15. Doves (We Buy Diabetic Test Strips , 2023)

“Doves” stretches nearly nine minutes but never hurries. There’s no rush in the arrangement—no drums, no rhythmic urgency—only slow, patient unraveling. Benjamin Booker and Kenny Segal craft a soundscape that feels weightless and submerged, a procession of glitches, drones, and flickering tones that move like candlelight on damp stone. It’s not still, but it resists motion.

Booker’s vocals hover above the production like a memory half-remembered. His voice cracks in and out, meditative and unsure, circling around the refrain: “I was only a dove, only in love.” It lands somewhere between resignation and yearning, a quiet dirge unfolding in layers.

billy woods’ verse arrives like a box in the attic you forgot you packed. It’s all cold air and fading memories—letters never sent, soup simmering on a back burner, a crib lifted in silence. His writing turns inward, fixated on decay and passage, watching the ground give way beneath everyday moments. There’s grief here, but it’s cloaked in domestic ritual, in the ghost of a dinner table that remains untouched.

ELUCID’s final stretch moves toward the spiritual. He circles themes of absence, finality, and transcendence with a solemn clarity. There’s no climax, only quiet recognition. The outro repeats like a mantra or lullaby, flickering between innocence and unease.

“Doves” holds space—long, unbroken space—for the things too heavy to say outright. It lingers, as though waiting for something that might not arrive.

14. Barbarians (Rome, 2017)

Built from a sample of JPEGMAFIA’s “My Thoughts on Neogaf Dying,” Barbarians opens with an unmistakable sense of tension. The production is unsettling and hollowed out, a dystopian throb beneath voices both measured and furious.

billy woods’ verse is dense with imagery, at once historical and surreal. He paints the outlines of empire in decline, not through grand battles but through cultural decay and warped rituals of power. The “Emperor at the gate” sits gold-draped and aloof, while chaos stirs just beyond the walls. woods lets the contradictions breathe—indentured artists who own their masters, black masses and backwoods, righteous anger encased in elegance. Each line scrapes against the myth of civilization as progress. If this is Rome, it’s burning slowly, and the crowd is just waiting for blood.

ELUCID responds like a bolt of lightning. His verse thrashes through structural violence, religious commodification, and historical amnesia. There’s no metaphor when he says “free every-god-damn-body”—just command. He flips apocalyptic language into grounded urgency, drawing links between the brutality of the past and the mechanisms that still grind on today. His voice rises, then fractures into something closer to a chant or demand, circling the question: “Who the f*ck are you?”

The hook mocks its own fascination with spectacle. It is all very interesting—but what does interest buy you, if the walls are still standing and the gates still closed?

13. Fuhrman Tapes (Paraffin, 2018)

“Fuhrman Tapes” is built like a case file left half-open—evidence scattered, names redacted, facts buried under noise. Produced by Willie Green and Messiah Musik, the track unfolds over a brooding beat with a loose, almost corroded structure, full of ambient details that give it the grain of a bad memory. The title draws a direct line to LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, whose racism and falsified evidence contaminated one of the most televised trials in American history. That reference isn’t about revisiting the case—it’s about naming the rot at the center.

ELUCID opens with elliptical imagery, flipping prophecy and reality, pleasure and trauma. “Black pussy is the world’s first religion,” he says, reverent and irreverent in the same breath. There’s no clear narrative here—just flickers of history and present collapsing into each other: gentrification, imperialism, police brutality, fashion, fascism, pharmaceuticals. He spits, “Pig reform policy is an ice pack on the gun wound,” and that’s the clearest thesis in a verse that dodges straight lines. This is lived experience rendered in code.

billy woods picks up where ELUCID leaves off, taking a colder angle. His delivery is haunted but steady: “Cain laid his brother in a shallow grave and went about his day.” The metaphors shift like surveillance footage. He’s not explaining so much as testifying. The refrain—”It’s the reason they don’t look you in the eye”—lands like a closing statement. Not accusatory, not absolving. Just the weight of truth, passed from speaker to listener, no resolution required.

