Ice-T Announces Next Body Count Album "Merciless" Is (Almost) Done

Ice-T is so much more than Detective Odafin Tutualdo on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Not only is he a pioneering gangsta rapper, but he's also frontman for the heavy metal band Body Count. The Grammy Award-winning band has released seven albums, beginning with 1992's self-titled debut and, more recently, 2020's Carnivore.

On Monday (May 1), Ice-T revealed Body Count is mere months away from dropping their next album, Merciless. As he explained on Instagram, "FYI... I just finished the final Vocals for the NEW @bodycountofficial album 'MERCILESS' this weekend.. Now the album just has to be mixed.. Stay Tuned.. Coming soon!" 

The hardcore metal band’s 2017’s, Bloodlust, was nominated for “Black Hoodie” but lost to Mastodon. But the pandemic put a wrench in things. As he explained to RAPstation's Kyle Eustice in 2021, "Imagine you got a band who got their hottest album and weren’t able to perform. We had been nominated the year before and this one, we got nominated for ‘Bum-Rush.’ And the band suffers differently than me because out of the band I have a day job. I’ve got all these other projects going on. Those guys are just musicians. So when you take away a summer tour from them, that’s their yearly pay.

“We were set up to go do 30 festivals all over Europe and it got shut down. We had a show in New York City, we had one in L.A. then one by one, they just started shutting down. Everybody kind of went through a zone—and not to mention the people we lost. COVID hit us pretty hard. It was a real wake-up for humanity to say, ‘Yo, this shit is very fragile.'”

With that in the rearview, Ice-T is focused on Law & Order and his new iHeart Media podcast, Ice-T's Daily Game.