Yeah, you’ve obviously been in the game a long time—since The Bible and the Gun in 2002. Open mics aside, how have you seen the scene change over time? What’s stayed the same, or come back into vogue?
You mentioned a full-circle moment earlier, and, like, speaking of full-circle moments, just look at vinyl. Vinyl is king again. And when I was 18, that was the way to get on—the vinyl world was booming. It was an underground rapper’s dream to get a distribution deal for like Landspeed Records or Fat Beats, right? If you print out 10,000 records, you could be living very well, you know? And these days, the same thing is happening. Shout out to my label Backwoodz; the reason why I even signed with them was because I wanted to put out Save Yourself on vinyl. It was just a lifelong dream, so it’s cool to see that it’s profitable again, that it’s a way for people to make money outside of streaming. It seems like we’re in a place where people are looking to commune with like the actual physical object of music, and that’s a real positive, I think. It’s ill.
You’re releasing the EP 48 Hours alongside I Guess U Had To Be There on vinyl. What is the relationship between those two tapes?
The original LP, I Guess U Had To Be There, was made over a period of time—we’re talking maybe a year and a half—but I was already working on REVELATOR at that point, and I actually put REVELATOR on pause to start this record. There was a lot of back and forth. But then I found out—well, I read the contract. [laughs] I read the contract and I was like, “Wait, I have to complete REVELATOR before the end of the year. Oh, shit. All right. So let me pause I Guess U Had To Be There and get back to REVELATOR.” So it was very back and forth, back and forth.
Still, [I Guess U Had To Be There] felt very focused because I was able to take my time with it, which is my favorite way to make a record. But conversely, for the EP, I had four days off in Switzerland at the very beginning of a tour, and Sebb [Bash] is in Switzerland, so we met up at his studio, and in two days, we made a brand new record. It was nice to feel that the chemistry that we had—just the sort of cyber thing and WhatsApp messages and FaceTimes—was real. He had come to New York a couple of times before, so we were able to hang out then too. But this was the first time we really sat in the studio together like that, and we just made the record in two days. Hence: 48 Hours.
You said you were working on REVELATOR and I Guess U Had To Be There somewhat simultaneously. How did you know that the songs you were working on for this wouldn’t be ones that worked on REVELATOR? What kept the records so separate in your mind?
Well, when I first start making a record, it’s always about just trying to find a voice and an identity for the record. That mostly involves making a bunch of things that probably end up in the trash. It doesn’t really matter, right? It’s just, like, the act of working every day—just the practice of trying to be creative. So it had its own sort of separation in that way. And also, I think REVELATOR was definitely expressing specific emotions, at least through the production, if not lyrically. I think it’s one of my rougher albums to listen to. It was definitely trying to express different things versus what Sebb does. Sebb doesn’t really make abrasive things, you know? His version of abrasiveness gets a little more spacey and maybe uncomfortable.It’s like standing alone in some vast area next to some, like, 150-foot obelisk sculpture. [laughs]
You made 48 Hours at the start of a European tour—and you’ve been touring a lot, lately! I know that lifestyle can get a little ridiculous, especially when you do have a family at home. What’s it been like balancing the two?
Well, shout out to my wife for helping with everything. We have two kids, one is eight and one is three. So shoutout to her, shoutout to our babysitters, shoutout to our family for helping take kids on the weekend. It’s hard—there’s a lot of Google Calendar scheduling involved, like a lot—but we make it work. I’m just lucky to have people in my life that want to see me win. And when I win, we all win. Like, we’re playing two festivals in the Netherlands next month. I’m bringing my eight-year-old with me. It’s his first time traveling to Europe, and he’s going to be doing the shows with me. It’s going to be fire. It’s really, really cool to get those core memories in for him.
You’ve talked before about how becoming a father changed the way you approach your work. I’m curious if you’ve seen continuous change, too, as you’ve started to watch your kids grow up.
