Brooklyn’s Billy Woods Is Bringing His Sci-Fi Horror-Filled GOLLIWOG Album to Dallas

Rapper Billy Woods is one of those rare artists who asks as many questions as he's asked.

Throughout our conversation, we spend most of the time talking about almost everything except GOLLIWOG, his gripping new record released on May 9 and got Best New Music by Pitchfork that uses horror and sci-fi themes to explore real-world atrocities like predatory real estate practices, drone surveillance and wartime immorality. The production, handled by Kenny Segal and Conductor Williams to a who’s who of underground rap icons like El-P, The Alchemist and Ant of Atmosphere, is often dark and heaving, stitched together with unsettling samples pulled from classic horror films.

Woods is bringing a heavy dose of this new material—along with deep cuts from his much-beloved catalog—to Club Dada this weekend. At his sold-out show on May 31 at Lodge Room in Los Angeles, he requested the stage be bathed entirely in red light, giving the GOLLIWOG songs in particular, an added sense of weight and menace.

But here we are talking about other stuff, completely unrelated, asking with an open curiosity about Portland, Oregon, favorite bars in Brooklyn and go-to Chinese restaurants in L.A.

By the time we’re watching Game 6 of the Knicks-Pacers playoff series together over the phone, trading play-by-play, we’ve forgotten this interview was to preview his Dallas show.
“Oh, nice block,” he exclaims as a New York Knick catches a piece of a Pacers player’s three in the corner before casually snapping us both back into the conversation at hand, answering our question about performing GOLLIWOG across the country and southern states like Texas with the social commentary themes in mind. “But your question was specifically about race in the South,” he says.

It makes sense that Woods would have an inquisitive mind, much of his music is rooted in observation, often connecting hyper-specific details in ways the listener never sees coming. On 2019’s “Spider Hole,” for instance, he name-drops Libyan militiamen and Grace Mugabe (Zimbabwe’s former First Lady, a nod to his immigrant father’s homeland) in the first verse alone, before pivoting in the chorus to proclaim that he has no interest in seeing Queens legend Nas perform with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The song then closes with a Brian Cox sample from Succession.

Somehow, he ties all that together into a meditation on staying in your own lane and realizing everyone is chasing their own angle in life. That’s part of what makes Woods so beloved: He’s a connector of literature, pop culture and history, all through the lens of his life as the son of immigrants navigating an often very dysfunctional world. (Reflecting this, his Genius annotations are stuffed to the gills with listeners trying to figure out all the references in each song).

“You look at movies like when I was growing up like Dirty Harry and Death Wish — those are films that are wrapped around the soaring crime of the 1970s, white flight, conservative revenge fantasies, racial animosity,” he says. “Speculative fiction…that’s the vehicle I’m using to talk about things with.”

While GOLLIWOG has drawn attention for its dark atmosphere — its namesake is based on a story he wrote as a kid that his mom saved about an evil doll — Woods insists it’s not a dramatic departure from his other works. He rattles off past tracks like “Hangman” and “Christine” that would’ve fit right in, which both encounter death and dark subjects. Even older works, like “Pompeii,” from 2012’s History Will Absolve Me, were vehicles for exploring murder as a result of systemic pressure.

Still, GOLLIWOG feels distinctly cinematic, a point we try to emphasize by asking Woods what its tagline would be if it was actually a horror movie that came out in theaters.

“If it was the ‘90s, the movie studio might have put ‘Homie Don’t Play’ with a picture of the doll on there,” he says, chuckling. “If it’s later, maybe they would have done [the opening lyric on the album], ‘Ragdoll playing dead, rabid dog in the yard, car won’t start.’ Maybe that’s too long.”

The beat on “Jumpscare,” GOLLIWOG’s opener, first reminded Woods of the eerie intro music from Tales from the Darkside, the 1980s horror anthology series produced by genre legend George A. Romero. Some of the album’s film samples — like the infamous line, “The call is coming from inside the house” on “STAR87,” lifted from the 2006 remake of When a Stranger Calls — came from memory. Another key influence was Diary of a Madman, a short story from a collection of Chinese literature gifted to Woods during the writing process, which touches on themes of social isolation and delusion.
Given the record’s heavy atmosphere, it’s fair to wonder whether performing it night after night will take a toll on this tour, which runs through November. But as Woods brings GOLLIWOG to Dallas — a city with personal significance, as his label Backwoodz Studioz is partially run here — he’s quick to note that his music isn’t as one-note as it might seem.

“I feel like if you’re into my music and you come to the shows, you can see the darkness in songs that don’t always seem dark,” he says. “And sometimes you can see the lightness, the humor, even the hopefulness in a [otherwise dark] song like ‘Born Alone.’ I like to think all the music contains multitudes.”

For longtime rap fans — especially those who came up during the sprawling, eclectic underground scenes of the 2000s — those multitudes can also carry a deep sense of nostalgia. Woods emerged from the same circles that produced Def Jux staples like Cannibal Ox, and his knotty, blunt-force delivery sometimes reminds us of Vast Aire, one half of the duo. (He and the group spent a lot of time together around the release of their classic record The Cold Vein in 2001.)

That shared nostalgia was palpable during the GOLLIWOG tour stop we attended in L.A. when Woods performed “STAR87." The crowd lit up at a line nodding to Anti-Pop Consortium—a deep-cut reference to that same early-2000s avant-rap lineage.

Of course, just like everything else we talk about, this sends us down another tangent, this time unpacking the differences between horrorcore-adjacent rappers like Detroit’s Esham and Sacramento’s Brotha Lynch Hung, and groups like CanOx, who fused grim street imagery with abstract social commentary. That then naturally leads us to the West Coast underground scene of the same era, where collectives like Quannum Projects were blending backpack rap sensibilities with experimental production, and artists like Pigeon John brought levity and playfulness to the table.

Once again, Woods isn’t just answering questions here — he’s pulling us into a rabbit hole. Just like his music, the deeper you follow, the more it all connects.

Billy Woods will perform on Saturday, June 7, at 7:00 p.m. at Club Dada, 2720 Elm St. Tickets are available starting at $32.47 here.