In the ever-shifting terrain of underground Hip Hop, few figures are as enigmatic or consistently brilliant as billy woods. A formerly nomadic, now Brooklyn-based rapper and co-founder of the Backwoodz Studioz label, woods has carved out a space entirely his own—eschewing trends, dodging clear-cut narratives, and cultivating a discography as challenging as it is rewarding. Over the past two decades, he’s emerged as one of the most vital voices in rap, pairing dense, poetic lyricism with avant-garde production that leans toward the surreal, the abrasive, and the otherworldly. His music is not easily digestible, and that’s the point. woods asks you to sit with discomfort, to rewind, to unpack.
Whether solo or as part of Armand Hammer (alongside ELUCID), woods has built a body of work that reads like a ciphered history of Black life, late capitalism, spiritual disillusionment, and postcolonial trauma. Albums like History Will Absolve Me, Known Unknowns, Hiding Places, Aethiopes, Maps. and GOLLIWOG reveal a restless intellect and a gift for vivid, often haunting imagery. He’s a rapper who references Frantz Fanon and J.G. Ballard with the same ease as corner store interactions—melding the personal and political, the esoteric and the immediate. His delivery—dry, deliberate, unblinking—gives weight to every word, as though he’s quietly reading from a classified report.
Production has played a key role in shaping woods’ universe. Longtime collaborators like Kenny Segal, Messiah Musik, Preservation, and The Alchemist offer backdrops that are murky, off-kilter, and layered with tension—perfect complements to woods’ dense bars. Even with such abstract or unconventional beats, woods never fades into the production. Instead, he rises above it, navigating fractured loops, eerie samples, and droning textures with surgical precision.
Selecting a mere 15 tracks from his solo discography is no easy task, in fact, it is the most impossible Top 15 list we compiled, along with Kool Keith‘s. billy woods’ songs don’t always stand alone in the traditional sense—they often feel like pages torn from larger, disjointed novels. But within his sprawling catalog are moments of visceral clarity, sardonic wit, and poetic brilliance that demand recognition. The following list doesn’t aim to define billy woods, nor could it. Instead, it highlights some of the most striking, enduring, and impactful songs from a career that refuses easy categorization.
These are the tracks that linger, that haunt, that reward every relisten. The songs that remind us why billy woods is, without question, one of the most essential voices in contemporary Hip Hop.
15. Bush League (Known Unknowns, 2017)
“Bush League” kicks off Known Unknowns with a dose of grim absurdity, the kind billy woods delivers like no one else. Over a jagged, twitchy beat from Aesop Rock—one that stumbles, skips, and stings—woods unpacks a world where slogans are empty, systems are rigged, and the playbook is written in blood. “Victory Formation only time he ever kneels,” he growls early, skewering political theater and institutional rot with the same breath.
The verses split the difference between sardonic critique and autobiographical fog. One moment, he’s dragging neoliberal complicity in the face of white supremacy—“Exchanged jerseys and shook hands / ‘Both teams played hard, my man!’”—and the next, he’s quietly tracing childhood trauma through broken phone calls and silence at the dinner table. That pivot is seamless, not jarring—woods has a rare talent for letting memory and satire bleed into each other without warning.
“Bush League” thrives in the disorientation. It’s full of sharp turns and sharp tongues, from butter-smooth bar talk to nuclear dread. The hook—“A couple flavors, a couple favors / A cup of coffee in the majors”—is as catchy as it is ambiguous, a nod to fleeting success or limited access, depending on how you hear it.
As the opener to Known Unknowns, it sets the tone with jittery confidence: personal, political, and deeply skeptical. woods doesn’t guide so much as provoke, tossing the listener into the deep end and letting the dissonance do the talking.
“Windhoek” is a haunted, heat-warped dispatch from the wreckage of empire, both personal and geopolitical. Messiah Musik’s production feels parched and grainy, like archival footage that won’t quite stay still. The track takes its name from Namibia’s capital—a city marked by a legacy of German colonization and South African apartheid—and that history lingers around the edges, felt in both the references and the emotional terrain.
woods enters in camouflage, deadpan and cryptic: “They put the plexiglass back how it used to be,” he mutters, evoking a return to old boundaries, old separations. The song drifts between registers: satire, reportage, confession. His delivery is steady but disquieting, built around contradictions and ghostly imagery—“Dead birds as far as the eye can see.” He raps of phony facades in suburban towns, foreign interventions masked as liberation, and the emotional numbness of survival. The lines are blunt, but not cold. He isn’t offering distance—just a view from inside the fallout.
Mach-Hommy’s verse floats through the middle like coded smoke, cryptic and menacing in its restraint. His presence adds another layer of obliqueness, a voice just out of reach, made more effective for how little it reveals.
