Open Mike Eagle, 'Neighborhood Gods Unlimited' Album Review

Open Mike Eagle Picks Up the Pieces on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited

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It has been 15 years since Open Mike Eagle declared he had seen the future on his debut solo record, 2010’s Unapologetic Art Rap, before warning: “If my premonition’s right, this is a demolition site.” Looking back at that song (“Helicopter”) from our vantage point in 2025, Mike’s once-parodically-grim predictions of bosses fully replaced by “mean computers,” terrorists transformed into gangs of “internet jerks,” and a society-wide inability to even take a shit without a keyboard at hand “to text on” feel more than a little prescient—holding not just a kernel of truth but a jumbo-size $14.99 AMC popcorn heaping of it. But at the time, the Chicago-turned-California rapper was so horrified by the thought that “every one of us” might soon be “living in [technology’s] reach” that he spent the chorus announcing “I’m getting the hell up outta here via helicopter / If I have to I’ll borrow Psycho’s helicopter / … / The only way up outta here is via helicopter.”

Ten albums and 15 years down the line, it appears Mike was not, in fact, able to talk Psycho into facilitating his escape plan. Tragically, in the absence of a helicopter, the coiner of “art rap” was stuck Earth-bound with the rest of us, unable to stop that future from arriving, or even to remove himself from it—and that’s never been more clear than on his latest release, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited. On its cover, Mike floats alone in a gray subspace, his own head replaced by a massive eBay-bought stereo, as if to say: forget merely “living in technology’s reach;” these days, we’re living in technology.

Critics are suckers for a throughline. We love to reconstruct an artist’s discography in the vein of a bildungsroman: the Boyhood-ification of a young voice, learning and growing in public, maturing as both an artist and person with each release. With ten solo records now under his belt and well over a decade on the scene, it would be tempting to hear Open Mike Eagle’s catalogue that way too. But, then again, he was already nearly 30 when he released Unapologetic Art Rap—already too skeptical, too self-aware, to play the naïf in some music journalist’s tidy narrative of self-actualization. That’s not to say there’s no growth, no evolution, across his releases; far from it. On the contrary, I’d argue that there actually is a bildungsroman narrative latent within his body of work, and it’s one that has grown more intentional and central with each album. It’s just that the subject of that coming-of-age story is not Mike himself, but the internet.

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Listening back, it’s startling how well his records trace its rise—Open Mike Eagle plays the bemused outsider on Unapologetic Art Rap, shaking his head at the “junior rumors on my new computer screen,” but soon becomes the self-admitted endorphin addict “staring at my phone / wondering how endorphins travel via screen” on 2016’s Hella Personal Film Festival. The next year, he spits the memorable proclamation of “Your phone’s the new ark of the covenant” on Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, a claim that reaches its logical and devastating conclusion by 2020’s Anime, Trauma, and Divorce, when Mike (semi-jokingly) blames his divorce on “tech shit” and “Netflix”—specifically, on a Black Mirror episode critiquing a fictional couple’s relationship (both to technology and to one another) that hit so close to home it destroyed his own. The stereo-head from Neighborhood Gods Unlimited even made its debut two years ago, on the cover of 2022’s Component System with the Auto-Reverse—but there he sat outside, the greenery and tables behind him a stark contrast to the gray void he hovers in now.

Open Mike Eagle’s discography, read as a whole, feels almost like a reluctant historical document of the adolescence of the internet rendered in miniature—from irritating novelty to totalizing force. That doesn’t mean, though, that his work feels detached or clinical. If anything, his hyper-personal writing, steeped in self-deprecation and a kind of everyday melancholy, has always made his observations sharper. He didn’t set out to capture technology, but humanity—and it just so happens that, along the way, the two became indistinguishable. His dry wit and vulnerability make him an ideal chronicler of this shift: someone who can not only chronicle the mundane but give voice to the often embarrassingly intense emotions it produces. Someone who can admit that an event as banal as breaking their phone left them “in mourning for the portion of my brain that has to grab the words before they circle down the drain,” and still find a joke in the wreckage.

Neighborhood Gods Unlimited takes all of those questions—about where “we” end and the technologies mediating us begin—and turns them into the album’s central metaphor. It’s a record about being split into pieces: selfhood as a broken phone screen, a reflection refracted in dozens of directions, a pile of black glass scattered across a city street, a horde of half-finished demos now lost to the void. That’s not my metaphor, but Mike’s own, impossible to miss on the aptly titled “ok but im the phone screen,” where he grieves the parts of himself—the voice memos, the notes, the to-be-songs—that instantaneously evaporated the moment the phone hit the ground, lost forever because he forgot to upload them to the cloud. (In a great, intentionally facetious moment, he compares the incident to RZA’s infamous, devastating studio flood: “It’s like that but, like, less- less devastating”). And as the title cheekily informs us, Mike is not just the bereft but the bereaved: he is the cracked screen he’s grieving.

