billy woods GOLLIWOG

Critic's Take

billy woods retreats inward on GOLLIWOG, folding the listener into a haunted house of creaks, moans and ominous voices while still landing razor-sharp lines and black humor. The review singles out “Waterproof Mascara” as surely one of the most harrowing rap tracks in recent memory, and praises “Born Alone” for a chillingly domestic, even absurd, detail. Politics and brutality thread through cuts like “Corinthians” and “Counterclockwise”, but woods's cleverness and comic smirk keep the album listenable. For anyone asking about the best tracks on GOLLIWOG, start with “Waterproof Mascara” and “Born Alone” for intensity and unsettling craft.

Key Points

• The best song is "Waterproof Mascara" for its harrowing, visceral portrayal of domestic abuse embedded into the beat.
• GOLLIWOG's core strengths are its horror-tinged production, political bite, and woods's dark humor and precise writing.

Themes

Critic's Take

In a voice that treats horror as social scripture, billy woods makes GOLLIWOG feel like a series of wake-up jolts where the best songs - “Jumpscare”, “Corinthians”, and “BLK XMAS” - do the heaviest lifting. The album reads like hyper-literate reportage, and the tracks singled out here become miniature nightmarish essays rather than throwaway skits. The production and imagery make those best tracks stick in the mind, each one folding everyday horrors into uncanny set pieces. Listening for the best songs on GOLLIWOG means following the lines that turn poverty, eviction, and spectral violence into dizzying, necessary confrontation.

Key Points

• “Jumpscare” is the best song because it crystallizes the album’s haunted imagery and sets the tone for social-horror vignettes.
• The album’s core strengths are its immersive production, hyper-literate lyricism, and consistent linking of everyday brutality to horror tropes.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods inhabits a cold, interrogative space on GOLLIWOG, and the best songs - like “STAR87” and “Waterproof Mascara” - crystallize that stare into something both cinematic and menacing. Moura’s prose lingers on the album’s fusillade of institutional tragedies while noting pockets of levity, so the best tracks on GOLLIWOG balance dread and dark comedy with surgical precision. He privileges songs that pair haunting production with razor bars, pointing to “Maquiladoras” and “Dislocated” as moments where atmosphere and narrative converge into the record’s most affecting statements. The result is an album whose standout songs feel like small, savage short films - intimate, accusatory, and impossible to look away from.

Key Points

• “Dislocated” is the album’s emotional climax, marrying thematic closure with intimate performance.
• GOLLIWOG’s core strengths are its atmospheric production, bleak storytelling, and darkly comic counterpoints.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods deploys a nihilistic imagination on GOLLIWOG, where the best tracks - “Jumpscare”, “Waterproof Mascara” and “Lead Paint Test” - function as the album's most harrowing set pieces, each one a distilled nightmare of domestic horror and historical violence. The reviewer revels in the record's venomous horrorcore - praising Steel Tipped Dove and Preservation for foregrounding sobbing samples and woozy loops - and singles out those songs for their vivid, bone-chilling lyricism and production. Across the 52-minute runtime the standout songs lock the listener into woods's grotesque metaphors and survivor's guilt, making queries about the best tracks on GOLLIWOG return to these cuts again and again. Ultimately, these top songs crystallize why this is described as woods's best solo project yet, an immersive graveyard of dead memories that rewards rabid dissection.

Key Points

• The best song is best because its production and vivid lyricism crystallize the album's nightmare-core and emotional core.
• The album's core strengths are its visionary, grotesque symbolism and consistently haunting production that foregrounds woods's lyricism.

Themes

Critic's Take

From the opening fog to the final unraveling, billy woods's GOLLIWOG reads like a haunted house of songs where the best tracks - “Waterproof Mascara”, “Misery” and “BLK ZMBY” - are the rooms you keep returning to. The reviewer's language is patient and cinematic, noting how “Waterproof Mascara” places a woman’s cry amid colonial ruins and how Kenny Segal’s production lets “Misery” drift like a guilt-haunted ghost. Meanwhile “BLK ZMBY” is called scathing, a grotesque portrait of power that nails the album’s postcolonial ire. This is not a singles record - it rewards repeat visits - but those tracks stand out as the album’s clearest beacons of intent and emotion.

Key Points

• “Waterproof Mascara” is the best-recognized track for its evocative atmosphere and colonial-ruins imagery.
• The album’s core strengths are its haunting thematic consistency, vivid imagery, and disorienting, cinematic production.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods makes GOLLIWOG a twisty horrorcore masterpiece where dread animates the best tracks - notably “Waterproof Mascara” and “STAR87”. The record revels in surreal, imagistic writing, with “Golgotha” and “Maquiladoras” deepening its anticolonial and hallucinatory reach. Woods’ cadences are stentorian and dynamic, letting melodically smothered production amplify lines that linger in the imagination. For readers asking what the best songs on GOLLIWOG are, these tracks stand out for mood, narrative ambiguity, and haunting vocal delivery.

Key Points

• The best song, "Waterproof Mascara", is best because its eerie production and ambiguous narrative maximize tension and emotional ambiguity.
• The album’s core strengths are its vivid, surreal imagery, inventive horrorcore production, and woods’ amplified, stentorian delivery.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods leans into pure nightmare on GOLLIWOG, and the best songs - “Lead Paint Test” and “Dislocated” - seize you with mournful piano and chant-driven finals. Rob Sheffield’s prose finds Woods at his most confrontational, a poet spinning horror tales that are social commentaries as much as shocks. The record’s standout tracks, from the quiet devastation of “Lead Paint Test” to the determined escape of “Dislocated”, show why these are the best tracks on GOLLIWOG, songs that force close attention. Sheffield treats the album as a tour de force, praising dense lyricism and bleak imagination while pointing to specific emotional peaks that make particular songs essential listens.

