Why Armand Hammer, Now
The New York rap duo work with past, present and future to make the most meaningful music in the world today.
“This ain’t about you.” — E L U C I D.
So opens We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the sixth studio album from New York rap duo Armand Hammer. One part Billy Woods and another E L U C I D, Armand Hammer has engineered an unequalled place in the contemporary hip-hop landscape, becoming known for dense, high-concept work. The pair are relentless innovators at a time when mainstream artists seemingly race to see who can strip out as much substance from their music as possible.
Released in 2023, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips does more to revolutionise hip-hop than any record since not-yet-Nazi Kanye West’s now decade-old Yeezus. In a genre increasingly characterised by a kind of “nihilism without nihilism”—stemming from the political and aesthetic Nazification set in motion by West—woods and E L U C I D produce decidedly generative music, refusing to participate in hip-hop’s accelerating death drive.
What Armand Hammer constructs with We Buy Diabetic Test Strips amounts to a kind of aural place in the concrete sense of the term. It brings to mind African American Marxist Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons—a space so foreign to the dominant ideological apparatus that its very alienness amounts to a form of creative resistance. The album’s title alludes to the ingenuity of the marginalised within late American capitalism: it is named for a hustling scheme devised by middlemen, who traffic life-saving test strips from wealthier, insured diabetics to poor, uninsured and disproportionately Black diabetics.
Inherent in this is a critique of capitalism’s current, permanent crisis. This collapsing, inhuman order where E L U C I D raps that “if you can’t be used, you’re useless” (sage advice once offered by billionaire Kanye West himself) is the album’s tableau vivant. But while not shying away from society’s putrescence, Armand Hammer also see an opportunity: the potential to coax alternative means of material and spiritual subsistence, falling outside legal sanction. In this way, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips celebrates what Moten and co-theorist Stefano Harney term ‘fugitive planning’ whilst reserving utter contempt for the forces necessitating such modalities.
The precarity of African American existence is the album’s most pronounced thematic throughline, chillingly captured when billy woods recounts:
“True story: I forgot four zips in the laundry
I was sweatin’, fearful
Went back the next day, she calmly gave me the laundry
Leaned in and said, ‘Papi, be careful.’”
What is exceptional about this latest album is how it fuses each emcee’s characteristically conceptual lyricism with equally multifaceted production. While earlier projects like Race Music and Paraffin always carried a distinctive sound, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips represents an enhancive stylistic radicalisation. The complexification in soundscape and instrumentation marks an escalation in the duo’s confrontation with the bounds of present possibility.
The sonic encapsulation of modern life’s insecurity and overwhelm is achieved by combining three distinct elements: a diverse group of producers, including August Fanon, Kenny Segal and JPEGMAFIA; live band instrumentation; and non-musical sounds that texture the album. The result is a remarkable musical polymorphism—a unique listening experience distinguished by its psychoacoustic effects. The live instrumentation provides uncommon depth and warmth in the form of Shabaka Hutchings’ lavish flute, evocative marimba from Jane Boxall and groovy bass by Adi Meyerson, among other talented players.
In contrast, a thick cacophony of dial tones, sampled recordings of phone calls and all manner of digital signals enkindle the unusual electronica ambient to modernity. African American socialist W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote of his ‘double consciousness’ formulation: “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self”. Here, woods and E L U C I D grapple with this historically contextualised—yet immensely personal—struggle, compounded by the refractive technologies of our age.
The album’s opening five tracks are replete with thoughtful musings on the at-once connective and disorienting nature of smartphones. On ‘Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Going to Die’, E L U C I D does just that, but he receives only a vague reply. Enmeshed in JPEGMAFIA’s panoply of ethereal computer-generated sounds, he continues:
“I’m just a image, a fetish
I fantasise”
Shortly after, on ‘The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory’, E L U C I D proposes an orientation:
“Many multiplicities
Living every mystery
[...]
Certainty is a circle, I don’t believe you.”
This hallucinatory digital haze is ferociously interrupted by the DJ Haram-produced ‘Trauma Mic’, marking the consummation of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’ technoindustrial landscape. The track opens with repeatedly crashing cymbals, mimicking the violent drudgery of factory production. This solidity is paired with the contradictory ephemera of feature artist Pink Siifu’s reverb-laden yelping. Siifu wailing “metal is my weapon” gives way to E L U C I D’s refrain of “no slave, no world”, as sounds resembling the roar of buzzsaws erupt.
The accompanying music video—where woods and E L U C I D conduct hard labour in a trash compacting yard—lends physicality to the song’s auditory motifs. Crucially, ‘Trauma Mic’ intimates a relationship between the hip-hop of Armand Hammer and the multidisciplinary works of a number of African American fine artists. Take, for instance, Thornton Dial, whose artwork is notably dense and expressive in composition, not unlike We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. Dial was principally employed throughout his life as a metalworker in Bessemer, Alabama, and used those skills to configure elaborate sculptures from found materials while in retirement.
Dial and his contemporaries, such as Lonnie Holley and Joe Minter, transmogrify materials that the white world usually sees as junk into poignant and provocative artworks. These new creations often resemble a form of hidden knowledge, speaking a language that only other African Americans of particular experience in life will recognise. Armand Hammer’s musical practice can be seen as a profound transposition of this Black Radical Tradition, expanding its artistic canvas in the form of cutting-edge hip-hop. On ‘Total Recall’, billy woods hints at these richly varied sources of inspiration with idiosyncratic black humour:
“No father, my style wild bastardised (the dirty version)”
Together, Armand Hammer’s sonic experimentality and tender, labyrinthic lyricism form a far too rare hip-hop spatiality: that of inextricable nowness, but which articulates, however abstractly, the many potential futures contained within our present. In striving to mediate their momentane human condition musically, the duo embody Moten’s inquiry “toward the future of that history and what it might engender, whatever liberatory possibility it might hold”. This makes billy woods and E L U C I D not only the best rappers working today but luminaries within the tiny handful of musicians the world over who truly demand to be listened to.