By the end, woods is unsparing: “Break every idol on your f*ckin’ mountain.” Not a plea or prophecy, just a flat imperative. “Windhoek” burns slowly, but it doesn’t drift—it sticks, unsettled and alert, staring down the ruins with a gaze that doesn’t blink.
13. Crocodile Tears (History Will Absolve Me, 2012)
Produced by Willie Green, “Crocodile Tears” is dense, serrated, and unflinching. The beat churns with clattering layers—percussion, looping keys, and fragments that twist around woods’ cadence like razor wire. From the opening bar, the tone is set: “32 bars on how to rob and kill your neighbors / Still got the nerve to ask God to save you.” It’s not a critique delivered from on high, but from within, a voice implicating itself in the rot.
The first verse jumps through collapsing empires, corrupt armies, and bad weed smoked in small apartments. woods’ lyricism runs like a fever—vivid, sick, alive with gallows wit. “Sea of green under rays gamma / Stunner shades, Ray Banner” delivers a Marvel reference laced with menace and personal restraint. There’s anger, but it’s tempered—contained, weaponized.
HiCoup’s hook, slurred and weary, loops like a resignation. “Bring me champagne when I’m thirsty… Y’all can’t hurt me, I’ve been feeling like this a long time.” It’s less bravado than a kind of exhausted defense mechanism. Emotional endurance as coping strategy.
The second verse dives further into stagnation and decay: washed-out hoop dreams, blunt rotations, jailhouse dead ends. There’s no spectacle here, just observation—honest, bleak, unsentimental. “Life crawling by the bottom of the screen like a news ticker” captures it best. This is lived experience rendered in slow motion, spiraling but unbroken. “Crocodile Tears” delivers reality as-is: unvarnished, unmerciful, unforgettable.
12. Sauvage (Aethiopes, 2022)
“Sauvage,” the fourth track from billy woods’ Aethiopes, encapsulates the album’s persistent dualities—on one hand, a searing look at the violence and trauma of inner-city life, and on the other, a deconstruction of colonial narratives. The French title, meaning “savage,” is a pointed reference to the historical European notion of “civilizing” the world, flipping the idea to reveal the savagery of colonizers themselves.
Boldy James opens with a verse dripping in grim realism, his calm delivery at odds with the severity of his words. He paints a picture of a life where trust is scarce, violence is common, and self-preservation is paramount. His chilling line, “In the hood with the hoodlums where the killers purgin’” sets the track’s unnerving tone, a tone only deepened as woods enters with his own vivid snapshots of trauma and survival. From the violence of Dre shooting his uncle to the harrowing image of kids forced out of their homes to avoid gang violence, woods offers no easy answers, only stark depictions of lives shaped by despair.
The hook from Gabe Nandez adds an unsettling layer to the track, with its looped refrain—“No collar on my neck, no secret”—echoing the chaos beneath the surface. “Sauvage” is a song about struggle, and it’s about the systems that forge it, the generational scars that persist long after the dust settles. Through it all, woods and his collaborators craft a track that pulls no punches and takes no prisoners.
11. Keloid (Known Unknowns, 2017)
A keloid is a scar that won’t stop growing. It is a dense and undifferentiated mass of tissue that continues to form long after the wound is meant to be healed. woods uses it as a metaphor for emotional and generational trauma—for what lingers after survival.
The production here is mournful and subdued, its weight carried by a looping melody that never resolves. Over it, woods delivers two verses that pulse with unresolved grief. He recalls prison calls, motherly sacrifice, and the uncanny dullness of living through chaos. The writing resists sentimentality — everything is stated plainly, but with precision: “Gas leak, plug screwed up the vacuum seal / Secret wars, left our dead on the field.” There’s no illusion of clarity. Even the repetition of the chorus — “you won’t never get no answers” — signals a refusal to decode the pain into something neat or coherent.
In the second verse, he moves from the personal to the societal, but the boundary is porous. Stories of lost friends, institutional neglect, and the ache of guilt blur into a single voice, cracking under its own introspection. “Trigger warnings in every verse / Can’t feel it if it doesn’t hurt.” The tone never wavers, but each line cuts closer to the nerve.
There’s no catharsis, no pivot toward resolution. “Keloid” acknowledges that some damage keeps growing — even when you look away, even when you try to forget. The wound is the body. The song is the scar.
