billy woods’ GOLLIWOG is one of the most unsettling and captivating rap albums we’ve ever heard. The instrumentals are rhythmically unmoored soundscapes with woods’ voice tumbling in unpredictable cadences over production that sounds like the soundtrack from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On Waterproof Mascara a woman’s quivering sobs loop through the entire track, and yet it’s deeply listenable, with a lyrical tapestry of smashed Black lives across continents and centuries.

From personal grief to historical trauma, woods opens with the lament that he doesn’t even speak his forefathers’ language, instead having to master the tools of his oppressor to survive in America. The album has collage-like production, with each track helmed by a different collaborator from St. Abdullah to The Alchemist, giving the record a constantly shifting palette that still feels coherent under woods’ vision. Old phones ring in the background, strings creak like a horror score, dusty crooner samples evoke unease, and sluggish, half-drowned drums drag everything further down into the murk. Everything feels threatening.

On All These Worlds Are Yours, over ghostly, minimal backing, woods recounts watching a man’s death as casually as one might describe the weather: “Today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home/The drone flew real low, no rush, real slow.” Delivered in deadpan, the verse perfectly captures the modern banality of evil, the mechanisation of death, the disposability of human life, and the desensitization of all of us as we witness it all through our screens. The horror on GOLLIWOG isn’t just a stylistic choice. It’s reality.

The lyricism on GOLLIWOG is a masterclass in density, balancing poetic imagery with cold-eyed reportage, as rhymes sprawl and tumble more like prose poetry than traditional rap. The record is full of moments which are horrifying in content, but subdued in delivery, which makes the album extremely listenable despite its darkness. woods doesn’t shout or moralize. Instead he observes and reflects, forcing you to look. GOLLIWOG is not a collection of bangers, nor is it designed for casual background listening. It’s challenging, meticulously crafted horrorcore which places the horror in the real world where it belongs, as woods’ drags centuries of violence and grief into light.

GOLLIWOG offers no simple solution, and no triumphant exit. It sits in the despair of now and asks you to witness it. In an age of smartphones, the world feels more horrifying than ever because the atrocities that have always been there are now inescapably visible. We can see racialized violence from our beds, and scroll onto the next distraction. At times woods sounds like a carnival barker, at others like a detached narrator reading from a case file, slipping between creepy personas as he casts a cold eye across centuries of pain. There’s evil in every direction, with characters living at the margins and making ugly choices. woods has dragged hip-hop back to the gutter and made an artfully honest portrait of the world as it is that’s scummy, druggy, and brilliant.