Album Of The Week: billy woods GOLLIWOG

It's the middle of December, and a family is being evicted. They've packed up everything they can fit into a couple of cousins' cars, and now the rest of their stuff is laid out on the sidewalk, abandoned. The neighbors shake their heads with disgust. What kind of sick monsters would put kids out on the street -- just before Christmas, at that? But then, one by one, those neighbors all start to realize something else: There is now a whole lot of free stuff sitting right there on the sidewalk, waiting to be taken. Nobody wants to be the first to rifle through it, but everyone hovers closer and closer, and soon they're all in there, picking through the remains like vultures. Imagine that you're one of them. Imagine that you're on the verge of getting evicted, too, and that maybe you can find a Christmas present for your own kids amidst this wreckage. Imagine how quickly you'd get back inside with your share of the loot. Imagine the greed and the guilt screaming at each other inside your head. Imagine knowing that all your neighbors did the same thing as you, that the only thing keeping you from judging them is knowing that you did the same. Lots of people don't have to imagine it. Something like that happens every day, probably somewhere near you.

That's the scenario that billy woods lays out on "BLK XMAS," one of the heaviest songs on his very heavy new album GOLLIWOG. The beat, from producer Sadhugold, is a beautiful piano loop that has decayed and corroded until its warmth sounds sinister. Bruiser Wolf, the vivid stylist from Danny Brown's Bruiser Brigade crew, is on here, daintily flipping words with cartoonish E-40-esque verve. But where Bruiser Wolf usually uses his gifts to flex, he's here eloquently describing the nothing that he comes from: "Street life adopted me/ Dying young was the prophecy/ I was raised improperly in poverty -- malnourished, food a commodity." Somehow, he still sounds slick as he builds a diorama full of "gamblers, scammers, grandmas in pajammers." But billy woods doesn't sound slick when he arrives. When he talks about those evicted neighbors and that stuff out on the sidewalk, he's speaking in plain language. It only seems abstract because the feeling is so overwhelming: "Old clothes, but my kid is little, they won't know the difference/ Dolls with they heads missing/ Wild-eyed rocking horse, mouth carved into a frown/ Family photos scattered on the ground, but they not of that family, I put 'em down."

billy woods tells that story in first person. His narrator is not a passive observer. He's out on the sidewalk, sifting through artifacts from someone else's unfortunate life. He heads back inside when it starts raining, and he lays all his new belongings out on the ground. The thoughts come rushing in: "Everywhere, it's hungry mouths/ It's gnawing doubt/ Dreams with teeth keep falling out/ And they insisting it's hamburger meat, but it tastes type foul." That's how it works on a billy woods record. One moment of prosaic everyday misery opens up something inside of you, showing another edge to the systems of control all around. You have to make a life within that system, so you do, but you're constantly aware that it's wrong. It's off. Some vampiric presence, seen or unseen, hangs over everything, occasionally destroying some poor chump's life. What can you do? You don't want that chump to be you, so you grab the stuff on the sidewalk and you run back inside, until it's your turn.

GOLLIWOG is named after a racist caricature, an exaggerated Sambo-type Black figure who exists as a folkoric gremlin, a supernatural nuisance. The golliwog was once used to sell children's books and rag dolls. It's a doll on the album cover -- abandoned out in the forest, either a figure of sympathy or a lurking, malevolent presence. woods has said that he wrote a story about an evil golliwog when he was a child: "My mother read it and told me it was overly derivative and needed some work. Here we are." He's spoken of the influence of horror short stories on the album, and there's plenty of actual horror in the stories that he lays out. The scariest thing about them is the way that they implicate you, the listener. When he talks about the stuff all laid out on that sidewalk, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. It that really woods' story, or is he imagining how he might act under those circumstances? It ultimately doesn't matter. It could be anyone's story. It could be yours.

billy woods works within a tradition of dense, incisive underground rap, but he doesn't really fit into any of the scenes currently existing, so he built his own. With his Backwoodz Studioz label, billy woods essentially has surrounded himself with like-minded mental travelers who found ways to explore their own ideas, whether through rap or avant-garde jazz. woods and ELUCID formed Armand Hammer, and their intense and divergent styles found perfect harmony. Most of woods' recent solo albums aren't real solo albums; they're group efforts, pairing him with producers like Kenny Segal and Preservation. For such a singular figure, woods rarely works by himself. He's a community-builder, and all of his music exists in conversation with that community.

