“Everything buffering, reality lag and jump/ Sometimes barely recognize the people I love,” billy woods raps on ‘Golgotha’, a line that cuts to the core of his hallucinogenic writing. The Brooklyn rapper articulates bad dreams, ghostly memories, and gloomy, cross-generational visions with strange lucidity, and while GOLLIWOG marks his first full-length effort without a primary collaborator in six years, he’s hardly alone in it. Past collaborators like Kenny Segal, Preservation, the Alchemist offer different shades of the same eerie backdrop, while guest rappers including ELUCID, Despot, Bruiser Wolf, and al.divino prove themselves to be operating under the same wavelength. Sometimes it’s hard to trace who’s relaying whose story, how the past blurs into the present, though woods points to a tale about an evil golliwog – the racist caricature the record is named after – that he wrote as a child, remembering how his mother said it needed some work. So we get a challenging, unsparing 18-track record that stands among the all-timer’s very best.
1. Jumpscare
The jumpscare can be a cheap trick in horror flicks, but billy woods has more than one way of keeping the listener on edge. He doesn’t need the scene to get dark, either. He sets it up with familiarly unnerving imagery – “rabid dog in the yard, car won’t start, it’s bees in your head” – melting into the horrors stewing in broad daylight: “The vaccinations was TB and whooping cough/ Looping, looping thoughts/ Morose villagers queue in the sun, an ouroboros.” So the song ties a noose around your neck, screeching, and that constant thud, like a jumpscare, hitting because it only brings the fear out of what’s already in your line of vision.
2. STAR87
woods now seems to be rapping into, rather than about, looping thoughts – and ever more strangely, phone calls. The ringtone cut up as the loop for the track, coupled with a swirling drone, punches you straight to the story, of which there are more glimpses here. As a narrator, woods never stops implicating himself, declaring, “Rigor mortis on the cordless mic.”
3. Misery
The narrator is now in the victim’s seat on ‘Misery’, ensnared by lust for an actual vampire. The sax-led Kenny Segal production calls to mind their work on Maps, pushing the music in a hazier direction more straightforwardly alluring than previous songs. Yet its characters and interpolations – from MF DOOM to Beloved – prevent your mind from drifting off. They’re played like hooks, slipping right into your head.
4. BLK XMAS [feat. Bruiser Wolf]
Bruiser Wolf brings fresh colour with the first guest verse on GOLLIWOG, touching on poverty and ending with the lines, “This flick as real as it gets/ Depicting it after living it, it’s sickening.” Then woods dials back the abstraction and into the story of a family that gets evicted right before Christmas, a first-person observer that, once again, can hardly remove himself from the everyday horror unfolding. He ends up taking some pots and pans, old clothes for the kids, but puts down the photos – “they not in that family.” Yet there’s a nagging sensation they all, more or less, see themselves in it.
5. Waterproof Mascara
Over some of the album’s most unsettling production, courtesy of Preservation, woods inhabits both the weeping mother and the kid watching his mother cry from the top of the stairs. “The king’s dead and your uncles are not our friends,” he hears her say. “How many times I gotta tell you kids?/ It’s us in this room, that’s it.” That the atmosphere is suffocating goes without saying; in the second verse, he invokes and twists Sylvia Plath’s suicide: “My house full of gas, my kids cry, then laugh right after, psychopaths.” Most of the songs on GOLLIWOG have an element of discomfort owing to an unjust system; ‘Waterproof Mascara’ feels wrong because of how personal it sounds, even if you’re left wondering what actually happened. It doesn’t get more harrowing than this.
6. Counterclockwise
The Alchemist’s serpentine beat and woods’ surreal flow move with the same logic, letting the samples that bookend the song do the real talking – and the listener to draw some line between them, or simply dissociate further.
7. Corinthians [feat. Despot]
woods ups the intensity with help from buzzing production by El-P, turning his attention to contemporary ruin with lines like “12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza strip” and “Them crackers won’t make it to Mars.” Before he makes his case, though, he’s quick to clarify: “Way I see it, ain’t no past tense.” History’s embedded in the horror. Which makes Despot, following up and calling back to his guest verse on 2022’s Aethiopes, ponder on the afterlife – looming questions he tackles by treating it all like an absurd joke. “Same old song, I sing it one more time, on the day you’re gone, ain’t nobody gon’ cry for you,” he raps, “Take what’s yours and I make it all mine ’til the money’s so long like it’s sayin’, ‘Bye-bye’, to you.”
