Album Review: Billy Woods and Kenny Segal - Maps

We didn’t have HBO at the time, and even though now we do, it is one of the many streaming services that more or less sit collecting proverbial dust within our television—I don’t watch a lot, at all, really. I haven’t for years, so in the final, ominous, and creeping moments of “Spider Hole,” the fourth track from Hiding Places, when a snippet of an episode of “Succession” plays—a show I’ve never watched and have literally no interest in—I didn’t recognize Brian Cox’s voice at first, and I had to search, in quotes, one of the lines he says in this bit of dialogue.

“You’ve got your own game going on. I’ve got my game,” he says, matter of factly, in a conversation. “Everybody’s got a game.”

I would arrive at this portion of Hiding Places at more or less the same place, each time I listened, on my walk to work—with roughly one block to go before arriving and usually, like, 15 minutes into the album, if I pressed play shortly after stepping outside of my home, and locking the door behind me. 

With the time I had on these walks, in the morning, almost always before the sun was up, or just as it was beginning to rise in the distance slowly, was when I would try to do a lot of thoughtful listening to a new album, or as much as I was able to listen to within those 15 minutes, in an effort to gather my feelings, or ideas, of how I might want to approach the album if I were going to write something about it, or was in the middle of writing something about it.

That was the process then—involved, sure, but much less so compared to how complicated and difficult I make things now. 

That was the process then—the pieces were shorter, much less ambitious, with literally no risk of them buckling under the weight of all that ambition.

This was in the spring of 2019—this was just a little over four years ago. This was before everything was terrible. This was when I still genuinely enjoyed the work I was doing at the job I walked to every morning in the moments just before dawn.

This was when my wife and I were living with a special needs cat—fostering, at first, but failing at it, adopting him officially over the summer. 

We no longer live with a cat. I no longer have that job. The genuine enjoyment ultimately ceases.

Everything becomes terrible. 

*

Today, I wrote nothing.

Billy Woods had been both an established solo performer and operating as one half of the duo Armand Hammer for a few years before I came across him—struck first by the stark, haunting cover art to their 2018 LP, Paraffin, then subsequently struck by how desolate and claustrophobic both he, and his Armand Hammer group mate, Elucid (born Chaz Hall) were in their respective lyricism, the cadence of their voices, and the albums’ production, as a whole. 

A few months later, a co-worker had recommended I listen to Open Mike Eagle’s (at the time) old podcast—and in scrolling through the list of episodes, and their guests, I found an interview with Billy Woods, from 2015, where he, among other things, shares the story behind the title of his then just recently released album, Today, I Wrote Nothing.

The phrase itself comes from the name of a volume of collected writings of Daniil Kharms—a Russian poet and writer, who died in 1942—a Soviet-era absurdist and avant-garde in his writings, I, shortly after listening to the interview, checked out a copy of Kharms’ book from the library, would consider him to be adjacent of Franz Kafka, Fernando Pessoa, and Sigizmund Krzhizhandovsky. 

Outside of recalling that I liked the titular piece from the collection, I do not remember anything else about the book Today, I Wrote Nothing—that phrase, though, is something that I have carried with me for almost five years now, specifically the way Woods says it with such emphasis both at the beginning and end of his verse on the album’s opening track, “Lost Blocks.”

“Today, I wrote nothing,” he begins. “Stared at the page blunted. Light drizzle out crooked window—sky color of an old pistol. Alternate side parking, I didn’t leave the apartment.”

“Orphaned, unfinished manuscripts,” he continues, just a few lines later. “Rhyme books in a rubbish tin. Tray thick with twice-lit clips. Today, I wrote nothing.”

I think about that phrase on days when it is true, and when it is not. If the writing I committed myself to, or was able to accomplish, was what I wanted to write about, or set out to write about, or if there is something still that I am not making the time, and the effort with.

If there’s something I am avoiding, for whatever reason.

Too many to name in some cases. 

Everything becomes terrible.

Today, I wrote nothing.

*

In the interview from 2015 on Secret Skin, the podcast with Open Mike Eagle, he jokes with Woods about the title of the album—“There’s a lot of words on here,” Eagle says, something to the effect of and totally deadpan, as a response to the expression Today, I Wrote Nothing.

I think about that all the time, actually.

“There’s a lot of words on here.”

