ELUCID's New Workout Plan

Like many men on the so-called wrong side of 40, ELUCID understands the value of exercise.

Beyond the craven looksmaxxing profiles and dubious peptide promos influencing younger people to get or stay fit, an internet-amplified emphasis on strength training and other forms of movement is being all-but weaponized against a comparatively maturing demographic at present. Then, of course, there's never enough protein being consumed to nourish the sore muscles, no sleep schedule sufficiently consistent to stave off hypertension. For those with grey in their hair, the promise of longevity serves as dangled reward for maximizing all manner of metrics, as daunting as the tasks may seem.

"The body is deteriorating," ELUCID says with a relatable laugh. "It's fucking breaking down before our very eyes."

Fresh out of a workout and now seated in his car, the New York native known for intricate, verbose solo albums as well as ones with billy woods in the critically acclaimed duo Armand Hammer sees both the banality and the absurdity lurking within this aspect of culture. "Oh, you're 45? Now you got to start a bodybuilding career!"

He declares the nature of gyms themselves to be downright strange. As someone whose life and craft revolve around music the silence in these spaces especially unnerves him. "All you hear is breath," he says. "You just hear people inhaling and exhaling really loudly and machines. You get on a stair climber... to nowhere. A row machine to nowhere, a bike to nowhere, elliptical to no-fucking-where."

And still he finds phenomena there worthy of fascination, the unintended hypnotic and almost meditative qualities of working up a sweat. "People are locking into these grooves of repetition and whatever they got going on inside their heads. It's kind of amazing."

It's no surprise that one of contemporary hip-hop's deepest thinkers would offer up such a ruminative appraisal of something so commonplace and ubiquitous. But getting a glimpse into his thought process helps to explain how ELUCID's lyrics so consistently transcend even those of other elite emcees. He's long surpassed the rap tricks and gimmicks of entendre-stacking, punchline pugilism, and ample alliteration, instead showcasing a mastery of mystic styles on his latest album I Guess U Had To Be There. Indeed, it's the only album you'll hear this year–or, for that matter any year–that references Alien Sex Fiend, Lonnie Holly, and the Fine Young Cannibals.

"I'm thinking about what rhymes firstly, it's a rhythm thing," he says of his approach to writing. "But then it should connect to my memory and my experience. It's like stream of consciousness, but not really because it actually connects to the thought proceeding or the thought before." This isn't so much freestyling, a term that has become demonstrably looser than ever in modern hip-hop parlance and practice, as improvisation in the jazz tradition. In his terms, it's
"just minding the mind."

Returning to his longtime home of Backwoodz Studioz after a rather brief foray with Fat Possum (2023's Armand Hammer LP We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, 2024's REVELATOR), ELUCID does something here he'd not done on any of his prior solo albums: work exclusively with a single producer. Another man of a certain age, Swiss beatmaker Sebb Bash became known to ELUCID through The Alchemist, during the Los Angeles studio sessions for what became Armand Hammer's 2021 album Haram.

"Everything sounds good coming out of Alchemist's speakers; it's the most amazing sound system," he says. "He keeps playing these beats and everything that I'm responding to, the answer is, Sebb Bash made this." After he connected the two formally, the first publicly shared collaboration with Bash appears on ELUCID's 2022 album I Told Bessie with the track "Bunny Chow." The following year, they officially reunited for the Diabetic Test Strips standout "Switchboard," though work on a more substantial team-up was quietly underway.

"Funny enough, we started this record before REVELATOR, but we had to pause it," he says, "because contractually [REVELATOR] needed to be out by a certain date."