Billy Woods - Golliwog Billy Woods

Album of the Week: billy woods – GOLLIWOG (Staff Review)

GOLLIWOG is the latest album from billy woods, the New York-based rapper known for Aethiopes (2022), Hiding Places (2019), and Maps (2023), the latter two in collaboration with producer Kenny Segal. He’s also one half of Armand Hammer, the duo with Elucid responsible for 2023’s excellent We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. With GOLLIWOG, woods delivers another masterpiece and further proof that he is one of the most singular, uncompromising forces in 21st-century hip hop.

woods’ music operates in an emotionally charged register, with a rawness and realism that transcends genre. GOLLIWOG is immersive and unrelenting, painting vivid cityscapes and psychological terrains through impressionistic sampling and impressive lyrical storytelling. While it draws from jazz-rap, horrorcore, and experimental abstract hip hop GOLLIWOG ultimately defies categorisation. If anything, woods seems to be carving a space we might reluctantly call post-hip hop, a fluid, expressionistic, genre-dismantling approach to rap as literary and sonic art.

Like much of woods’ discography, GOLLIWOG feels like art in constant motion. He remains uncompromising, and his darkest, most noir moments land with palpable impact. On Waterproof Mascara, a chilling sample of a sobbing woman and faint, mournful instrumentation underpin a narrative that’s almost too real to bear. Counterclockwise, built on an ingenious pitch-shifted sample from obscure New Zealand prog band Airlord, is another standout, its emotional weight echoing woods’ storytelling.

The production is stellar throughout with Segal, The Alchemist, Messiah Musik, and others contributing richly textured beats and field recordings, news clips, ambient street sounds, that deepen the album’s tangible dystopian atmosphere. One of the album’s immediate highlights is Corinthians, produced by El-P (Run The Jewels) and featuring a guest verse from Despot. The track radiates a tension and unease that is indicative of the album as a whole.

The sequence of Maquiladoras into A Doll Fulla Pins is another standout. The former offers unflinching, conversational lyricism over static and harsh sonic textures, before dissolving into a soulful jazz coda that interpolates the R&B classic Time Is On My Side. That leads directly into the haunting A Doll Fulla Pins, a smoky, midnight jazz composition with a mournful refrain by Yolanda Watson, whose vocals grow in intensity alongside the gradually swelling arrangement.

Instrumentally, GOLLIWOG is consistently fascinating and eclectic, veering between stark minimalism and lush, brooding jazz-inflected compositions. woods’ stream-of-consciousness delivery moves seamlessly between abstraction and brutal realism, landing frequently on hard-edged, direct statements. His storytelling is as incisive as ever, confronting systemic violence, political decay and corruption, and existential despair with incredible sincerity.

GOLLIWOG is deflating in its truths, but breathtaking in its execution of an artistic vision, an album that holds a mirror to the bleaker than bleak realities of today. With GOLLIWOG woods presents a visionary work that is uncompromising, prescient, poetic, and utterly essential