I think about that in relation to myself, when I write, and how I write, especially how it has certainly evolved more and more over the last three or four years. But I think about that with regards to Woods as a writer and a rapper as well—about the urgency and the breathlessness with which he often delivers his lyrics.

And within that urgency, and breathlessness, I think about what Woods often writes about—or the references he manages to include within his lyricism, like the title of a collection from a Russian absurdist born in the early 1900s, or subtle aside connected to something from the film adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, or name-checking a character from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

I think about what Woods often writes about—and the kind of level of intelligence and cleverness that regularly operates from, at times quietly speaking a non-sequitur into the microphone at the beginning of a song, as the beat is beginning to take shape underneath him, like you’ve walked in and he’s mid-conversation, talking about something else entirely before the song truly “begins” and he, in taking an enormous inhalation, begins his verse.

Within that urgency, and that breathlessness, though, what is more important than his diction and the command he has over language, is the brinkmanship he uses in writing and in performing—rapping like he has maxed out his word count, but doesn’t care what an editor has said, because every word has power, or has meaning, and he’s trying to cram as many of them as possible in before the music stops.

And in all of that, yes, there is intelligence and a cleverness, but what I continue to think about when I think about Woods as a writer and an artist is that the world he creates within all of his records—especially over the last four or five years, and a world he seemingly creates with relative is, is that it is incredibly fucking bleak. 

Everything becomes terrible.

*

I am uncertain if it happened at all within the first few years of music writing, when things were a lot less complicated both for me, as, like, a person attempting to exist in this world, and also how I thought about, and then wrote about, artists and albums, but there became a point at least five years ago when I would encounter an album that I, perhaps, was interesting in collecting my thoughts on, but the more time I spent with it, I found that the very notion of writing about it, and doing it any justice in terms of analysis, was incredibly intimidating. 

Billy Woods, even in the instances that I have been able to gather my thoughts w/r/t his work, is one of those artists, simply because there is often too much to try and unpack in terms of the different layers the album, and Woods himself, is working within.

And I have, in recent years, been remiss to refer to myself as, or be on the receiving end of what I assume to be compliments where someone tells me they believe me to be “prolific,” because I disagree. There was a time when I was an objectively much more prolific writer, but I would argue that those days have come and gone, and that in publishing two to three pieces a month—yes, they are often sprawling in length, but word count doesn’t, to me anyway, mean the same thing as the total number of completed works.

And I bring this up because I am uncertain how Woods views himself, and his output, especially over the last few years, but I would say that for an artist who, a decade ago, was ready to walk away completely from music, he has become quite prolific—in both what he issues under his own name, as well as part of Armand Hammer. 

Perhaps it has to do with a hunger—literal and figurative, as the chorus of “No Days Off” from Paraffin is, “You don’t work—you don’t eat.”

In 2019, just a few months after Woods released Hiding Places, produced in its entirety by Kenny Segal, he returned with Terror Management; in 2020—obviously, a difficult time to release and promote music—he and Hall issued the fourth Armand Hammer album, Shrines, and its follow up, Haram, the next year¹.

At the end of 2020, Woods released a collaborative album, Brass, with Camae Ayewa, the Philadelphia-based artist who performs under the name Moor Mother; then, in 2022, he released two albums—Aethiopes, in the spring, followed by Church, in early autumn.

I haven’t written about Woods, either as part of Armand Hammer, or as a solo artist, since the release of Terror Management—my intent, in 2020, was to put together something on Shrines, but, for as challenging of a time as that was for artists to release and promote albums, it was also a very challenging time for me, as an analyst, to write about a lot of things that I wanted to; additionally, the longer I sat with the album, the more I realized that it was, maybe, something I would be unable to put together any kind of thoughtful reflection on. I didn’t dislike it, but what I wanted was a Paraffin II, which it certainly was not.

And my intention, of course, upon their respective releases in 2022, was to write about Atheiopes and Church. Last year was, by all accounts, a less challenging time for the world as a whole, comparatively speaking, than two years prior, but it was still a challenging time for me, as a person, muddling through life—for every album that I am able to sit down with, spend the amount of time that is necessary to write about with any kind of insight, there are myriad albums that I am just, for whatever reason, not able to dedicate that much time to. 

