Billy Woods writes a horror movie on the daunting GOLLIWOG

Each chapter which follows is told from then perspective of a different member of the village, each of them with their own myths and superstitions about this strange, lonely figure, and each of them, in turn, through their trauma or their terror, contributing in some small way to her tragic death.

Hurricane Season is one of the most brutal books I’ve ever read: blunt-force writing which churns a nauseating stew of raging machismo, small-town superstition and trauma begetting trauma, across lines drawn in blood. As I listened through the advance copy of Billy Woods’ new album that small, haunted village of La Matosa was the first thing on my mind.

It's hard not to take Golliwog as a rebuttal of sorts. After more than two decades Woods’ emerged ever so incrementally from the nichest of rap niches before arriving, in 2023, at a career breakout. Woods’ 2023 album Maps was perhaps his most immediately enjoyable record to date; a sonic travelogue which boasted sung verses and jokes about daiquiris. It had punchlines and hooks and it dealt in the universal experiences of life on the road. Golliwog makes absolutely no attempt to capitalise on that accessibility.

Just as Hurricane Season’s chapters float from house to house, revealing horrors behind each closed door, so too does Golliwog drift ominous between horror story - from the rag doll of the album’s cover to the ghosts of "Golgotha" and the vampire romance of "Misery". Sonically, the record sounds like a stroll through a haunted house. The beats are crafted by a menagerie of legends and underground stalwarts - El-P, The Alchemist, Shabaka Hutchings, Kenny Segal, Conductor - but all of their idiosyncratic styles are folded into the album’s sonic world: a ghostly tapestry of snatch piano, squawking sax and scattered laughter of Final Girls.

Despite the ghouls and zombies, there’s a tension at the heart of the album between gothic horror and contemporary reality, cutting across each-other as if they’re one and the same. "BLK XMAS" unfolds like a Shirley Jackson short - ending with Woods in bed, surrounded by the scavenged possessions of a turfed-out family, evicted by their landlord on Christmas Eve - but there’s no otherworldly hand at play, no horror beyond destitution. On another song he professes that “today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home / the drone flew real low, no rush, real slow”.

What Woods is getting at is the core of what horror has always been, from Rumours to Day of the Living Dead: fantastical imaginings of our earthly nightmares. Zombies themselves appear on "BLK ZMBY", whose titles is a reference to the 1977 Fela Kuti album; itself a blistering indictment of the Nigerian military dictatorship. Woods’ song begins with a view from a beach, watching as zombies staggering into the sea, except these bodies are actually just people, pushed from their home countries by corrupt governments and post-colonial extraction. “Universities empty, the troublemakers is drowned or drivin' Uber overseas”. Moments like these prove Woods to be one of rap’s best ever storytellers and, what’s even more remarkable, is that among this Golliwog remains a distinctly New York rap record too: full of dry asides, references to NBA draft picks and even a fleeting appearance from Despot.

As Hurricane Season reaches its end it eventually becomes apparent that The Witch is not a witch at all; just a lonely soul living in a troubled town, the victim of gossip and bullying which turned her into an exile. It was the townsfolk who made her, and the townsfolk who killed her, either explicitly or with their suspicious eyes. This idea that we are the makers of the horrors of our lives is one Woods visits himself on "Make No Mistake": “it’s easy for you but it’s hard for me / to forget the things we did ‘cus we had to eat… at least that’s what we said when we did the deed”. Golliwog may be filled with allusions to the cannon of Black horror but its setting is the real world, a horror story created by our own loud silences. That’s about as scary as it gets.