Shit is heavy right now. As much as we wish we could make an easy, breezy backseat getaway getting high with billy woods with producer Kenny Segal riding shotgun like we did on the cross-continental tour dispatch that was 2023’s Maps, Golliwog is the escape these times deserve. Thankfully, with our narrator being one of the best rappers alive right now, it’s not very hard to sit your ass right down into place, let these tales engross you, and keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish, from the very first “Jumpscare” to every “Cold Sweat” in between.

Much ado has already been put into typing of the New York City underground wordsmith’s latest being an masterful horror and sci-fi thriller-inspired listen born in his creative head since childhood. That it is, as the homage to horrorcore and the MF Doom blueprint is impeccably designed in its medley of very ominous, lurching beats, spiral cinema strings, and samples culled from scary movie tropes — the slasher effects of mass incarceration on “Star87”, flies swarming about the privileged living dead on “BLK ZMBY”, the woman weeping in fright on “Waterproof Mascara”, or the vintage doll TV advert taunting humankind’s bad habit of being endlessly complicit against atrocities big and small — sculpted from a supporting cast of studio gurus like the aforementioned Segal, El-P, Steel Tipped Dove, The Alchemist, and Conductor Williams.

That kind of fiction only serves to inspire the scarier realities woods is making visibly clear in this dark world, however. Disturbing, distorted CIA dispatches on torture methods crack through the warped space between woods’ bars and a stark piano on “Maquiladoras”, and a hard droning beat rains down on flagrant greed on he and Despot’s book of “Corintheans” before “Pitchforks & Halos” and “All These Worlds Are Yours” fill in the foreground even further with grim spoken word of war and noise. The poetry is bleak, blunt, and intentional in its violence. The brilliance behind the twisted genius that is woods’ horrorcore pen is how there isn’t really a way out of this thing once you’re in it either. “You can’t come in here with me, you’ll see / You can’t come in here with me, I can’t be located”, go the final words on the album’s surreal, soul-harvesting and fiery racial commentary closer, the ELUCID team-up, “Zaire”. He’s lured you in with a promise of fun scary stories that end up being way more fucked up and heavier than you realize, only to lock the door on you after making an escape for himself. There’s no way out of this world, and that should terrify you.

Highlights: “STAR87”, “BLK ZMBY”, “Corintheans”

billy woods’ GOLLIWOGG will be released May 9th on Backwoodz Studioz.

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