Dumile Daniel Thompson -- better known as his masked alter ego MF Doom -- was ready to chuck his hip-hop career for good after his short-lived rap group KMD was destroyed by the sudden death of his brother and musical partner DJ Subroc and the band's subsequent dumping after one album by Elektra Records.

After spending several years homeless and crippled with despair, he re-emerged in 1997 as the metal-faced MC/producer MF Doom and followed through magnificently with a cheap-as-crud album of abstract hip-hop bangers called Operation: Doomsday. A lot of the content is actually pretty sad and wracked with loss, but Doom camouflages his lingering trauma rather well with a lot of bent, head-spinning wordplay and an all-in production palette dotted with Muzak and cartoon-soundtrack samples. It was rightly adopted by the underground hip-hop community as a signpost towards the future and casts a long shadow of influence to this day, despite the fact that Doom left this world too early in October of 2020.

TRACKLISTING:

1. The Time We Faced Doom
2. Doomsday
3. Rhymes Like Dimes
4. The Finest (ft. Tommy Gunn)
5. Back in the Days
6. Go with the Flow
7. Tick, Tick... (ft. MF Grimm)
8. Red and Gold (ft. King Geedorah
9. The Hands of Doom
10. Who You Think I Am? (ft. X-Ray, Rodan, Megalon, K.D., King Geedorah, Kong)
11. Doom, Are You Awake?
12. Hey!
13. Operation: Greenbacks (ft. Megalon)
14. The Mic
15. The Mystery of Doom
16. Dead Bent
17. Gas Drawls
18. ? (ft. Kurious)
19. Hero vs. Villain (Epilogue) [ft. E. Mason]