Key Points

• The best song is the finale "Dislocated" because it closes with a powerful chant and a narrative of escape.
• The album's core strengths are dense, horror-tinged lyricism and cinematic, unsettling production that foregrounds survival and racial critique.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods’s GOLLIWOG reads like a haunted village in record form, and the best songs - notably “BLK XMAS” and “BLK ZMBY” - are where that eerie collision of gothic horror and contemporary reality hits hardest. Liam Inscoe-Jones writes in clipped, vivid bursts, comparing “BLK XMAS” to a Shirley Jackson short and tracing “BLK ZMBY” back to Fela Kuti, which makes the album’s strongest tracks feel both literary and unforgiving. The storytelling on “Make No Mistake” and “Misery” cements Woods as one of rap’s best storytellers, songs that trade scares for social indictment. Overall, the record’s haunted production and dry New York asides mean that the best tracks on GOLLIWOG are as unsettling as they are precise.

Key Points

• The best song(s) like "BLK XMAS" marry literary horror with stark social detail, making them the album’s emotional center.
• Golliwog’s core strengths are its vivid storytelling, haunted production, and the collision of gothic tropes with real-world social critique.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods arrives on GOLLIWOG routinely unsettling and intellectually restless, and the best songs - notably “Make No Mistake” and “All These Worlds Are Yours” - showcase that acuity. In tones equal parts forensic and dreamlike, the reviewer tracks how “Make No Mistake” lays bare woods' autofictional truth while “All These Worlds Are Yours” turns American hegemony into a dizzying Black Mirror tableau. The album's standout moments reward close listening, even as fragmentation and divergent production keep the listener off-balance. Ultimately, the best tracks on GOLLIWOG are those that marry lyrical precision to disorienting sound collages, offering the album's most piercing insights.

Key Points

• “Make No Mistake” is the best song because it crystallizes woods' autofictional honesty and lyrical acuity.
• The album's core strength is its fertile, riveting collage of production and imagery that rewards close listening despite deliberate fragmentation.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods makes GOLLIWOG feel like a haunted house of an album, and the best tracks - notably “STAR87” and “Maquiladoras” - showcase that unsettling power. The review leans into the record's sound-design triumphs, citing dissonant strings and sampled screams that make “STAR87” a standout. Meanwhile the gorgeous saxophone closing “Maquiladoras” and the shivery textures on “Pitchforks & Halos” explain why those songs register as the most affecting. Overall the album's bleak clarity and moments of beauty mark where its best songs reside and why listeners asking 'best tracks on GOLLIWOG' will hear those pieces first.

Key Points

• The best song(s) like “STAR87” stand out for their harrowing sound design and dissonant strings.
• The album's core strengths are its horror-inflected production and lucid, bleak lyrical examinations of state violence.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods delivers a harrowing masterwork with GOLLIWOG, where the best songs - notably “Waterproof Mascara” and “Dislocated” - crystallise his afro-pessimist vision. Tom Morgan’s prose finds the album unnervingly successful at mirroring its terrifying cover, and he highlights “Waterproof Mascara” for a bold production trick that repeats a crying sample like an incantation. The closing “Dislocated” is presented as a gutting finale that leaves the listener close to tears. Throughout, tracks such as “BLK ZMBY” and “A Doll Fulla Pins” stand out as provocative, haunting pieces that make GOLLIWOG one of woods’ most confrontational releases.

Key Points

• The best song, notably “Waterproof Mascara”, is best for its bold, incantatory production trick that heightens the album’s horror.
• The album’s core strengths are its unflinching afro-pessimist themes, dense lyricism, and striking, unsettling production.

Themes

Critic's Take

billy woods has long specialised in uneasy, elliptical rhyme and on GOLLIWOG that trait is sharpened into something clearer and more terrifying. The reviewer's voice finds Kenny Segal-produced “Misery” and “Born Alone” as crystalline moments, and highlights EL-P's touch on “Corinthians” as perfectly aligned with woods' vision. This is an album where the best songs - notably “Misery”, “Corinthians” and “BLK ZMBY” - act as entry points into its dark, rewarding whole, even as samples of screams and dissonant textures make it a disorienting listen. Listen to it as a unified experience, but start with those standout tracks to understand why GOLLIWOG feels like his most distilled statement yet.

Key Points

• The best song(s) work because expert production (Kenny Segal, EL-P) crystallises woods' uneasy, surreal lyricism into standout moments.
• The album's core strengths are its cohesive, horror-tinged soundscapes, incisive commentary on race and class, and rewarding whole-album design.

Themes

Critic's Take

In his usual unsparing register, billy woods turns GOLLIWOG into a catalogue of modern horror where the best tracks - “All These Worlds Are Yours” and “STAR87” - act as the album's bleak fulcrums. The reviewer's sentences linger on images and production details, praising “All These Worlds Are Yours” for distilling Woods's worldview and “STAR87” for Conductor Williams's relentless tremolo strings and slasher-like closing. The piece singles out “Waterproof Mascara” as effective nightmare fuel and lauds “Corinthians” for its John Carpenter menace, all reasons these songs surface as the best tracks on GOLLIWOG.

Key Points

• “All These Worlds Are Yours” best encapsulates Woods's worldview with intimate, surreal violence imagery.
• GOLLIWOG's core strengths are its menacing production and unsparing lyrical precision that favor confrontation over catharsis.

Themes