The hard truth is, no matter how many albums we review for Paste each year, there are always countless releases that end up overlooked. That’s why, from now until the end of December, we’re bringing back our No Album Left Behind series and singing the praises of our favorite underrated records of 2025.
“What’s the role of a poet in times like these?” The line crops up midway through Armand Hammer’s Mercy, but billy woods and E L U C I D spend the album’s entire runtime circling it. It’s a familiar provocation, worn thin by repetition yet no less urgent for it. We are, after all, watching in real time as the essence of personhood sheds all things human, becoming a dataset made up of search results, corporate algorithms, and commodity consumption statistics—made all the worse by a media apparatus that treats human life as a sliding metric, its value revised with each headline and calibrated to whichever bodies the New York Times decided to count that day. In a world where nothing seems to accumulate into meaning or consequence, why keep writing, creating, caring at all?
Mercy doesn’t answer the question so much as live inside it—the album is, perhaps, less interested in solutions than what it looks like to continue on without them. Over and over, woods and E L U C I D return not to moments of rupture but to the unglamorous logistics of endurance: showing up, clocking in, staying alive, and trying to remain human while doing so. The world may be ending, but there’s still a bus to catch, a meal to make, a kid to put to sleep, a verse or 14 to write. If the record is skeptical of grand narratives—of art as salvation, of poetry as resistance—it’s deeply invested in the act of continuing anyway. Mercy treats witness not as testimony delivered upward to history or power or posterity, but as something lateral and intimate: attention paid in real time, without the promise that it will accumulate into justice or even meaning. Endurance, here, isn’t passive, and neither is attention. Both are forms of labor: quiet, unspectacular, and exhausting in their refusal to disappear.
Over the past decade, Armand Hammer has carved out a singular lane in underground rap, pairing woods’ grim, hyper-specific storytelling with E L U C I D’s more elliptical, free-form approach to language. Their collaboration with The Alchemist—first crystallized on Haram before their long-awaited reunion on Mercy—has refined that balance, aligning their writing with beats that privilege mood, tension, and negative space over punchlines or hooks. But there’s a modesty and mundanity to Mercy that distinguishes it from some of their most imposing work: Haram hit hard and loud, a claustrophobic sprawl of baroque menace that reset the temperature of underground rap; Shrines and Paraffin constructed vast symbolic architectures around violence, religion, and empire; even 2023’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips thrived on friction, humor, and jittery movement. Mercy, by contrast, is quieter in affect and smaller in scope. Alchemist’s production here is meticulous (as always) but restrained, favoring smeared loops, hushed drums, transitions so fluid they barely register. Songs like the opening “Laraaji” and early standout “Peshawar” don’t so much begin as they seep in. The jazzy beats drift, blur, and bleed into one another, less interested in hooks or punctuation than in maintaining a continuous psychic space. It’s enveloping rather than explosive, built to hold you inside a mood instead of jolting you through it.
That choice does carry some risk. At times, Mercy’s mood feels so carefully sustained that individual tracks blur together, especially across the album’s middle stretch. The gauzy “Nil by Mouth” and the numbing “Crisis Phone,” for instance, tilt so heavily into atmosphere that their distinctions feel more conceptual than visceral, the subdued loops and steady cadences occasionally failing to give individual moments enough shape to linger. Part of that blur comes from how deliberately untethered many of the performances are from their instrumentals. woods and E L U C I D often rap around the beat rather than inside it (with some songs lacking a distinct beat entirely, instead relying on droning hums and buzzing synths), their cadences sliding past rhythm instead of locking into it. At its best, that approach reinforces the album’s themes of dislocation and endurance; at its weakest, it can flatten the music’s contours, making individual tracks feel interchangeable even when their ideas are distinct. But, to be fair, even a weaker Armand Hammer track outdoes many other artists’ best work.
As a result, Mercy feels somewhat less exciting and groundbreaking than some of the New York duo’s other releases, if only because those releases set the bar impossibly high. And, again, there is a logic to the choice here: this is just what life sounds like when the emergency never ends and the sirens fade to background noise—a notion made nearly literal on “Glue Traps,” when the dull, repetitive loop at the song’s foundation is repeatedly punctured by a screech that sounds like rubber tearing across asphalt. As the song drags on amidst discussion of labor and routine—scrubbing floors, punching clocks, surviving shifts—the crash grows less noticeable each time, absorbing back into the routine until it only registers as another limb of the instrumentation. The soundscapes are often accumulative, like sonic collages of everyday mundanities: grainy radio and movie samples, field recordings of neighborhood pick-up games, the sound of a glass clinking on a table. On the other hand, the rare moments of alignment between flow and beat are most often found in the act of subtraction: the instrumentation cutting out under woods’ final lines on “Peshawar,” the sonic vacuum around the killer chipmunk soul melody in “Moonbow,” the way “Scandinavia” lets its kick drum thud in isolation, like distant impacts heard through fog. Mercy isn’t trying to shock you awake; it’s documenting what it feels like to stay conscious in a world that runs on dull repetition.