10. Spider Hole (Hiding Places, 2019)
There’s nowhere to hide on “Spider Hole,” but billy woods makes isolation sound like a strategy. The track plays like a dispatch from deep cover—unseen, unsentimental, and utterly unflinching. Produced by Kenny Segal, the beat lurches forward on a foundation of distorted low-end and decaying samples, eventually giving way to smoldering guitars that surface halfway through like buried tension breaking loose. It’s not chaos, but it is pressure—controlled and claustrophobic.
The title evokes the infamous hiding place of Saddam Hussein, but the reference points don’t stop there. woods folds war imagery into daily rituals like breathing, smoking, and dodging phone calls. “Holdin’ my breath in the crawl space, weight taped to my body / Barbarians at the gate, Benghazi”—the line doesn’t just open the song, it drills straight into its marrow. The spider hole is literal, metaphorical, and symbolic all at once.
That same tension pulses through the chorus. “I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall / No man of the people, I wouldn’t be caught dead with most of y’all.” It’s not just antisocial—it’s a statement of refusal, a rejection of sentimentality, celebrity, and comfort.
woods isn’t seeking connection here; he’s narrating from a distance, eyes sharp and trust scarce. Each verse is laced with surveillance, cynicism, and grim humor, told from a place that’s seen too much to believe in clean exits. It’s a song about hiding, but every line lands like it’s already been seen.
9. NYC Tapwater (Maps, 2023)
“NYC Tapwater” is a standout track on Maps, though it’s hard to pick just one from an album where every song plays a crucial part in the larger narrative. Here, billy woods returns to New York, reflecting on the city with both fondness and a sharp awareness of its dangers. The jazzy, laid-back beat lures you in, offering a sense of comfort, but the lyrics quickly reveal the complex, often harsh reality of life in the city.
woods kicks off with a nostalgic reference to the city, describing how one sip of New York City tapwater instantly brings him back to life. From there, he weaves a series of vivid, sometimes unsettling moments—familiar faces, shifting street scenes, and the weight of survival. The imagery is haunting: “Crabs in a bucket,” “Death in a top hat dance a jig in the street,” and the ever-present knowledge that “the city wicked, it’ll crush you with its feet.” There’s a sense of being caught between the allure of home and the darker realities that come with it.
As woods navigates these memories, he reflects on how much has changed, with new faces replacing the old, but the struggle remains the same. The track captures a moment in time, and it reflects the tension between nostalgia and resignation, a feeling that permeates the entire album. “NYC Tapwater” is a poignant piece in the mosaic of Maps, more proof of woods’s talent for layering personal reflection with social commentary.
8. Paraquat (Church, 2022)
“Paraquat” opens Church with a thunderous sense of reckoning, grounding the album in both personal history and global consequence. Over Messiah Musik’s textured production—first spare and tense, later grimy and mournful—billy woods unspools a dense narrative about growing up in the wreckage of failed systems. The title references the toxic herbicide sprayed on marijuana crops, a metaphor for the poisoned conditions that shaped his world.
The verses span time and geography but remain rooted in harsh, vividly rendered detail. The track opens uptown, with dope lines out the door and memories of cheap weed passed off as “chocolate.” woods drops reflections with surgical precision—religion, betrayal, survival—all tangled in the economy of the block. “Loved that girl, but knew we wouldn’t work like Harden on the Rockets” sets the tone: cutting, personal, dryly self-aware.
As the beat shifts, so does the scope. What starts as a tale of corner hustling and familial tension zooms out to implicate state violence and historical trauma. “Whitey hit Hiroshima, then he doubled back / Black rain baptized black skies,” he spits, collapsing decades of devastation into a few scalding lines. Even escape—personal or political—feels elusive. The suggestion is clear: we were all raised on paraquat.
Though Church flows as a cohesive document, “Paraquat” stands firmly on its own. It’s a track about being shaped by forces you never chose—chemical, ideological, spiritual—and having to fight for breath in the residue.
7. Waterproof Mascara (GOLLIWOG, 2025)
“Waterproof Mascara” is a descent through memory, trauma, and spectral dread, guided by one of billy woods’ most lacerating performances to date. Preservation’s beat is suffocating in its minimalism—a woman’s cry looped endlessly, like a ghost moaning through cracked vinyl, while splintered piano stabs and distant drums hover like echoes in an abandoned building. It’s not just eerie; it’s intimate in a way that feels invasive, as if we’re eavesdropping on something we were never meant to hear.
woods pulls no punches. His verses move through the aftermath of childhood abuse with clarity so sharp it cuts. Watching his mother weep at the top of the stairs, hiding passports, learning distrust as a survival skill—each line is heavy with implication but never over-explained. He collapses timelines, showing how the damage lingers, mutating into thoughts of self-harm or the bleak laughter of children who have already seen too much. “Sometimes it’s all you can do not to do it like Sylvia Plath,” he says, dryly, and the line hangs like a lightbulb swinging in a basement.
