Armand Hammer

Introduced by a third rapper

Armand Hammer came together in New York around 2013, after the rapper Uncommon Nasa put billy woods and ELUCID in a room together. The two had already crossed paths on record — ELUCID guested on woods' 2012 solo album History Will Absolve Me — and the duo took its name from the American industrialist and art collector Armand Hammer, a joke about ownership and respectability that has aged well alongside the music.

The structural detail that matters most is the label. Every Armand Hammer release has come out on Backwoodz Studioz, which woods founded in 2002 and runs with Anton Schlesinger. That means no A&R, no release-date politics and no pressure to sand down the writing, which is why the catalogue sounds the way it does: dense, allusive, politically specific, and almost entirely uninterested in a hook.

woods also keeps his face out of circulation. Press photographs obscure it, and at the duo's NPR Tiny Desk session on 28 July 2026 he performed from behind a pop filter rather than face the camera — a practice he has maintained for the whole of his career.

The run of records

The discography builds steadily rather than breaking out. Race Music arrived in 2013, followed by the Half Measures mixtape the same year and the Furtive Movements EP in 2014. Rome came in 2017 and Paraffin in 2018, the latter the first to land on a serious spread of critics' year-end lists.

Shrines, in 2020, widened the circle — Earl Sweatshirt and Moor Mother among the guests — and set up the record that changed the duo's reach. Haram, released in 2021 and produced entirely by the Alchemist, put woods and ELUCID's writing against the most recognisable sample palette in American rap and found that the two things fitted. We Buy Diabetic Test Strips followed in 2023, with the compilations WHT LBL (2022) and BLK LBL (2024) filling the gaps between albums.

Both members have substantial solo catalogues running in parallel, and woods' has lately outpaced the duo's in visibility. His ninth solo album, Golliwog, came out on Backwoodz on 9 May 2025 with production from the Alchemist, El-P, Kenny Segal, Conductor Williams, DJ Haram, Shabaka Hutchings, Ant and others. It holds a Metacritic average of 88, an 8.7 from Pitchfork, five stars from The Skinny and four from The Guardian, and it charted abroad — number 7 on the UK R&B albums chart, number 41 in Germany.

Mercy: the Alchemist, second time

Mercy, the duo's second full collaboration with the Alchemist, was released on 7 November 2025 through Backwoodz with Rhymesayers Entertainment — fourteen tracks across 41 minutes and 51 seconds, trailed by the single "Super Nintendo" on 14 October 2025. Guests include Earl Sweatshirt, Quelle Chris, Pink Siifu, Silka, Cleo Reed and Kapwani. It reached number 32 on the UK album downloads chart.

The duo have been clear that they were not trying to repeat Haram. Speaking about the record, woods described the earlier album as feeling claustrophobic, where Mercy "moves through a lot of different moods and feels more expansive and open". ELUCID has said the beat that became the opener "Laraaji" was the point at which the project turned serious. The Alchemist went well beyond handing over instrumentals, restructuring and remixing tracks — the Earl Sweatshirt collaboration "California Games" was reshaped by him into its released form.

Critics largely agreed, without unanimity. Mercy carries a Metacritic score of 79 from generally favourable reviews: Pitchfork gave it 8.0, calling the Alchemist's work here some of his weirdest and most harrowing; The Line of Best Fit and Paste both gave 8 out of 10. Beats Per Minute, reviewing on 11 November 2025, scored it 89 per cent and picked out the stretched piano and what it called Carpenter-esque synthesiser waves, noting the gentle dub of Haram had been stripped out in favour of unease. Slant was the notable dissent at three stars out of five, describing an album that elicits respect more than excitement.

Where they stand in autumn 2026

The commercial position is modest and the critical one is not. Thirteen years in, Armand Hammer are the reference point for a strand of American rap that treats the album as a literary form, and their label has become a hub for it — Backwoodz artists and collaborators including Quelle Chris, DJ Haram, Curly Castro and Kenny Segal recur across each other's records and now across each other's tour bills.

The most visible recent development was the Tiny Desk session on 28 July 2026, which arrived between the two legs of the Mercy tour. Rather than perform over backing tracks, the duo handed musical direction to Kenny Segal, who assembled a band: Segal on keys, sampler and Omnichord, Ryan Crosby on guitar and bass, Diego Gaeta and Jesse Justice on keys, Mekala Session on drums, and the jazz trio Human Error Club. The six-song set ran "Laraaji", "Super Nintendo", "Spongebob", "Spelling", "Dislocated" and "Stonefruit" — three of them from Mercy, the rest drawn from the wider Backwoodz orbit.

The touring itself is the heaviest the duo have attempted. The Mercy run was announced with tickets going on sale at 10am local time on 9 January 2026, opened on 24 April in Durham, North Carolina, and ran through to early May before pausing. A European stretch followed in June, taking in Gazarte in Athens on 6 June, Tavastia in Helsinki on 8 June and Komuna // Warszawa in Warsaw on 12 June. The North American leg resumed on 22 September in Portland, Maine.

The rest of the 2026 schedule

Seventeen dates remain as of early October. Canada gets two: Théâtre Fairmount in Montreal on 6 October and Lee's Palace in Toronto on 7 October. From there the run moves through The Loving Touch in Ferndale, Michigan on 9 October, Thalia Hall in Chicago on 10 October, X-Ray Arcade in Cudahy on 12 October, High Noon Saloon in Madison on 13 October, Fine Line in Minneapolis on 14 October and Electric City in Buffalo on 16 October.

A western swing follows in November: 191 Toole in Tucson on 3 November, Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix on 4 November, the Constellation Room in Santa Ana on 5 November, Lodge Room in Los Angeles on 6 November, Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on 8 November, Mississippi Studios in Portland on 10 November, The Crocodile in Seattle on 11 November and the Marquis Theater in Denver on 13 November, with a final Brooklyn show at Music Hall of Williamsburg on 15 November. The venues are consistently in the few-hundred to thousand-capacity range, which is the scale the duo have grown into rather than past.