Backwoodz Studioz engineer Willie Inexperienced has mentioned he needs folks to have a “bodily response” after they take heed to one of many label’s information. Final yr, Inexperienced and Armand Hammer’s Elucid assembled a crew of gamers for a session on the Greenhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, with the concept of jamming to beats and following the place it led them. It was the primary time that Shabaka Hutchings (flute), Adi Myerson (bass), Max Heath (synthesizer), and Hisham Bharoocha (drums) had met; Elucid says that watching their early fumblings give approach to grooves with religious heft was foundational to the creation of We Purchase Diabetic Check Strips, Armand Hammer’s sixth album. By Inexperienced’s personal rubric, the album is successful—it may really feel like being tugged by dozens of various fingers but nonetheless being pulled ahead.
That natural jam session—by which relative strangers discovered the funk of their very first assembly—mirrors the best way that Elucid and his companion within the duo Armand Hammer, Backwoodz founder billy woods, have collected a slew of eccentric personalities and given them a typical function. woods has known as Elucid Backwoodz’s “secret weapon” as an A&R, and he is likely to be proper; it’s exhausting to think about anybody else making a file like this sound coherent. woods and producer Kenny Segal’s 2023 album Maps was a vividly evocative tour diary populated by colourful characters, however when the 2 rappers work collectively, Elucid lifts woods into the ether.
Armand Hammer’s music will be indecipherable by design, with profundity typically camouflaged by abstraction. On We Purchase Diabetic Check Strips, they ponder their inevitable finish, typically graphically (“Males pregnant with dying, frightened on the quickening/It totters on unsteady legs, boy you invited to the christening,” woods raps), but handle to stave off hopelessness. The 2 proceed to course of life’s indignities with absurdist humor and a caustic wit, telling disjointed tales by means of intersecting narratives that solely come into focus when considered as a complete.
Probably the most unconventional of their visitor stars is, in fact, JPEGMAFIA, the Baltimore rapper and producer recognized for his abrasive productions and persona. JPEGMAFIA’s work accounts for a bit greater than 1 / 4 of the album, however his glitchy, warped aesthetic bookends the tracklist and helps outline the temper. He opens the album with a hypnotic synth loop and a vocal pattern stuttering within the background; there’s no bass, only a single snare crack punctuated by a landline dial tone. He’ll bury a delicate melody beneath cacophonous yelling, then change the beat mid-song to weave online game SFX into boom-bap drums and drench the entire thing in reverb (“When It Doesn’t Begin With a Kiss”). Even within the sluggish and quiet moments, chaos lurks in his productions—an interrupted moan, a hair-raising scrape—and it’s fascinating to observe woods and Elucid adapt their flows to fulfill the problem.
We Purchase Diabetic Check Strips is as a lot a Backwoodz Studioz showcase as an Armand Hammer album. During the last decade or so, Backwoodz has steadily established itself as a paragon of the New York underground, an instance of how a group and a enterprise can feed off each other. You possibly can see the fairness as plain as their publishing splits. Backwoodz’s roster is all around the LP—visitor verses from Curly Castro and Moor Mom; manufacturing from Metal Tipped Dove, Kenny Segal, Jeff Markey, and Willie Inexperienced—leading to an album that gels regardless of its idiosyncrasies. It’s becoming that there’s an El-P manufacturing credit score, as his now-defunct indie label Definitive Jux was to the New York underground within the ’90s as Backwoodz is at present: a free collective of left-of-center artists that coalesced round artistic freedom quite than a specific sound, emphasizing transparency in enterprise, if not all the time their artwork.
