By Gary Suarez in FARR — Oct 11, 2024

Friday Afternoon Rap Roundup: ELUCID

Armand Hammer's maskless half drops his chaotic fourth LP, plus the week's new hip-hop album recommendations

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New Release Highlight of the Week:

**E L U C I D, REVELATOR (buy it / stream it**)

Now a beneficiary of the music festival industrial complex, Armand Hammer put ELUCID in front of bigger audiences than an artist of his caliber, range, and depth tends to receive. Venturing beyond his duo work with billy woods and delving into his solo catalog provides a greater sense of what his creative, revolutionary practice contains. On 2022's I Told Bessie, he cracked his chest wide open to disseminate memories and visions of life through a New York native's lens, contributing to one of the city's most meaningful hip-hop traditions. Somewhat more challenging and decidedly more eclectic than last year's excellent AH affair We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, his follow-up Revelator resides in the noisy margins and profound footnotes of revolutionary poetics and sound.

The post-punk percussive sputter of "THE WORLD IS DOG" sets the off-kilter tone for the strangeness ahead, mirrored in his additional co-productions with Jon Nellen like the claustrophobic, rhythmically wriggly "IKEBANA." Call it controlled chaos if you must, but the calculated skronk and curated clatter serve a higher purpose here, giving the rapper both space and hurdles to toss his verbal darts at/around. Family matters and dystopian creep fill the same thematic buckets, overflowing into "BAD POLLEN" and later flooding the retrofuturistic "XOLO." His guest list stays exclusive and artful, with two woods features including on the sloping Samiyam-helmed banger "INSTANT BANGER," as well as an immersive passage on "14.4" by latter-day Brooklynite SKECH185.