Open Mike Eagle had one of the strongest runs in all of hip hop over the course of the 2010s, culminating in two standout albums, 2017’s, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, and then 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce. Especially coming on the heels of his most personal album to date, everyone had been wondering where he goes from there. The answer is now here, as he drops his newest full-length album, a tape called component system with the auto reverse.

So how do you follow up your most personal and vulnerable album of your career? In Eagle’s case, you go in a completely different direction and create a project that is more outwardly focused. For component system, he’s literally taking things back to when he was first falling in love with hip hop, taping stuff off of the radio and making mixtapes for friends and so on. In fact, the name of the album actually comes from an old tape that Eagle made. What this means in a more practical sense is that this is Open Mike Eagle’s most straight ahead rap album in years, with a particular aesthetic choice made to keep things sounding like the whole thing was recorded off of the stereo in your family’s living room back in the day. To make this happen, Eagle enlisted the help of producers Child Actor, Kuest1, Quelle Chris, Diamond D, Madlib, and Illingsworth. Because of this particular choice to make the album sound this way, we also have to pay respect to Kenny Seagal for mixing the album and Daddy Kev for mastering this unique project. There are a few guests on the album, but Video Dave and still rift show up multiple times, giving the album just enough of a posse feel to it, and all three have different style that complement each other really naturally and just make the album that much more fun to listen to. And while Eagle is not getting as vulnerable as on previous projects, he still finds room to find that emotional connection as he dissects hip hop culture, such as on tracks like “for DOOM,” and “peak pandemic raps.” These songs pay homage to a lost hip hop legend and get to the weird mental and emotional state the last couple years have put us in, respectively. We also get Eagle’s sense of humor coming through again and again, poking fun of himself and others with tracks like “I retired and then I changed my mind” (I seriously had this conversation with someone about an artist just days ago). Perhaps what drives the feeling of this album home more than anything, though, are the handful of times when Eagle is playing segments of his actual tape, giving you just a taste of what it meant to have locally produced radio shows that let you see not just what was happening in hip hop, but what was happening in your city.

In lesser hands, an album like a tape called component system with the auto reverse could have just been some silly fun, or worse, an album full of dinosaur raps about how hip hop used to be real. Fortunately, this project was put together by one of the most thoughtful and inventive voices in hip hop, so Open Mike Eagle instead gave us a really compassionate look at hip hop culture and also the value of the mediums in which people of a certain generation fell in love with it.