Tom Hardy is trading the silver screen for the recording booth, and releasing his debut rap album. Yes, you read that right. The English actor will embody his Frankie Pulitzer rap persona again for a full-length collaboration album with East Coast supergroup Czarface. The project has a very straightforward title, Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer, and it will be out on Aug. 28.
The unacquainted don’t have to wait to hear Hardy’s bars, either. The actor-turned-rapper, or maybe it’s actor/rapper, previewed the LP on Thursday with new single “Brothers Grimm.” Over a Nineties hip-hop beat, East Coast to be exact, Czarface’s Inspectah Deck and Esoteric spit their verses before Hardy, er, Pulitzer comes in. “You coppin’ lead when I’m dropping it,” he raps, and honestly, the song goes pretty hard (sorry).
While it may sound like Hardy is taking a left turn from acting to rapping, real fans know he isn’t new to the rap game, he’s true to it. Back in 2011, the actor revealed that he had actually nabbed a hip-hop record deal in the Nineties when he was 15, and ended up recording “loads of stuff” that was never released. “Because I come from a nice middle-class neighborhood it was a very hard sell. And I wasn’t very good,” Hardy said of his short-lived rap career.
Flash forward to 2018 when mixtape Falling on Your Arse in 1999 surfaced on the internet. The lo-fi tracks feature Hardy, under the stage name Tommy No 1, spitting bars atop British writer-director Edward Tracy-produced beats. It was the first time that the world had heard Hardy’s rap attempts, and the tape actually received some praise.
Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer is also not the first time that Hardy worked with Czarface. In 2021, the actor first rapped on the group’s Good Guys, Bad Guys EP, using the name Frankie Pulitzer. Just a few years ago, he joined Method Man on Czarface’s “Knull & Void.” Method Man will also make an appearance on the new LP, along with El-O and rap icon Busta Rhymes.
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