12. The Rent Is Too Damn High (Race Music, 2013)

Produced by DOS4GW, “The Rent Is Too Damn High” is a grimy dispatch from apartments that creak with memory, decay, and defiance. The track is built on a skeletal beat—dusty drums and spectral loops—that leaves ample space for the voices of billy woods and ELUCID to linger and decay, like cigarette smoke in a stairwell.

woods begins in a project hallway that stinks of weed and cheap liquor. “The man in 3C is dying of cancer / Told me straight-up / I admire his candor,” he says, half weary, half marveling at the clarity. His verses trace survival through paranoia, coded memory, and thin-walled intimacy. The political and personal blur into one indistinct shadow cast by the long arm of the state—police raids, poverty, necromancers slinging death off stoops. He ducks behind metaphors and peepholes alike.

ELUCID enters with a different gait—rhythmic, angular, slicing through layers of blunt smoke and economic wreckage. “Modest brownstone, sad ghost in the hallway,” he raps, drawing the building itself as a relic haunted by both past and present residents. His verse is a tumble of images: jerk chicken, burnt spoons, loan debt, shattered lineage. It’s not a panorama, it’s a tight close-up—neighborhoods at street level, where “Jesus on the main line” might be a punchline or a prayer.

The chorus is a quiet scream. Sex, prayer, freezing pipes—these are the daily rituals of those cast aside yet still burning, still loud, still present.

11. Dead Cars (Shrines, 2020)

Produced by Kenny Segal, “Dead Cars” plays like a haunted procession through abandoned neighborhoods and psychic wreckage. The beat is skeletal and shifting, built on muted percussion, buried horns, and feedback that hovers like fog. Each verse enters as if summoned, voices overlapping in a patchwork of memory, folklore, and spectral detail.

ELUCID opens with ghostly grace: “Scrapyard ghosts levitating, slap box under wolf moons.” He sketches a zone where violence and myth blur—coordinates tracked but unspoken, killers remembered by name. There’s no safe distance; past wrongs trail close, like stray dogs too stubborn to leave.

billy woods answers with corrosion and irony: “Dead cars stuffed with garbage line lost blocks / Laughin’ at alternate side parkin’.” His bars move with weary precision, dismantling the urban decay of forgotten systems and the absurd rituals that remain. Later, he reappears to deliver some of the song’s most vivid lines: “Got the correct directions in gibberish / Tolls diminish, desperate trolls abandon crumblin’ bridges.” Woods doesn’t just describe a crumbling world—he walks through it, misread map in hand.

R.A.P. Ferreira shifts the tone with surreal bursts: “Yahweh’s gardener was bored.” His imagery coils inward, a cryptic aside to divinity and metamorphosis. It’s a strange detour that feels like it belongs precisely because it shouldn’t.

The final ELUCID verse lands heavy, dense with apocalyptic fragments and esoteric grief. “Projects on the beach, sandcastle instead of lawn.” In Dead Cars, the machinery is busted, but the engine of poetry hums on, low and possessed.

10. Where The Wild Things Are (Race Music, 2013)

Produced by Willie Green, “Where the Wild Things Are” speaks in the language of survival, its title nodding not just to childhood fantasy, but to the quiet terror of growing up in a world where innocence erodes early. The track unfolds like a double exposure—one image of youth in motion, the other of the systems pressing in on all sides.

ELUCID opens with raw autobiography, recalling his early encounters with violence in detail that feels freshly bruised. Each bar captures the moment violence ceased to be abstract, the instant it became necessary, even instructional. His father’s ultimatum—fight back or face him—sets the terms. From there, the verse grows heavier, moving through schoolyard fights, neighborhood trauma, and inherited roles he hadn’t yet chosen. The emotion is close to the surface, swollen like the cheek he describes, but focused and clear-eyed.

billy woods answers with a sprawling, cinematic verse. His lens is wider, though no less personal—layers of cultural reference, war metaphors, and deadpan irony scaffold his portrait of normalized chaos. Lines flicker like warning signs: “You don’t really want to know how it go, like ground beef.” The verse oscillates between fatalism and satire, its brilliance lying in how much can be condensed into a single breath.

The song ends without catharsis. Just a long exhale and the distant echo of a news report. The wild things aren’t monsters in the woods—they’re home, in the streets, under the skin. And somehow, dinner still gets made.

