Open Mike Eagle appears in his new music video as a masked hero named Iron Hood. His arch-nemesis is a white-collar figure swinging a baseball bat at three model buildings. These represent Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, the largest US public housing development before it was demolished with the false promise of 2,388 mixed-income units to replace it. “There’s a photo of the Robert Taylor Homes where the buildings are lined up in the back, and in the front and there’s a playground,” Mike says. “I kept looking at that picture. Then it popped into my head: I wanted to see that building with a head and arms.”

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Mike, a South Side native, remembers how imposing that complex was when he was younger: how chain-link fences enclosed the balconies, how he used to hear gunshots. But this was also where he and his parents would walk a mile to see his great-aunt and his first cousins; there was a human side to these buildings that’s rarely discussed.

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is an archaeological dig turned concept album about what Robert Taylor used to be – a home. It is as smart and empathetic as any release Open Mike Eagle has put out over the past few years, mostly material about combating the existential dread of being a black man in 2017. Mike relocated to Los Angeles and, with his 2010 debut, established what he called “art rap”. That term began a protest against how rock is treated with more critical nuance than hip-hop; today, it is its own subgenre.

What separates Brick Body Kids from his past work is the lyrical territory, but also his tone. “When I was writing these songs, I didn’t feel like I had the space to laugh,” he says.

This album exists because of a flight Mike had over a year ago. He was on this airplane, wondering what happened to the Robert Taylor Homes. “I just assumed that it was turned into something – was it condos?” he says. He used the airline wifi to watch several documentaries, learning that, apart from a few hundred units to replace the 4,300 demolished ones, the site is nothing but an overgrown field.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Taylor Homes in 1987. Photograph: John Swart/AP

Pop culture (the documentary Hoop Dreams, the book turned film There Are No Children Here, a good portion of rap music) has been kinder than public policy about recognizing the tens of thousands of people who live in public housing. Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is yet another example. The opening track, Legendary Iron Hood, comes from the perspective of a child playing pretend as a Marvel-inspired super-villain, and features guitar by Dan Miller of They Might Be Giants. Yet undergoing his transformation, this kid can’t help but notice the roaches running rampant at home – his reality. This approach to storytelling, where there isn’t any outright explanation, was inspired by the video game director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s approach to Dark Souls, the notoriously difficult fantasy role-playing game that Mike has played frequently over the past two years. “You have to use your imagination to connect the dots,” he says.

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Like his 2016 album Hella Personal Film Festival, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a combination of fictional storytelling, hypothetical scenarios and personal experience. Legendary Iron Hood isn’t at all autobiographical, as listeners have been inclined to believe of most hip-hop songs, though it is rooted in emotional truth. By comparison, Brick Body Complex is Mike addressing us directly, both when he raps: “Don’t call me nigga or rapper / My motherfucking name is Michael Eagle, I’m sovereign” and when he repeats “My body is a building, a building, a building, a building” – as illustrated on the album art.

Mike says: “Part of the statement for the album is about when we talk about humanizing trauma, and the hardening and horror that takes place. These buildings go up. They come down. And a lot of people don’t think about the quality of suffering that might happen to people who were in that situation. There’s a correlation there to what happens to black bodies, when black people are murdered by police. There’s a lot of people who have no empathy to that.”

Mike swears up and down that any reaction to Brick Body Kids, even apathy, is valid. “That’s the risk I run by wanting to express my true range of emotions on these matters and the time we live in,” he says. The album ends with My Auntie’s Building, its most visceral and autobiographical song – one last plea to understand why this policy failure feels so personal. To static, he mutters that the demolition of Robert Taylor Homes is “the sound of them tearing my body down to the ground”. It is our hero meeting crushing defeat.

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is out Friday on Mello Music Group