Armand Hammer, the rap duo of ELUCID and billy woods, announces its eighth studio album, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, out September 29th via Fat Possum Records. Today, they have shared lead single “Trauma Mic” featuring Pink Siifu. The visual, which stars DJ Haram, billy woods and ELUCID, is co-directed by acclaimed actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, O Brother Where Art Thou) and his son Henry Nelson. Produced by DJ Haram, the duo’s visceral new track “snowballs,” Armand Hammer describes, “except instead of snow it’s a neodymium magnet cascading down a mountain of discarded pig iron.”

Alongside the news of its new album, Armand Hammer announces autumn and winter tour dates that will begin a few days after releasing its new album. The 28-date tour will begin on October 1st and run until the end of February, taking the album through North America and Europe. The duo is also announcing a free daytime show this Saturday, August 5th at Brooklyn’s Public Records, where fans will be able to hear select songs from the new album for the first time. Tickets for the tour are available HERE.

We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is an entirely different beast, incorporating live instrumentation and featuring an array of producers including JPEGMAFIA, EL-P, Kenny Segal, DJ Haram, Black Noi$e, Preservation, August Fanon, Steel Tipped Dove, Child Actor and Sebb Bash. Holding true to the sonic identity they’ve successfully cultivated since their 2013 debut, familiar faces like Pink Siifu, Moor Mother, and Curly Castro make contributions, while also bringing new and like-minded peers into the fold, with features from Junglepussy, Moneynicca (of Soul Glo) and Cavalier. Virtuoso jazz musician and celebrated composer Shabaka Hutchings shows up on flute, one of several musicians who sat down with ELUCID and celebrated engineer Willie Green for a jam session in 2022 that helped pour the foundation of this album.

Of his experience working on the album, ELUCID shares, “This sort of reverse engineering of talented players who met for the first time in the studio jamming to pre-recorded beats before splintering off into new directions. Being in the room quietly watching 4 people fumble around each other’s sonic worlds before finally locking into a solid groove was a clear and obvious magical moment for me.”

From the desk of Armand Hammer:

We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is a Midsummer’s night in Brooklyn, the stage busy with Gods old, new, and unborn, the orchestra pit thick with weed smoke. Memories, true and false, tangle like wires. Afrofuturists rewind analog answering machines. Brownstones line empty streets on quiet nights where even outside the Men’s Shelter, they pass cigarettes in silence. Street sweepers rattle the morning, broken hovercrafts sent from the past to do nothing at all. People move out of the building in the morning and move back in at dusk, excited to get settled in their old place. Dropped calls fall into the ether, the cracked mirror in your pocket is past warranty but not to worry, they have already mailed you a replacement.

Pre-order We Buy Diabetic Test Strips by Armand Hammer HERE