And both Aethiopes and Church, as one might expect from Woods, are both bleak and haunting—breathless and urgent in the way only he can be, and the more time I spent with them, playing through my headphones as I went about my day, the more intimidating the idea of trying to gather my thoughts became, and I, as I often do, talked myself out of it.

*

Arriving around eight months after his last outing, and re-teaming with producer Kenny Segal, Maps is not a sequel to Hiding Places—not in the tone of its lyricism, nor in the soundscape. Both Segal and Woods want you to know that up front—“We needed to go on other journeys, artistic and otherwise,” Woods said in press materials regarding the album. “To come back and do something fresh.”

Clocking in at 45 minutes, Maps’ track listing can be deceiving—spread out across 17 songs, the shortest of which is only 70 seconds, the longest is still well under four minutes. It’s an album that, overall, as well as broken into individual pieces, never runs the risk of overstaying its welcome—and even if you do want moments to last a little longer, or be expanded upon slightly, Woods has said all he needs to, or wants to, in that instance, already a step ahead of you, sprinting into the next track.

It is dark (of course it is), and the darkness, or pessimism of Woods’ outlook and lived experience is often contrasted against Segal’s favoring of beats that regularly feature crisp, sharp-sounding percussion and jazzy piano melodies, twinkling along albeit in a disembodied form, creating the base for blistering ruminations on loneliness, isolation, a sense of entropy, and the uneasiness from still tangentially being connected to the streets.

*

I don’t know if referring to any of Woods’ output, especially his releases over the last few years, as “concept albums” is an accurate assessment, but they are albums featuring songs that are connected, loosely or otherwise, by shared ideas or themes—and, I mean, this is most obvious in his writing, but within the albums where he has worked with one specific producer on every track included, part of that concept, or connectedness, can also form from how cohesive the album can sound. 

Hiding Places, outside from the frenetic tension and release from Woods as a gifted emcee, works because of the desolate and dark soundscapes crafted by Segal—and because Maps is not intended to be a continuation of that project’s tone, really, and more of just two artists reconnecting after a number of years, it does take a number of listens to really find your way into the atmosphere this record is establishing. Segal’s production is not inaccessible by any means, and it is often quite fascinating to hear the layers he works with and how he works with them, but there is something about it that requires time, and patience, and it does keep you at arm’s length before eventually embracing you a little closer, but never fully.

There are portions of Maps’ production relies on beats constructed out of tightly wound drum samples—they sound intentionally dusty, or a little ramshackle at times, but there is a punch and a crispness to how they sound coming through a pair of headphones, which speaks to the kind of meticulous nature of Segal’s work in the studio. 

Segal does take his time, though with the introduction, then reliance on this kind of sound—the album opens with “Kenwood Speakers,” all of 80 seconds total, and true to its name, or at least the vivid thing it references and recalls, skitters along erratically, blown out and compressed, from a rhythm tapped out on an antiquated, chintzy sounding drum machine. But the sense of whimsy, or the playfulness from how it opens quickly fades and is replaced with something slightly more ominous—along with his favoriting of jazz-leaning arranging, Segal regularly uses quick flashes of thick-sounding guitar string strums and plucks—often sounding just slightly “off” somehow—warbled or simply out of tune. 

Throughout Maps, at least in terms of production and beat construction, Segal walks the line and tries to find a balance between something that is rooted in a strong rhythm—the kind of thing that you feel compelled to nod your head along to, but is juxtaposed against something much, much darker. Not sinister, or menacing, but something uneasy—a sense of dread, which is to say, these kind of compositions certainly lend themselves to Woods, and his narratives, which are often boiling over with uneasiness and a palpable sense of dread, or that some kind of trouble is waiting for you right around the corner.

This kind of production arrives as the first half of Maps continues to build its momentum—and you can hear it, and what I am kind of talking about in the way there is a convergence of elements to create something that is unique but also familiar and comforting in some regards(eerily reminiscent at times of the production coming out of the east coast in the early 1990s) on “Sound Check,” which features a charismatic guest turn by another independent rapper and cult favorite, Quelle Chris, and “Rapper Weed,” then returning in the album’s second half on “The Layover” and “Waiting Around.”

Elsewhere, and while he never does return to the distorted programming heard within the album’s opening track, Segal does oscillate back and forth between the more organic, crisp sounds lifted from a drum kit, and other beats coming from a machine—the rhythm from Babylon By Bus skitters along anxiously and ominous, alternating between a tinny sounding hi-hat and a low, percussive clattering that continues to tumble; then, on the striking “Year Zero,” with rattling cymbals and other jangly sounds swirling together, the pacing slows down to a trudge, with a bass drum hit that sounds, and feels, like a swift, effective punch in the center of your chest. 