That repetition is never empty, though—in no small part because woods and E L U C I D use it to stage subtle variations in perspective. woods remains the album’s ballast, his verses built from day-to-day specifics and logistics delivered in a measured, conversational swagger (see: his flow on tracks like “Scandinavia” especially) that makes catastrophe feel embedded in routine. On “Laraaji,” doubt arrives as an offhand aside (“there’s no use writing, rest assured, you’re wasting words”) only to be swallowed back into motion, self-flagellation rendered moot by the very fact that the song continues on. Domestic minutiae in woods’ “Dogeared” verse—bus transfers, late-night phone calls, leaky pipes, half-read novels—is rendered, crucially, not as throwaway detail but as the substance of the thing itself. Atrocity enters his writing with the same flat affect: “It’s hard to get out of bed when there’s glue traps behind the stove,” he spits on “Glue Traps,” “bulldozers in the olive grove, soldiers switching to civilian clothes.” On “California Games,” he slides from jet lag to settler violence to professional burnout in a single, unbroken flow, refusing to elevate any one register over another. Meaning, here, isn’t discovered but painstakingly assembled from the debris of a life lived under pressure.
Where woods builds meaning through accumulation, E L U C I D approaches it through fracture. His verses on Mercy resist narrative continuity, favoring instead a language that feels interrupted mid-thought, pressured into instability by history, labor, and surveillance. On the opener, he introduces himself through disjunctive images rather than orientation—“Jazz hat like Laraaji / Black derbies and denim”—before snapping into structural critique (“Myth of meritocracy, fuck a cock-and-squeeze” has got to be an all-timer rhyme) and futurist dread, all without pausing to smooth the transitions. On “Nil by Mouth,” thought doesn’t unfold so much as collide: “Armand Hammer uncommon carnage / Iran-Contra cadence, psychic karmic violence.” Elsewhere, endurance is rendered not as dignity but as abrasion: he repeats the mantra “Stretch a little, take a little more” on “Glue Traps,” then grounds it in bodily labor—“I scrub concrete with bleach water in kitchen whites / Wash my hands a thousand times a shift”—creating a loop of effort without release. Across Mercy, E L U C I D’s voice functions less as testimony than as interference: syntax frays, cadences scrape past the beat, and images refuse to cohere into resolution. If woods documents the logistics of staying alive, E L U C I D dramatizes what that persistence does to language and perception themselves—the psychic static that accumulates when survival is continuous and relief never arrives.
That contrast sharpens the album’s most devastating moments even when the two aren’t in direct dialogue. On “Calypso Gene,” woods grounds the song in lineage and memory while E L U C I D splinters it into motion and threat, both circling water as inheritance and border without ever resolving its meaning; on “No Grabba,” they share a mantra of refusal but diverge in method, woods anchoring his verse in anecdote and place as E L U C I D leans into free-floating references and sound-play. And on the surprise standout “u know my body,” woods raps alone, but the absence of E L U C I D’s dissociative counterweight makes the song feel brutally overexposed: woods’ repetition of “bodies on bodies on bodies” initially locks to the beat (a fact made particularly notable by how rare an occurrence it is on the record), then gradually drags behind it, the rhythm collapsing under the weight of what it’s trying to measure. It’s a devastating formal choice; the limits of enumeration made audible. In that moment, Mercy stops circling the question of value and shows you what happens when life is reduced to numbers. When corpses are piled sky-high, gravity makes toppling inevitable.
When Mercy does generate forward motion in its final stretch, it doesn’t treat it as escape so much as a brief change in voltage. “Longjohns” spikes with energy—Cleo Reed’s chorus is quick, bright, almost effervescent—but The Alchemist fractures that lift with jagged jazz stabs, turning momentum into something unstable, difficult to hold. “California Games” opens into something expansive, flutes and vocalizations widening the frame, yet even its looseness feels exhausted, worn thin by travel and repetition (and also, probably, Earl Sweatshirt’s unfortunately sleepy opening verse). Closer “Super Nintendo” is all 16-bit nostalgia, invoking childhood play only for the present to drain it of comfort, memory looping back on itself rather than offering refuge. Still, there’s a flicker of warmth in these moments—a sweetness that refuses to be fully extinguished. These songs don’t resolve Mercy’s tensions so much as demonstrate what survives them: fleeting pleasure, shared rhythm, the small, compromised reliefs that don’t fix the world but make it briefly livable.
All of this feeds back into the album’s central provocation. If art can’t stop the machine—can’t halt genocide, can’t reverse automation, can’t make history behave—what is it for? woods and E L U C I D refuse the comfort of an answer. Instead, Mercy makes a case for something harder to quantify: the discipline of staying human, day after day, inside conditions actively trying to erase that possibility. What’s the role of a poet in times like these? woods spends his verse in “Dogeared” haunted by the question—but even by its end, all he can do is answer honestly, without triumph or despair: “I’m still grappling.”
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
