billy woods’ GOLLIWOG opens like a trap door. It doesn’t aim to provoke in cheap ways. It lingers, stalks, and drips with unease, constructed like a horror movie shot in reverse. Across 18 tracks, woods delivers some of his most vivid, fractured work to date. The album is dense and difficult on purpose, pulling from a wide cast of producers—The Alchemist, Preservation, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Steel Tipped Dove, and more—to build a rotating gallery of dread. Every beat feels like it’s coming from the bottom of a locked basement. Every verse is a flashlight flickering in the dark.
The opener “Jumpscare” sets the tone with groaning metal, off-kilter percussion, and the kind of stillness that makes your skin crawl. woods doesn’t shout. He speaks in low tones, like someone reading a crime report in the next room. Steel Tipped Dove’s production makes it feel like you’re already too deep in the building to turn back. woods doesn’t sound like he’s rapping at you. He’s delivering dispatches from somewhere too far gone. The track loops with hypnotic menace, refusing climax.
“STAR87” is equally suffocating. Conductor Williams folds thin strings, ringing phones, and synths that crackle like faulty wires into a beat that walks on broken glass. The tension never releases. woods moves through the chaos without trying to organize it—he doesn’t need to. He’s lived in this house a long time. He knows where the dead ends are. His flow is conversational, even detached, but the words land with fatal weight. It’s a performance style that makes every bar feel like a post-mortem.
GOLLIWOG sounds grim and weathered. “Misery” finds Kenny Segal looping a fragile piano line under hiss and hum, like a tape left out in the rain. woods’ voice is nearly buried, but every word cuts. It’s one of the more stripped-down tracks, and one of the heaviest. He sounds tired in a way that can’t be faked. There’s no clean emotion to it—just the sludge of survival, the dragging of lived experience. The song captures the entropy of trauma. Segal’s lo-fi textures and deconstructed piano phrases echo the disorientation of emotional burnout. The track is a grim march, not a lament, and therein lies its power.
On “Waterproof Mascara,” Preservation loops what sounds like a cry—processed, twisted, and repeated until it barely resembles a voice. It sits beside anxious piano hits, forming something close to psychological torture. woods doesn’t respond to the chaos; he floats over it like he’s already gone. There’s no hook, no break—just a looped scream and a voice rapping like it’s clocking out. It’s a track that refuses to resolve, letting dread smolder until it snuffs itself out. It’s a case study in weaponized repetition, where emotional exhaustion is the endpoint, not a side effect.
“Corinthians,” produced by EL-P, lands like a wet concrete slab. Despot’s verse has a wild-eyed sharpness, cutting into EL-P’s brutal mix of synths and distortion. It’s fast, cold, and brutal. The energy swells here but never turns explosive—it holds just enough space for everything to feel tightly wound. EL-P’s production is glacial and unrelenting, matching woods’ delivery with slabs of industrial noise that feel less like beats and more like pressure systems. Despot sounds feral, snarling his way through the distortion. The song’s structure mirrors psychological overload, letting the layers build until you either adjust or get crushed.
Elsewhere, “All These Worlds Are Yours” is thick with menace. DJ Haram and Shabaka Hutchings throw industrial percussion and metallic hums into a free-fall. The beat doesn’t move in straight lines. It lurches. woods and ELUCID exchange verses like they’re scanning a wreckage. There’s no chorus, no safe passage—just static and pressure. Hutchings’ contributions are especially disorienting, wrapping the song in metallic textures and broken-jazz phrasing. The track sounds like it’s being held together with rotted rope. It’s the sound of history collapsing on itself in real time.
“Maquiladoras” sounds like factory ghosts. The drums hit with a cracked precision, while ambient noise creeps around the edges. al.divino and Saint Abdullah sculpt the production into something hollow and echoing, like a half-finished warehouse. woods raps about labor and violence without explaining it. He doesn’t need to. His lyrics often arrive in fragments, impressions that don’t ask for resolution. The result is an atmosphere that’s deeply political without being didactic, with critique encoded into tone and texture. “Maquiladoras” becomes a parable of commodified suffering, told in footnotes and static.
