Shrines

About

Shrines is the fourth studio album by American hip-hop group Armand Hammer. It was released via Backwoodz Studioz on June 5, 2020. The album's cover is a photograph of an NYPD police officer about to tranquilize and capture the tiger Ming of Harlem. billy woods and E L U C I D toured Europe as Armand Hammer in 2019. While in Edinburgh, they started writing a song titled "Bitter Cassava" and made demos. They recorded the song after they got back to New York City. Once a few things were figured out, they started work on Shrines. The album wasn't supported by any singles, but the track "Charms" was released in tandem with the album, alongside a music video. They also uploaded a BTS "making-of" for the "Charms" video. On July 9, they released a combined video for "Solarium" and "The Eucharist", which are the two solo cuts off of the album. Eden Tizard of The Quietus stated that "Shrines sees a new kind of clarity takes shape, a departure from 2018's monolithic Paraffin." He added: "Where production there was thick and volatile like boiled tar, Shrines is comparatively spacious, the density of the bars even more pronounced." Tom Breihan of Stereogum described Shrines as "an album about people trying to build utopias on perilous and unstable piles of garbage." He stated that "Armand Hammer take in the poison-cloud existential joke of a world around them, and they answer that joke with images as poetic as the tiger at the window.

via Last.fm

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