That concept threads throughout the entire record. A sampled voice at the end of the opening song, “woke up knowing everything (opening theme),” asks, baffled, “I saw the man broken, how he put his self together?” Both “contraband (the plug has bags of me)” and “mirror pieces in a leather bound briefcase” provide potential answers to that all-important question, but not good ones. On “contraband,” Mike imagines discretely bargaining with a local dealer to buy back the chopped-up slices of himself making rounds on the streets: “Bought myself back in plastic bags / Let’s call it contraband.” But even after scoring that fix, it doesn’t take long for Mike to find himself fiending once more. In fact, the end of the next song, “almost broke my nucleus accumbens,” is overtaken by a last-minute coda consisting solely of Mike pressing, over and over, “How do I get some more me?”

A few songs later, “mirror pieces in a leather bound briefcase” reframes the transaction as corporate rather than illicit, selling prepacked identities for profit rather than meaning. That track’s final moments are a fun-house mirror image of the “nucleus” coda, introduced after an identical burst of television static and pseudo-ad-reads, but sparse and dismissive rather than pulsing and insistent. Over a dull, repetitive clicking noise, Mike provides reassurance in a monotone: “We got that you for you.” Towards the latter half of the record, though, the question shifts somewhat, moving from “How do I find the pieces of myself?” to “Wait, what would I do with these pieces even if I had them?” By “rejoinder (burning the last puzzle piece),” the external search has been consumed by the internal one, with Mike asking point-blank: “Is it me if I’m all split up? / Do the pieces contain the whole?”

Based on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, I’d argue that, at the very least, they reflect it. Across the record, these disjointed remnants are in constant conversation with one another, and a “whole” does emerge from these still-disparate fragments. This in part due to the concept of the record, borrowed from a shelved TV pilot Open Mike Eagle once envisioned, titled Dark Comedy Television (a reference to the name of his third record), giving those fragments a kind of narrative scaffolding: the entire album is presented as a scrambled hour-long broadcast from a failing cable network so close to going under they’ve been left no choice but to shove all their programming into 60 minutes. These segments seem disparate, but they’re on the same channel, bound by the same ads and producers—and those scattered shards may never fit neatly again, but each one still reflects the same face.

Across the record, identical bursts of sonic leitmotifs—the sound of glass breaking, bizarre Sid Katz infomercials about “modern drugs,” orchestral swells that resemble a TV tuning in and out, a glitched-out voice announcing “Dark Comedy”—briefly interrupt songs or bleed into one another, like someone flipping past the same four channels on a malfunctioning set. These blink-and-you-miss-it moments of self-referentiality begin to feel like the parameters of the album’s world, the record’s version of the glass barrier between living room and broadcast.

As a result, the production on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited is the glue holding its conceptual particles together. The beats rarely demand attention, but that’s deliberate: their gauzy textures, garbled loops, and minimal drums reinforce the sense of identity dispersed and refracted. The palette is wider than it first appears—there’s the lush K-Nite 13 soundscape on “woke up knowing everything,” the eerie murk of Kenny Segal’s contributions, the vaporous melancholy on Child Actor’s, and so on—but always filtered through the same gray void. The constant presence of those sonic motifs creates an internal logic: that of a fragile broadcast. The effect is that of hearing yourself on delay: familiar yet alienated, distant yet personal. (As a result, though, ear-worm melodies and uptempo flows are few and far-between—a choice that makes sense for the record but is a bit of a shame nonetheless, if only because Mike does so well with both).

Similarly, Open Mike Eagle himself largely remains in a more subdued register, only occasionally venturing into the swaggering drawl of previous tracks like “Burner Account,” “No Selling (Uncle Butch Pretending It Don’t Hurt)” or “Relatable (peak OME),” and that louder, sharper intensity seen on “Why Pianos Break,” “The Black Mirror Episode,” or “Informations” is almost entirely absent. But even without these more overt shifts in tone, his flow never becomes dull, nor do the songs behind it. Mike’s sly, conversational delivery often gives way to surprisingly emotive crooning, colorful features from Mr. Aquil, STILL RIFT, and Video Dave keep listeners on their toes, and the production is never without soul—but the sonic palette keeps pulling Mike back into the gray fog of its concept, the sound of glass breaking and the intrusion of TV static serving as constant reminders.

While the biased listener in me admittedly found myself missing those other, more immediate aspects of Mike’s style—from the abrasive experimentation of “Original Butterscotch Confection” to the addictively playful sound of “The Curse of Hypervigilance” to the impossibly catchy hooks of “Microfiche” and “Bucciarati”—the critic in me knows that Neighborhood Gods Unlimited doesn’t suffer for their absence. For better or for worse, it is more of a slow-burner than some of Mike’s other work, but in turn, it feels tighter and more unified as a result. The looser, more abstract production never feels gaseous, precisely because the record narrows its sonic focus and allows for free play within that stricter lens. The repetition of these disjointed fragments ends up making the record feel wholly cohesive, ensuring all the while it doesn’t fall prey to monotony.

