Billy Woods & Kenny Segal’s MAPS is the Album of the Year

As far as my listening goes, 2023 has been a disappointing year for music so far. Only Black Country, New Road’s Live at Bush Hall and Black Thought & El Michels Affair’s Glorious Game have been powerful enough to me to inspire multiple listens. I did also like UGLY from slowthai and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final album, 12, but nothing has really gotten to me.

No album had gripped me, wormed its way into my head. And so, when I saw that billy woods was promoting a new upcoming record, I started rubbing my hands together like your favourite cartoon villain when concocting their wicked plans. Fully produced by Kenny Segal, who worked with woods previously on their album Hiding Places (one of woods’ best), Maps was bound to be good.

And it is. But it’s also surprising, and that surprise is certainly worth discussing.

For context, billy woods’ recent albums have been far from personal. woods is a decidedly private person — his face has never been seen other than at live shows (no pictures exist). His last two albums have been towering, too. Aethiopes (released April 2022) still baffles me — a 36 minute album with some of the best production I’ve ever heard which details the history of oppression. The lyrics are impossibly rich, with just the opening song talking about the asylum of socialist leader Mengistu Haile Mariam and sampling from an obscure Nigerian film, Kongi’s Harvest. Church, released in the same year, is just as staggering conceptually and lyrically with harder to trace themes and ideas. But, importantly, both records focus more on political issues or ones concerning race, colonialism or similar topics rather than on woods’ own life.

The cover for woods’ previous album Aethiopes, released in 2022.

This makes Maps a significant change of pace as woods gets personal. And he makes it clear that he’s having something of a hard time. With its abstract, often manic production from Kenny Segal (which is seriously good, bringing cohesion to chaos whilst switching between hip-hop sub-genres effortlessly) serving woods’ lyricism beautifully, Maps is an intimate documentation of woods’ thoughts of alienation and anxiety in the midst of touring. He speaks of his child, he speaks of struggling to maintain a healthy relationship whilst touring with his child’s mother (and his ex), he speaks of nihilism and giving up on trying to find solutions, he speaks of humanity being past saving, on cheap travel, on his position as a black celebrity/artist, on dissociation. I can keep going, but there’s no need to spoil everything that the record has to offer.

Woods’ lyricism across the entire project is just perfect. He remains massively inspiring. There are so many beautiful or deeply dark lines worth pointing out, so, here are a handful of them:

‘Maybe suicidal thoughts was the struggle,
For a brief sweet moment,
There was nothing in the thought bubble.’
//
‘People don’t want the truth,
they want me to tell them
Grandma went to Heaven’
//
‘My taxes pay police brutality settlements’
//
‘I don’t go to sleep, I tread water ’til I sink’
//
‘I say I’m at peace, but it’s still that same dread,
It’s a funny feeling, like knowing your enemies is in the feds,
It’s hard to live when before you was dead.’

It’s worth noting again that even when going back through the album to find these lines, I found two full verses I wanted to put down. I’ll put those closer to the bottom, but just let those lines sit. Each and every one of them is so good — a mix of intelligence and emotional expression that is so striking.

billy woods photographed for The Wire by Jamil McGinnis.

The production, thankfully, more than backs up woods’ work. As do the carefully chosen features. Kenny Segal’s work here isn’t catchy in the way that some of the beats from Hiding Places are, but that clearly isn’t the intention. The album is a reflection of a pretty chaotic space of mind, the chaos of touring, always on the move, cheap hotels and Easyjet flight delays — the music reflects this. What stands out is the interlude in the middle of the record of jazz instrumentals, or the low foghorn-type sound that crops up a couple of times on Hangman. For an album to be able to move from jazz instrumentals all the way to industrial hip-hop sounds (as on Babylon by Bus, those drums are incredibly punchy) speaks volumes about the ability of Segal as a producer.

The features across the board are great, too. Appearances from Danny Brown, Quelle Chris, Sam Herring, Elucid and more ground the album further, though part of me does wish that woods stuck entirely to his focus on his own experiences for the record. The features add beautifully to the music, and fit the tracks that they appear on (Brown’s feature on Year Zero is bound to be a future classic verse, it’s so disjointed and bizarre in its flow but has multiple extremely funny punchlines) but at the same time woods’ position as the focus of the album is temporarily disrupted. Again, I do enjoy the features in and of themselves and I think they compliment the songs they’re on, but the album thematically suffers *slightly* because of them.
I’m still floored by Maps, even a while after first listening. Replays continue to be more rewarding as more information and more references become clear, the themes continue to build, etc. Others have covered this album very well – I particularly enjoyed Professor Skye’s YouTube review/analysis of the record. His channel is fantastic across the board — an academic approach to hip-hop with seriously detailed reviews. Skye goes into far better detail than I think I ever could.

Kenny Segal and billy woods, photographed by Alexander Richter.

And finally, I’ll leave you with my current favourite few lines (which change consistently, but right now, I can’t get over these few) and then the last lines of the album — both feel like light jabs to the heart. Thanks for reading.

‘Play stupid games, you flyin’ Easyjet,
Bratislava, Utrecht,
Something felt off before I even left
So when I saw the missed calls, I knew what was next
Didn’t have to open the text
Stupid prizes, couple’s therapy on Zoom
It’s a train wreck.’
//
‘I’m in the park with the baby on the swing
When it hits me crazy, anything at all could happen to him
He been climbing higher and higher on the jungle gym
Running faster, sometimes pushing other kids
Tear-streaked apologies, balled fists, it’s a trip
That this is something we did
I kiss her on the lips
I watch him grow, wondering how long I got to live’

Some of the most flooring final lines to any rap album I’ve heard, ever. Maybe to any album I’ve heard generally!