8. Pitchforks & Halos
Maybe it’s the track’s dazed paranoia or Segal’s production, but this one really seems to feed off the energy of Maps, almost like a leftover. Yet woods builds toward some of the most resonant lines on the album, tying its themes together in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment: “The stirring words of dead revolutionaries who were wrong/ The blurring world of all them centuries, I wonder where the time gone.” He repeats “I wonder where the time gone” as if burrowing in it, and then: “The hood of the time machine was still warm/ People make time for the things they really want.”
9. All These Worlds Are Yours [feat. ELUCID]
Horror-movie sound design gives way to frenetic, otherworldly production from DJ Haram and Shabaka, which woods and his Armand Hammer bandmate have no trouble sifting through. As the title implies, the narrator implicates not just himself, but you, in the horror, blurring the line between passive observation and participation. “Today, I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home,” woods begins. “The drone flew real low, no rush, real slow/ He curled up into himself, a fetus in the womb, womb was the Earth.” It’s a setup ELUCID turns cryptic but no less evocative.
10. Maquiladoras [feat. al.divin]
This is as brooding and bleak as GOLLIWOG sonically gets, Saint Abdullah and Eomac’s low end digging way below the surface of the earth. Woods meditates on Frantz Fanon’s concept of self-amputation from his book Black Skin, White Masks: “The amputee says accept it, there’s no escaping/ Accept the prosthetics/ They give ill-fitted limbs as gifts and insist you can only live in the present.” But the past comes back to haunt you, the way “Time is on my side,” the refrain from Armand Hammer’s ‘Flavor Flav’, returns to bless the end of this song; blurry but beautiful.
11. A Doll Fulla Pins [feat. Yolanda Watson]
Yolanda Watson stuns in the song’s chorus, lamenting the “graspy little men” falling into the same traps. But the track takes a dizzying turn with woods’ second verse, which expounds on the significance of the album’s titular doll. You can’t quite make heads or tails of it, but it holds you in its grip.
12. Golgotha
A sort of sequel to ‘Misery’, with Messiah Musik conjuring the slippery feeling this time, emboldening it. “In bed, she’s a dead fish, but it’s more to life than sex,” woods raps before invoking Ali, evil spirits in Georgian mythology that threaten the pregnant, newborn, and lone travellers. In the midst of it all he captures the essence of his songwriting. “Sometimes barely recognize the people I love,” he raps, and sometimes you never come closer to recognizing them than caught in fear.
13. Cold Sweat
The recurring “we up on bad dreams” from ‘Misery’ becomes “wake up in a cold sweat,” yet woods’ dark humour is more pronounced and colorful, animated by Ant’s production. It’s the same bad dreams, sometimes, that keep you up and crack you up.
14. BLK ZMBY
An interview clip from Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni frames woods’ political commentary, which begins: “Staggerin’ post-colonial African zombie state chase the people into the waves/ Watch every ship and raft ’til they disappear.” Steel Tipped Dove’s dynamic, nifty production allows woods to broaden his perspective in one of the album’s most breathlessly uncompromising flows.
15. Make No Mistake
A little more down-to-earth and personal, the song homes in on nostalgia not as something overwhelming but rather off-kilter, mirrored in its slightly jagged flow. “I told a few lies in my time, but nеver once over a beat,” he raps, then puts it another way: “I hide everything in the rhymes, that’s why I need it dark onstage.” Behind the boards, too, his collaborators serve him well.
16. Born Alone
An eerie piano loop provides the perfect backdrop as woods raps about death looming closer. It’s introspective and downcast, but not unfunny: “Doctor read the X-rays while you read the doctor’s face/ I rock a clean pair of socks every day just in case.”
17. Lead Paint Test [feat. ELUCID and Cavalier]
ELUCID, Cavalier, and woods trade ghostly memories of family over a wistful Willie Green beat. ELUCID and Cavalier are in peak form, but woods’ verse, swaddled in layers, reaches ever so deeper: “Lean shadows, dust swirling in sunbeams/ Shadows reach for my son in dreams/ Some shadows that deep, shadowing me.” In the intoxicating refrain, which flips woods and Kenny Segal’s own ‘Soft Landing’, home is “my beloved haunt,” which pretty much sums up the whole album.
18. Dislocated [feat. ELUCID]
The scarier GOLLIWOG becomes, the less spooky it is. ‘Dislocated’ hits home in a way that warrants ELUCID’s backing, as dreamlike and discombobulating as Human Error Club instrumental, which would recall Radiohead even if it wasn’t about disappearing completely. “I can’t be located,” they repeat with their backs to the audience. Its formlessness is something to imprint yourself upon, like something beyond grasp but never too far away, lurking.