There’s no false catharsis, no narrative arc to comfort the listener. But within the song’s bleakness, there’s astonishing precision. The repeated refrain—“Weed had me paralyzed, hit it again off automatic”—feels like both coping mechanism and confession. “Waterproof Mascara” doesn’t beg for sympathy. It simply refuses to flinch. It’s a song that peers into the dark and, instead of looking away, takes notes.
6. Pollo Rico (Church, 2022)
Produced by Messiah Musik, “Pollo Rico” threads grief through memory, imagery, and silence. The track unfolds in dim light, centered on a hospital room where woods delivers champagne and weed to a dying friend—an offering, or a form of penance. The song circles the wreckage: not the car crash itself, but the psychic splinters left behind. Survivor’s guilt simmers in each line, too sharp for nostalgia, too tender for denial.
The beat is washed in haze—vocal fragments looped in slow motion, held just beneath the drums, like a voice half-swallowed. It’s mournful but never maudlin, a fitting backdrop for woods’ oblique storytelling. “Hospital vending machine, D2 is the Cheetos,” he raps, locating the scene with visceral banality. The specificity stings. “New Year’s Eve, I snuck in the Clicquot” lands soft and heavy at once, indulgent and elegiac. These are not flashbacks, they’re hauntings.
Verse two widens the lens. woods draws a line from personal tragedy to collective betrayal, from wrecked cars to burnt corpses in unnamed forests. “Wake up thinking ’bout the ones they left in the forest” is not a punchline—it’s a wound. He slips between domestic and apocalyptic with no warning, never settling long enough for the listener to get comfortable. The weight doesn’t lift.
Despite the album’s title, “Pollo Rico” offers no absolution, only gestures toward it: a late-night meal, a borrowed vape, a toast to the dead. All small attempts to soften what can’t be undone.
5. A Day In A Week In A Year (feat. Mothermary) (Hiding Places, 2019)
There’s a quiet kind of dread that runs through “A Day In A Week In A Year,” an aching patience to its plodding beat and smeared piano that feels like fog settling over ruined ground. Over it, billy woods doesn’t deliver verses so much as weather reports—grim conditions from the front lines of a life defined by precarity, disillusionment, and survival. The song plays like a string of bruised recollections: dusty shoes stored like trophies of labor, nightmares coiled with self-doubt, the subtle humiliation of being unprepared for hope when it shows up unannounced.
woods threads these moments together not with a linear story but through sharp, impressionistic cuts—each vignette echoing the same quiet fatalism. The crack pipe blooming with chrysanthemums and daffodils is not just a haunting image, it’s a thesis: the futility of beauty in the face of compulsion and decay. His narratives drift between abstract metaphor and blunt realism, offering no solutions, no moral center—only the suffocating pressure of capitalism, addiction, violence, and broken dreams grinding down whatever might’ve been.
The chorus, delivered by MOTHERMARY in an airy cadence, only deepens the haze: “Do we fight it? Do we like it?” The answer, inevitably, is silence or a shrug. woods ends the track where so many lives begin: out of money, out of time, pretending to play a game that was never built for him. Few songs capture such existential exhaustion with such poetic density. This is the sound of knowing exactly what’s coming—and still flinching anyway.
4. Lead Paint Test (feat. ELUCID & Cavalier) (GOLLIWOG, 2025)
“Lead Paint Test” is a quiet reckoning. With production from Willie Green and DJ Mo Niklz, the track is skeletal—dusty drums, soft horns, bare piano—and every note feels lived-in. It’s not sparse so much as stripped of pretense, clearing space for something weightier. E L U C I D, Cavalier, and billy woods don’t so much trade verses as pass burdens. Each one delivers something heavy—something they’ve been carrying a long time.
E L U C I D opens, framing his childhood home as a space that conceals as much as it reveals. His verse is rich in tactile detail: cracked plaster, parquet floors, steel wool in the walls. But it’s not about décor—it’s about ghosts, both personal and structural. His lines move with the rhythm of memory: elliptical, never quite linear, all the more affecting for it.
Cavalier follows, his verse dense with inherited ache and survival tactics. Family bonds and breakages are rendered vividly, sometimes with gallows humor, sometimes in hushed grief. “Every Black life a thriller” cuts deep, especially as it sits alongside domestic images that feel fragile under pressure. His reflections carry a worn clarity—the kind that only comes with long familiarity.
woods closes the door gently but firmly. His verse, steeped in silence and omission, is about the things that are never said but always known. The house becomes a symbol of something deeper, older. By the end, he’s pressing his ear to a locked door—seeking answers, maybe—but only hearing his own pulse. That’s all that’s left.