Oh, completely. I think it’s definitely influenced the writing. It’s given me another perspective on life in general, really. Watching them achieve milestones and start to shape their own identity and assert themselves… It’s wild. It’s the trippiest thing. Seriously, being a parent is one of the trippiest things ever. [laughs] I have had my fair share of psychedelics, so trust me when I say being a parent and just watching these little humans grow is one of the only things to actually match that. There’s also just the stress of it, too.
I’d also say it’s just really slowed things down for me. That’s the first thing I noticed: it slowed everything down. I’m definitely a person who, usually, is just very free with his time. Like, I enjoy having free time, having time to be free in. So realizing that “Oh, my time is getting cut short here” took some time. I’m very much on a schedule now, which seems constraining and very anti-creative. There’s this line [from “Cantata”] that I wrote when my kid was one and still breastfeeding: “Let that baby suck your titty and leave me the fuck alone / When you need it, I go get it, then I be needin’ my own.” That came out of pure frustration, honestly [laughs]. Like, being dad and partner and this and that—it’s a lot. It’s hard not to feel there’s some sort of sacrifice happening, a loss of your personal time, your personal goals, even just your personal time with your own partner. Weirdly, that feeling wasn’t there so much with the first kid. It was only when the second one came along that things sort of started adding up and I started really feeling the weight of it. But over time I’ve found ways to make it work. Like, right now I’m talking to you, but if I weren’t talking to you, I might be in the studio—and I’m always in the studio for dad hours.
Dad hours?
Yeah, like, I’ve gotta schedule around dad time. I’m running on dad hours. I’m in the studio until, like, 3 p.m., but then I’m picking up the kids, and it’s like, “Hey, I’m dad now.” [laughs] You know what I’m saying? So the process of writing itself had to shift a lot—I had to learn to tell myself “All right, you have this block of time to get busy, and then after that, you’ll do what you got to do.” They’re these short bursts of time, but that taught me that this really has to be a daily practice thing—I had to understand that I can’t just wait for lightning to hit me, for creative lightning to strike and ideas to pop up. Like, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you just have to get to work. You can’t afford to wait for it.
At the same time, though, sometimes even when I actually have time to write—which is rare on its own—I might just sit there for hours and nothing will happen. And at that point, I’ve had to teach myself to, like, just get up and go do something else. Like, nothing is happening, so go and read something. Go watch something. Maybe go outside and just watch what’s happening out in the world. That’s often when things come to you—you read words of people that are much smarter than me or yourself, and it’s just like, “Oh, shit, what about that?” There’s something to mine for. And, like, that’s lightning too. The best writers are all readers, and people don’t say that enough. Man, I can’t wait ‘til New York Public Library tries to holler at me, or at Armand Hammer. Like, I would love to rock with the library in whatever capacity they’d have me. [laughs]
Were there any books or poets or anything you were reading that inspired this record?
Someone had given me Black Music by Leroy Jones, which is a book of really interesting essays about jazz and the New York City jazz world and the ’60s. That was fire. And then there was—I’m actually looking at the books right now; I’m sitting in the library—Food of the Gods by Terrence McKenna was another one. It’s about plants, specifically mushrooms, but also like tobacco, sugar, cotton, and how these built the world from the jump. How they built empires across the world. It’s fascinating stuff, all these really interesting connections between plants and empire, which is really tight. It’s really, really good. It’s weird, I think I got older and probably stopped reading less fiction and more nonfiction, but there’s one fiction that I pick up occasionally—it’s called Black Jesus and Other Superheroes by Venita Blackburn; it’s a book of short stories and they’re really sharp, really clever. woods actually let me borrow it. I just haven’t given it back to him yet.
Speaking of language and writing, I know everyone uses the word elliptical to talk about your lyrics, but that’s just a great word for it—these little vignettes of feeling and thought that are almost strung together to create this associative way of thinking. I think a lot about how nothing exists in a vacuum, and how that’s especially true of language; you can take any two words and smash them together and there will still be an association for someone with them, even if they’re completely unrelated.
