The Song "Doves" By Armand Hammer?!?!

I turned off We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the album that rap duo Armand Hammer had just released, about halfway through my first listen. It was a beautiful day in September and I had just started a four-hour roundtrip drive in Washington State, from my parents' house to SeaTac Airport and back. Playing this in the car is like playing Dem Franchize Boyz on earbuds, I thought to myself, switching to something more conducive to the evergreen trees and distant mountains that surrounded me.

Armand Hammer, comprising consummate detailsman billy woods and horizon-grasping orator E L U C I D, have made some of the most engrossing, unique rap music of the past decade. Starting with 2017's Rome, they're on a five-album streak of consistency that somehow never retreads ground. Listening to Armand Hammer is like stepping into a river.

I was a little surprised that their latest album wasn't hitting for me when I first turned it on, but I thought nothing of it. Wrong place, wrong time. Sometimes this phenomenon creates an itch that begs me to scratch it until the music clicks, other times it produces a sickly aura around the album art that pushes me away every time I scroll through deciding what to listen to. Although I tried We Buy Diabetic Test Strips a few more times last Fall, it fell into the latter camp. It's hard differentiating new downstream areas in Armand Hammer's discography from supposedly well-trodden sections upriver that still reveal new eddies and rapids with each listen. Even still, my indifference was more due to comparison than standalone evaluation. Both their previous album, 2021's Haram, and woods' May 2023 album Maps, are top-five considerations in my mental 2020s albums list.

This is all an excuse as to why Armand Hammer's February 2024 release "Doves" slipped past me. They announced the 9-minute single via all official channels, and it got written up on all of the music websites that I read, but I don't think I remember hearing about it. Maybe I did, and the words "We Buy Diabetic Test Strips outtake" turned me away at the door.

While scrolling Twitter on Wednesday, two days removed from a fresh Maps re-listen and two days ahead of seeing woods at Pitchfork Fest, I saw a tweet announcing a "Doves" maxi-single and I finally listened to it. Not halfway through the song, I ordered a vinyl copy.

As I pile on years spent as an obsessive music-listener, I find myself craving more surprises. I'm open-minded in the sense that I can find something to appreciate inside of most genres, and while the bulwarks that stand between me and the weirdest of the weird—harsh noise, musique concréte, etc.— may be crumbling, I still have a long way to go before I'm freebasing field recordings with the tame gateway drug of traditional pop structure behind me in the rearview. After all, Haram and Maps are the most accessible things that woods and ELUCID have ever released.

The better analogy is someone who keeps ramping up their kinks. Sure, they probably wouldn't turn down missionary if it was with the right person, but the only future experiences that are going live with them are the heretofore unseen, the unimaginable, perhaps even the dangerous.

~~

"Doves" is a deconstruction. woods and ELUCID rarely operate like Run-DMC or the Beastie Boys, finishing each others' lines or grabbing the mic mid-verse, but on Armand Hammer songs, their verses usually bump against each other. Here, they play disparate roles in service of a loose arc. The music, co-produced by frequent woods collaborator Kenny Segal and singer/guitarist Benjamin Booker, is minimal in theory—just a guitar, a piano, and noise manipulation—but it's all-encompassing, even oppressive, in practice. Like the only other composition that has served as inspiration for an entire newsletter this year, "Doves" is something I hesitate to call a "song."

The first segment belongs to Booker, whose solo music I absolutely need to check out after this. In a wispy, impressionistic way, he sings about time, love, and doves, introducing the song's themes without a trace of spoiler alerts for what's to come.

Three minutes in, I was wondering how woods' dense, decidedly unmelodic sensibility would be incorporated. The answer comes in the form of an extended, untethered rap verse. woods excels at finding improbable pockets in impenetrable music, and he gets into a groove over Segal and Booker's miasma in a way that no other active vocalist could. The way he operates on "Doves" recalls the select group of musicians that are able to make free jazz less daunting by chasing the twin flames of liberated expression and structural familiarity.

