The violence in Armand Hammer songs tends to be ambient, lingering in the air like a pink mist. Elucid and billy woods write about how that violence seeps into everyday life, like the Confederate flag woods can sense at a gas station on “War Stories,” or how, on “I Keep a Mirror in My Pocket,” Elucid asks, “What’s life without wartime?” The daily grind gets interrupted by a volley of gunfire, only to resume moments later like an inning after a rain delay. The rappers themselves aren’t yet desensitized to it, but they recognize how most people operate: trudging through an existence that’s actively being stripped away, so used to the machinations of dehumanization that they’ve become, as Elucid puts it on “Slewfoot,” “bored of the apocalypse.” We’re inundated with terrible news, saturated to the point that fresh horrors don’t always register. Work doesn’t stop, rent’s still due. Their new album, Mercy, asserts that the carnage of our times can no longer be ignored; it looms above all of us, eager to pounce. It’s not an option to simply live—how do we survive?
Mercy reunites woods and Elucid with prestige rap kingmaker The Alchemist, who turns in some of his weirdest and most harrowing production since The Skeleton Key. A lot of Alc’s recent work has been constructed from daydrunk lounge loops that risked tipping into “type beat” territory, but here, he follows the candlelit sound of Haram, his first collaboration with Armand Hammer, further into the darkness. Gone are the jazzy accents of “Indian Summer” or “Squeegee,” replaced with a palette of sustained piano notes and nervy, unconventional drum patterns. Songs like “No Grabba” and “Nil by Mouth” trudge like a funereal march; the kick drums in “Scandinavia” sound like targeted strike detonations in the distance. It’s a fitting complement to woods and Elucid’s piercing bars, creating a pervasive tension that oscillates between mournful and paranoid.
If Haram was the Alchemist’s entry to Armand Hammer’s world, Mercy is a shared vision. There’s a greater understanding of what they can create together, and a willingness to add other sounds into their combined vocabulary. “Calypso Gene” could’ve been unearthed from some lost trove of Dungeon Family recordings, dipping into that collective’s gospel and funk-tinged waters; “Crisis Phone” taps into the white-knuckle pressure Alc and Boldy James explored on “Scrape the Bowl” and “Brickmile to Montana”; “California Games” unfolds like a ’70s psychedelic soul epic, flutes and wordless vocals intertwining over a splashy groove, wailing up at the heavens. And there are thrilling accents that reveal themselves after a few listens, like the synths on “Dogeared” that overlap to create dissonant siren calls, or the car peeling out during the heist-movie soundtrack of “Glue Traps.” These details become little vortexes, pulling you further into the trio’s universe.
There’s a pronounced urgency on Mercy, a grounding in the here and now that’s not always prevalent on woods or Elucid projects. The two have distinct ways of experiencing time—woods flattens it by meticulously threading historical events together, showing how they rhyme, while Elucid operates in a more metaphysical lane, weaving facts, feelings, and memories into spiraling, nonlinear episodes. Those methodologies appear here, but they’re increasingly used to react to the wretchedness of our current age.
On “Peshawar,” woods bemoans the sudden prevalence of AI: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human/Mind, that’s the rubric/Deep Blue versus Vladimir Putin.” The song itself is named after a city in Pakistan that suffered a brutal terrorist attack on a school in 2014, a scenario that now unfolds across the globe. Elucid dreams of “exploding beepers” on “Nil by Mouth” after images of the one-drop rule, the Iran-Contra affair, and “self-made martyrs” stream through his head like a sour meditation. On “Glue Traps,” he paints a picture of the intersecting lives in his neighborhood, reflecting on its beauty while ruing the constant hustle required of its residents. The brief but brutal “u know my body” sounds like woods describing the scenes of destruction livestreaming from Gaza, but could represent any genocide, past or present. After spending seven records anticipating and examining the effects of our ever-curdling history, Mercy presents the results: The war has arrived at everyone’s doorstep.
So what is there to do? On “Dogeared,” woods’ companion asks him, “What’s the role of a poet in times like these?” The question haunts him like an extra shadow, nagging at his brain as he goes about the routines of work and parenting. His relentless pondering makes him that much more present, noticing the bacon grease kept next to the stove, the neglected novel on his nightstand, the splash as his child hops into a puddle. A solution never surfaces, but he’s discovered how poignant each small moment can be. Across the album, woods and Elucid’s mind-meld feels stronger, more lived-in; they trade bars with a fluidity borne not only from years of practice, but a sincere depth of trust. Perhaps these are the answers to the question: looking for the magic in the ordinary, sharing it with others, recognizing how far collaboration can take us. Perhaps mercy isn’t something we beg for, but something we build.
