5.6.2024
Mach-Hommy Announces Details and Release Date For #RICHAXXHAITIAN, Arriving May 17th, Just Before Haitian Flag Day
The Enigmatic Artist Collaborates With KAYTRANADA and 03 Greedo on the Album’s Title Track, “#RICHAXXHAITIAN”
The Acclaimed Haitian-American Artist Examines the Past, Present, and Future Through the Lenses of His Two Homelands with His Ambitious Upcoming Album, Featuring Guest Appearances From Black Thought and Roc Marciano, Among Others, and Production from Kaytranada, Conductor Williams, Quelle Chris, Sadhu Gold, and More
“#RICHAXXHAITIAN” single artwork
The Rundown:
Mach-Hommy moves through the industry like a ghost, keeping his government name private, hiding his face behind a Haitian flag bandana, and eschewing all forms of social media. Though he’s mostly content to dwell in the shadows, Mach knows exactly when to emerge and make his presence felt. On his next album #RICHAXXHAITIAN, out May 17th, Mach not only confronts the ills that have long afflicted Haiti, but empowers any entity in confrontation with existing power paradigms. While switching between the colloquialisms of the Vailsburg section of Newark, Haitian Kreyol, and taunting French lullabies, he extends the richness of his culture to empower the listener and evoke their imagination for a brighter future.
Today, the prolific Mach-Hommy “#RICHAXXHAITIAN,” the album’s title track, produced by GRAMMY-winning Haitian-Canadian artist KAYTRANADA and featuring L.A. street legend 03 Greedo. Following in the footsteps of “$payforhaiti,” Mach’s fan-favorite 2022 collaboration with KAYTRANADA, “#RICHAXXHAITIAN” is an uptempo, house-inflected heatrock, featuring an interpolation of Afrobeat legend Odion Iruoje’s “Ikebe” and boasting some of the densest lyrics, fastest rhyming, and most engaging melodies of Mach’s long career. 03 Greedo proves to be the perfect flexing partner, his melodic flow percolating over KAYTRA’s instrumental as he struggles to choose between the numerous Lambos in his garage.
Stream “RICHAXXHAITIAN”: https://too.fm/zqqamx7 (Live now on Apple and Audiomack. Keep an eye out for the song today on Mach’s page on other DSPs)
#RICHAXXHAITIAN album artwork
About #RICHAXXHAITIAN:
Arriving just before Haitian Flag Day on May 18th, Mach sees #RICHAXXHAITIAN as a small musical panacea for his homeland amidst poverty and political strife, combating the public’s negative images of Haiti by focusing on the greatness and prosperity of the country’s diaspora, of which Mach is a proud citizen. The album examines the country’s rich history as the world’s first free Black republic, and emphasizes its potential, imagining the nation’s possible future as an exemplar of Black cultural and economic excellence. #RICHAXXHAITIAN is Mach’s first solo album since 2021, when he released his massively-acclaimed albums Balens Cho and Pray For Haiti, the latter a critics’ list mainstay of which a hefty portion of the proceeds benefited Mach’s fund to promote social, economic, and technological growth in the titular country. #RICHAXXHAITIAN is the final album in a “Tetralogy” that started with Mach’s 2016 breakout album H.B.O. (Haitian Body Odor), and continued with the two 2021 records.
#RICHAXXHAITIAN draws from a variety of musical styles, moving between pre-rock & roll samples and futuristic electronic music with ease and panache. Mach-Hommy welcomes collaborators new and old to flesh out the sound, including Grammy-winning producer Conductor Williams, along with Multi-Grammy-winning producer KAYTRANADA, Grammy-nominated producer Quelle Chris, longtime associate Sadhu Gold, and many others. Mach also welcomes an eclectic array of guest vocalists, all of whom are immensely respected in their own right. The dense lyricist shares the mic with a group of peers and kindred spirits, including the legendary Black Thought (who listed Mach as one of his favorite current emcees), underground king Roc Marciano, L.A. street hero 03 Greedo, Afro-Futurist R&B/jazz luminary HEPHZIBAH, and Buffalo-based activist/singer/songwriter Drea D’Nur, plus frequent collaborators like Your Old Droog, Tha God Fahim, and Big Cheeko.