For sure. My writing process is pretty phrase-based for that reason. I used to always be the person that would have a little pad and a pen everywhere I went; I’d just ride the trains and think of things and write something down. Now it’s on the phone, but it’s still the same thing. Like there might be a note page just full of random phrases, ideas, observations, and all of those become prompts. I go back to them and it’s like, “Hmm, I like the way that sounds.” And then it takes off from there.
Have you ever found new associations and new meanings have emerged over time out of songs you’ve already written?
Yeah, I started to notice that after I Told Bessie came out a few years ago. A while later, after maybe some time had passed, some of the songs definitely took on new meanings. I was writing about what I might have been going through in life, but sometimes, in hindsight, it feels like I was writing a message to myself in the future from that record. Somehow it’s speaking to me in the now-future, the present. It’s hitting me and it’s feeding me. Like, how could that be? I honestly don’t know. But the words were able to do that. The music was able to do that.
Was there a particular song that evoked that for you?
“Impasse” was definitely one—ironically produced by Sebb Bash, actually—and “Old Magic” was another. Those two in particular somehow spoke to, like, the future self. It’s odd, because in the moment, I was cool with the songs and I liked them, but it really wasn’t until a while later that the impact was felt.
Obviously, as you said, I Guess U Had To Be There isn’t the first time you’ve worked with Sebb, but this is the first full album that you’ve ever done with him. What changed or accumulated in the relationship that made this the right time for a complete project together?
I think everything sort of cleared up. Between me and woods, it’s been a pretty steady stream of things since 2020—it’s like group records, solo records, group records, solo records. I feel like we’ve had things organized in a particular way, and now things finally just opened up. It just made sense. It was actually woods’ idea for the record to actually happen. I was cool with just making one off here and one off there, but he was like, “Yo, you should just do a full record with Sebb Bash.” And I was like, “Wait, that makes sense.” I’m easily persuaded these days. [laughs]
Which came first for you, the idea for the album, or the collaboration itself?
It started with the collaboration. We started just making things, and then I just had to figure out, like, where I was going with it—like, what was actually happening there. You know, we opened this conversation talking about places and the history of places, and I think that’s where the record was really rooted from. That’s where it started. It took off in another direction, but I was just living and walking around Brooklyn, thinking about New York and what’s happened—all the different histories in these new places that people may not have any idea about. That’s where it all came from, just trying to explain the significance of events or places—of past things, really—to people who have no idea. It’s really difficult to do, honestly. And somehow I felt like Sebb Bash’s beats, the way that they’re constructed, the way that they’re structured, it just felt like that to me, because it feels old school. It feels like old school boom-bap, but also not at all. It feels like something that I might not even be able to describe, a retrofuture sort of a thing. There’s an uncertainty about it that I really like, because it feels like fertile ground to do anything, really. Anything can happen here, and I like that feeling.
Talk to me about the sonic universe of this album. Do you see it mimicking that kind of retrofuture New York you were talking about?
I think that’s what it became. I’m here in 2026 making this thing, but we’re making music that’s based off things that were already made 50 years ago, sampling things from years and years ago. I want to reverse-engineer the sensation that people might have had in the ’60s the very first time they put their hands on a synthesizer. The first time you experience a sound, what does that feel like? So I’m dealing with that and trying to bring it into 2026. And funnily enough, some of those very early sounds and techniques that people were using 50 and 60 years ago still sound fresh today, especially when you play it for people who still have no idea what’s happening. I love that. And, of course, Sebb is a DJ first, so he has a pretty unique ear for certain sounds. But for me, it’s always about pushing in new directions and trying to make something that’ll make people say, like, “What the fuck? What was that?” The goal is confusion. [laughs]
You’ve talked before about “arrogant listeners” and the desire to understand a song immediately as it’s presented to us, which I think is very true, especially in this day and age, with the short attention spans and online brainrot of it all. Is that where this desire to confuse comes from, for you? To force people to sit with that confusion?
