure, and that makes it a 3.5: good, knotty, and best taken whole.
