Body Count have unveiled the title track from their new album Merciless. The new song and accompanying music video arrive a day before the LP’s release on Friday (November 22nd).
The vicious track pits Ice-T’s bars against a riff that sounds like the intro from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” It creates a doom vibe that drops into a chorus of Slayer-like thrash with ominous gang vocals chanting the song and album title (“Merciless!”). Ice-T proceeds to make his point clear: “I’ve only got one life to live / I got no more fucks to give.”
The Jay Scorsese-directed NSFW video is quite a sight, recreating the shocking Merciless album cover — Ice-T as a torturous surgeon going to work on a KKK member — as if it were a scene from a horror film. Scorsese also directed the video for previous single “Psychopath,” another homage to horror and splatter films.
Merciless is Body Count’s first studio album since 2020’s Carnivore, an album cycle that was halted by the pandemic. Before they could even tour in support the album, they were asked to record the follow-up, which became Merciless. Studio sessions began as early as 2022.
“We dropped Carnivore in March 2020 and the pandemic dropped right on top of us,” Ice-T told Kerrang!. “We never got to tour that album, even though we had like 40 different dates set up in Europe. Because I’m on television, we only have this little two-month block where we can get out on the road. Then the label were, like, ‘Give us another record!’ I was, like, ‘What?! You want me to just go shit out another record real quick?!’”
He continued: “We’d just won the Grammy [2021’s ‘Best Metal Performance’ for ‘Bum-Rush’] so we were on a real high, but it was still pretty difficult to grind another album out. I needed time. When you’ve released an album — having written maybe 20 songs, of which 12 make it — you’re all out of ideas. And you don’t want to rehash those ideas again. But once we got going, we got it done.”
The title track “Merciless” is the fourth single from the album following the aforementioned “Psychopath,” “Fuck What You Heard,” and a striking cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” featuring David Gilmour.
Stream the video for “Merciless” below.
