Mercy is a fever dream. Armand Hammer & The Alchemist make it impossible to look away.
Armand Hammer and The Alchemist have returned to remind us that reality is best served slow-cooked, unsettling, and with a whisper of danger curling around the rim. If Haram was the duo’s first orbital station — lush, murky, and dripping with cosmic condensation — then Mercy is the scorched planet below. A world stitched together from blood, empire, kids cackling at something they probably shouldn’t have seen, and a constellation of unpaid parking tickets forming a kind of bureaucratic Big Dipper. You know… relatable stuff.
ELUCID and billy woods sound like they’ve been living inside this place for years, filing field notes by candlelight while the roof leaks metaphors. The guest list is a motley crew of specialists: Earl Sweatshirt skulking in like a philosopher who missed his tram; Quelle Chris passing through with surrealist precision; Cleo Reed shading the corners; Pink Siifu warping the temperature; Kapwani and Silka adding doses of spectral presence. Meanwhile, The Alchemist is behind the curtain, building the entire ecosystem brick by brick — every thump, hiss, bell, and shadow. He’s the urban planner of their shared apocalypse, basically.
“Mercy,” out now on BackwoodzStudioz.
Mercy isn’t here to soothe. It presses gently, like someone checking for a bruise they already know is there. But damn if it doesn’t feel good. It’s the kind of album where every listen unlocks a fresh corridor, one that was definitely not there last time, and which may or may not contain a trapdoor. And yet, as always with Armand Hammer, there’s beauty in the rubble — wiry, wary, weird, and wonderfully alive.
Mercy is a world you won’t want to live in, but you’ll absolutely want to visit again. Just keep your wits about you and your secrets tucked somewhere safe.
Lyrics_ Glue Traps (feat. Quelle Chris)
[Intro: billy woods]
For a sip of cold water
Do it all over
[Verse 1: billy woods]
Real money's whatever's in your pockets when you're broke
'Cause for that last twelve twenty-five, dog, you don't even wanna know (You don't)
Prize fighter, past my prime, so it's gon' go how it go
No dives, though, this deep water, can't just hop out the boat
Haram on the shirt, damn right I want that pig smoked
If it's good work, only need a couple tokes
Recidivist, never gave up hope that we could move that dope
Hold up, let me pull your coat
What profit a man to gain the whole world if he don't have time to gloat?
All-whitе crowd? I laugh at life's little jokes
Somе of y'all never got up at the crack of dawn to go to work for the low and it shows (Good for you, though)
It's hard to get out of bed when there's glue traps behind the stove
Bulldozers in the olive grove, soldiers switching to civilian clothes
Every story tell a story that's already been told
Everything's dead and gone, we only had the name of the road
[Verse 2: E L U C I D]
Stretch a little, take a little more
Stretch a little, take a little more
Down today, with a little subtle mourning
Getting over, everything half price what he told her
Shopping cart rolled in, loaded down
Meat man pulling up in the lady barber
3 Suns on Fulton, beef, pork, chicken, shrimp
Work is work, he smirked, said it only gets harder
Hardest working for your people, it be your own, send my regards
Keep your garbage out our garden
I scrub concrete with bleach water in kitchen whites
Wash my hands a thousand times a shift
Flip what's hid behind the pipes, it's only right
Name a price, body, mind, spirit
Feel it in your warmest void, behind and under
Tweed and Corduroy, looping moving pictures
Chicken backs and gizzards
Crack your skeleton, it's Baby New Year
Cross-town traffic, hop out on Gates and Green
Black derby, not Nate Dogg with the pinstripe, step light
Bay rum in the air, there's a word for that
I'ma yearn it back, there's a word for this
(Stretch a little, take a little more) No tickets at the door
(Stretch a little, take a little more) No tickets at the door
Down today
[Verse 3: Quelle Chris]
I did it, mama, I did it, pops
Your boy done hung his hat a billion spots
Rolling stone, moss don't touch me like soap on white folks' legs when they wash
Or a colored Kente cloth
Your subgenre's da Vinci-core
These thoughts sound like pumpkin spice for D-boys
Stress got me at a high smoking point, I'm like grapeseed oil
Turning soil, left it caked in dirt, learnt I'm way too loyal, way too cool
Gotta strip layers like working through nursing school
Second coming of nice, rebirth of cool
We hula hoop with the ring of fire these guys are jumping through, nothing new
Tears shed for the buuck in neutral
Zig, zag, ziggy, business as usual
Gang runs on numbers and liars, plug is for hire
Old bucks tryna get back on the track and youngins to buy up
Plus most of these Yakubian products making dollars in the industry are simply DEI hires
If we keeping it funky, keep it a buck
[Outro]
What I expected him to be actually, was to be a militant
In, in the line of Malcolm X, or, um, Martin Luther King, or, um, uh, Garvey
And he was none of these things, he was simply a quiet, very conservative intellectual
And he fit in very well, he got along very well with everybody there
Um, I never quite understood why I was having problems
Why are you smoking dope, why is, um, uh, all this discontented blah-blah?
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