Billy Woods: Golliwog review – one of the most engrossing, unnerving records you’ll hear this year

Golliwog has the ambience of a fearfulness movie: dissonant strings, similar nails connected a chalkboard, signifier the ground of the way Star87; agonised screams are sampled throughout; each truthful often, an ominous drone volition capable a opus to the constituent of overwhelm. On that level alone, New York underground icon Billy Woods’ latest medium would beryllium a feat of dependable design, and 1 of the year’s astir engrossing, unnerving records. Of course, this being a Billy Woods record, that’s conscionable scratching the surface.

Golliwog’s fearfulness aesthetics are a counterpoint to its tales of real, mundane nightmares. Through samples, impermanent verses and his ain lyrics, Woods unearths innumerable images of inhumanity: stories of CIA torture methods, “12 cardinal USD hovering implicit the Gaza strip”, a people of nonrecreational “zombies” consenting to crook a unsighted oculus to the moving people that makes luxury possible.

It’s heavier, if lone slightly, than Woods’ accustomed output. He inactive finds clip for moments of quality amid the bleakness – the gorgeous saxophone that ends Maquiladoras; the fuzzy synth illustration connected Pitchforks & Halos; the bushed connected Make No Mistake that feels astir adjacent to creation euphony – but Golliwog is dominated by inherited trauma and state-sanctioned terror, and Woods assesses it each with horrible clarity. You could telephone it a haunted location of an album, but that would beryllium optimistic – you’d beryllium hard-pressed to judge Woods sees a wide mode out.