I always lean more towards woods' lucidity than ELUCID's deep-but-quicksilver stylings, but the latter's fit on "Doves" was more obvious from the start. There's no way he wasn't going to be the cleanup hitter here. His booming, raspy singing clarifies the song's massive scope, and once things slip into even more disorienting levels of abstraction in the last third, his distant vocals definitively prove that melodic, structural, and lyrical blurriness often offer starker truths than plain, paint-by-number artforms.

"Doves" is about mortality. (Most 2020s music that I've deemed worth my time is about mortality)

Booker's the only one to mention the titular bird by name, but in fewer words, he invokes all of its spiritual baggage. woods then pivots to more concrete territory, mostly focusing on the deeper significance of workaday minutia, but also zooming out: "Know it can slip away slow, or you can lose it all in a moment."

ELUCID gets straight-up biblical:

Someone here tonight
Won't hear that trumpet
What a privilege
What a joy
They sit among us
Someone here tonight
Won't feel death's sting
What a privilege

When the music deconstructs around him, so does his hopeful facade. He initially repeats the words "great day," but then begins asking, "Is it me?" The shift between the first and third iteration of this question confirm the subject matter. He's like Max von Sydow's knight in The Seventh Seal, initially greeting Death as an abstract wanderer before slowly realizing the reason that it appeared to him.

~~

After my initial "Doves" listen on the couch, I cued up We Buy Diabetic Test Strips while I grocery shopped and cooked. I was right: this is music for dodging people on the sidewalk, for looking down and noticing the interlocking patterns of escalators at the subterranean Target, for looking up and noticing how cloud banks parallel the elevated subway tracks. It's still got a long way before it becomes my favorite Armand Hammer album, but its grasp of unruly chaos made more sense to me.

Yesterday, I drove my dog to the dogsitter. Driving in New York is still weird as hell to me. When I put on "Doves," then some more Armand Hammer, I reconsidered my September 2023 opinions. I was driving under the elevated 7 train track, listening to "Slew Foot" from 2020's Shrines. I walk these blocks, I ride the train above, but I'd never driven here. I noticed how wide the road was, how the e-bikes that I fear as a pedestrian fear me as a motorist, how I was suddenly the driver that I regularly hate for blocking the crosswalk. Maybe Armand Hammer sounds best when I'm realizing how complicit I am in the things I bitch about every day.

I got home and saw a streak over Manhattan that looked like friendly Ghostbusters clouds. I cued up "Doves," craned my neck at the clouds directly above me, and wondered how much longer they'd get to stay in the sunlight than us poor bastards on the ground.

BOI (Best Of Inbox) #35

Bbyafricka & SURF GANG - "PARACHUTE"

Location: Inglewood/NYC // Genre: cloud R&B // RIYL: early SZA if Squadda B produced for her // From: HARD COPY, out now

Cold Gawd - "Gorgeous"

Location: Rancho Cucamonga, CA // Genre: heavy shoegaze // RIYL: Nothing, Cloakroom // From: I'll Drown On This Earth, out 8/30

Jessica Ackerley - "All of the colours are singing"

Location: NYC // Genre: free jazz // RIYL: Bill Orcutt, a hypothetical collaboration between Arthur Russell and The Durutti Column // From: All Of the Colours Are Singing, out 8/16

Juice Mazelee - "Pressure (B4 the Meal)"

Location: Chicago // Genre: neo backpack rap // RIYL: Blu, Vic Mensa, Freddie Gibbs at his chillest // From: Here Now N Forever, out now

Liam Benzvi Feat. Blood Orange - "Other Guys"

Location: NYC // Genre: tropical '80s pop // RIYL: "Everybody Wants to Rule The World" but make it queer // From: ...And His Splash Band, out 9/27

NOUN - "WANTED"

Location: Philly // Genre: all-ages basement show doom metal // RIYL: Screaming Females (this is singer/guitar god Marissa Paternoster's new reboot of her longstanding side project, and now she's got an incredible drummer alongside her) // From: WANTED/CONSUMED, out now

OsamaSon - "popstar"

Location: Charleston, SC // Genre: hyper-rap // RIYL:  Skaiwater, dollywood, midwxst

All Inbox Infinity picks are available in playlist form via Apple Music and Spotify.