Armand Hammer - BLK LBL Vinyl Pop Up Show

"Armand Hammer are [...] touring in support of their excellent 2023 album We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and as Stereogum points out, they revealed that they’ll have a vinyl-only album called BLK LBL available at the shows. They did a similar thing in 2022 with WHT LBL, a limited-to-500, vinyl-only release “consisting of unreleased material and collaborations, new and old,” and billy woods says, “Like the WHT LBL, some individual songs may end up in new (or old) places but this project will not be on streaming.”

The album features production from JPEGMAFIA, Aesop Rock, DJ Haram, Messiah Musik, Kenny Segal, The Lasso, Samiyam, Andrew Broder, August Fannon, The Lasso, and Armand Hammer’s own ELUCID, plus appearances by Dreamcrusher, Mattie, Zeroh, and A. Billi Free." [Brooklyn Vegan]

ARMAND HAMMER (pronounced Arm & Hammer) is a New York based hip-hop duoconsisting of longtime collaborators ELUCID and billy woods. Both artists already had burgeoning solo careers when they joined forces for their 2013 debut, Race Music to modest critical acclaim. 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.

We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is the new Armand Hammer album, and their first on Fat Possum Records. The record features production from JPEGMAFIA, EL-P, Kenny Segal, Black Noi$e, Preservation, DJ Haram, Child Actor, Sebb Bash, August Fanon, and more.

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.

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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