credit Ryosuke Tanzawa
“one of rap’s most popular indie voices” – The New York Times
“a moody, unsettling, sharply observed album” – Pitchfork
“billy woods and ELUCID raps are, like Hieronymus Bosch paintings, packed to the brim with both carnage and humor” – Vulture
“one of the most dynamic underground rap groups in the country, speaking to communities that the mainstream has forgotten” – The Washington Post
Today, powerhouse NYC rap duo Armand Hammer shares an entrancing new song “Doves” featuring Benjamin Booker. The song is a bonus track that will be added to the duo’s widely praised album We Buy Diabetic Test Strips on DSPs in March and future physical editions. “Doves” is co-produced by frequent collaborator Kenny Segal and Benjamin Booker, who makes his long-awaited return on guitar and vocals, who together add another haunting layer of enveloping atmosphere to the duo’s soul-searching raps, which reverberate throughout the mix.
Alongside the single, Armand Hammer is sharing a short film for “Doves” directed by Ryosuke Tanzawa (MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, Navy Blue). The video captures the duo comprised of billy woods and ELUCID in the calming solace of New York in January, traversing both the smooth and rough edges of the song’s sonics with layered visuals of the duo weaving their way through a snowy New York and an assortment of Tanzawa’s black-and-white photography archive.
Speaking about working with Armand Hammer on the visual and their intention with it, Ryosuke Tanzawa expressed, “Sage Elsseser, also known as Navy Blue, connected me with Woods last year, and I was very much looking forward to doing a video for Armand Hammer (Tabula Rasa & Stone Fruit are important tracks me) but I never expected something 9 minutes long, with basically everything…it’s quiet and loud, intimate and vast, beautiful and ugly – all of those things in one. I was a bit intimidated by the scale of the track at first and asked Woods to give me some time to think about whether I would be the right director for the project. When I went through my archive of black and white photos and started testing them out, laying them over the singing parts of the track, I felt like ok — this is going to work. So I called Woods and told him I wanted to do it. It turns out we had more or less the same idea of where and how to film him and Elucid. In the end, me and my producer Sean, with an arsenal of cameras from super 8 to iphone, shot it over the course of 3 days on a snowy January week.”
We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, Armand Hammer’s masterfully written opus, has been celebrated by outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian and hailed as one of the best albums of the year by Vulture, Pitchfork, Paste, and The FADER. FLOOD called billy woods and ELUCID “two of the best bar-for-bar emcees and creatively thrilling verbal stylists on the planet.” The album saw the duo colliding their raps with live instrumentation from an all-star array of producers including JPEGMAFIA, EL-P, Kenny Segal, DJ Haram, Black Noi$e, Preservation, August Fanon, Steel Tipped Dove, Child Actor, and Sebb Bash. Holding true to the sonic identity they’ve successfully cultivated since their 2013 debut, familiar faces like Pink Siifu, Moor Mother, and Curly Castro make contributions while also bringing new and like-minded peers into the fold, with features from Moneynicca (of Soul Glo) and Cavalier. Virtuoso jazz musician and celebrated composer Shabaka Hutchings shows up on flute, one of several musicians who sat down with ELUCID and celebrated engineer Willie Green for a jam session in 2022 that helped pour the foundation of this album. Alongside the success of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, Armand Hammer is in the process of wrapping up their 28-stop tour this month, capping off a long list of shows that traversed throughout North America and Europe.
Upcoming Live Dates
3/3 – Los Angeles, CA – BLK LBL pop up
3/6 – Mexico City, MX @ Pitchfork Festival Mexico City
3/20 – Boise, ID @ Treefort Festival
3/23 – Knoxville, TN @ Big Ears Festival
4/5 – Iowa City, IA @ Mission Creek Festival
4/6 – Kansas City, KS @ Record Bar
4/7 – St. Louis, MO @ Off Broadway
5/28 – Barcelona, Spain @ Primavera Sound Festival
6/13 – Helsinki, Norway @ Sideways Festival
6/16 – Manchester, TN @ Bonnaroo Festival
7/26 – Suffolk, England @ Latitude Fest
7/27 – Brno, Czech Republic @ Festival Pop Messe
More about ELUCID:
Queens born rapper/producer ELUCID has been at the forefront of New York’s avant-garde for much of the past decade. From his earliest days dropping self-produced mixtapes, while working with artists as disparate as Tanya Morgan, J*Davey, A.M. Breakups, and Beans from Antipop Consortium, ELUCID always brought his own unique vibration to every collaboration. Although he is best known as a vocalist, ELUCID’s resume as a producer has quietly grown quite impressive, including a film score (2017’s Bernadette), an experimental album (2020’s Seership), full projects for Backwoodz affiliates ShrapKnel and Duncecap, and self production on 2016’s Osage and 2018’s Shit Don’t Rhyme No More. That is not even including the production he has done for Armand Hammer, Nostrum Grocers, billy woods, and Mach Hommy, amongst others.
More about billy woods:
billy woods is an artist who took the long way around to his current position as one of the foremost writers in the genre. He has been making music for twenty years but only saw his star begin to rise in recent years as his run of indelible, gravity-defying releases became impossible to ignore. woods (stylized in the lower case) work and life story both rest on intersections of the black diaspora experience. He claims Washington, D.C. as his hometown but has spent nearly all his adult life in New York City. He was born in the U.S. but spent much of his childhood in Africa and the West Indies as the second child of a Jamaican intellectual and a Marxist revolutionary. On the mic, woods is no less a conundrum, possessed of versatile flows and not only an ability to tackle topics other artists wouldn’t imagine, but bring unique perspectives to the familiar ones.
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