You knew. As soon as those fucking disgusting chopped-off bloody pig heads showed up in your timeline, you knew. Less than a month ago, the announcement arrived up on Twitter: a title, a release date, those pig heads, “an album by Armand Hammer & The Alchemist.” No tracklist. No advance music. All that came later, bu...

For years, Armand Hammer have been making concussive, apocalyptic rap music about the problem of existing in a hostile world. Together and apart, New York rappers billy woods and Elucid make biting, vivid abstract-expressionist music that demands serious textual analysis. Last year, Armand Hammer released the excellent album Shrines, and both me...

There's at least some chance that Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist's Alfredo, while excellent, isn't the best Alchemist-produced rap album to come out in 2020. A few months before Alfredo, the Alchemist teamed up with the hardbitten Detroit rapper Boldy James, a longtime collaborator, and released a tense and entrancing LP of seen-it-all drug-rap...

It's beautiful out. That's one of the fucked up things. From all available evidence, we've been blessed with a nationwide wave of sunny spring-into-summer weather. At this point, I've seen dozens of videos of police beating and manhandling and pepper-spraying and tear-gassing demonstrators while wispy clouds drift lazily across clear blue skies....