9. Chicharonnes (feat. Quelle Chris) (Haram, 2021)

“Chicharonnes” stews in metaphor, wit, and menace, simmering over The Alchemist’s slow, stoned beat like something left to boil too long. The title references fried pork rinds, but here it’s not just food—it’s a symbol, a slur, a vehicle for critique. In the opening verse, billy woods takes on the language of self-surveillance and internalized authority with unblinking precision: “Got caught with the pork / But you gotta kill the cop in your thoughts.” It’s a dizzying line, brimming with disgust, refusal, and clarity all at once.

The production lingers in a kind of deliberate haze, letting each bar hang like smoke in a closed room. Quelle Chris delivers both the hook and second verse with a smirking cynicism that only sharpens the blade. His imagery spins out across police violence, Black identity, and co-opted movements, fusing surrealism with cutting social analysis: “We let BLM be the new FUBU, we ain’t bros.” It’s the kind of line that sits uncomfortably in your ear long after it lands, which is exactly the point.

There’s humor here, but it’s blackened and dry—the laughter that comes right before the teeth clench. woods and Quelle aren’t making points so much as building pressure, twisting the symbolism of pigs into a kaleidoscope of fear, appetite, and complicity. If you blink, you miss the shift from parable to threat. If you listen close, you realize there was never any difference to begin with.

8. Microdose (feat. Quelle Chris) (Rome, 2017)

“Microdose” plays like a transmission intercepted mid-apocalypse, its signal distorted but insistent. Produced by August Fanon, the track trudges forward on a glitched, industrial throb—static-laced, churning, and stubbornly unresolved. It’s a raw nerve, buzzing with equal parts paranoia and clarity.

ELUCID opens with a jolt: “I was born in the year of this country’s last recorded lynching / My question is, who stopped recording?” His verse is dense, incendiary, layered with spiritual rupture and political critique. The delivery is breathless yet deliberate, unraveling like an incantation chiseled from chaos. He pulls from hauntology, scripture, and street mysticism, until the lines blur between prophet and casualty, spellcaster and symptom.

Quelle Chris follows with a deadpan swagger that masks razor-sharp commentary. His cadence loops hypnotically: “I am not astounded, I am not surprised,” both mantra and indictment. The verse drifts between satire and warning, skewering shallow wokeness, state surveillance, and inherited self-hatred. He moves through references with sly wit, couching heavy truths in casual, off-kilter phrasing that lingers after the laugh.

billy woods enters last with a verse that feels like classified intel half-redacted. “You gon’ need more than bows and arrows, you dig?” he warns, the tone sharpened by generational weight. The wordplay is tactile, abrasive—moments of wit buried in concrete. There’s a quiet tension in the refusal to over-explain. Some truths are coded for survival.

“Microdose” scrapes against the grain of understanding, not to confuse, but to insist that comprehension must be earned. It crackles with intent, each verse a flare in the fog, each bar a breadcrumb for those willing to follow deeper into the static.

7. Woke Up And Asked Siri How I'm Gonna Die (feat. JPEGMAFIA) (We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, 2023)

There’s a certain chill to this one, like stepping into a dim room lit only by the glow of a cracked screen. JPEGMAFIA’s production hums with dread and surreal beauty—glitchy, slow-burning, and unsettlingly fluid. It’s a murmur that becomes a pulse, never quite stable, as if the track is holding its breath.

The refrain sets the tone before a verse lands: “Woke up and asked Siri how I’m gonna die.” It echoes like a ritual, part deadpan tech-age prayer, part existential joke. Woods doesn’t force the line—he repeats it until the absurdity curdles into prophecy.

ELUCID enters like a transmission from another plane. His verse swerves between intimacy and myth, bending lines around spiritual dissonance and carnal confessions. The delivery is elastic, slippery. Images flash—sticky buns, empty pots, a pistol smoking—and vanish just as quickly. He lets the contradictions stand uncorrected.

Then woods unpacks his side with clinical precision. The lines feel weighted: tinnitus, steak aging, traffic stops, scars new and old. He folds tragedy into irony and irony into observation, until it’s hard to say what’s a joke and what’s a warning. Everything lands sharp but slightly slanted, as if refracted through memory or static.

There’s no single shape to this track. It mutates. The mood crawls, creeps, then settles into something stranger—less a song than a signal picked up by accident, a message buried in the noise that feels far too specific to be random.

