billy woods has always trafficked in the shadows with his solo and collab albums. There’s always been a form of horror and evil lurking, but GOLLIWOG is something else entirely. It’s not just dark — it’s an album that moves like smoke through the ruin of American Black mythology, drawing its power from what’s been falsely buried and what still festers. With GOLLIWOG, woods delivers one of his most conceptually pointed and emotionally unsettling projects to date — a fever dream of racial trauma, coded menace, and cultural decay. It feels like looking at a piece of abstract art. woods wastes no time with his rap flow and throws you into the real-life nightmares in the first couple lines of his raps.
From the opening track “Jumpscare,” woods sets the tone with dissonant textures and haunted dusty music box samples that don’t just accompany his voice — they stalk it and his story about a ragdoll—the Golliwog, a childhood book character derived from the racist minstrel shows in the early 19th century that was then sold as a toy up unitl the 1970s. Instead of just sharing the history of the racist doll, woods uses the Golliwog as a moment of fear and dread for black people in America, all throughout the album. For example, the Golliwog appears again in “A Doll Fulla Pins featuring Yolanda Watson,” which might be my favourite track on this album because of Watson’s soulful RnB vocals.
The production, handled by a cadre of underground alchemists, including Kenny Segal whom he dropped Maps with back in 2023, veers into horrorcore territory without the gimmicks. These beats don’t pop; they lurk. It’s ambient, industrial, and deeply cinematic, reminiscent of a horror score filtered through a broken speaker. And then we have woods angry, sometimes spoken word verse with so much aliteration and visual stimulus paint his tales. No one really raps like woods. His bars carry a visceral charge. He dissects the grotesque legacies of caricature and religion on “Golgotha,” surveillance and war on “All These Worlds are Yours,” incarceration and living on “Cold Sweat,” and historical revisionism. The closest we get to a typical modern bragadocious rap song is the jazzy horn-led “Misery,” which woods takes direct references from Stephen King’s book and uses samples from the gothic horror film, Beloved.
I will say, GOLLIWOG is a dense album and perhaps too dense for the typical rap crowd who wants singles for easy revisits. It’s not an easy listen, but if you just sit and decide to experience it, it’s quite the trip.
