The first song on billy woods‘ Golliwog is called “Jumpscare,” and from its opening sputter of a rolling projector reel, a steady stream of cinematic horror tropes unravels: the metronomic tick of a clock, abrasive metallic scrapes, the twinkle of a warped ice-cream truck music box. When woods begins his narration 30 seconds in, he adds dimension to the shadows on the wall and the things going bump in the night, observing a “Ragdoll playing dead/Rabid dog in the yard, car won’t start, it’s bees in your head.” Despite the song’s title, and one brief scream in the background about one minute in, there are no cheap thrills to be found here—just a visceral sense of terror that never lets up, even when presented with gallows humor.
With 2023’s Maps, woods was gracious enough to offer a soft landing; there are few such mercies here, an album where nothing is beautiful and everything hurts. The titular Golliwog is that “ragdoll playing dead,” transmogrified from a racist caricature from 19th century children’s stories and 20th century British marketing into a Robert the Doll-like object of malevolence—its grin on the cover art grows more unsettling the longer you gaze at it peering back through the trees. It’s an avatar for the litany of horrors that comprise the album’s 18 tracks, examining the well-worn motif of trauma as monster but rarely couching it in grotesque creature features or slasher chases. There’s no mistaking the threat, whether colonial empire or landlord, but the wow and flutter of a warped sample or a sharp stab of strings gives the red in their eyes a terrifying gleam.
Golliwog is an album-length commitment to horror as a unifying theme—the violence here has always been at least suggested before, whether via the dense array of images in Aethiopes or the gravity of the narratives on Armand Hammer’s Rome. And unlike something like clipping.’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned, there’s little in the way of pure homage. Like his longtime collaborator ELUCID, who on last year’s Revelator juxtaposed imagery of atrocities with a noisier sonic palette, or how fellow Backwoodz alum Fatboi Sharif captured such a grisly atmosphere on 2023’s Decay, woods cleverly finds ways to draw the listener in closer to bear witness to the brutality. The cruelty of capitalism rampages through “BLK XMAS,” with Bruiser Wolf lending a TV-announcer cadence to lines like “Horror, drama, suspense/It’s a thriller if you can pay the rent,” while woods states matter-of-factly, “neighbors just got evicted/how you gon’ put folks out a week before Christmas?” “Misery” invokes Stephen King in its psychosexual number-one-fan story (“Ragged holes in my throat, but I love to see those lips shiny with blood“), while “Waterproof Mascara” tests the listener’s endurance with its unsettling loop of a woman crying, juxtaposing images of childhood trauma with haunted-house editing techniques. “Watched my mother cry from the top of the stairs, scared/When it came through the walls I covered my ears/Half hoping you know who would die/Then he did,” woods briefly pauses, his own reverb-drenched voice replying, “Surprise!”
As the first of woods’ solo records to be made without a solitary production partner overseeing its sonic palette, Golliwog weaves together a who’s who of beatmakers and soundscapists—many of them prior collaborators—into one cohesively chilling whole. Where Conductor Williams spins up pitch-unsteady cinematic strings and wobbly basslines, El-P lays down a landscape of heavy, futuristic doom on “Corinthians.” Messiah Muzik offers a bed of seasick horns for the “house full of ghosts” on “Golgotha,” and DJ Haram and Shabaka Hutchings offer a sparse industrial ambience beneath scenes of wartime violence on “All These Worlds Are Yours.” Even the rare moment of jazzy accessibility, like Jeff Markey and Messiah Muzik’s saxophone-heavy bed for “A Doll Fulla Pins” or ELUCID and Cavalier’s hazy chill-out classicism in “Lead Paint Test,” carry a mournful darkness about them, less an immediate scare than an overbearing sense of dread.
As the narrator who navigates this landscape of atrocities, woods is at times sardonically defiant, like on “STAR87,” wherein he glowers at Internet trolls: “leave the comments on/the racism pouring in/This is how I win.” But not every voice he speaks through is a hero in this litany of horrors, and some of them, like on “Make No Mistake,” are haunted by their complicity: “It’s easy for you, but it’s hard for me to forget what we did ’cause we had to eat/At least that’s what we said when we did the deed.” A macabre masterpiece and a breathtaking tome of humanity’s lowest depths, Golliwog is woods at his most challenging, daring us not to look away as he weaponizes honest observations into living nightmares. “I told a few lies in my time, but never once over a beat,” he says in “Make No Mistake.” He’s just telling the truth, and we think it’s hell.
Label: Backwoodz/Rhymesayers
Year: 2025
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billy woods : Golliwog
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