6. If He Holla (feat. SKECH185) (Paraffin, 2018)

Produced by August Fanon, “If He Holla” is a dense, shape-shifting monologue fractured across three voices—each confronting trauma with different tools: surrealism, gallows humor, controlled detachment. The beat staggers with irregular grace, a bassline submerged under static and jazz-brushed percussion, like it’s been broadcast from a shortwave radio just out of range.

ELUCID opens in a mode of oblique swagger and spiritual irony, launching lines like cryptic missiles: “Deadstock box on ice to be thawed in a time of crisis.” His verse is laced with invocations and mockeries—false prophets, fake IDs, designer fabric as ritual armor. Every image feels unstable, caught between opulence and decay. He refuses transcendence, but still names it. “I ain’t make the rules,” he shrugs, even as he maps them out.

billy woods follows, grounded but bitterly mystic. He doesn’t offer clarity so much as consequence. “Your God is distant / Your father never listen,” he begins, cutting to the root. His lines pile up like case notes, scrawled in marginless anger—intergenerational silence, economic traps, grief rituals masquerading as holidays. He raps like someone recalling too much too vividly: “I grew up at the reaper knee.”

The final verse belongs to Skech185, whose delivery burns slow and searing. His entry is personal, stripped of metaphor. “I fight everyday to die as an old man,” he confesses. The tone never breaks into catharsis. Each verse deepens the ache. Together, they create a portrait of survival where memory lingers like a bad taste—refusing to sweeten, refusing to leave.

5. Trauma Mic (feat. Pink Siifu) (We Buy Diabetic Test Strips , 2023)

“Trauma Mic” erupts without warning. DJ Haram’s production hits like broken circuitry, fusing jagged guitar squalls with a scorched-earth rhythm section. The track seethes from the first seconds, scorched with distortion and raw energy that never lets up. What follows is not a performance—it’s a reckoning.

Pink Siifu sets the temperature early, delivering his verse like a warning flare. His words slide between taunts and declarations, refusing to play by any known rulebook. There’s tension in every line, a challenge hurled at anyone still coasting on appearances. ELUCID follows, eruptive and unapologetic, tearing through illusions of progress with barbed phrases that land like broken glass. “No slave, no world,” he says—flat, stark, unblinking. His verse is a storm system of unease, where faith and futility collide.

Then woods steps in. His voice carries the weight of worn truths and sharpened memory. There’s a dry humor in his delivery, but the observations are anything but light. He drags clout-chasing and artistic burnout into the daylight, sidestepping judgment in favor of dissection. His closing lines are cold and brilliant, collapsing faith, myth, and survival into brutal imagery: hot lunches in church basements, numb fingers reaching for heat, visions of divinity in the middle of the block.

“Trauma Mic” seethes, loops, and corrodes; a track that seems to both resist and reflect the world it inhabits. Every verse hits with intent. Nothing here is casual.

4. Stonefruit (Haram, 2021)

“Stonefruit” unfolds like a slow-motion eclipse—glowing, solemn, and strange. It marks the end of Haram, but there’s nothing conclusive about it. Instead, Armand Hammer lingers in transition, a place where comfort is suspect and clarity never arrives whole. ELUCID drifts through the verses with a half-sung, half-sighed cadence, sounding somewhere between resignation and revelation. “Comfort’s dull but gets us through / I got so much left to undo.” The line hangs in the air like a confession—personal, unfinished, and deeply human.

The Alchemist’s production is restrained and dreamlike, sketching a muted landscape with spare piano notes and spectral textures. It’s a beat that holds space rather than commands it, giving the vocals room to breathe and stretch. And billy woods fills that space with vivid, gothic imagery. His verse slips between reality and hallucination, painting a portrait of a lover-turned-mourner, cloaked in ritual: “She drank rosé out the skull but held it gentle as my living head.” It’s both grotesque and tender, a love story soaked in blood and myth.

The song speaks in symbols but doesn’t chase interpretation. There’s a sadness embedded in it—about distance, about transformation, about the parts of ourselves we leave behind for others to carry. And yet it never pleads for understanding. “Stonefruit” plays like a haunting, not just a song—something beautiful and bruised, left behind in a room just emptied of light.

