The Best Song of 2024
Lucca Swain / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
“It’s cold again,” begins pseudonymous New York MC Billy Woods’ verse on “Doves,” hip-hop duo Armand Hammer’s 2024 bonus track, a follow-up to last year’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. For Woods, it’s all bleak, his trademark matter-of-fact tone now punctuated by a potent sardonic edge. The end times materialize themselves in the blase: piles of letters unsent, ill omens carved into trees, broken attic stairs leading to nowhere.
Woods finds his mind transmogrified into a metaphysical fallout shelter, constantly at threat of being busted wide open by, “something hiding in the vents, ductwork, or worse.” But “Doves” is not confined solely to the mental space of one man. Because for Armand Hammer, which Woods makes up half of alongside fellow producer-MC Elucid, the Rapture may as well already be ongoing.
“Doves” is 2024’s bleakest song, in addition to being its best, a nine-minute ambient, industrial, post-hip-hop, post-whatever monolith that may be about death or religion or the interminable passing of time.
But does it matter? Little other music this year is as haunting, as thought-provoking, as necessary. It captures urban decay and mortality in ghostly groans, in the broken buildings and frost-laden streets of New York that permeate the soul-wrenching montages of its music video, in Billy Wood’s desperate plea for the listener to “save yourself.” Benjamin Booker’s verse that opens the first third of the track comes out as little more than a wounded moan, and yet every time I hear him eke out the words, “I was only a dove/Only in love,” in that impossibly melancholic tone, I find myself gasping for air.
The track’s instrumental skeleton really isn’t much more than ambient noise and airy guitar strums – strung together by former Woods collaborator Kenny Beats, alongside Booker and Elucid – but what the three manage to do with it is nothing short of remarkable. It’s everything: Biblical allegory, apocalyptic fury, an uncategorizable, lovelorn masterpiece of the hip-hop avant-garde. Even as the track fades out in a wash of noise, Elucid can’t help but get the last word in; “What a privilege/ Someone here tonight/ Won’t hear that trumpet” he sings with apparent sarcasm in his voice, not long before being swallowed by the unstoppable wall of sound, his words lost to to the unceasing flow of time now and forever.