Open Mike Eagle is channeling the past here, shouting out MF DOOM and Sanyo and Bill Beutel and other linchpins of life in the Eighties and Nineties. And he’s not alone—a ton of rappers, many too young to experience any of it, shouted out the past. I don’t think this is necessarily nostalgia. A sense of turning came into focus in 2022, that there needed to be hip-hop that wasn’t mumbling trap (not an insult) or actual revivalism. This album digs into the glory of sampling and full audible wordplay. Open Mike Eagle is no tough guy—he can hear his son’s belly laughs in the next room, and that sounds more like the future than anything else.