GOLLIWOG is the first billy woods album made without a creative partner since 2019's Terror Management. There's no consistent producer. Instead, he gets production from many of his past collaborators -- Kenny Segal, Preservation, the Alchemist -- and from others, like Conductor Williams, whose styles line up with his. Even with all these cooks in the kitchen, GOLLIWOG is a perfectly cohesive album, an extended collection of 18 songs made with a single sonic point of view. woods raps in commanding, declamatory bursts, and he knows that his voice sounds best over clanking drums that seem to drag just slightly behind where they might be expected to fall. The tracks on GOLLIWOG hum with static, and they always seem ready to break down into sheer noise, whether it be peals of molten saxophone, screeches of outmoded modems, or the buzzing of hungry flies.

It's not an easy listen, but it's not homework, either. Sometimes, it can feel good to submit to all that dread, to let that dank atmosphere take over. On the El-P production "Corinthians," for example, woods conjures imagery of global rot -- "If you never came back from the dead, can't tell me shit/ 12 billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip/ You don't want to know what it costs to live, what it costs to hide behind eyelids." Behind him, swirling synth drones build and build. At the moment that those drones reach their crescendo and the drums come thundering in, woods disappears from the track. He passes the baton to Despot, the blustering New York underground veteran who confoundingly refuses to ever release an album or to show up on more than a song or two per year. Despot sounds incredible on a track like this, and woods sets him up beautifully. All of the guests on GOLLIWOG -- Cavalier, al.davino, woods' ride-or-die ELUCID -- get chances to show out, and they all take advantage. But they all know they're here to serve one man's vision of right-now dystopia.

You can feel like you understand the way things work, the fucked-up extraction systems that govern the lives of everyone around you, and then billy woods can come in with a shard of imagery that throws everything into a whole new light. He's done it time and again over the years. GOLLIWOG is part of a long, unbroken run of queasily powerful billy woods records, and I have no desire to figure out where it ranks in his personal pantheon. All I can do is marvel at the totality of his project. GOLLIWOG has the loose concept of horror stories working for it, and certain tracks fit right into that matrix. On "Misery," for instance, woods' narrator is consumed with lust for a married woman who turns out to be an actual vampire. On "BLK ZMBY," the zombies are the masters of the universe, the aliens from They Live: "Newborns in the bush, heads stove in with stones/ Sahel to Savannah, zombies roam in Ferragamo and Comme des Garçons... Universities empty, the troublemakers is drowned or drivin' Uber overseas/ The zombies chuckle at they computers, French doors open to the breeze."

Even when it concerns itself with the supernatural, GOLLIWOG is never fanciful. Its metaphors don't bother to disguise themselves much. More often, billy woods' horror stories aren't horror in the Stephen King sense. The horror is realizing that you could be one of the people going through the stuff on the sidewalk, or that you're lucky if you can even rely on the members of your immediate family: "Mom showed us where she kept the passports hid/ The king's dead, and your uncles are not our friends/ How many times I gotta tell you kids?/ It's us in this room, that's it!" Sometimes, the horror is just total societal instability, hell always 'round the corner even if it never bothers to arrive: "Doctor read the X-rays while you read the doctor's face/ I rock a clean pair of socks every day, just in case." Sometimes, failure is just the stuff of dark comedy, especially with respect to the Detroit Pistons' decisions in the 2003 NBA Draft: "I had my community sick/ When they unraveled, I time-traveled and still picked Darko Miličić."

You will not feel good about the world after listening to billy woods. That is not the point. If you throw GOLLIWOG on at a party, you are fucking up. But it can feel weirdly good to indulge in the doom-swirl intensity of this record -- not because it'll educate you or help you visualize a better future but just because billy woods is an incredible, peerless rapper. Early on GOLLIWOG, he lays out his purpose in real-talk terms: "The English language is violence/ I hotwired it/ I got ahold of the master's tools and dialed in." It's the closest to a total triumph that you're going to find here, or anywhere else. Savor it where you can get it.

GOLLIWOG is out 5/9 on Backwoodz Studioz.

Other albums of note out this week:

• Pinkpantheress' Fancy That
• Preoccupations' Ill At Ease
• Deradoorian’s Ready For Heaven
• Mclusky's The World Is Still Here And So Are We
• Young Thug's UY Scuti
• Alien Boy's You Wanna Fade?
• Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke's Tall Tales
• Kali Uchis' Sincerely
• Adult Mom's Natural Causes
• Counting Crows' Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!
• Provoker's Mausoleum
• MIKE & Tony Seltzer's Pinball 2
• Alex Orange Drink's Victory Lap (#23)
• Men I Trust's Equus Caballus
• I'm With Her's Wild And Clear And Blue
• King Hüsky's King Hüsky
• Peter Murphy's Silver Shade
• Maren Morris' Dreamsicle
• Benny The Butcher’s Excelsior
• Andy Bell's Ten Crowns
• M83's A Necessary Escape (Dakar Chronicles Original Soundtrack)
• Sleep Token's Even In Arcadia
• The Head And The Heart’s Aperture
• Little Feat's Strike Up The Band
• The Wonder Years' Burst & Decay Vol. III
• Laibach's Alamut
• Behemoth's The Shit Ov God
• The Kooks' Never/Know
• Maia Friedman's Goodbye Long Winter Shadow
• Knowledge The Pirate's The Round Table
• Grupo Firme's Evolución
• Spacey Jane's If That Makes Sense
• Das Koolies' Pando
• Chaos In The CBD's A Deeper Life
• Naomi Westwater's Cycle & Change
• The Vernon Spring's Under A Familiar Sun
• QUINQUIS' eor
• Kristina Murray's Little Blue
• Jack Van Cleaf's JVC
• Billy Reeves' When Lord God Almighty Reads The News
• Jake Wesley Rogers' In the Key Of Love
• Boyfriend's In The Garden
• Brandon's Before You Go
• Brandon Woody's For The Love Of It All
• Shunkan's Kamikaze Girl
• Kevin Olusola's DAWN OF A MISFIT
• Dan Wilson's good night, los angeles
• Kara-Lis Coverdale's From Where You Came
• Shifting Heigo's Model Phenomena
• TVOD's Party Time
• Dew Claw's E.L.F
• Hedvig Mollestad Trio's Bees In The Bonnet
• Unwed Sailor's Cruel Entertainment
• Cuco's Ridin'
• Amanda Ekery's Árabe
• Ringdown's Lady On The Bike
• Kurt Deimer's And So It Begins….
• Tamir Barzilay's Phosphene Journal
• Bibi Club's Feu de garde (les braises)
• Ding Dong's From Ding Dong To The World
• Le Volume Courbe's Planet Ping Pong
• Ghost Bath's Rose Thorn Necklace
• Nicolas Bougaïeff's Prime Funktion
• The Chain's Blind The World
• Marwan Moussa's The Man Who Lost His Heart
• Harrison Lipton's Between Us There Runs A Tether
• SAILORR's From Florida's Finest
• Skinny Lister's Songs From The Yonder
• KALEO's MIXED EMOTIONS
• Arcade Fire's Pink Elephant
• Lou-Adriane Cassidy's Triste Animal
• Leftover Salmon's Let's Party About It
• Blake Shelton's For Recreational Use Only
• 98°'s Full Circle
• Various artists' Look At All The Love We Found: A Tribute To Sublime (20th Anniversary Deluxe)
• Various artists' Tsapiky! Modern Music From Southwest Madagascar
• Various artists' Born In The City Of Tanta - Lower Egyptian Urban Folklore And Bedouin Shaabi From Libya's Bourini Records 1968-75
• Butthole Surfers' Live At The Leather Fly
• Art Peppers' An Afternoon In Norway: The Kongsberg Concert
• Rilo Kiley's How We Choose To Remember It
• INXS' Listen Like Thieves (40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
• Lamb's An Extension Of Now: Unreleased Recordings 1968-1969
• Xmal Deutschland's Gift: The 4AD Years
• Jackie DeShannon's Love Forever—Demo Recordings 1966-1968
• The Bottle Rockets' The Brooklyn Side (Expanded Reissue)
• Jesse Ed Davis' Tomorrow Might Not Be Your Day: The Unissued Atco Recordings 1970-71
• Annie & The Caldwells' I Was Living In A World Of Sin (Mixes Part I)
• Pierce The Veil's The Jaws Of Life (Deluxe)
• Gong's I See You (10th Anniversary Edition)
• Joe Goddard's Kinetic EP
• Candlemass' Black Star EP
• Catbite's Doom Garden EP
• Amelia Moore's he’s still just not that into you! EP
• Cult Of Venus Algorithm EP
• Love Spells' The Love I Showed You Was Yours To Keep EP
• Softie's Somersault EP
• Marta Knight's Unbothered EP
• Nils Frahm's Night EP
• Merrick Winter's The California Zephyr EP
• Nippa's Hope She Hears This EP
• Ava Joe's Try Me EP
• L.Mayland's The Slow Fire Of Sleep EP
• Naomi Sharon’s The Only Love We Know EP
• Sleep Habits' Mourning Doves EP
• Ratbag's kissing under an (almost) full moon EP
• Grant Pavol's Left That Party EP
• Christian Chavez's Sí EP
• No Windows' The Great Traitor EP
• Alien Chicks' Forbidden Fruit EP
• Bestfriend's BESTFRIEND HAS AN IDENTITY CRISIS EP
• PARAMIDA's Devil’s Destination EP