On “A Doll Fulla Pins,” Yolanda Watson’s vocals float above the beat like smoke. Jeff Markey’s arrangement is minimal but sharp, with glimmers of jazz buried under creeping effects. The lyrics are more image than story—brief flashes of surveillance, danger, escape. It’s one of the album’s most quietly disturbing pieces. The chorus doesn’t offer comfort; it’s like a lullaby from someone you shouldn’t trust. woods lets the beat breathe, slipping in and out like someone pacing just out of sight. The result is deeply cinematic, like a neo-noir thriller with the camera pointed just slightly askew.
The back end of GOLLIWOG doesn’t ease up. “BLK ZMBY” strips things down to the bone. The beat clicks and snaps in slow motion, giving woods’ lyrics a wide berth to land. His delivery is measured and hushed, almost drained. There’s a walking-dead energy to it, not in tone but in movement—forward, relentless, no destination. It’s one of the most existential tracks on the album, preoccupied with inertia, with the slow grind of erasure. The sonic landscape mirrors the dissociation woods raps about: numbness given texture.
“Lead Paint Test” turns into a cipher with woods, ELUCID, and Cavalier trading verses over Willie Green’s minimal, drum-focused production. There’s no flash—just space, tension, and impact. Every word matters because there’s nowhere to hide. It’s a track that rewards replays, not because it’s dense with meaning, but because the interplay between the rappers and the silence between drums becomes its own rhythm. Each voice bends the beat differently, making absence feel heavy. The restraint in the production is deliberate, the negative space accentuating the cumulative weight of their words.
“Dislocated” closes the album in near silence. Human Error Club lays down a moody, jazz-soaked beat that feels like descending a stairwell with no bottom. woods sounds buried, almost underwater, his words blurring at the edges. ELUCID returns, adding another layer of weight. It’s not a resolution—it’s an erasure. The track fades, but doesn’t finish. It simply stops, like someone walking out of frame. It’s an ending that feels less like closure and more like disappearance—fitting for an album obsessed with presence as a ghostly act.
Throughout GOLLIWOG, woods doesn’t offer escape. The album is designed to be sat with, not skimmed. The beats are heavy but sparse, the samples intrusive, the lyrics scattered like crime scene evidence. woods never moves quickly. He doesn’t signal where a track is going. That disorientation is the point. GOLLIWOG is about being inside the machine after it breaks, about seeing the ghost in the mirror and not looking away. It’s about the after—after protest, after hope, after the body has adjusted to trauma. It’s an audio archaeology of the emotional detritus modern life leaves behind.
There’s a sense of pressure that runs through the whole record—not loud, but constant. It’s in the breathing room between snares. It’s in the samples that sound like surveillance footage. It’s in the way woods writes about violence—not dramatic or explosive, but worn down, familiar, inherited. The horror isn’t theatrical—it’s procedural. There’s no shock, no twist. Just repetition. Just routine. That’s what makes it terrifying. The album doesn’t present terror—it ambiently is terror.
What elevates GOLLIWOG is not just its darkness, but its discipline. Every choice is precise. The production is diverse but thematically unified. The features are sparse but vital. No track overstays its welcome, yet the cumulative effect is crushing. woods doesn’t editorialize. He assembles. He curates unease. The result is an album that feels haunted, but not by ghosts—by systems, memories, histories, the weight of being watched and misread. It’s political without polemic, expressive without exhibition.
GOLLIWOG feels like both a logical progression and a bold departure in the broader context of billy woods’ discography. It deepens his long-standing themes—alienation, Black identity, the weight of history—while embracing an even more abstract, theatrical approach. If Maps was woods at his most expansive and Aethiopes his most collaborative, GOLLIWOG is perhaps his most conceptually daring. It’s an album that feels built from wreckage, from tape hiss and secondhand memory. It’s an anti-spectacle that draws power from restraint.
For years, we’ve regarded Hiding Places as the strongest billy woods album of the past decade—its raw intensity and claustrophobic production still unmatched. But with GOLLIWOG, he may have just surpassed it. There’s a clarity of vision here that feels rare, even in a catalog full of masterpieces. It’s as if woods has distilled everything that makes his work powerful—his eye for detail, his resistance to structure, his refusal to compromise—into a record that feels both impossibly current and totally timeless.
GOLLIWOG is not just another excellent billy woods record—it’s one of his very best. A haunting, visionary masterwork. An incredible album.
9.5/10
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