Album Review: Armand Hammer - We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

Adorning the cover of Armand Hammer’s fourth studio album Shrines is the stark tableau of an NYPD officer levelling a tranquilizer gun at Ming, the tiger infamously kept in a New York apartment for three years by local resident Antoine Yates. In an impromptu 2011 interview (later repurposed as an outro for the track Pommelhorse), Yates is candid about going so far as to steal food at times in order to keep the big cat fed (after all, whether you have money coming in or not, the tiger’s gotta eat), but for as outlandish an idea as it was, his rationale is surprisingly admirable: “We’re starting to step out the box as a people, and want more out of life…My brother wanted to build a zoo, he wanted to build a utopia. Because when he looked around him, all he seen was destruction in our neighbourhood”. At the time, Shrines seemed to toe the line in terms of how abstract the music of billy woods and ELUCID could get, a palette of unusual and unnerving compositions that has nevertheless been eclipsed in oddity by the duo’s newest full-length effort, whose eponymous nod to the back-alley industry of redistributing medical supplies from the insured to the uninsured (at a premium, of course) is the twisted mirror image of Yates’ tiger-brained scheme. Both speak to the harsh (and often ridiculous) realities of existing under capitalism, yet just as Armand Hammer have shifted metaphors from the dream of a communal zoo in the middle of Harlem to a grey-market health insurance exploit, so too has their sound descended to places even more dismal and unreachable, with their lyrics reflecting that cynicism in ways more obfuscating than ever. At times the album may step one foot too far into that abyss, but billy woods and ELUCID are still operating at another level of genius entirely for the vast majority of We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and at this point in their careers, one hand could count the number of living writers (in any medium, frankly) operating on the same level and with the same consistency.

It’s difficult to evaluate whether We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is any more or less forthcoming than their prior releases; certainly the title and repeated telephone references (Landlines, Switchboard, Blocked Call) suggest a touch more thematic continuity to glom onto than usual, even if the actual lyrics spit by both rappers tell a different story (or often, seemingly no story at all). ELUCID opens Landlines setting a stage both familiar and unfamiliar (“Sipping mead on a blue note/Sidewinder out the two-door/Extra crispy on my three-piece/Leave a message at the beep, beep”), imagery that woods picks up and adds to (“Don’t play on my phone ‘less you Badu/I wanna buy me a home and sit on the stoop/Smoke me a cone, night breeze catch the trees, sipping somethin’ smooth”) even while he seems to delight in hiding the full picture (“High ground, keep ‘em guessing/One eyebrow at the very mention/Every answer I gave in the form of a question”). Neither have ever been prone to stating much of anything directly, and ELUCID in particular is an even more arcane presence than usual, his gruff, demanding flow often drowned in reverb or mired in repetition on tracks like this and the glitched unease of Supermooned. Regardless of one’s own personal tier list, it’s hard to argue that woods isn’t carrying the bulk of the lyrical weight here, in word count if nothing else - how could he not, when even as capable an intro as ELUCID’s on Blocked Call (produced by August Fanon, one of a few returning Armand Hammer regulars) gets completely eclipsed by both of woods’ verses, indecent and introspective in equal measure: “Knelt to worship, sis hiked up her habit/Think in cursive, spit jagged fragments/Every word out my mouth drag my people backwards”. Parsing (as Armand Hammer albums often do) as something closer to a series of semi-connected musings than linear progressions on a theme, such a fractured approach only exacerbates this album’s status as their most unforgiving listen yet, not helped (or reinforced, alternatively) by their equally erratic taste in beats.

With the exception of 2021’s Haram (solely produced by the Alchemist), Armand Hammer have always stitched their albums together with dichotomous bits and pieces from a litany of producers, reflected this time around in everything from the compelling Run The Jewels-esque The Gods Must Be Crazy (El-P, fittingly) to the comfortable woodwinds of Total Recall (Kenny Segal, fresh off his and woods’ triumphant second outing Maps from earlier this year). On We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the most frequent presence (and most surprising in a way, given a beef dating back to the Shrines era that was only recently squashed) is that of JPEGMAFIA, who produced four of the album’s fifteen tracks and set the tone for much of its sonic direction (for better or worse). It would be hard to point to any specific moment here as evidence of Peggy’s shortcomings (even if the ambient Woke Up and Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die could have done without a full minute of aimless synthetic wandering), but his dominant presence in the album’s first leg only exacerbates the friction that arises later as more producers enter the fray. It’s difficult to reconcile the drumless textures of The Flexible Unreliability of Time & Memory (Child Actor, stealing the title of most incongruent beat from right under Peggy’s nose) and Landlines with energetic singles chock-full of memorable billy woods one-liners like The God Must Be Crazy (“Henry Kissinger my album’s only feature”) and Trauma Mic (“Missionary ‘cause I know God see us”), especially since the latter mood is responsible for many of the album’s standout moments despite being largely confined to its middle stretch.

