Released May 9, 2025,
via Backwoodz Studioz.
Billy Woods loves collaborations. They’ve led to some of his best releases – of course with Elucid as part of Armand Hammer, with Kenny Segal (twice), with Moor Mother, and with many others. Last year, however, with Golliwog, he brought everyone together at once. The album gathers three decades of underground producers (El-P, The Alchemist, Preservation, Ant, Kenny Segal, DJ Haram, etc.) and like-minded rappers (Bruiser Wolf, Elucid, Cavalier, and more). This person, once mentored by Vordul Mega of Cannibal Ox, created a meeting point for an entire school of demanding hip-hop. And naturally, it’s not an easy album.
Not easy in its sound. The producers push a challenging musical approach, playing with dissonance and the unsettling noises of everyday life, like the phone ring used by Conductor Williams on “STAR87,” a track that mentions Antipop Consortium and Company Flow (and samples Viktor Vaughn), both renowned experimentalists. They craft an abrasive jazz rap, as on “A Doll Fulla Pins,” the excellent “Golgotha,” and Kenny Segal’s “Misery.” They combine heavy rock textures, jazz saxophone, and the oddities of contemporary music on “Pitchforks & Halos,” also produced by Segal. They give rappers sparse, fleeting, and uncertain soundscapes, as The Alchemist does on “Counterclockwise.”
Some compositions are stripped down to three noises and two piano notes, as on “Maquiladoras.” Obscure sounds emerge, like splashing water and animal cries at the end of “BLK XMAS,” or sobbing just afterward on “Waterproof Mascara.” All of this makes Golliwog feel like the soundtrack to a harsh, desolate film. It even includes cinematic excerpts, such as from the science-fiction film Primer, heard through much of “Counterclockwise.”
If the album isn’t easy, it’s also because of its themes. A golliwog is a frizzy-haired doll representing a Black man. Woods, a deeply engaged artist, uses this racist emblem to comment on the seemingly inescapable, perpetually tragic fate of his people. The concept is introduced from the uncomfortable “Jumpscare,” where he recalls the fraught domination of Black people by white people, through slavery in the America where he lives, and through the colonialism of Cecil Rhodes in the southern Africa where he was born.
And as if to intensify this horrific history, to underscore its dread, Woods (more a spoken-word declaimer than a conventional rapper) draws on horrorcore, the language of horror cinema. He stages a threesome with a vampire woman on “Misery.” With Bruiser Wolf on “BLK XMAS,” he very explicitly compares ghetto poverty to a thriller. On “Corinthians,” the enemies of Gaza are likened to cannibals. Americans are portrayed as zombies on the superb “BLK ZMBY.” And on “Cold Sweat,” in the tradition of the indie rap he comes from, Woods likens the music industry to a nightmare.
All of this is filled with bile and anger, rubbing the listener the wrong way. But in a time when the masses are turning away from rap, leaving it to its most devoted followers – people who take it seriously – this angry man who quotes Shakespeare, Frantz Fanon, and the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, this dark prophet who weaves Georgian or Japanese texts into his verses, this ultimate funcrusher that is Billy Woods, has every right to be here.
