Album Cover via ELUCID/Instagram
If reading novels as “research” for the novel he’s writing counted towards the actual writing of said book, Will Schube would have written so many books.
ELUCID’s music is haunted by regional, political, and personal history. His 2022 album, I Love Bessie, is a eulogy unearthed from family archives, a mournful tribute to his dear grandmother. He felt Bessie everywhere. She emerged as a spirit that navigated across his unrecognizably gentrified city and perched on his shoulder. The music was a way to speak to her, somehow.
The New York rapper told me in 2022: “I don’t know if you ever had those ideas that you kind of ignore…then one day…literally you can feel it, you can touch it and smell it.” Making a record about his grandmother wasn’t a choice he made but something that happened to him. ELUCID as conduit, summoner of ancestors.
It’s the role he also generally occupies in Armand Hammer, his group with billy woods — perhaps the best duo currently rapping. ELUCID is a mystic with a machine-gun voice. He’s possessive of omens found on the damp tiles of subway platforms. He sees stories in the eyes of bleary-eyed bodega clerks. On “I Keep A Mirror in My Pocket” from 2023’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, ELUCID sees what we’re being sold: “Please no chocolate ganache on the damn cake.” How much frosting does it take to cover up the taste of decay?
ELUCID decided to burn it all to the ground on 2024’s REVELATOR, a noxious post-punk, post-industrial, post-everything explosion that looks for hope in collapse. He imagines the dancing that will be done after imperialism’s last gasp — while mourning the toll this evil has wrought on multiple generations.
Bessie was the closest ELUCID got to seeing the great white light, deeply clarifying and utterly intoxicating but the sort of thing he only wanted to view once. REVELATOR is its counterpoint, less insular, angrier — a scream to protect the lives of this Earth. On “CCTV” he raps: “Bust through the walls/ To the victor spoils/ Even rebels gotta pause/ When blood spill so casually.” He seems to ask: How can those that inflict pain disassociate with such ease from the suffering they’ve created?
This is a metal album not in genre but in material, a world of brutalist buildings before that movie lead to a million perversions of the architectural concept. The drums explode because the world is blowing up; ELUCID growls and howls because there are only so many words for pain.
As we discuss in the below interview, he looked to Nine Inch Nails and Miles Davis to master the dynamics of REVELATOR. He recruited usual suspects August Fanon, The Lasso, and Child Actor to handle the beats, but drummer John Nellen and Irreversible Entanglements bassist Luke Stewart help build the identity this album claims its own. REVELATOR sounds like what Death Grips thought it was, but ELUCID is a generational MC and Ride did something…else. While there are bursts of 70s dub (“14.4”) and minimalist jazz trio compositions (“In The Shadow Of If”), the thrash and noise and angst is the real show.
While ELUCID has often favored reinterpreting lived experience through shrouded verses of poetry and elusive impressions, REVELATOR is tethered to the cold dead Earth, boots caked in mud and hands almost glowing with grime. He explained this tonal shift, saying: “This record is just frustration spitting back at the music. That’s what it felt like, kind of licking wounds, but also spitting back.” When they go low, knock ‘em to the damn ground.