Elsewhere, it’s left to the duo’s guests to lend this musical whiplash some legitimacy, be it a primal hook from Curly Castro rumbling alongside the percussion on Empire BLVD (Willie Green) or Cavalier’s self-referential wordplay (“The confused read him like they Kanye tweets in verse form”) on I Keep A Mirror In My Pocket (Preservation). Multifarious rapper Pink Siifu sets the tone on both the punk-tinged Trauma Mic (DJ Haram) and the smooth Don’t Lose Your Job (Black Noi$e), even if what could have been another album highlight in the form of the latter trails off into unfortunate tedium in its second half. woods is rhyming with peak charisma once again (“Break up weed on one phone, FaceTime on the other/Break up with me, I’m a G, I stay friends with your mother”), but the spoken-word passages from ELUCID and Moor Mother are more admirable than actually enjoyable, and the transition to Jeff Markey’s barely-there instrumental only makes the skip button seem all the more enticing. Trauma Mic makes for a much more complete package; DJ Haram and her radically industrial soundscapes are as impressive as ever, the perfect complement to ELUCID’s hard-hitting salvo of aphorisms: “Dead plan in the crisper/Dead rapper, no pin dropped/Day tripper, dead planet/No slave, no world/Fuck you know/What the fuck you know?”. Most successful of all is Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here (Steel Tipped Dove) – not just for the DOOM-tinged beat of cartoonish hysteria that fits both our headliners like a glove, not just for Junglepussy nonchalantly delivering some of the album’s best lines one after another (“Minding my business, building my iron/Sitting on his face ‘til I’m inspired/Why fuck him? I’m a better writer”), but also for woods’ breakdown over a climactic beat switch (full credit to Messiah Musik) that (in typical billy woods fashion) raises just as many questions about the album’s themes as it answers: “Stress will mutate your genes, we buy diabetic test strips/Show me not the ends without the means, useless/Guest list only got me mezzanine, VIP is ruthless/I looked at the crowd, not the guillotine, nibble amuse-bouches/The queen begs and screams, much to they amusement”.

It's moments like this, where everyone involved is firing on all cylinders and pooling their genius into some of the best alternative hip hop in recent memory, that will define We Buy Diabetic Test Strips for many of its listeners, though they may find disagreement in where exactly those highlights are located – a consequence of the album’s production being more inaccessible and disjointed than ever, leaving it unable to satisfyingly coalesce to the extent that a Shrines or a Haram can. In spite of the eccentric beat choices, though, this record seemed intentionally positioned to be the duo’s next great leap forward in popularity after the renown brought in by Haram (a beefier-than-usual rollout, multiple prerelease singles, being put out by Fat Possum Records instead of woods’ homegrown label Backwoodz Studioz), and while the copious acclaim it has received is not undeserved in the slightest, one has to wonder whether it is simply the result of more and more people catching on to the fact that billy woods and ELUCID are two of the best to ever do it. It’s fitting in a way that a decade after the release of their first full-length album Race Music, Armand Hammer have once again let themselves be photographed for an album cover, eschewing a faceless lineage of bloodied pigs’ heads and in media res tiger captures to pose casually yet decisively amidst the everyday urban decay that has fueled so much of their music. Ten years later, woods and ELUCID are a little wiser, perhaps a little more cynical, and have transformed Armand Hammer from a project few took seriously into one of the most universally acclaimed groups in rap today. With that cinematic a past, and with this celebrated a present, it’s impossible to not see We Buy Diabetic Test Strips as, at the very least, another worthy inductee into an unparalleled discography.

8/10

Favourite Tracks: Y’all Can’t Stand Right Here, The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Key Is Under The Mat