---
title: "Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘Tabula Rasa’ with Armand Hammer runs 4:11 of his 24-minute 2022 album"
url: https://badiyaa.com/earl-sweatshirt-tabula-rasa-armand-hammer/
published: 2026-11-10T22:40:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-10T22:40:00+00:00
section: Entertainment
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘Tabula Rasa’ with Armand Hammer runs 4:11 of his 24-minute 2022 album

Earl Sweatshirt's "Tabula Rasa" with Armand Hammer was the second single from Sick!, his 24-minute 2022 album on Tan Cressida and Warner Records.

Earl Sweatshirt’s album *Sick!* lasts exactly 24 minutes, and one song takes up more than a sixth of it. “Tabula Rasa,” his collaboration with the New York duo Armand Hammer, runs 4 minutes and 11 seconds, the second-longest of the record’s 10 tracks, and it is the only cut on which Earl hands the floor to two rappers at once.

The song came out as a single on December 10, 2021, the same day the album itself was announced. It was the second of three advance tracks, after “2010” on November 19 and before “Titanic” on January 7, 2022. *Sick!* followed on January 14, 2022, through Earl’s Tan Cressida imprint and Warner Records.

## Who Armand Hammer are

Armand Hammer is billy woods and Elucid. The pair formed the duo in 2013 and released the mixtape *Half Measures* and the album *Race Music* that year. Woods also runs the label Backwoodz Studioz, which he founded in 2002 and which later signed Elucid. Woods is known for keeping his face hidden in publicity photos and has never revealed his birth name.

That makes “Tabula Rasa” a meeting between a major-label release and one of underground rap’s most self-reliant camps. The credits show it: the song is written by Earl (Thebe Kgositsile), Elucid and Billy Woods, along with Xenophon Yialias and Thaniil Theoharis, and produced by Theravada and Rob Chambers, with Earl credited as a recording engineer.

## The record around it

Earl described the album as a “humble offering of 10 songs recorded in the wake of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns.” Critics took it well: *Sick!* holds a Metacritic score of 85 from 17 reviews. It peaked at No. 80 on the main US albums chart and No. 38 in New Zealand.

The guest list is short. Besides Armand Hammer, only Zelooperz appears as a featured artist, on “Vision,” and Na-Kel Smith adds vocals to “Titanic.” The Alchemist produced the opener “Old Friend” and “Lye.”

## A timeline of the three-way connection

- **2013:** billy woods and Elucid form Armand Hammer.

- **2021:** Armand Hammer and the Alchemist release *Haram*; in December, “Tabula Rasa” arrives as a *Sick!* single.

- **2022:** *Sick!* is released on January 14.

- **2023:** Earl and the Alchemist release the joint album *Voir Dire*.

- **2025:** Armand Hammer and the Alchemist reunite for *Mercy*.

Read that way, “Tabula Rasa” sits in the middle of a small, tight circle of artists who keep returning to one another. The Alchemist links all three; he has also turned up on mainstream records lately, producing “Ruby Rosary” with J. Cole for A$AP Rocky, whose [album Don’t Be Dumb opened its second disc with Shroom Clouds](https://badiyaa.com/asap-rocky-shroom-clouds-dont-be-dumb-disc-2/). For more new releases and catalog deep dives, see our [Entertainment section](https://badiyaa.com/category/entertainment/).

Nearly five years after its release, “Tabula Rasa” still sits at track five of 10, the exact midpoint of the album, with Armand Hammer’s 2025 album *Mercy* its most recent follow-up in the same circle.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Sick! (Earl Sweatshirt album)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick!_(Earl_Sweatshirt_album))

- [Wikipedia: Billy Woods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Woods)

*Image: Eli Watson, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*