3. Rehearse With Ornette (Paraffin, 2018)

There’s no easing into “Rehearse With Ornette.” The song drops like a curtain torn down, its opening line already aflame: “All that he seen burnt a hole in his brain.” It’s a mantra and a wound, repeated over a creeping, unstable beat produced by ELUCID—half echo chamber, half warning siren. The track takes its name from Ornette Coleman, whose free jazz ethos hovers in the dissonance and improvisational looseness, but the focus here is trauma, survival, and the mental scarring left behind.

billy woods begins with deadpan exhaustion, surveying the debris of memory and movement like someone too tired to look away. He laces irony through flashbacks of military posturing, fumbled success, and broken civic dreams: “Semper Fi, waving weapons at the peasants / Hearts and minds that don’t work / Start squeezing off one at a time.” His delivery drifts between sardonic and shell-shocked, counting bars like body bags.

Then ELUCID detonates. His verse veers from polemic to surreal spasm, tracking everything from consumer complicity to systemic abandonment. The barbs are barbed wire: “Reverse weave white hoodie, all-American lynching.” His rage spirals outward, touching the industry, the crowd, and the broader theater of oppression. There’s no fantasy here, only performance—and he’s not playing along.

The hook keeps returning like a fever: “Only came back to tell ‘em ‘bout them f*ckin’ flames.” What they’ve seen doesn’t resolve, it loops. This is a dispatch from inside the fire, scorched but speaking.

2. The Gods Must Be Crazy (We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, 2023)

The title alone sets the tone: absurdity mistaken for divinity, disruption mistaken for progress. El-P’s production snakes through that tension, layering frantic drums, garbled vocal samples, and sudden sonic spasms into a landscape that feels unstable by design. Nothing stays still for long.

billy woods opens with wide angles—drive-in movies, Rhodesian conflict, Kissinger cameos. The scope expands and contracts with every bar, time folding in on itself, history collapsing into memory. It’s not just the language that’s dense—it’s the density of implication, the feeling that every reference is pointing at five others, just out of frame.

ELUCID is less linear, more spectral. His lines spiral into themselves: six-headed brides, Xeroxed passports, data loss as metaphysical condition. He speaks in fractured prophecy, more oracle than narrator. His refrains—“Your money’s no good here”—cut through like warnings carved in stone.

The final verse from woods gathers the entire arc into a tumbling descent. Images of CIA drug flights, ancient cave symbols, and hunter-gatherers watching modernity collapse swirl together until it all feels mythic. One minute it’s diagrams and surveillance, the next it’s bushmen and skyfall. The gods aren’t just crazy—they’re complicit.

No verse settles. No beat rests. There’s something frantic in the structure, a refusal to land or resolve. The track ends with a simple “Declined,” hanging like a verdict, as if the song was itself a transaction denied on arrival. Everything said, nothing accepted.

1. Falling Out The Sky (feat. Earl Sweatshirt) (Haram, 2021)

“Falling Out the Sky” is a memory puzzle, three voices slipping in and out of youth, loss, and the strange beauty of distant summers. The beat floats, understated and sun-faded—Alchemist at his most restrained—carrying the voices without ever weighing them down.

Earl Sweatshirt opens, weaving grief into cosmic imagery. He barely raises his voice, yet every line lands heavy, orbiting around the death of his father and the intangible space left behind. “Sometimes we collide / the black sky full of supernovas and stars that died.” He doesn’t explain—he gestures, and the ache is there in the pauses between bars.

billy woods lands in California, early twenties, broke but scheming. His verse captures that disorienting stretch of new adulthood: painting houses, listening to MJG & 8Ball, already plotting his return with something stashed in the door panels. It’s a collage of heat, hustle, and paranoia—his presence always shadowed by the idea of getting away with something.

Then ELUCID, pulling the clock back further, recalls a childhood summer camp: the quiet horror and fragile magic of being away from home for the first time. His verse moves like a dream disturbed—light bugs, red moons, crushed ICEE on old Ebony magazines, the submerged sound of voices heard underwater. It’s haunting, but also tender, even funny in places.

No one here is trying to resolve anything. Instead, they write around the edges of memory, holding it loosely, knowing it never quite fits back together the same way.