Tom Hardy has released his first official rap album with Czarface, featuring guest appearances from Busta Rhymes, Method Man and El-P.
The Oscar-nominated actor performs under his Frankie Pulitzer moniker on ‘Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer’, which arrived on Friday (August 28) via Silver Age, having been first announced in June.
The 15-track album is a full-length collaboration with Czarface, the hip-hop collective comprising Wu-Tang Clan rapper Inspectah Deck and underground duo 7L & Esoteric.
The record sees Hardy making sly references to his own acting career, including on ‘Grim-Visaged War’, which sees him recite the opening “winter of our discontent” monologue from Shakespeare’s Richard III, using the distinctive voice of Bane from 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.
‘Raw Forever’, his collaboration with Busta Rhymes, includes references to Nicolas Cage and Martin Scorsese’s 1999 film Bringing Out The Dead.
“I’m bringing out the dead like a paramedic out the Cage, directed by Marty,” Hardy raps, before invoking Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin from 2002’s Spider-Man and Marvel villain Doctor Doom.
On ‘Mad Technology’, meanwhile, Hardy invokes Stephen King’s Cujo and Misery, delivering an explicit reference to the latter film’s Oscar-winning star Kathy Bates.
“You shit-for-brain no-name lame, that bites like Cujo,” he raps. “I’d rather masturbate to Kathy Bates than hear you flow / And you know that misery, it loves company.”
The actor’s history with hip-hop stretches back to the time that he recorded a mixtape titled ‘Falling On Your Arse In 1999’ under the name Tommy No. 1. That project surfaced online in 2018.
Later that year, reports also emerged that Hardy was working on a grime album, although that project never materialised.
Czarface, meanwhile, have released collaborations with Ghostface Killah and the late MF DOOM. Their second album with DOOM, 2021’s ‘Super What?’, received three stars from NME, with the review noting: “It’s often said that Esoteric’s voice recalls the clipped drawl of Jay-Z, but here the similarities aren’t merely linguistic – the Czarface MC rhyming atop production that wouldn’t feel out of place segued into Hova’s seminal ‘The Blueprint’.”
Away from music, Hardy will return as fixer Harry Da Souza when the second season of MobLand premieres on September 18.
