— From its sixth studio album out this Friday, Armand Hammer shares the third and final single, “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” produced by El-P of Run The Jewels.
This latest offering is another indication of the expanded community of collaborators and diverse palette of production Armand Hammer brought into the fold on We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, out Friday via Fat Possum Records. The album also includes previous singles “Trauma Mic,” featuring Pink Siifu and produced by DJ Haram, and “Woke Up And Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die” produced by JPEGMAFIA.
“woods and ELUCID have something special going and I am happy we got together on this jam… I think we made a banger.” — El-P on collaborating with Armand Hammer.
Just two days after the album’s release Armand Hammer will begin its 28-date Autumn and Winter tour. Launching October 1st and running until the end of February, the duo will be taking the album through North America and Europe with stops in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Toronto, Detroit, amongst others. Tickets for the tour are available now at the official Armand Hammer website.
The groundbreaking NYC rap duo of ELUCID and billy woods’ new project arrives two and a half years after Haram, their labyrinthine collaboration with The Alchemist. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is an entirely different beast, incorporating live instrumentation and featuring an 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 Junglepussy, Moneynicca (of Soul Glo) and Cavalier. Virtuoso jazz musician and famed composer Shabaka Hutchings shows up on flute, one of several musicians who sat down with ELUCID and acclaimed engineer Willie Green for a jam session in 2022 that helped pour the foundation of this album.
Of his experience working on the album, ELUCID shares,
“This sort of reverse engineering of talented players who met for the first time in the studio jamming to pre-recorded beats before splintering off into new directions. Being in the room quietly watching 4 people fumble around each other’s sonic worlds before finally locking into a solid groove was a clear and obvious magical moment for me.”
As solo artists, ELUCID and billy woods had already achieved modest success prior to collaborating on their 2013 debut, Race Music. That album was followed by an EP; Furtive Movements in 2014. Both artists continued to collaborate over the following years, making appearances on each other’s work and performing together, but fans would have to wait four years for a new Armand Hammer project. ROME was released in November of 2017, and the duo doubled down with Paraffin in 2018. Like opposite sides of a coin, the two albums are connected, yet radically different in their design. Paraffin was greeted with a wave of critical acclaim that only rose in the wake of 2020’s naturalistic masterpiece Shrines or their transgressive 2021 collaboration with The Alchemist, Haram.
Listen to “The Gods Must Be Crazy” above, see below for a special statement on WBDTS from Armand Hammer and more info on the album out this Friday.
From the desk of Armand Hammer:
We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is a Midsummer’s night in Brooklyn, the stage busy with Gods old, new, and unborn, the orchestra pit thick with weed smoke. Memories, true and false, tangle like wires. Afrofuturists rewind analog answering machines. Brownstones line empty streets on quiet nights where even outside the Men’s Shelter, they pass cigarettes in silence. Street sweepers rattle the morning, broken hovercrafts sent from the past to do nothing at all. People move out of the building in the morning and move back in at dusk, excited to get settled in their old place. Dropped calls fall into the ether, the cracked mirror in your pocket is past warranty but not to worry, they have already mailed you a replacement.