What keeps Neighborhood Gods Unlimited from collapsing under its own conceptual weight—having to shoulder an entire TV series pitch is no joke—is, as always, the line-by-line genius of Open Mike Eagle’s lyricism. Even at his most unobtrusive, his wordplay remains sharp and strange, peppered with left-field pop culture references, shrewd political commentary, and a vulnerability that cuts through the fog. The opening repetition of “Show the Mephistos” in “me and Aquil stealing stuff from work” proves once again that few rappers in the game know their way around homophones and antanaclasis like Mike does, as the meaning of the phrase transforms slightly each time he reiterates it with a subtly altered pronunciation or intonation (“Show them my fists tho / Show them Mephisto / Show them a feast tho / Show them Mephistos”).

On opener “woke up knowing everything,” he weaves a surreal, almost comic list of conspiracies and half-truths from chemtrails to freemasonry to astrology—”it’s cause the moon is in Gemini / and Mercury’s in the gatorade” standing out as a particularly clever turn of phrase—both parodying and participating in the paranoid logic of the modern internet. He takes shots at Superman and criticizes Goku’s lackluster parenting on “my co-worker clark kent’s black box,” finds solidarity in the tragic backstory of Adventure Time’s Ice King on “contraband,” shouts out Marvel’s Sinister Six in “rejoinder,” and begrudgingly accepts wisdom from an insistent omnipotent baby in “a dream of the midnight baby (not a euphemism).” On “michigan j. wonder,” he weaves the three founding pillars of his lyricism—effortless pop-culture allusions, dry self-deprecation, and blunt, incisive critique—into as many lines: “⅗ of [my heart] had been euthanized / I was my own Dr. Frankenstein / My hands glowing like Hohenheim.” But as these quips and references stack up, so too does the sense of being overwhelmed by the very noise he’s chronicling—an endless stream of voices, media, and memory that he can’t seem to quiet. By the final track, “unlimited skull voices,” the metaphor resolves into something almost frighteningly plain: “I see every solitary voice / I don’t know how to turn off all the noise.”

15 years ago, Open Mike Eagle feared a world where we’d all be living constantly in technology’s reach, as if it were a long, cold hand we could still, in theory, jerk away from. Neighborhood Gods Unlimited serves as a crucial update to that hypothesis: our existence is not defined by mere proximity to the internet anymore. Our existence is within it. Your future lives in the code, your present is spent on the apps, your past saved (or, worst case scenario, lost) in the cloud. This noise—bite-sized shards of media, memory, identity, everyone else’s endless chatter—will not go away just because you shut the laptop, silence the phone, or even touch every blade of grass the Earth has to offer. The fractures that time, trauma, and technology carve into you will still remain.

And yet, amid all that noise, Mike keeps gathering the fragments, naming them, arranging them, making them speak. It’s painstaking, Sisyphian work, but that’s what makes it matter. In an age of immediacy, of outsourcing even the ordeal of living to AI, it’s the trying that counts. In 2025, with “art rap” increasingly rare and the scene it once galvanized splintered, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited stands apart—less as a bid for relevance than as a document of persistence. In an era of algorithm-friendly hooks and AI-generated verses, Open Mike Eagle’s painstakingly human work feels almost oppositional, a quiet refusal to be flattened into the noise he critiques. It’s a statement in itself: there’s still value in slow, difficult, intentional work.

In “relentless hands and feet,” Open Mike Eagle drops the cliche sentiment that “the fact that we exist is magic,” but the rest of the song—the rest of the album, really—insists otherwise. Breathing isn’t magic, it’s “a bad habit.” Survival isn’t a miracle, it’s labor—and that labor depends on community, not only in others, but also in your own scattered selves. “We huddle together,” Mike sings on “relentless,” soft and airy. “It keeps me running forever.” This is where Neighborhood Gods Unlimited leaves us: not with a fantasy of wholeness, but with a quiet commitment to keep searching among the shards anyway. Not buying them back from some dealer, who will only leave you addicted; not taking them from a businessman, who will hand you something hollow and call it you. You have to find them yourself, or at least try to. You have to learn to live among your own disparate reflections, the hundreds of selves stacked up in a digital trenchcoat to approximate an identity, and start recognizing them as yours. It’s 2025, and it’s time to face the music: There is no helicopter coming, so kneel down on that sidewalk and start picking up those pieces yourself.

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].

Open Mike Eagle Picks Up the Pieces on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited

The West Coast rapper’s latest is a record about being split into pieces: selfhood as a broken phone screen, a reflection refracted in dozens of directions, a pile of black glass scattered across a city street, a horde of half-finished demos now lost to the void.