It began, as these things sometimes do, at the end. Late last year, billy woods and Elucid began working on what would become “if we must die,” a sardonic yet deadly serious collage of ShotSpotter microphones hidden on lampposts, bones frozen in limbo at the La Brea Tar Pits, and serpentine catheters spilling out of naked emperors. The title came from the Claude McKay poem—a suggestion from woods’s English scholar mother—an excerpt of which would eventually open the record. According to woods, it’s the only time a project of his has ever been catalyzed by a song that he knew, from its inception, would serve as its finale.
That looping nature is of a piece with the thematic concerns explored on Snakes & Ladders, the new Armand Hammer album that was surprise-released late last night. Shortly after writing “if we must die,” the MCs gave themselves a strict deadline, completing the LP well before the snow had melted in New York. “I’m always all about methodology,” woods told me a few weeks ago, “so I was like, ‘Let’s have that be our thing. We’re going to record in this moment about everything that we’re feeling right now and that’s going on right now’” in the country. And as Elucid explains, much of what’s going on in the country is familiar American evil, looped up as if on a sampler, the concentric circles completing quicker and quicker by the minute.
What follows is a track-by-track breakdown of the 15 songs leading up to “if we must die,” the road to an end which is also the beginning.
1. Deadbolts [prod. clipping.]
As an intro, this is so patient and peaceful. There are the running themes of cooking, family, parenting, but there’s danger lurking outside.
Elucid: I think the production dictated where it ended up on the tracklist. Like you said, it is very patient. It feels pleasant on the surface, but there’s certain sounds in there that kind of point at something a little darker. The slice-of-life thing that’s happening in between all this travel and tour, just savoring those moments. And while we’re at home, we can protect, we can just soak in and lock in the family—but right outside the door, it could be a completely different reality at any point in time.
How do you guys get the “Daddy, are you happy?” audio?
Elucid: Just hanging out with my four-year-old. I have a nine-year-old and a four-year-old. The nine-year-old is super obsessed with recording himself. He’s like a fake streamer. He’s not on any platform, but he’ll just have his iPod and be recording things. My four-year-old said it one day and I was just struck. It was one of those things that kind of knocked me down. It was like, yeah, I am, but the fact that he could ask me that question… is he sensing that I’m not? It just made me pause. We were making the song that week or something. It was very close in time. I asked him to repeat it again, just to get it on record.
2. Send For Me [prod. Kenny Segal]
When I heard this beat—
billy woods: Kenny’s in the car if you’re planning to talk shit about him.
Yeah, I was going to say it’s terrible. No, I was telling woods the other day that if I didn’t have the production credits, I would think this album was by one or two producers. It’s very wintery to me, but there are these warm, analog sounds. This one sounds like flipping through basic cable channels.
Kenny Segal: I’m not talented enough, like Q-Tip, to do a real needle drop for that long, but it just sounded tight. So I looped it up and then it just kind of flowed from there. But that track’s cool because it’s just literally one track in Ableton. There’s no extra stuff at all. It’s just chopped up needle drops on that record.
The verses, especially Chaz’s, feel like that, too: a bunch of ideas roped together in a way that keeps ratcheting up the momentum.
billy woods: With this one, I don’t think there was a discussion beforehand. This is definitely one where Chaz picked a beat and I was like, “Cool.” And then I think you just caught a ridiculous flow on that.
Elucid: Yeah, I did. But yeah, it was just like the chaos of that beat—or, it’s not really chaotic, but there’s something very unorthodox, obviously. I had never rapped on some one-drop type beat, and that’s just classic hip-hop in its purest form to me. I just kind of ran with that sort of improv energy. The scarabs and glyphs on Bushwick part, those are actual scarabs and glyphs on the temple on Bushwick Avenue. There’s something really beautiful about the sounds in there and I was trying to match up with the energy.
billy woods: A lot of that stuff felt... I mean, I can’t speak for you. But it felt very stream-of-consciousness, push-and-pull with the beat. I definitely remember getting it and being like, “Whoa, the flow is crazy and it’s just so many images and visions.” It was like a serious vibe and I was thinking, “OK, what am I going to do?” And I feel like my verse was really kind of about... In some ways it starts off with talking about politics. And by that I don’t mean elections or whatever, but politics as an ideology and politics at an intersection with religion a little bit. And then really my verse is really about the end of the, I don’t know, Black revolutionary era that starts with the Panthers and stuff in the ‘60s and intensifies in the ‘70s.