3. Spongebob (Hiding Places, 2019)
On “Spongebob,” billy woods crafts a disorienting, subterranean parable from the depths of disillusionment, with Kenny Segal’s eerie production laying the groundwork for a track that feels less like a song and more like a hallucinatory dispatch from the underside of modern life. The beat lurches forward in slow motion—muted drums, warped samples, and flickering melodic fragments swirling together like wreckage beneath murky water. It’s a perfect setting for woods’ opaque, sardonic poetics.
He opens with a jarring juxtaposition—moshing through an orchestra pit, skipping CD-Rs, and dope sickness—and the verse only spirals further into fragmentation. woods strings together cryptic historical allusions, flashbulb memories, and visceral street imagery with precision that feels accidental, like stumbling across truth in a fever dream. The titular SpongeBob becomes a cipher, shorthand for absurd survival, a porous icon drifting through chaos. The chorus—”the whole operation underwater”—isn’t simply a surreal punchline; it’s a devastating summary of submerged systems, submerged emotions, submerged hope.
What makes “Spongebob” so affecting is its emotional volatility. Woods speaks in riddles, but his voice trembles with resignation and rage, dark humor and deadpan calm. One moment he’s recounting battlefield prayers in Tora Bora, the next he’s making shadow plays in the bodega. The track never settles. It spirals—like memory, like trauma, like the descent it maps.
This is woods at his most unflinching: precise in chaos, poetic in collapse. “Spongebob” presents an atmosphere thick enough to drown in.
2. Remorseless (Aethiopes, 2022)
“Remorseless” from Aethiopes is like a benediction scorched at the edges, a meditation on futility, survival, and self-delusion. Preservation’s production coils like smoke—jazzy loops, woozy textures, faintly dissonant Moog lines drifting through a haze that feels both sacred and decaying. It’s not a finale that seeks closure, but a last glance back through cracked glass.
woods delivers two verses, each layered with historical allusion and internal corrosion. He opens with apocalyptic imagery—burning temples, lost treasure, moral clarity turning to ash—and tempers it with the mundanity of betrayal and financial anxiety. The past is a weight, but so is the present. “My accountant is a head full of bad memories and sad endings” might sound like a joke, but it’s not a punchline. There’s no laughter here, only the hollow rhythm of surviving with your hands already washed.
By the second verse, woods shifts into a more spectral register. Photographs rot, chains tangle like noodles, crocodiles laze under a brutal sun. Time slips, but the sense of alienation only deepens. One moment he’s on the Dollar Tree clock, the next he’s watching Earth from orbit. There’s humor here—sly and biting—but it’s the humor of someone playing cards with quarters under flickering fluorescent lights.
The outro unfolds like a warped government broadcast, spitting out repealed decrees and extermination orders in a bureaucratic frenzy. It’s a surreal coda—part theatre, part threat—that underscores the track’s fixation on authority, collapse, and control. Rather than driving toward clarity, it gestures outward, looping listeners back into the album’s fractured world. Remorseless doesn’t tie up threads—it disperses them like ashes, leaving behind only echo and inference.
1. Red Dust (Hiding Places, 2019)
“Red Dust” closes Hiding Places with an emotional gravity that refuses to be compartmentalized. Kenny Segal’s production is stark and meditative, built on a slow-moving piano motif and skeletal percussion that drifts like smoke. The instrumental provides an unnerving stillness for billy woods to unfold two verses that feel connected by trauma, but split by emotional register.
The first verse is dense and restrained, drawing on imagery of genocide, imprisonment, and personal complicity. woods documents moments of silence, inaction, and survival, mapping a life negotiated in shadow. The writing is layered with historical and psychological weight, revealing how power and guilt often intertwine in imperceptible ways. His tone remains composed, but the details are brutal: a ceiling hideout during a raid, bread broken with known killers, a prison glimpsed every day as an extension of routine.
The second verse erupts with venom and sorrow. woods channels an intense, almost ceremonial rage, spoken in intimate, disturbing poetry. The language is stripped of euphemism. Desire, violence, and shame are entangled in a cathartic purge of language. It’s not clear who or what is being addressed — perhaps a person, perhaps a system, perhaps the past — but the intent is unmistakable.
The track’s title “Red Dust” isn’t definitively explained, but likely refers to political violence in Africa, where the dirt is often described as red, perhaps made more so by all of the blood spilled there. That history haunts every line, not as backdrop, but as essence.
“Red Dust” offers no closure, only aftermath. It’s one of the most staggering moments in woods’ discography — an unsparing document of internal collapse rendered with surgical control.
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