Armand Hammer & The Alchemist – Mercy
Armand Hammer‘s intricate, hazy lyrical imagery lends itself to a fragmented sound. Agile and elastic wordsmiths ELUCID and billy woods are equally adept at weaving their way through abstract ambience as they are with a wall of noise, or building out from unrehearsed live-band improvisations captured in the studio, as they did on 2023’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. So when they delivered a full-length made with a sole, dedicated producer, as they did with The Alchemist on 2021’s Haram, it represented an operational shift for the rap duo, finding a suitable foil with a beatmaker whose body of work includes luxuriously soulful soundbeds for Freddie Gibbs and tense, paranoid ambience with Boldy James alike. With Armand Hammer, however, The Alchemist honed in on the dark atmospheric quality of their work, shining a light on every shade of onyx and obsidian.
On “Laraaji,” the leadoff track on Mercy, the prolific producer seemingly drops us in the middle of the action, looping a scrap of sustained guitar vibrato in a hanging moment of suspense punctuated by a drum roll. Where Haram‘s “Sir Benni Miles” offered a more eerily gradual fade in, here the trio’s reunion offers no such grace but with a similar feeling of disorientation setting in all the same. ELUCID jumps straight in with both feet, free-associating a fast moving sequence of images with more than one fixed meaning: “Cocorosie codeine trip in a home with no heat/Grandmaster Flash gave me a job/Cold storage, the room is live/myth of meritocracy/Fuckin’ cock and squeeze.” By the time woods grabs the mic, he raises the stakes with a taunt that feels more like a threat: “You shoulda killed me when you had the chance, now it’s out your hands.”
Less a continuation of the ideas explored on their last collaborative outing than a deeper exploration of their mutual musical language, Mercy is only occasionally brighter and, on moments like “Laraaji,” a little more agitated and abrasive. It’s also never less than sensorially rich, an immersive textural landscape for woods and ELUCID’s labyrinthine meditations on systems of predation and support alike, life, survival and what separates the two. A standout like “Peshawar” highlights Al’s aesthetic at its most psychedelic, its piano loop descending like an acid-dipped RZA beat, tumbling around woods’ bemusement at trying to topple a behemoth: “Gleefully watch the system crash, no matter though, they easily reboot it, back of the napkin math looking fucking stupid.” An atmosphere of terror permeates the spacious, string-streaked “Crisis Phone,” even amid a great one-liner (“Miss me with the mystery meat“), while the cosmic jazz-psych surging in “Longjohns” lends a sense of urgency beneath Cleo Reed’s choral hook, each recitation of “tighten up!” growing more tense and breathless.
The idea of mercy is both a luxury and scarce commodity throughout, a MacGuffin, an Easter egg and a deeply felt absence. The two minutes of “u know my body” are the bleakest, an exasperated catalogue of cruelty in which woods reminds us, “everybody was somebody moments before their body was torn.” Bolstered by gorgeous flourishes of piano, ELUCID and woods juxtapose verses of water as source of both solace and territorial lines on “Calypso Gene”—a reference to Louis Farrakhan’s stage name as a singer—its refrains of “dip me on the water” both spiritual invocation and cry for relief.
Memories, traumatic or unsettling ones, often haunt Armand Hammer’s work, but “Super Nintendo” is the rare song that actually feels nostalgic, its title console a kind of symbol of lost innocence. In its second verse, billy woods takes an introspective look, pondering how he’s changed, where his peers have gone, and probably both: “Rewind my old raps/Wonderin’ where that brother’s at.” It ends the record on a note of both warmth and resigned acknowledgement alike, a touch of—well, the album’s title pretty much sums it up. Just last year, ELUCID told me about the importance of being able to see more than just shades of darkness. “There’s detail, there’s nuance, and there’s no way this could all be one color,” he said. “I see purple, I see orange, I see a lot of black, sure, but there are other ways to look at it as well.” There are a few softer tones to be found on Mercy, some brighter hues—ones given enhanced dimension courtesy of The Alchemist—but even at its darkest, Armand Hammer create something multichromatic.
Label: Backwoodz
Year: 2025
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Armand Hammer & The Alchemist : Mercy
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