The trudge, or dirge, remains the tempo on “Hangman,” though the way the drum hits is much flatter in comparison, and the album’s first single, “FaceTime,” which features a surprising guest turn from Sam Herring (vocalist of the idiosyncratic indie outfit Future Islands) aims to split the difference, as it were, between the thick, rattling, programmed beats with the sharp jazzy sampling, walking the fine line of the convergence between the two aesthetics.

In an album like Hiding Places, the production was at its most fascinating when it was at its most intense—I am thinking about the haunting and soul-shattering pairing of Woods’ delivery with the ferocity of the arranging on the album’s closing track, “Red Dust”; and here, on Maps, the smoothed out, jazz leaning foundation to many of these tunes are impressive, yes, and I could listen to an instrumental companion piece to Maps repeatedly while going about my day, or sitting down to write, but perhaps this album is at its most compelling, or at least there is a unique flash that ripples through it, when there is no beat at all underneath the song, which is the case with “Bad Dreams Are Only Dreams.”

A blistering 70 seconds in length, there is no beat at all under the woozy, swaying samples of mournful brass instrumentation, and lower, extremely foreboding piano chords—and, as is the same within a few other places on Maps, Woods delivers his narrative uninterrupted as a stream of conscious—there’s no chorus that he retreats to, and as he speaks, he refuses to stop and come up for air until the fine line is spoken and the music swirls and spirals out into a controlled chaos. 

*

Somewhere, deep within the layers of Maps, there’s a sense of humor—it’s subtle, and often dark or macabre, but I mean, at this point, that should be apparent, but even in this subtly, you do, sometimes, have to really look for it in order to find it, if there is any to be found.

Not everything is funny all of the time, though.

Not everyone wants to be funny all of the time.

Everything becomes terrible.

Often, on Maps, and honestly, throughout Woods’ canon that I am familiar with, these asides he mumbles casually prior to the actual beginning of a song have little if anything to do with the narrative to come—this happens on “Kenwood Speakers,” where, with a little bit of an attitude in his voice, he calmly says, “Yeah, I’m leaving tomorrow, but I got time today,” before quickly turning and launching into the opening line. However, it’s on Maps’ second track, the standout “Soft Landing,” where the line between a weird non sequitur and the first line of the track blur, with the former running head first into the latter.

“Excuse me,” he quietly says. “Uh…on those drinks…,” like he’s the server at a restaurant, before reaching down deep within for the exuberance needed to quite literally shout the first line, delivered in a way where he is practically cutting himself off from those introductory thoughts. “It’s 2:1:1 on the daiquiris,” he exclaims. “It ruins the whole day when my baby mother mad at me,” Woods continues, before he descends into the bleak, sprawling, freeform narrative of the rest of the song. “A single death is a tragedy, but eggs make omelets,” he observes a few lines later. “Statistics how he looks at war casualties. Killin’ is one thing—what sticks is how casually.”

“Grew gaunt in prison,” Woods continues. “My own warden, celly, and superintendent. Flaunt flagrant dissociation—dissonant cadence.”

Then later, in the second verse, a brief respite from the darkness in the clever, layered opening lines. “My daily routine narrated by an Attenborough over the instrumental to ‘Keep it Thoro.’”

On “Soundcheck,” the song that immediately follows, he begins with something that is perhaps meant to be a statement, but with the heft of his voice and persona coursing through the phrasing, it comes off sounding almost like a threat. “I will not be at soundcheck,” he explains. “I will not be in the green room if it's too lit.”

From there, “Soundcheck” touches, as much as Woods is willing to let it, on the mythology that surrounds his unwillingness to let anyone see his face. “Is it rap beef, or is it on sight?,” he asks further on in the song. “Talking out they teeth, don’t even know what I look like…Please be advised, I will not be at soundcheck, not on your life—just cut the mic on and kill the lights. Nikon flash, my face is the mask. Develop the photograph, but something just wasn’t quite,” he continues, before cutting himself off with a smirking aside of, “That’s weird—can’t see it.”

