New York emcee billy woods has been on a tear over the last decade. Starting with 2012’s History Will Absolve Me, he’s been dropping challenging and hard-hitting hip hop albums at a steady pace since then, while also taking time to work on collaborative projects, namely his duo with ELUCID, Armand Hammer. While he’s stayed busy over the past three years, that time has been devoted to two Armand Hammer albums and one collaborative album with Moor Mother. It was only time before we got another solo album, though, and that time is finally here with Aethiopes.

For those that are wondering, Aethiopia is a term first used by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus to refer to Sub-Saharan Africa. The reference of such a term will come as no surprise to billy woods fans, however, since he has spent much of his career speaking to issues of race, history, and power, and demonstrating how they are all intertwined. For this album, he has teamed up with deejay and producer Preservation. Preservation is one of these classic New York behind-the-scenes artists, who despite a two-decade resume that includes being Yasiin Bey’s tour deejay and producing for Bey, Ka, Jean Grae, MF DOOM, and others, he remains largely unknown to casual hip hop fans. Hopefully, Aethiopes will help to change that, because he’s delivering some really fantastic production on this album. It’s grimy, dense, and experimental, pushing the song form in different directions and always keeping you on your toes as a listener. With that said, you can see why someone like billy woods would want to work with him. woods thrives on making hip hop that pushes the art form and challenges listeners, with his clear and direct, spoken word-informed delivery that plays off of this type of avantgarde production really well. Where woods has really become a master is the way he goes back and forth between painting these abstract poetic lines and then just hitting you in the face with some blunt truths about the way that America and the world at large works. This album is not a radical departure for woods, just further finetuning and perfecting the style he’s been carefully crafting over the last decade.

Aethiopes yet another excellent and exciting album from billy woods. He found an excellent collaborator in Preservation, and he once again delivers a hip hop album that challenges the norms and conventions and forces listeners out of their comfort zones and pushes them to think long and hard about why things in the world are the way they are.