GOLLIWOG- billy woods: Review
Review by Lavender:
billy woods is simultaneously one of the most prolific and most acclaimed voices in the rap underground. Releasing multiple projects a year, pretty much every year, with a variety of collaborators, he seemingly never runs out of clever turns of phrase and stories to tell. While his talent is obvious, I've often expressed my issues with his prolific output, which often creates multiple solid records when one great record could have easily sufficed. That's not the case with GOLLIWOG, an album whose conceptual ambitions and frequent highlights feel like they come from another world than even some of the more acclaimed billy projects in recent years. It's why I can recommend the record full stop, even to those who haven't been as in love with billy woods as some critics, as I think it's his best album of this decade so far.
I went into GOLLIWOG already more excited than I would be for any old billy woods record. Much of that was because of the lead single “Misery.” The track sees billy humanizing himself in a different way, meeting an absolute fucking baddie he can't stop thinking about. It's an utterly slick and often funny song, which is why I was so surprised by the resulting album that followed it. This record is conceptual in the sense that it embraces the chilling isolation and scary motifs of classic horror films and often cuts it with extremely serious subject matter, something you'd never glean from its lead single.
But you do get all of those horror vibes right out of the gate with the album, and as a result, it's an extremely strong start. “Jumpscare” first introduces the motif of painful subject matter, in this case, billy rapping about struggling for food, delivered over eerie horror movie atmospheres. That leads into “STAR87,” which embraces the themes even more directly with tons of phone ringing samples that add up to a “call is coming from inside the house” punchline. Though the album is quite serious, billy is never one to abandon his comedy entirely, and the punchline about Coach Thibbs on this song made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it. It's only one-upped by an even funnier NBA joke early on the song “Cold Sweats.”
The record's real highlight also comes in the first half of its runtime. In addition to being one of the most harrowing fucking things I've ever heard, “Waterproof Mascara” might be the masterpiece of billy woods’ entire career. It features an extremely sparse beat built around a loop of a woman crying as billy dives into the depths of isolation and trauma that surrounded him as a child and built much of his defensiveness as an adult. The fact that he's a little bit tongue-in-cheek at points on the song feels like a reaction to the lasting pain of the subject matter, which makes observing him experience it through song even more haunting.
In between all of those songs is “BLK XMAS” which opens up with a solid Bruiser Wolf verse and eventually transitions into billy lambasting landlords with his typical lethality. It's a theme that comes up on “Cold Sweat” as well where billy gets justified revenge by refusing to move out and preventing a building from being sold. Around that same time, billy serves up “Make No Mistake,” one of the album’s most definitive lyrical highlights. Most of the record's very best songs come in the first half of the album, but that doesn't mean the second half is without even more highlights.
That includes pretty much any time billy's Armand Hammer collaborator E L U C I D pops up. That comes first on “All The Worlds Are Yours,” which features a sparse and brooding beat courtesy of DJ Haram and Shabaka Hutchings. The final two tracks, “Lead Paint Test” and “Dislocated,” also feature E L U C I D, and the former is a fascinating moment. Despite having one of the brightest instrumentals on the record, the bed of horns still feels so eerie when it's framed against billy's lyricism about his childhood.
While GOLLIWOG certainly has plenty of moments where billy isn't at his 100% sharpest through and through, my least favorite moments in GOLLIWOG tend to be from other rappers. “Corinthians” has an eerie beat courtesy of El-P, and I was actually looking forward to the Despot feature, but it runs on way too long and loses its momentum. Even worse is al.divino's appearance on “Maquiladoras,” though the song may have been a non-starter regardless with the way the glitchy vocal samples sometimes get in the way. There are moments like “A Doll Fulla Pins” which does have a pretty good hook, but feels so conventional and outside billy woods wheelhouse that it's almost like he becomes a different, and notably less interesting, rapper.
So the tracklist isn't perfect, but for a billy woods record, this is just about as good as I could ask for. The horror themes that run through this entire record are taken to fascinating and occasionally harrowing places, yet billy is capable of maintaining an irresistible charm and even playfulness throughout. All of this is wrapped up in the word-bending lyricism and commanding vocals that have always made his floor so much higher than his underground rap contemporaries. GOLLIWOG isn't just the best billy woods album I've heard in years, but by some distance the best rap album I've heard so far in 2025. 8/10
