Labeling something horror creates an ironic contradiction. If it’s referring to the horror genre, it serves as an advanced warning, a kind of shorthand that you’re about to experience a ticker tape parade of demons, psychopaths, and shredded viscera. By its very nature, works of art categorized as horror let you know you’re not in any real danger. You’re just going for a quick ride on the ghost train, to blow off some steam with a few lung-rattling screams, only to return, safe and sound, to the well-lit safety of society.
Then there’s the other kind of horror. The horror that makes up headlines and, even worse, the kind that never even makes the papers in the first place. Soul-grinding poverty, bigotry, dehumanization, and greed are all horrors that make anything dreamed up by Wes Craven or John Carpenter seem like Sesame Street.
On GOLLIWOG, billy woods interrogates every aspect of horror, from the macro to the micro, with an album’s worth of hyper-literate hip-hop, laying out a litany of nightmares and social realism over a tangled thicket of low-down beats and nightside samples. Ragged rundown yards, dead cars, rabid dogs, and daddy longlegs rub shoulders with plague-ridden natives and poison rivers, everything surrounded by the silent dead on “Jumpscare”. Scarecrows stand in mute witness while AI invokes Stephen King‘s Carrie on “Corinthians”. A heart becomes a voodoo doll on “A Doll Full of Pins”.
Elsewhere, the horror infects everyday life like some sort of ancestral curse. Drug addicts become the walking dead on “BLK XMAS” before the narrative shifts to a Christmas eviction, parents haunted by the possibility of contagion in their dreams. Dead rappers become a chorus of incriminating spirits on “STAR87”. A romantic infatuation becomes a vampiric succubus on “Misery”, itself a reference to a Stephen King novel.
A pair of dead man’s shoes becomes a self-fulfilling curse on “Born Alone”. A long-lost uncle becomes “the ghost of Thanksgiving past” on “Lead Paint Test”. It’s as if our day-to-day reality is a fragile orb of light, barely keeping the darkness at bay. It’s like the air is teeming with ghosts, with the restless and ravenous dead just waiting for a flicker so they can take their shot.
Still, elsewhere, the horrors of everyday existence aren’t exaggerated at all. Woods raps about watching a drone execute a man in a hole with a grenade on live TV with dead-eyed detachment on “All These Worlds Are Ours” before moving on to muse about basslines programming people into assassin automatons. The shadow of the genocide in Gaza hangs over “Corinthians” like a pall.
Gentrification and the threat of eviction hang over “Cold Sweat” like a death shroud. The sound of weeping accompanies a heartrending tale of a Russian Doll of abuse before a razor’s edge pivot to a particularly chilling reference to Sylvia Plath. It’s dark stuff, not for the faint of heart, yet it’s completely addictive thanks to its imaginative production and immersive worldbuilding.
GOLLIWOG is the first album credited solely to billy woods since 2019’s Terror Management. Instead, he works with a dream team of past collaborators, tagging everyone from the Alchemist to El-P to Armand Hammer collaborator Elucid to create a dense tapestry of different production styles and outside voices, making the whole collection seem more like an especially harrowing short story collection rather than one cohesive novel.
That makes GOLLIWOG just that much more unsettling, as if the seams were just waiting to rupture and tear, ripping apart into gaping chasms, pulling you into their darkness. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s a stunning achievement. Gazing into the abyss is never fun, but it’s necessary if we hope to understand what lives there. Billy woods knows, and he’s not afraid to tell us.