Over the past decade, both woods and his collaborator Elucid, their stage names, have made career of telling crushing tales about the lie of the American Dream. “We Buy Diabetic Test Strips,” their sixth studio album, captures why Armand Hammer is one of the most dynamic underground rap groups in the country, speaking to communities that the mainstream has forgotten. Their latest work, which was released on Sept. 29, documents how Americans attempt to navigate an economic system cracked by the pandemic, with only their heroic need to endure.
The duo combine the heartbreak of poverty and the despair of racism to make music that is both understatedly intense and oddly romantic, with lyrics like “rising and grinding, couldn’t help/wasn’t seen, wasn’t felt/an honest day is overrated” on 2018’s anti-capitalist anthem “No Days Off” or Elucid’s poetic line, “Spirit swells like faces under the baton strike,” on the fiercely pro-Black deep cut “Bob Barker.”
Backed by grimy, atmospheric music, Armand Hammer’s descriptions of life amid gentrification, commercialization and unrelenting capitalism — the feeling the state’s boot is constantly resting on your neck — place them firmly in the tradition of the late ’90s underground hip-hop label Definitive Jux, along with the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin, Giuliani-era Spike Lee, and John Steinbeck.
woods, who never shows his face in pictures, is a bare knuckle brawler of a rapper, mixing loquaciousness with political knowledge inherited from a Jamaican literature scholar mother and Zimbabwean revolutionary father. Born in Washington,, he moved with his family to Zimbabwe as a child before returning to the United States, an experience of crossing worlds that informed his sense of displacement, the effects of colonialism and music. Back in America, he started his solo career after eight years on the fringes of the alt rap community.
From Jamaica, Queens, Elucid is the son of a churchgoing singer and musician. In the aughts, he started perfecting his deeply knotty lyrics and intoxicating delivery, honing his skills in a Crown Heights brownstone.
After the two appeared on the same compilation in 2011, woods, who spent time on the fringes of underground rap community, reached out to Elucid for a guest verse on his solo album, according to woods’s Backwoodz Studioz. There were introduced by a mutual friend, the Backwoodz Studioz artist Uncommon Nasa, with woods telling the music site Pitchfork, “There’s no Armand Hammer without Nasa.”
Since their first collaboration in 2013’s “Race Music,” they rattled over four acclaimed albums, including 2021’s “Haram” (with legendary boom bap producer the Alchemist), a career-defining record that is jazzy and colorful compared to their trademark maximalist abrasion. “We Buy Diabetic Test Strips,” for which they worked with multiple producers, including DJ Haram and JPEGMafia, is back to that chaos and directness.
“‘Haram’ is lean because it is one producer. So, we didn’t want to do the same thing twice,” explains Elucid. “[“We Buy Diabetic Test Strips”] is sprawling and fits into the idea of a secret network, secret economy — so the songs have a winding kind of feel that will show up in the songs.”
“Niggardly” sounds like a knife is being sharpened in your ears as woods raps about eating while “starving his enemies.” On “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” woods chides “White women with pepper spray interpolating Beyoncé.”
Both Elucid and woods have solo careers, with the latter coming off 2023’s “Maps,” a critically acclaimed record about colonialism, marijuana and the perils of touring. Still, he returned to the work as Armand Hammer intact, and attempted to find the space that has allowed him and Elucid to achieve success.
Collaborating with Elucid has “made me a better artist, working with someone who is so talented,” he says. “To be able to turn around and establish a collaboration as rich as this, I am already doing something so much different.”
After ten years together Elucid thinks that woods is getting even better.
“He’s become such a great songwriter,” Elucid says. “There’s just more mastery.
With the release of “We Buy Diabetic Test Strips,” woods and Elucid reflect on how far they’ve come.
“The era that we started was so strange,” Elucid says. “Shows were not really booking rap acts. It’s a little bit different. Doors were shut then. So, it was like: “Am I still going to be here?”
woods’s Backwoodz Studioz label has grown from a company of one to eighteen, attracting artists such as Skech185, Akai Solo and Fatboi Sharif. Fat Possum Records, a notable independent label that signed indie rock singer Soccer Mommy is distributing “Strips.” Now, the duo is ready to embark on a worldwide tour.
Even so, for woods, his face will be a shadow; his words will be carefully chosen.
“I get recognized by someone in public once a year,” he says. “That’s not life-changing levels of fame.”
Nor does he feel he has attained a level of fame that makes it difficult to hold onto his principles.
“I want people to pay attention to my art,” woods says. “I don’t particularly need to be recognized in the streets. People who do want that should explain themselves, not me.”
