Amoeba Music

New York-based hip-hop duo Armand Hammer visits Amoeba SF for a signing of their new album, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips (out now via Fat Possum on 2LP & CD), on Wednesday, October 11th at 5pm. Buy the album at Amoeba SF that day and get a free poster, only while supplies last. Attendees must purchase the album at Amoeba SF to get into the signing line.

Also catch Armand Hammer at The New Parish in Oakland later that night!

We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is the new album from NYC rappers ELUCID and billy woods, known collectively as Armand Hammer. The duo’s new project arrives two and a half years after Haram, their labyrinthine collaboration with The Alchemist. WBDTS 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. 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.

“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,“ ELUCID says.

Both rappers in Armand Hammer arrive here on the heels of groundbreaking solo work; for billy woods that means a three-album run from last spring’s rap AOTY Aethiopes - a diasporic Deathstar of a rap record - to this years’ darkly humorous travelogue Maps, sandwiching a quiet classic in the hazy memoir Church. Still, most Armand Hammer fans will be the first to tell you that ELUCID’s flawless ‘22 project I Told Bessie was as good as any of them. On We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, Junglepussy, Moor Mother, Pink Siifu, Cavalier, Curly Castro and Moneynicca - the moonlighting frontman of Philly punk band Soul Glow - add their spells to Armand Hammer’s incantations.

“It was an interesting process because we linked up with some artists that we never worked with before, but we also worked with some previous collaborators in new ways,” billy woods explains, “Cavalier and Siifu are good examples of cats we are down with that move in the same circles, but had neither had ever been on an Armand Hammer record”

This album 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.