The chorus to “Soundcheck” involves the repetition of Woods using the expression, “Every victory pyrrhic.” And for an artist who often makes brainy, and at times, hyper-literate references, it should not be a surprise to hear a word you simply just do not know—a little obscure, and certainly what I would deem to be a ten-dollar word—casually tossed into the song. 

A “pyrrhic victory” is, per the line’s annotation on Genius, is a “victory with a cost so high to the victor that it might as well have been a defeat.”

Every victory pyrrhic.

Everything becomes terrible.

The further along Woods leads you into Maps, the more he oscillates between small bits of cutting, clever humor, and attention-grabbing poignant observations—often moving so quickly through each song, never really letting the words hang in the ether before lunging himself forward into whatever comes next, so it can, at least if you are someone who wants to (or needs to, in the case of me, a music writer) really spend time an analyze his writing, it takes awhile to make your way through each track, pausing, then going back, just to make sure you heard him correctly.

On “Rapper Weed,” where the tongue twister of a chorus appears almost to make him crack a shit-eating grin so audible the microphone picks it up the final time he delivers it, early run the song, he muses, “Tupac with the pressed juice and therapy Tuesday at 2—a lot of shit negroes shoulda do. Not saying I do,” he admits. “I don’t like shit, stay inside the crib…”

In “Blue Smoke,” which moves at a breakneck pace and lasts all of 90 seconds, he reflects, “Symbols eclipse the things they symbolize,”; or, in “Babylon By Bus,” where he returns to the bleak and fleeting: “Rifle on the wall is an icebreaker. All the world’s a stage—she came to me in full makeup. Anyone wanna be in my life gotta sign several waivers.”

And there are, of course, countless others as you make your way through Maps, simply because Woods is such an intense thinker and writer in how he reflects on both himself and the world around him, but also because of his breath control and diction, he’s able to cram perhaps entirely more than another rapper might into the space of a song—meaning there is exponentially more to unpack at times, which is one of the reasons that his albums can be so intimidating to think about analytically. 

“No need to ask who sent you—it was always a question of when,” he utters on “Hangman,” which is one of the lyrically darker tracks on the album. 

Something that Woods has done in the past, which is not as prevalent here in this collection of songs as it is elsewhere, is write about his romantic difficulties. Specifically, I am thinking of his attempt at connecting with a woman, as depicted in the track “No Hard Feelings,” taken from one of the two records he released last year—the feeling is present on Maps, yes, but for different reasons, and one of the sensations that Woods is a master of weaving into his narratives is that of loneliness.

He begins to make subtle references to it as Maps reaches its halfway point, on “Baby Steps,” which, again, features a strange and out-of-context introduction spoken quietly before the lyrics begin clipping along. “I actually took a $300 Uber to a show,” he boasts. “Asleep in the back like Future. Might as well be a Maybach. Showed up with nothing but a computer; let’s go.” But from there, he begins to explore this continued struggle to connect with another. “My love language an obscure dialect,” he explains later in the song. “Pulled me aside, explained she was just doing a bit.”

“I was like, ‘Oh.’”

This all culminates, then, in lines from the album’s first single, “FaceTime,” which features a surprising guest turn from Sam Herring, lead singer of the esoteric indie outfit Future Islands. “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,” Woods confesses. “Stupid prizes, couple’s therapy on Zoom—it’s a train wreck,” he continues. “My evil eye ward off hex, though. FaceTime declined; I’m trying to live in the moment like death row.”

And it is within “FaceTime,” as well as in the following track, “Agriculture,” where Woods makes two of the most affecting observations of the entire album.

“I don’t go to sleep—I tread water ’til I sink,” and, “I say I’m at peace, but it’s still the same dread.”

*

Rap music, at its core, is about storytelling—crafting a narrative that the rapper themselves may be a central character in, or they are simply the means to relay somebody else’s tale; and there is a line that is, of course, blurred between fact and fiction in rap as a genre, which is a facet that continues to make exciting to listen to, albeit difficult to find rappers that are actually doing all of this well.

The marketplace for rap music is, and has been for years, overcrowded, and it takes, at least for me, a lot of effort to find artists that are truly saying something—and saying something that will linger—with their music. Billy Woods has been, and continues to be, one of those artists, who doesn’t so much push back against the boundaries of the genre, or the culture, but is truly operating on another level all together—more intelligent and regularly more visceral than any number of other rappers.

