Armand Hammer’s Mercy Finds Grace in the Wreckage

The violence in Armand Hammer’s music has always been less about spectacle than atmosphere—a constant pressure in the air, like barometric dread. It’s in the details: a Confederate flag glimpsed at a gas station on “War Stories,” or Elucid’s weary provocation, “What’s life without wartime?” on “I Keep a Mirror in My Pocket.” For billy woods and Elucid, brutality isn’t a breaking point but the ground beneath our feet, something absorbed through osmosis. The apocalypse isn’t an event—it’s a lifestyle. “Bored of the apocalypse,” Elucid sighs on “Slewfoot,” a line that lands like a punchline no one laughs at. The world burns in perpetuity, and the rent’s still due.

Their new album Mercy is both a lament and a reckoning: a record that stares into the chaos until it stares back, unflinching. It reunites the duo with The Alchemist, whose production has never sounded more alien or haunted. If 2021’s Haram felt like Alc tentatively stepping into Armand Hammer’s claustrophobic dreamworld, Mercy is full immersion—smoke-thick, pressure-cooked, and somehow both funereal and alive. The jazzy inflections and easy cool of his recent work are gone; instead, there are hollowed-out piano loops, uneasy percussion patterns, and moments that feel like time itself has fractured. “No Grabba” trudges like a death march; “Nil by Mouth” seems to fold in on itself, collapsing under the weight of its own decay. Even when a groove emerges, it’s uneasy, trembling.

Yet Mercy is far from monochrome. The trio broaden their shared vocabulary, tracing hip-hop’s timelines while bending them to new shapes. “Calypso Gene” dips into a warped gospel-funk register that feels pulled from a lost Dungeon Family archive. “Crisis Phone” channels the bleary tension of Alc’s work with Boldy James, all smoldering menace and slow-motion detonation. “California Games,” with its psychedelic flutes and weightless harmonies, sounds like a soul record half-buried in ash. Everywhere you listen, small sonic signatures flare up—the dissonant synths on “Dogeared,” the car tires peeling out on “Glue Traps”—each detail another breadcrumb in a labyrinth of paranoia and wonder.

If Haram was premonition, Mercy is aftermath. The questions woods and Elucid pose aren’t abstract anymore—they’re immediate, personal, unavoidable. They’ve always been masters at manipulating time: woods the historian, connecting dots between centuries; Elucid the mystic, twisting moments into metaphysical knots. Here, those methods converge into something raw and contemporary, anchored in the present tense of crisis.

On “Peshawar,” woods ties the omnipresence of AI to the endless recursion of violence, his tone closer to exhaustion than outrage: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” The title references the 2014 school massacre in Pakistan, but the horror could be anywhere, anytime—it’s the point. On “Nil by Mouth,” Elucid’s brain flickers between eras and atrocities: the one-drop rule, Iran-Contra, self-made martyrs. “Glue Traps” zooms in on his neighborhood, where the mundane and the miraculous coexist uneasily. And “u know my body” feels like a dispatch from the end times—Gaza, Sudan, Ferguson, take your pick—its brevity only heightening its impact.

By the album’s back half, the question becomes not what the world is doing to us, but how to keep living inside it. On “Dogeared,” a companion asks woods, “What’s the role of a poet in times like these?” He never answers directly, but the question lingers like an afterimage. Maybe the answer lies in the act of noticing: the bacon grease jar by the stove, the dog-eared novel on the nightstand, a child splashing through a puddle. Maybe mercy is the brief reprieve of being present while everything else collapses.

What makes Mercy feel so urgent is how naturally it unfolds, two artists at the height of their powers refusing to look away. woods and Elucid don’t trade bars so much as braid them, their voices merging into a single consciousness that feels equal parts fury, wisdom, and fatigue. The Alchemist’s production sharpens that bond, turning each song into a room where light barely leaks in but meaning fills the space.

Mercy isn’t interested in hope so much as endurance. It’s a record for those who can still feel the ache of history pressing down on their daily routines, who sense that survival itself has become a radical act. The apocalypse, it turns out, is slow—but Armand Hammer have learned to make art in its tempo. Perhaps mercy, as they suggest, isn’t something we wait for. It’s something we make.