History Will Absolve Me: the album that made billy woods

Before 2012, billy woods was a working New York rapper with a small audience. After History Will Absolve Me, he was the artist everyone in the underground kept name-checking.

What the label says

Backwoodz' own artist page↗ (opens in a new tab) frames it as the turn: after "much of the 2000s in relative obscurity," woods "struck a nerve" with the album, described as "an audacious mission statement" and "a Molotov cocktail of sarcastic fury, with production to match its uncompromising vision."

It took two years to make. You can hear the labor in the density.

Why it landed

Three things separated it from the era's underground output:

It had a thesis. The title, borrowed from Fidel Castro's 1953 courtroom defense, sets the terms: this is a record about judgment, history, and who gets to write it.

It refused a hook economy. In 2012 a lot of independent rap was still shaped by blog-era song structure. History mostly ignores it.

The writing was already finished. woods' style — compressed images, sudden scene changes, punchlines that land as dread — is fully present here. Later albums improved the sound around it, not the voice inside it.

The reissue

The album has stayed in print through Backwoodz rather than disappearing into a licensing hole. A 2019 Bandcamp edition↗ (opens in a new tab) is available, and the label has also issued a 10-year edition↗ (opens in a new tab) — which is itself a small statement about running your own label: nothing goes out of print unless you decide it does.

Listening to it now

It sounds like a 2012 record, and that is fine. The drums are drier and the mixes are rougher than anything woods has released since. Come to it after Hiding Places or GOLLIWOG and you will hear a writer who arrived fully formed and then spent a decade finding people who could frame him properly.