Opening with a huge, twangy sample lifted from a late-60s jam record looping lazily, billy woods and ELUCID trade bars with an untethered cadence that you find yourself nodding along to but not in anything close to 4/4. The production from The Alchemist leans into dream logic with murky, drifting instrumentals that feel like half-remembered moods. The sound palette is hazy, saturated and surreal, flirting with a Lynchian atmosphere built from smeared samples.

This musical dreaminess is matched by a jester-like energy from woods and ELUCID, rarely staying on a single theme for long, ricocheting from image to image with sarcasm and amused detachment. With a cracked grin, both MCs are enjoying the freedom of having no fixed anchor, with a fluid and relaxed delivery, observing the darkness rather than living inside it. Nil by Mouth drifts by almost beatless, whilst Dogeared feels like a melancholy but comforting end-credits sequence. Crisis Phone is a standout rolling dubstep pulse that rumbles like classic Kode9, heavy, physical and restrained with treble elements shimmering eerily above, uneasy without being aggressive. Mercy feels relaxed in its own strangeness, deeply experimental hip-hop that moves through abstract and murky environments. woods and ELUCID aren’t concerned with accessibility, the album is too intellectually dense, moving at a bewildering speed that’s loaded with wit and intent, but slips by too fast to be decoded. Meaning is blurry, as their voices bat lines back and forth with the ease of a tennis rally. There’s too much happening to unpack it all, and the point is to experience the album rather than to solve it. Every bar is packed with internal logic, and the cumulative effective is hazy and narcotic, leaving you in a fog of images and half-grasped ideas. With words that function as texture as much as text, Armand Hammer are perfecting their language.