There is, of course, a looming sense of loneliness and of isolation that follows Woods throughout his canon—often amplified by just how claustrophobic the arranging within his music can often sound. Maps doesn’t exactly play against that, but what it focuses on is the chaos, and the literal and figurative unrest, of momentum—of moving forward always, whether you want to or not. 

And even in the blurred space between fact and fiction that makes up a portion of Maps, in terms of its narratives, Woods turns things inward within the album’s final two tracks: “NYC Tapwater,” and “As The Crow Flies.”

Originally from Washington D.C., Woods relocated to New York in the 1990s, where he briefly attended college and began wading out into the city’s underground hip-hop scene—and “NYC Tapwater” is not exactly an homage to where he developed his career, but it is a personal lament of what it is like to feel conflicted about returning to the city after time away.

“One sip of New York City tapwater, I’m dialed back in,” he concedes in the second line, while a woozy, and seemingly de-tune guitar sample continues to unfurl behind him. “I miss this place ’til I’m back, long face to match,” he continues; then, near the end of the first verse, questions how he’s been able to sidestep, as best as he can, the hardships of the city: “Jet-lagged, I sipped in the bar at last call. Crabs in a bucket—how the fuck I escape them claws? Survivor’s guilt with a side of buyer’s remorse. I’m home, but my mind be wandering off.”

Even with these inward and pensive ruminations, Woods, in the second verse, still manages to keep his sense of humor as he talks about the varying aspects of gentrification in his neighborhood—“$400 Japanese jeans,” he marvels before breaking the fourth wall with one of the best asides on the album: “They’re actually very comfortable.”

The sentiment of “NYC Tapwater,” though, is set up within the first few lines of the song’s second verse, and speaks to a kind of universal understanding of the complexities we all perhaps face from movement and accumulation—“Sometimes I don’t tell anyone I’m back around…fingers steepled, wondering if I really need all this stuff I got here.”

Maps concludes with “As The Crow Flies,” which features a guest turn from Woods’ Armand Hammer collaboration Elucid—who, as often seems to the be the case when he appears as a featured artist on a solo track of Woods’ almost takes over the entire song, with Woods, then, coming in to deliver the final verse—and here, since this “Crow” is the last song, his verse becomes a bit of an epilogue to an album, before the song fades out and leave the listener with no resolution whatsoever, but a terrible sense of unease.

There is a strange sense of finality to Elucid’s contribution, specifically in the first few lines: “Everybody cooking,” he begins. “I’m just cleaning up my kitchen. Emptying the fridge, bleaching counter, sweeping corners. I be in my drawers aligning my silverware in order—couple hours, I’ll be waiting at the gate.” 

Woods, then, arrives with less than a minute left in the song, and over chaotic keyboard notes and a snappy-sounding drum kit rhythm, thoughtfully delivering an extraordinarily vivid and sobering eight lines—“I’m in the park with the baby on the swing,” he begins. “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 apologizes, 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.”

The song ends, and as it ends, Woods leaves us with a horrible feeling of dread, even in this fragment where there is the quickest flash of hope (maybe one of the few on the entire album), there is still the suspicion that something awful is waiting for us at every turn, and that in this forward momentum and entropy, we can never be at rest.

*

Four years ago, Hiding Places was not a “difficult” or inaccessible album by any means, but it was extremely dark and murky, both in lyricism and production—here, in an effort to not repeat themselves exactly, Billy Woods and Kenny Segal have made an album that is still dark (not nearly as much as its predecessor) and inherently less murky in sound. Its unrelenting forward momentum propels it into a space of accessibility in terms of Segal’s knack for genuinely interesting rhythm and production, while Woods, even in partially stepping out of the cavernous darkness of his previous efforts, still leaves it all on the floor with Maps—often gorgeous, troubling, and messy, and it never ceases to be a compelling journey through the self. 

^{1- This is like just a quick aside to mention that Haram could be the greatest record of all time, and I would never know, simply because I refuse to listen to it due to the graphic nature of its cover art. Literally, all of Woods’ projects have at least two, sometimes more, different cover variants for different formats. The default cover for Haram (which appears on the digital version and presumably the vinyl release) is a photo I could live without ever having to see again.} 

Maps is now available as a digital download—currently, the myriad other formats the album was released on are sold out—per the Backwoodz Bandcamp page.