Much of Elucid’s music, be it solo or in tandem, is about the politics of space—who gets to control it and why, how urban renewal threatens to displace those the system forced into poverty, the ways gentrification reinforces class warfare—and finding a sense of place in a broken world. His writing often echoes this: a beautiful thing can be in close proximity to a terrible one in his verses. And so much of that comes from living in one of America’s most densely populated cities, where obscene wealth and near destitution are sometimes only separated by a few blocks.

A Queens-raised New York lifer who now lives in East New York, Brooklyn, his music is agitated and unsettled, mirroring the constant state of his hometown. As gentrifiers push people out of their homes, he’s forced to reconcile with a changing city. “[Gentrification] is a wave, and I’ve watched it spread,” he says, as it begins to hit East New York, which was dubbed “gentrification’s last frontier” last year. He plays a game with his wife where they count the ever-increasing number of white people on the train. “I take pride in my city. I’ve always taken pride in my city. I be angry sometimes, I ain’t gon’ lie, but I feel like it’s gonna be what we make of it right now. [The city] is an unstoppable force of capitalism and I kinda threw my hands up with that. I don’t know what I can do; I don’t know if we have the economic power to really do what we want to do.” But he isn’t resigning himself when faced with these odds; instead, he has focused on cultivating his own safe spaces where he can.

In turn, his music has what he calls “an emphasis on community.” “Watching this whole wave has kind of brought me stronger to a lot of brothers and sisters,” he says. “It’s a new kind of a common ground, like a fictive kind of—not a kinship, but like something we can all agree upon, like we’re fighting against the same evil.” On that common ground, he found like-minded MCs Billy Woods and milo, with whom he forms Armand Hammer and Nostrum Grocers, respectively.

Each project’s sound is a reflection of these co-collaborators, their processes, and Elucid’s relationships with them. “Woods is more precise, very calculated. milo is a jazzy dude, less rehearsed and more improv. He’s really into freestyling, super off-the-cuff things, keeping mistakes in. That’s why I like working with both of those dudes: I need both of those things,” he says. But there are throughlines that carry throughout, across his work with both artists, despite some subtle differences between them. “I have the same conversations with both guys when we’re not together,” he says. “milo is utopian and optimistic, whereas Woods is dark and kinda like ‘fuck-it-all.’ And I have both of those inside of me. But the connecting points—wanting freedom, understanding the limitations of freedom, wanting power, understanding how power corrupts us—are the same. It’s all those things worked out in the balance.”

Elucid isn’t an oracle but he is always reading the signs. He anticipated Trump—just as he predicted Bloomberg years ago—even winning a bet with Billy Woods on election night. He didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election or in any recent local elections. (He hasn’t voted since the Obama re-election.) He believes America’s sociopolitical framework is broken and unfixable. “I don’t have faith in where we’re at politically,” he says. “Things are really going haywire it seems and people are still kicking that same your vote matters shit, and we’ve seen the votes are stolen and things are adjusted and shifted. I don’t know what to call it but I’m not involving myself in that. I’m really interested in building communities of like-minded folks. I really want to divorce from where we’re in—in the world and in this political sphere—and ideally, that’s my utopia.” His utopia is one of “freedom of thought” and upheaval. “I have faith in us as a people. I have faith that we can endure. I have faith that we can innovate. I have faith that we can build. Because we’ve been through worse. I still have faith in us. I don’t have faith in the current system. I want to see these systems knocked down. Let’s start fresh. Let's build a new one.”