Billy Woods’ New Album Explores What We Fear and Why

O
n a late Spring afternoon (that doesn’t feel like April), Prospect Heights’ Leland Eating and Drinking House is pretty empty. Four people sitting at tables in the upscale cafe, chatting over a playlist of early ‘00s hits from artists like Ashanti. 

Eventually, Billy Woods arrives wearing a Black jacket, black shirt, and jeans. He says he’s feeling under the weather after several European show dates. Crosscontinental tours are becoming common fare for Woods, the Brooklyn-based rapper boasting one of rap’s elite pens. He’s been rapping since the ‘00s, but caught a stride with early ‘10s albums like, becoming a darling of underground rap heads and steadily elevating his penmanship on recent projects like Church (with Messiah Musik), Maps (with Kenny Segal), Aethiopes (fully produced by Preservation), as well as his duo with partner-in-rhyme ELUCID, which releases under the name Armand Hammer. The two collaborated on 2021’s Haram with The Alchemist and We Sell Diabetic Test Strips in 2023. 

Now he’s set to release Golliwog, his first solo project in five years. Over a sandwich and chips, Woods tells me about the new project that he’s meticulously crafted over the last several years. Initially, the plan was to work on a new Armand Hammer project, but ELUCID was working on his album Revelator, freeing Woods up to pursue his first solo project since 2019’s Terror Management. He utilized his ever-growing network to procure beats, prioritizing production that gave off the vibe of a horror movie score. Sometimes, like with the Conductor Williams-produced “Star87,” he found something in a beat pack that fit his preference. Other times, like on “All These Worlds Are Yours,” he says he worked with producer DJ Haram to turn an “ethereal” Shabaka Hutchings beat that reminded him of a rainforest into “nanobots just flying in and eating this rainforest up.” 

Other Golliwog production credits include The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant of Atmosphere, and Steel Tipped Dove. “I knew it was my first multiple producer product in a long time,” he says. “I knew that I had more connections than ever before. So, I tried to cast a wide net.”

He made 22 songs for the 18-track album, eschewing his normal “tunnel vision” writing process to take his time and write an average of just one or two songs per month. “This is the first record [in a while] where it was up to me how fast I was going to move,” he says. Several artists feature on the project, including Backwoodz mates ELUCID, Cavalier, as well as Mascara, Despot, al.divino, and Yolanda Watson. 

Golliwog re-explores a story he wrote as a child about an evil Golliwog. Woods says he’s always been fascinated by horror story collections, citing Mariana Enríquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire and Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye—the latter threads together short stories with a cat who finds themselves in every story. In his new work, Woods casts the racist, ragdoll-like caricature known as a Golliwog as the connecting overseer of the project. 

Though dark, searing production permeates the album, he says there’s no overarching theme or thesis, with each song unfurling a unique terror. “Misery,” the project’s first single, depicts a toxic infatuation with a married woman, which takes a vampiric swerve at the end: “Ragged holes in my throat, but I love to see those lips shiny with blood,” Woods rhymes. “BLK ZMBY” sounds like a pessimistic depiction of African people from slaveship to a tool of capitalism. On “Born Alone,” over doleful piano, Woods portrays the precarity of life in the streets, where he wears clean socks just in case calamity strikes — we don’t often consider our fashion choices as commentary on impending death. On “Cold Sweat,” he plunges us into a nightmare where the “hallway was barely lit, air thick with dread / it’s a room full of record execs on the other end and you dancin’ on the desk.” 

Throughout Golliwog, horror is at the beholder’s behest. Some people find vampires horrific, while others have trepidation about young Black artists dancing for boardrooms of white record executives. Songs like “All These Worlds Are Yours” utilize pitched-down voices for ghoulish effect, but laid-bare bars like, “today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home / the drone flew real low, no rush, real slow” from “All These Worlds Are Yours” jar a listener despite his intentionally flat delivery. 