“All the people I worked with are people who I know and who I’ve worked with before,” says Mach. “I like to deal with like-minded creatives. Even if the person has their own panache or je nais se quoi that they bring to the table, there has to be a thread of commonality between us in order for the work to sustain. And not to mention they’re fucking talented, exceptionally gifted at what they do, and the ear that they possess.”
Attempting to transform our modern dystopia into a utopia using only his rhymes and force of will, Mach-Hommy invites us all, from his most loyal investors to his freshest fans, to imagine a brand new world. With #RICHAXXHAITIAN, that seemingly impossible dream creeps ever closer.
“I’ve always wanted to rep for Haiti and the cultural and intellectual richness we’ve provided the world,” he says. “From our musical styles like kontradans that have influenced world music, our natural resources which provide so much raw material for so many important advancements in technology, our thinkers that pioneered philosophical movements and Black pride, and our spiritual leaders who kept the religious traditions of Guinea alive and intact, the religious traditions of Ayiti….”
Stay tuned for much more about #RICHAXXHAITIAN in the coming days.
Photo credit: Manfred Baumann
Please contact Michelle or Kevin for more info.
The Background:
Defying convention and transcending interpretation as he blazes his own path through the music industry, Mach-Hommy is a true original. The prolific Haitian-American artist can be hard to track, physically and metaphysically: his face and birth name remain a mystery, he does not use social media, and his Machography spans more than 50 albums, some only available in limited-edition physical formats, some gone forever as limited-edition digital releases. When they’re out in the world, Mach exhibits them like high art, selling them at prices that reflect their true value, not the artificially deflated value imposed upon music by the streaming age. Mach-Hommy’s incisive lyrics probe the frailty of the human condition, arranged into alchemical verses that draw instant rap hands from even the most-seasoned hip-hop head (“…every bar is rap chemistry” – Rolling Stone; “Over the past five years, Mach has made some of the strangest, most incisive, most tantalizingly intertextual rap music in the world” – GQ).
Exclusivity has been an integral part of Mach’s brand, giving off the aura of a man rapping from the penthouse of a billion-dollar high-rise complex, covered with spray painted Basquiat tags, hidden in the middle of a magic forest only accessible by solving age-old riddles. But now, Mach-Hommy is interested in being more forward-facing. “I’m on my Hommy Appleseed shit,” he says. “Now that I’ve done the so-called impossible, the next thing for me to do is make sure this music spreads all over—making sure samples are cleared so the music can play wherever I need it to play. I may have been contracting before because that was what was good for me in that place. Now I’m in a place where I should expand. But don’t expect to see anything weighing down the impact and the style of how I present material. I’m still gonna be Mach-Hommy.”
Stay tuned for #RICHAXXHAITIAN, Mach’s next album, coming out on May 17th.
Critical Praise:
Read Mach-Hommy’s 3-Part FADER Cover Story (written in part by Mach himself): 1 | 2 | 3
“Over the past five years, Mach has made some of the strangest, most incisive, most tantalizingly intertextual rap music in the world…He has a pliable voice that effectively communicates contempt (often) or longing (selectively); his writing seems like collage until it doesn’t, breaking from interpolated lyrics and allusion into richly rendered scenes from his own memory.” – GQ
“…every bar is rap chemistry” – Rolling Stone
“The charms of Hommy’s music are on full display as he moves slickly, with casually clever wordplay, through well-curated soul samples.” – The New Yorker
“…tightly constructed yet freely floating through hip-hop’s past and present like ghosts in Gore-Tex jackets.” – Pitchfork
“Mach is worldly the way you imagine a spy would be, or at least upper management in a global oil conglomerate: He knows how to order coffee in Damascus and a hit in Paris, knows which local toughs to muscle out and which to charm into his service.” – Pitchfork”
“Hip-hop heads love to talk about that feeling. It’s a nebulous concept, at times an old-head argument to dismiss new folks, and in other instances a passionate plea to try and articulate what can be so powerful and transformative about hip-hop. That feeling, while oftentimes trite, is the best way to convey to a latecomer what makes Mach-Hommy the most exciting MC today.” – Billboard
“His work is often crammed with diasporic twoness, but crammed with other doublenesses, too.” – NPR
“Mach-Hommy is special. He can rap absurdly well, and he could have a career on that alone, but he doesn’t seem to want it. Instead, he seems to want to exist in a lane that did not exist before him. He’s pulling it off.” – Stereogum
Links:
Mach-Hommy: official site | zotanica | youtube | spotify | apple