Image missing.
Neighborhood Gods Unlimited

Paul A. Thompson

created: July 15, 2025, 4:02 a.m. | updated: Nov. 10, 2025, 10:49 a.m.

When David Lynch died this January, my life became filled, even more than usual, with short-form videos. These were clips from his movies and TV shows, the little weather reports he self-recorded in his final years, that wonderful footage of Angelo Badalamenti demonstrating how he and Lynch composed Laura Palmer’s theme from Twin Peaks. There were also pieces of Lynch’s interviews, usually circumspect and deliberately opaque. He almost always punctuated this thought with the same sentence: “You want to commit suicide.”About halfway through Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, Open Mike Eagle experiences a version of this: “I dropped my cellphone and it got ran over,” he raps, with the mournfulness of someone recounting a dying friend’s last days. At one point in “phone screen,” he compares the experience of losing his notes and voice memos to an image that could’ve come right out of that show: a man “scratched up, trying to climb walls in a dream.”

3 months, 4 weeks ago: Best New Albums