Time out of Joint - The Wire

""This system will take your ancestral traditions and twist 'em indigenous", raps billy woods on "Make No Mistake" from Golliwog. Raising questions about where the boundaries of tradition are drawn, that line seems to get longer through repeat listens. Time doesn't move sequentially on Golliwog. The record opens with a back-spinning sample, swiftly followed by an incessant tick-tock. The tracks feel time-dilated, with warm soul, jazz and R&B instrumentation hitting disturbed beats as woods seemingly folds eras into each other."

"Across the album, deep histories of colonialism are meshed with their contemporary ramifications. Meanwhile, gruesome and supernatural imagery shares ground with 1990s horrorcore groups such as Geto Boys or Gravediggaz, but with woods the gap between allegory and reality is less clearly demarcated, reinforcing the sense that he is threading linkages forwards and back through history. The nonlinear temporalities Golliwog inhabits resonate with other corners of underground music in 2025."

Billy Woods's Golliwog collapses chronological flow, layering back-spinning samples, ticking rhythms, and warm soul, jazz and R&B instrumentation over disturbed beats. Lyricism moves between gruesome, supernatural, and allegorical imagery while connecting deep histories of colonialism to their contemporary effects. Temporal palimpsests appear elsewhere in underground 2025 music: Cerpintxt deconstructs Arabic poetry with cut-up effects and simulates King's Chamber reverb to create a garbled lament against exclusion. Beirut sextet SANAM interpolates medieval Persian texts, singing Omar Khayyam fragments over radiant guitar, synth, buzuq, and drums, producing euphoric collisions of past and present. Across these works, era-spanning techniques map oppressive systems and open possibilities where historical leakages create both dread and euphoria.

Read at The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music