Photo by Alexander Richter

The members of Armand Hammer have already been on a winning streak this year with their own respective solo efforts. Like their Brooklyn brethren AKAI SOLO, they’ve also a penchant for the fourth quarter album drop, and this time around, they’re bringing along their HARAM production collaborator, The Alchemist, along with them. It’s always intriguing hearing how these forces level up from what they’ve already made, and lead single “Super Nintendo” is everything the kid in you could ask for in a track with a title like that.

Armand Hammer gone experimental synth-pop may not have been on your 2025 bingo card, but the listen’s vintage video game aesthetic with a reverent guitar and drum line needling behind it stitches the violence and innocence of the duo’s childhood reflections together. “We was drunk and high watching Intervention / We was just happy to be outside when our peoples was in prisons of all types,” goes one line, staggering you with a one-two punch of better times and hard times. Adulthood usually has its ways of looking back on yesteryears without the warm rose tinted glasses on anymore, but billy woods and ELUCID have found a way to keep both visions in tact here within their game.

Armand Hammer’s Mercy will be released November 7th on Backwoodz Studioz.