And then you have groups that were still active as sort of underground revolutionaries, although by then it’s like, that part of the struggle seemingly is over. I’m talking into the ‘80s. And there’s a specific Brink’s robbery in 1981. [Ed.- At this point, woods takes out his phone to verify a few details—it was members of the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Communist Organization—but is interrupted by “AI trying to sell me a home-security system.”] Mutulu Shakur is involved and they end up killing this Black police officer. And everybody involved eventually went to prison, or was killed. And I was just sort of thinking about operating at the end of… the war is over, but you’re still going. Maybe you haven’t realized it yet.
You have the “graying Japanese soldiers” line.
billy woods: Yeah. It’s like, looking back in retrospect, what is going to come from robbing this Brink’s truck in 1981? [laughs] The window for whatever revolution was imagined has been closed. Reagan has probably just been elected. But a lot of these people were already on the run and stuff in the ‘‘70s. And then I felt like that tied into some of the things that we were exploring about the contemporary moment.
3. Lock Out/Tag Out [prod. Sebb Bash]
There are a lot of moments on this record where you guys are rapping on, if not different beats altogether, very different parts of one beat’s arrangement, and I think the album plays very briskly in large part because of that.
billy woods: I think that’s just how it played out, to be honest. that’s kind of how it played out. On Mekala Session and Petter Eldh’s beat for “Incidentals,” that’s how they sent it to us, that’s how we got it. And then there were others where, like with “Lock Out/Tag Out,” we asked Sebb Bash, “Oh, we like this. Can it also be this?” And Sebb was like, “Yeah, OK. I can go in there and create a switch and all of that.” So I don’t think we had that as an idea for the album structure, but on that particular song, it did come about that way.
How early on did you feel like you guys had zeroed in on a specific sound palette for this album?
Elucid: I don’t think we really had that intention to begin with. It was really just about collecting the beats that would hit the hardest. We have so many different producers, but like you said, it sounds like it could come from one or two different people. Maybe that’s just our ear at this point, just being able to lock in what really works well with our voices and the beats allow for us to convey whatever we need to.
billy woods: Yeah, I don’t think so either. I would give a caveat though, which is that when we started with the idea, there was a phase where we were like, “Oh, maybe we do something with Kenny and Human Error Club.” But then it also started to be like, “Well, the pace that we’re trying to work at…” and it just seemed less likely. But ultimately Kenny was very involved in this album, so even if his name is not on every track, he definitely touched a lot of different things and also at certain points was an intermediary in dealing with some of the producers.
4. Jet Magazine [prod. Kara-do & Mekala Session]
I saw it on the tracklist and I was like, “Well, that’s a Chaz title.”
billy woods: No, that was me! That’s a good bet. No, not this one. That was me. There’s something really propulsive about the beat, and at the same time… I don’t know, man. Some of that shit Mickey’s doing feels like hip-hop and the ‘70s at the same time. When I think of Jet Magazine... It always felt like something from before. You know what I mean? It always felt like something that’s slightly outdated at the time that it was happening. And then yeah, there’s an energy to it that just made me feel like kind of ‘70s vibes.
Can you tell me how you then arrive at that specific vocal approach you’re taking at the beginning?
billy woods: This is one where Chaz picked a beat. To be honest, it was a beat I really liked, but not something I necessarily would have chosen—and it felt challenging. So I took my time writing it and trying to come up with a way to approach it and actually set the table. I remember us talking on the phone. An important thing to note here is there is no Armand Hammer record where we recorded more songs together in the same room than this one. It might be in the future, but there was not prior to this. But we were working at a steady clip, going to the studio weekly. And I called him and said, “What’s your verse like?” And he did it for me, and I was like, “Damn, that’s fire. I really just need to set the table properly here.” And so that was really my approach: trying to find something I could do that would work with the beat and lead into what he was doing. So it was a lot of sitting at my desk in trial and error.
5. Nightswim [prod. Kenny Segal]
Elucid: When we’re talking about capturing the moments, we’re just capturing America at its craziest. There are things that my grandparents have never seen in America that my kids are experiencing, the ways that shit is just playing out and just the absurdity of a lot of it—and also just the loop of it. It’s like the viciousness, the transparency of the viciousness, of the hate, of the evil that is America, and just the absurdity and surrealness of it all as it’s played out on the news and on our phones and in our face and we joke about it and we’re onto the next thing ten seconds later. I really wanted to convey that feeling within the verse. And shout out to Ministry. I had the “raw milk in the land of rape and honey” line on there because that’s just some right wing concern that I had been laughing at for a few months.
