Billy Woods “Funny Games” Review: Horror & Surrealism on GOLLIWOG

After the relative warmth and jet-lagged observations of 2023’s Maps, I think a lot of us expected another smooth victory lap with Kenny Segal. Instead, woods just dropped “Funny Games,” and it’s clear he’s decided to burn the map entirely.

The new single, featuring the always-unsettling Fatboi Sharif, is our first real look at his new album, GOLLIWOG. If you were hoping for more “nimble travelogues,” you might want to brace yourself. This is something much darker.

From Global Traveler to Cinematic Horror

The shift here is jarring in the best way possible. While Kenny Segal still pops up in the credits, GOLLIWOG feels like a pivot toward the claustrophobic. It’s a “danse macabre”—a literal dance of death—that stitches together high-concept horror with deep-seated Afropessimism.

“Funny Games” sets the tone perfectly. It doesn’t just sound like a song; it sounds like a psychological thriller. With Sharif’s surreal energy acting as the perfect foil to woods’ gravelly precision, the track feels like a fever dream you can’t quite shake off.

The Weird World of GOLLIWOG

This isn’t just an album; it’s a haunted house. The imagery woods is playing with this time around is honestly wild:

• Time-traveling trap cars and malevolent ragdolls.

• The ghost of a dying Frantz Fanon.

• African zombies wandering through a production landscape handled by a “murderer’s row” of the underground’s best beatmakers.

It’s messy, it’s intellectual, and it’s deeply uncomfortable. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from woods, yet it sounds like nothing he’s ever done before.

Why “Funny Games” Hits Different

In a landscape where most “experimental” rap feels like it’s trying too hard to be weird, “Funny Games” feels naturally necrotic. It’s the sound of an artist who has seen the world (Maps) and decided to come home and dig up the backyard.

If this single is the barometer for the rest of the album, GOLLIWOG isn’t just going to be a “new release”—it’s going to be an event.