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.
