CZARFACE released Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer on 28 August through Silver Age, a 15-track album on which the actor Tom Hardy raps from end to end under the Frankie Pulitzer name. The record was first announced in June.
Czarface is Inspectah Deck of the Wu-Tang Clan with the underground duo 7L & Esoteric, and the group has a long history of guest-led projects. This one is different in scale: Hardy is not a feature but a full member of the record, credited alongside the group in the title.
He uses it to raid his own filmography. On Grim-Visaged War he recites the winter of our discontent opening from Shakespeare's Richard III in the voice he used as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, which is either the best or the worst idea on the album depending on your tolerance.
Raw Forever, his track with Busta Rhymes, works the same seam. "I'm bringing out the dead like a paramedic out the Cage, directed by Marty," he raps, folding Nicolas Cage and Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out The Dead into one line before moving on to Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin and Doctor Doom. On Mad Technology, with Method Man, he pulls in Stephen King's Cujo and Misery and Kathy Bates.
Hardy's history with rap is older than the joke suggests. In the late 1990s he recorded a project with the producer Eddie Too Tall under the name Tommy No. 1, a mixtape titled Falling On Your Arse In 1999 that never came out and only surfaced online in 2018. Reports later that year that he was working on a grime album came to nothing.
The rest of the album keeps Czarface's usual company. El-P appears on Dragon Canon, Kendra Morris sings on Frankie, and the group's earlier collaborations with Ghostface Killah and the late MF DOOM, including 2021's Super What?, sit behind it as precedent. Hardy returns to his day job when the second season of MobLand premieres on 18 September.
The album files under hip-hop, follows the announcement that it was coming in August, and is logged on the release calendar. Busta Rhymes has had a busy stretch of his own, having spent much of the year working through J Dilla's unfinished material.
The facts
- Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer runs to 15 tracks
- It came out on 28 August 2026 via Silver Age
- Frankie Pulitzer is an alias for the actor Tom Hardy
- Busta Rhymes, Method Man and El-P guest on the album
- Czarface is Inspectah Deck with the duo 7L & Esoteric
- Hardy recorded an unreleased rap project as Tommy No. 1 in the late 1990s
How this checks out
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