CW 33 has one major album landing today, one preview of an important upcoming underground collaboration, and one announcement that is not a release at all but is arguably the most significant producer news of the week for anyone reading this blog. In order: Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal drop DOOMED! on Backwoodz Studioz. Apollo Brown and Skyzoo preview Luxury Tax with the first single. And Erykah Badu and The Alchemist confirmed August 28 as the date for their long-gestating collaborative album, dropping "Witch Doctor" alongside the announcement.
Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal – DOOMED!
The full title is DOOMED!: Rap Songs About A Relationship That Ends In Every Possible Universe. Open Mike Eagle's five-year relationship ended right when he and Kenny Segal started building this album together. His response to that timing was direct: "Perfect, I have a lot to say about this." The result is fifteen tracks about a breakup filtered through the kind of absurdist, multiverse-spanning concept architecture that has always been Open Mike Eagle's strongest mode.
DOOMED! is out today on Backwoodz Studioz — billy woods' label — which immediately places it in a specific underground universe. Kenny Segal produced, mixed, and performed additional instrumentation throughout. Daddy Kev mastered. The features are: billy woods on "She Swear I'm Colorblind," Gothic Tropic on "Streets of Rage: Public Arguments Edition," and Hemlock Ernst — Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands — on "Unfinished Concrete Initials," the lead single. The Treble review described the production palette as warped jazz vibraphone over city memories and soulful choral loops, comparable to Maps, the billy woods and Kenny Segal album from 2023.
This is not a Boom Bap record. Open Mike Eagle operates in a more left-field, abstract, comedy-adjacent register than the Griselda orbit this blog usually covers. But the argument for its place here is the same argument that got JPEGMafia on these pages in CW 21: Backwoodz Studioz, billy woods, Kenny Segal, Project Blowed lineage, total independence, craft over everything. The ethos fits even when the sound moves in a different direction. DOOMED! is one of the year's more fully realized underground albums by any measure, and that earns the write-up.
Mike's own framing of the music: "Each vision is a crashed airplane halfway on the border of dream and nightmare, bitter and sweet, sadness and freedom. 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."
Available on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms. Vinyl, CD, and cassette via Backwoodz Studioz.
Apollo Brown & Skyzoo – God Given (Preview: Luxury Tax, September 25)
Apollo Brown appeared in the widontplay CW 30 write-up with his instrumental album No Pressure, No Diamond. Now he is back with the first single from a full collaborative album with Skyzoo, dropping September 25, 2026. The album is called Luxury Tax.
Skyzoo is a Brooklyn MC with a long catalog of observational, street-level New York rap built around vivid neighborhood portraiture and the kind of lyrical density that rewards close listening. His work with producers like !llmind, 9th Wonder, and Apollo Brown himself has consistently sat in the corner of the underground that this blog covers. "God Given" is the first taste of what that pairing produces at full-album length. Apollo Brown's track record — Skyzoo, Guilty Simpson, Joell Ortiz, O.C., Ghostface Killah, Stalley — means that when he commits to a full collaborative LP, the result usually delivers. September 25 goes into the calendar now.
The Alchemist & Erykah Badu – Album Confirmed for August 28
This is not a release. It is an announcement, and it is the most important producer news of the week for anyone on this radar.
Erykah Badu and The Alchemist confirmed August 13 via Pitchfork and every major outlet simultaneously that their collaborative album arrives August 28 on Control FREAQ Records and Young Recordings. The announcement came alongside a new single, "Witch Doctor" — a six-and-a-half-minute hypnotic zone-out where Badu's voice drifts through Alchemist's slow, heady beat before the whole thing dissolves into what Stereogum described as a campfire drum circle. The project is currently untitled. The Bandcamp listing reads: "Sorry, we don't have an album title yet."
The origin story is the right place to start. A few years ago, Badu told her longtime creative partner Cold Cris that she had always wanted to rap over Mobb Deep's "The Realest" — an Alchemist production. That one sentence is how this album began. The producer had been quietly hoping to work with Badu for years. They were introduced. Their first studio session in Los Angeles produced "Next to You," the album's first single. From there Alchemist sent Badu a collection of instrumentals, and she took them apart: adding kalimba, layered chords, drums, reshaping his warm punchy samples into something that moved between the two of them. The process took 18 months across Dallas and Los Angeles. Before committing anything to record, the duo tested the material live in phone-free, intimate venues throughout 2024 and 2025, with Badu's digital collective the Cannabinoids and Alchemist working the MPC beside her. The press release describes the result as moving "fluidly between soul, blues, funk, rock, jazz, and underground hip-hop, yet belonging entirely to none of them."
Badu's last project was 11 years ago. Her last official studio album was 16 years ago. New Amerykah Part Two came out in 2010. That context matters not as a number but as a measure of what this moment represents for anyone who has been watching her catalog.
The widontplay angle here is specific. The Alchemist is one of this blog's core reference points, covered in CW19, CW23, and CW25. But this project asks something different of that reference. An Alchemist album with Erykah Badu is not a Griselda record. It is not Boldy James over loops. It is Alchemist as co-author alongside a voice whose scope is entirely different, and the result is a project where "producer-driven" stops meaning boom bap specifically and starts meaning authorship. That distinction is what makes August 28 genuinely worth circling on this calendar.
The joint tour runs September 10 (Highland Park, IL) through September 29 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
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