I think so. It’s hard, because people’s attention spans are what they are and people pay attention to what they want. I’m not sure how we combat that, exactly, but I am very interested in using confusion as a way to engage. I’m really into using suggestion and tempo and rhythm to tap in, in a way. And if you’re confusing listeners, that means you’ve got their attention—they have to actually sit and process what’s happening. But confusion on its own isn’t enough; like, you’ve got their attention right there, now. The question then becomes what you do with it.
I mean, I’ve always been curious about music. I’m not ashamed to say I got into a group like Throbbing Gristle or Psychick Youth as a grown person. When YouTube first came out in 2008 or whenever that was, I was suddenly exposed to all sorts of footage of concerts and of recordings, things I’d never heard of. And when I found that, I realized, like, “Oh, they were dealing with the same thing as well—the psychology of the mind, and using music as a way to intrude.” Obviously, they took a very militaristic approach to their ideas: the messaging and the propaganda, the wanting to jump into your mind and feed you this sort of thing. But I definitely took inspiration from how they got down with that. I’m still trying to figure out my ways, though. It’s a process, I think.
If I Guess U Had To Be There is trying to feed listeners in that sense, what kind of fullness do you hope that they feel after?
Honestly? I’m not really sure what I want them to feel. Because this record, for me, was a lot of pure delight in the craft of rapping and the craft of emceeing. It’s different from an Armand Hammer record for me, where things tend to be more rooted conceptually and sometimes things feel a little bit more heavy. I’m not saying I was taking it easy or anything on this one, but conceptually speaking, a lot of it was more me falling back into classic rapper braggadocio and really just loving being a rapper, straight up, which is a space I haven’t inhabited this purely in a while. It was just a fun thing to do. You know?
There’s one song on there that I think is pretty grounded in a heavier, more conceptual way—”Parental Advisory,” the last song on the record, which is about, like, corporal punishment and shit. When I was working on the record, it felt like it needed some kind of touch point, and there was nowhere else but the end of the record to add that to—especially thinking about the next thing that I do, like, taking off from that point.
Oh, interesting. Do you think of records a little bit like a relay race, then? Where the final song is almost a baton pass in a way, tapping off and handing it over to the next album?
Yeah. Listening to the record from top to bottom and then looping it up, I think there’s a logic in that. But then thinking forward to the next thing, and using the ending as a simultaneous beginning of a new thing, has always really interested me.
There is something pleasure-based about this album, too, in a way that there really wasn’t in a record like REVELATOR. It feels somewhat rare to come across that as a predominant theme in music these days, given how grim the world around us often feels right now. How did you land on that as a throughline?
Pleasure-based is a good way to put it. Enjoyment, celebrating your wins. More victories. There’s a lot going on out here, and there’s a lot that can take you down and distract you, so of course it’s important to be aware of these things and to work against them where we can. But it’s equally important to celebrate—celebrate ourselves, celebrate our people. Saying who we are, standing up for who we are, being proud of who we are. I think that when people say a word like braggadocio, it has all sorts of these maybe-negative connotations, but that’s not really how I view it. I think, inherently, it’s just standing and saying who you are in the face of a system that tells you that you’re not those things.
There’s a sort of rebellion inherent in the act of publicly enjoying who you are, especially when the “you” you are is someone you’re told you should be ashamed of or guilty for—and that’s such a fundamental part of rap itself, too.
Exactly. Like, that’s what rap was rooted in. You think of the origins of rap, and that’s exactly it. It came out of the rubble; they’re on the mic anyways. And if you listen to what they’re saying, it’s like, they didn’t have an incredible time, obviously. People often forget about that when they’re talking about the “grabbing my dick” braggadocio of it all—like, maybe if we saw that rinky-dink community center somewhere in a park, the burnt-out buildings and shit, it might offer a greater context. It’s all about standing up in the face of all that; about saying “I’m here.”
Totally. This is making me think of your last album with woods, Mercy, particularly the question on “Dogeared”: “What is the role of a poet in times like these?” Is this kind of celebration a part of the answer for you?
