Over the previous decade, each woods and his collaborator Elucid, their stage names, have made profession of telling crushing tales in regards to the lie of the American Dream. “We Purchase Diabetic Take a look at Strips,” their sixth studio album, captures why Armand Hammer is among the most dynamic underground rap teams within the nation, chatting with communities that the mainstream has forgotten. Their newest work, which was launched on Sept. 29, paperwork how Individuals try and navigate an financial system cracked by the pandemic, with solely their heroic have to endure.
The duo mix the heartbreak of poverty and the despair of racism to make music that’s each understatedly intense and oddly romantic, with lyrics like “rising and grinding, couldn’t assist/wasn’t seen, wasn’t felt/an sincere day is overrated” on 2018’s anti-capitalist anthem “No Days Off” or Elucid’s poetic line, “Spirit swells like faces below the baton strike,” on the fiercely pro-Black deep lower “Bob Barker.”
Backed by dirty, atmospheric music, Armand Hammer’s descriptions of life amid gentrification, commercialization and unrelenting capitalism — the sensation the state’s boot is continually resting in your neck — place them firmly within the custom of the late ’90s underground hip-hop label Definitive Jux, together with the good tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin, Giuliani-era Spike Lee, and John Steinbeck.
woods, who by no means reveals his face in footage, is a naked knuckle brawler of a rapper, mixing loquaciousness with political data inherited from a Jamaican literature scholar mom and Zimbabwean revolutionary father. Born in Washington,, he moved together with his household to Zimbabwe as a toddler earlier than returning to the US, an expertise of crossing worlds that knowledgeable his sense of displacement, the results of colonialism and music. Again in America, he began his solo profession after eight years on the fringes of the alt rap neighborhood.
From Jamaica, Queens, Elucid is the son of a churchgoing singer and musician. Within the aughts, he began perfecting his deeply knotty lyrics and intoxicating supply, honing his abilities in a Crown Heights brownstone.
After the 2 appeared on the identical compilation in 2011, woods, who frolicked on the fringes of underground rap neighborhood, reached out to Elucid for a visitor verse on his solo album, based on woods’s Backwoodz Studioz. There have been launched by a mutual good friend, the Backwoodz Studioz artist Unusual Nasa, with woods telling the music web site Pitchfork, “There’s no Armand Hammer with out Nasa.”
Since their first collaboration in 2013’s “Race Music,” they rattled over 4 acclaimed albums, together with 2021’s “Haram” (with legendary growth bap producer the Alchemist), a career-defining file that’s jazzy and colourful in comparison with their trademark maximalist abrasion. “We Purchase Diabetic Take a look at Strips,” for which they labored with a number of producers, together with DJ Haram and JPEGMafia, is again to that chaos and directness.
“‘Haram’ is lean as a result of it’s one producer. So, we didn’t need to do the identical factor twice,” explains Elucid. “[“We Buy Diabetic Test Strips”] is sprawling and matches into the thought of a secret community, secret economic system — so the songs have a winding sort of really feel that may present up within the songs.”
“Niggardly” seems like a knife is being sharpened in your ears as woods raps about consuming whereas “ravenous his enemies.” On “The Gods Should Be Loopy,” woods chides “White girls with pepper spray interpolating Beyoncé.”
Each Elucid and woods have solo careers, with the latter coming off 2023’s “Maps,” a critically acclaimed file about colonialism, marijuana and the perils of touring. Nonetheless, he returned to the work as Armand Hammer intact, and tried to seek out the house that has allowed him and Elucid to realize success.
Collaborating with Elucid has “made me a greater artist, working with somebody who’s so proficient,” he says. “To have the ability to flip round and set up a collaboration as wealthy as this, I’m already doing one thing a lot completely different.”
After ten years collectively Elucid thinks that woods is getting even higher.
“He’s turn out to be such an ideal songwriter,” Elucid says. “There’s simply extra mastery.
With the discharge of “We Purchase Diabetic Take a look at Strips,” woods and Elucid mirror on how far they’ve come.
“The period that we began was so unusual,” Elucid says. “Exhibits had been probably not reserving rap acts. It’s slightly bit completely different. Doorways had been shut then. So, it was like: “Am I nonetheless going to be right here?”
woods’s Backwoodz Studioz label has grown from an organization of 1 to eighteen, attracting artists comparable to Skech185, Akai Solo and Fatboi Sharif. Fats Possum Data, a notable unbiased label that signed indie rock singer Soccer Mommy is distributing “Strips.” Now, the duo is able to embark on a worldwide tour.
Even so, for woods, his face can be a shadow; his phrases can be fastidiously chosen.
“I get acknowledged by somebody in public annually,” he says. “That’s not life-changing ranges of fame.”
Nor does he really feel he has attained a degree of fame that makes it troublesome to carry onto his rules.
“I would like folks to concentrate to my artwork,” woods says. “I don’t significantly have to be acknowledged within the streets. Individuals who do need that ought to clarify themselves, not me.”