Woods says moments like that demonstrate his straightforwardness as a songwriter, which belies the popular conception that he’s an “abstract” lyricist. “I think it can be an easy take at times,” he says. “It’s just funny that that will be a thing that people hang their hats on. Because some of the stuff is very straightforward. And I also do a lot of storytelling in my music as compared to lots of [rappers] — even those who I like — who haven’t done a linear story in their music in five or 10 years.”

He references the story he tells on “BLK XMAS” with Bruiser Wolf, where neighbors get evicted and residents parse through their left-behind belongings; there’s no layered double-meaning, just a story including the lamentation, “How you gon’ put folks out a week before Christmas — and they got kids? Them people sick in the head, it’s sickenin’.” He rhymes about headless dolls in a pile of junk; in this horror story, the toys aren’t supernatural, they’re a sobering glimpse of a treacherous rental market. On Golliwog, systems often play the boogieman. 

“I think a lot of horror is social commentary [on] what people are scared of,” Woods says. He gives an example of Rosemary’s Baby, which is about “an evil cult manipulating this woman to have their baby,” but also speaks to a woman being stripped of her humanity in a misogynistic society. He also references Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Reductively, it’s about a haunted house, but more aptly, it’s a portrait of slavery. “I think that when something is well written enough or hits enough different points of social commentary, people try to move it out of that [horror] space and it becomes a thriller or whatever, which is fine,” Woods resolves. “But all of these [works of art] ultimately are about the same sorts of things.” 

And though Golliwog’s sonic universe is a fantastic netherworld, Woods occasionally makes a real-life cameo to address some things. On “Make No Mistake,” he sarcastically raps, “When they say it’s off beat, that’s how I know I got them on skates,” referencing a common criticism of his unconventional delivery, which often prioritizes inflection and emphasis over earworm melodies. He jokes that the criticism reminds him of coming to America from Zimbabwe in 1989 and being told he was “trying to be white” for raising his hand in school. Woods sees both close-minded kids and rap detractors as potential peer pressure he knows better than to feed into. “Having already dealt with those ideas when I was a little kid, I don’t pay them any mind now,” he says. “Now [my] fan base has grown in a bigger position and people want to be like, ‘You just talking. It’s offbeat…’ I’m not concerned. I’ve been doing this a long time. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it.”

But to Woods’ satisfaction, many enjoy the music that he and his Backwoodz studios peers have created over the years. He says he’s “so happy and proud” of what the label has become. “Sometimes I think about it, I’m like, ‘Damn, okay.’ At this point, [we’re] one of the indie rap labels that you could be like, ‘Yeah, they do interesting shit, man.’ Not even rap. We put out an experimental jazz record last year,” he says, referencing the band ØKSE’s eponymous debut. He also notes that the label, which began in 2003, had success last year despite no release from the “tentpoles” like himself, ELUCID, or Armand Hammer. Projects like Cavalier’s two albums, and ShrapKnel (the duo of Curly Castro and PremRock) kept the flag waving for Backwoodz as a home for talented indie acts, genre be damned. 

And, along with being an artist and label head, Woods is delving into book writing with a memoir that he says has been “challenging.” The book will chronicle his parents, as well as his winding journey from childhood into young adulthood. “My parents being where they were from and who they were from,” he explains. “And then ending up moving to Zimbabwe right after the revolution, [the] first 10 years of Zimbabwean independence and then living there for that time and coming back and forth to New York in the eighties and Jamaica, and then coming back here and being rudely thrust into life in the nineties DC area. Yeah, all of that’s interesting enough, but more interesting really than anything to do with rapping.” He says he’s “pretty close” to turning in the book. 

In the meantime, he’s set to drop Golliwog, a project that uses horror to put up a funhouse mirror to society. The album is laden with social commentary, but Woods isn’t overestimating its potential impact. While noting the figurative “beginning of the Fourth Reich” in America he says, “I would not have this hubris to say what I can do about” the state of the world “on an artistic level,” though he values art for connecting “as human beings across time and space and experiences.” 

He adds, “When I read Dostoevsky, I live in a world that he couldn’t have imagined and he lived in a world which I have never seen, but I can connect to their ideas that can connect to my experience, and enrichen my understanding of the human condition and of myself and of the world.” That’s exactly what many would say about Woods’ work.