Yeah, at least to a small degree. Another part of that, of course, would be to tell the truth about our world. I think it all factors in. There are so many different parts of ourselves as humans, as artists. And like, yeah, I’m definitely celebrating tonight, but then tomorrow, I’m gonna get up and tell you how fucked up things are, and then the next day, I’m gonna get some people who think the same way as I do and we’re going to try and figure something out to make it better. To make our lives better, our kids’ lives better, our communities better. It’s all part of the whole.
I mean, I think you see that even just looking I Guess U Had To Be There and REVELATOR next to each other, the pleasure and celebration of the former with the frustration and the anger of the latter side-by-side. It’s so interesting to me that you worked on them at the same time yet kept them so separate. Do you find it’s helpful for you to distinguish between those two emotional headspaces rather than mesh them together more?
I think I kind of enjoy the separation. For me, the one goal in making a record—if there’s any at all, really—would be to push myself to do something different or new, in whatever way possible. That might be narratively, it might be with production choices, it might be working with multiple producers versus a single producer or something. This was obviously the single producer record. I’m always going to have something that sticks out as different, though. I’m not very interested in doing the same thing again. So I think that I’m always looking towards differences rather than similarities—I prefer separation over merging in general, I think. Maybe one day I’ll look back at this and disagree. I just haven’t gotten to that point just yet.
What’s the next “push” that you’re particularly interested in pursuing? Do you have a new way to challenge yourself already in mind going forward?
Solo-wise, no, not at the moment. But that’s probably because Armand Hammer hasn’t stopped writing since Mercy was released, funny enough. We already have an album’s worth of material, which is insane, because we’ve never actually worked that fast.
What made it so speedy this go-around?
Honestly, it might just be the times that we’re living in. Everything is so upside down. There’s almost too much to write about. But for whatever reason, yeah, woods and I have just kind of been on a tear. The next record is yet to be determined, but we’re trying to line some things up already.
Speaking of separation and also of Armand Hammer, how do you think about the relationship between your solo voice versus your Armand Hammer voice? Do they feel distinct to you, or is it more fluid?
I know I’m kind of going back on what I just said [laughs], but I think it’s probably more fluid than people might assume. Working in a group is easier because you’re literally doing half the work. That’s the main difference, honestly—it’s not just all me, and that’s something I need to keep in mind. I have to consider someone else in the situation, which is actually a great way to live, both art-wise and in life in general. It makes it easier, because you can gear down a bit, but it also just makes you better. It’s a lot more conversation. And with conversation, good conversation, so many ideas sprout. I think that’s part of why I like working with a group in general; it’s always been more prolific for me than my solo output. At this point, I’m pretty sure we’ve made more Armand Hammer records than ELUCID solo records, and that’s just because of our chemistry.
At what point in your friendship with woods did you guys realize, like, “Oh shit, we really have something here”?
To be honest, the first night we were in the studio. I swear, it was just like, “Okay, we should just do this again next week, right?” [laughs] It was so weird. It was so weird! Man, it was just easy. Like, the first day I really hung out with woods in his apartment, he was smoking ribs in the stove—which you’re not supposed to do. [laughs] And we just talked about, like, Raekwon and Ghostface for hours. It was just, like, “Oh, my brother.“
How did the ribs turn out?
Oh, the ribs were incredible. He’s an amazing cook. I gotta say, that was a clue. All the best rappers are also great cooks. I don’t know if you knew that, but I’m telling you. All the great rappers are great cooks. Every single one of them. I haven’t been let down yet.
But, yeah, the first time I met woods… I had already done a bunch of solo things, just self-released on Bandcamp or whatever. I’d worked with other groups in the past too, but I had always sort of felt like a person apart, like an outsider—like, “Does anybody really understand what I’m trying to do here, where I’m trying to go with this?” It was a little bit of an outcast feeling. I thought that that was just kind of how it had to be. But then I met woods. And the thing about woods is that he’s definitely a strange person. [laughs] But so am I! And then once we made music, it was just, like, “Oh, shit.” Like, it doesn’t feel so strange anymore. I found someone who was strange like I was, so how could we be strange? We’re not strangers anymore. How could we be?
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
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