billy woods' American Horror Stories: An Interview

On stage at Lodge Room in Los Angeles, billy woods issues a warning to the sold-out crowd. "If there's one thing I know in life, it's that there's no free rides. Everything we do, we pay for eventually."

It's a rare moment of between-song banter during a suffocatingly tight Armand Hammer set teeming with songs by the Backwoodz Studioz indie impresario and his creative cohort ELUCID, in duo and individual mode, and with no less than The Alchemist himself on the proverbial ones-and-twos.

A slightly premature release party for the trio's forthcoming album Mercy, the successor to their 2021 outing Haram, the show doesn't waste any amount of time between tracks, including apparent live debuts of recent singles "Calypso Rose" and "Super Nintendo" alongside older numbers. Among these was "383 Myrtle," a deep cut fan fave dating back nearly a decade, in which woods ends his verse with the following lines: The numbers wasn’t what you expected to see, huh? // Sometimes it’s C.O.D // Sometimes you pay years later in ways you never even dreamed.

So for woods to offer up those words of caution suggests something bedeviling his beautiful mind, something he's compelled to share.

Some months earlier, seated side-by-side in a trendy Brooklyn cocktail bar a few blocks away from the Barclays Center, I ask woods to indulge me with some of his favorite horror flicks. As mutually-identified bad movie buffs, we've chatted at length about film a few times before for the CABBAGES podcast, on cringe comedy flops (Marci X, 2003) and Oscar-nominated melodramas (Street Smart, 1987), but given the uneasy aesthetics of his 2025 solo album Golliwog it seems appropriate to delve into this particular genre.

He names several, from Stanley Kubrick's iconic The Shining to less obvious choices like 2001's disturbing Frailty. As someone who consumes a seemingly great quantity of movies, woods fittingly doesn't hold back on his opinions. The Babadook had him "hiding under covers." Despite its promising premise, Heretic proved "middling at the end" and "almost felt like a waste of time." Ari Aster's sinister Hereditary was "really good," but Clive Barker's sadosexual Hellraiser is just plain "bad."

"My boy Charlie put me onto Ichi The Killer and I was just like, I ain't down," he says of director Takashi Miike's extreme flick. At one point, he even phones said friend, whose taste in horror he respects though not necessarily agrees with. The two proceed to get into all manner of tangents–noirish '90s erotic thriller The Last Seduction, anyone?–and debates over their divergent picks. "Audition is not standard, but keep talking," woods tells his pal over the speaker, disagreeing over Miike's other not-for-the-squeamish cult classic. "You live in an alternate reality."

I'm nowhere near the first to liken Golliwog to a horror anthology, nor does woods have any sort of monopoly on the idea or image of the titular doll and its racist origins as fodder for one. Fairly recently, specifically 2018, the O.G. Tales From The Hood creators Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott reunited for a sequel, with one included sequence called "Good Golly" adding gore and gasps to an increasingly absurdist nightmare one might've had after watching Spike Lee's misunderstood Bamboozled. Unsurprisingly, woods has a fondness for the multi-tale format, and intentionally constructed the album with that structure as part of the intent.

"When I was a kid, I liked sci-fi anthologies," he says, citing Ray Bradbury collections as well as Stephen King's Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight as part of his voracious childhood consumption of words. "'The Langoliers,' it's a good idea. King's writing is brisk enough that you're staying in pace. But at the end of the day, I don't even remember what happens at the end, whereas I remember a lot of the stories from different anthologies."

Indelibility is not an issue with Golliwog, certainly based on the L.A. crowd response to woods' live rendition of album highlight "Misery." Its title nods to a recognized King-penned classic with a lasting footprint, thanks to the big screen Rob Reiner / William Goldman adaptation and Kathy Bates' corresponding Oscar win. Yet for woods, it serves as bar bait for a lascivious tour tale where the worst possible outcomes involve hitchhiking after-hours with a bad case of blue balls. But bookended by the microphone rigor mortis of "STAR87" and the chilling eviction-to-shelter pipeline of "BLK XMAS," the inherent and consequential thriller aspects of even a seemingly (read: deceptively) mundane narrative seep through. "It's not that 'Misery' shoves its concept in your face," he says. "It unfolds at the end."