Hiding Places is a dense record. Billy Woods is from my home town, Brooklyn, and he can do grimey raps, but everything is just a little bit heavier, and a little bit deeper…”The bombs was on us, the bombs was on us, came back to God like, ‘Motherfucker you promised!'” He drops effortless similes (“awkward silence, like when the grenade a dud”) and will suddenly be hilarious in the middle of a desperate painful rhyme: “I don’t wanna go see Nas with a band in Carnegie Hall,” he says on Spider Hole, a story about copping drugs from a hole in the wall. If you’ve ever been a Brooklyn junkie, you know exactly what he’s talking about. At least I do.
And check out bigfakelaugh, where he gets political while paying tribute to one of the most important rap songs in history: “I got a letter from my insurer the other day, I opened and read it, it said the treatment wasn’t covered.
Production is from L.A.’s Kenny Segal, and the beats are slow, dirty, grinds–like being on morphine. The beats are the perfect compliment for some of the smartest, tightest bars I’ve heard in months.
Don’t sleep on this.
