billy woods & DJ Haram, Strange Brew: ‘Looks horror in the face and gets out alive’

Bringing together the people behind two of 2025’s finest albums, this show looked unmissable as soon as it was announced. DJ Haram and billy woods have worked together a number of times, most recently on All These Worlds Are Yours from woods’ superb long player Golliwog.

Before getting behind the decks for woods’ set, the New Jersey producer gave a powerful half hour performance of her own.

Even at its most danceable, DJ Haram’s music is radical – a galvanising blend of US club and rap music shot through with shaabi riffs and artsy New York noise.

After roughly ten years pulling these elements together in her DJ sets and productions, they collided explosively this summer on full length solo debut Beside Myself.

New Jersey producer DJ Haram blends US club and rap music with elements of the Egyptian genre Shaabi, translated as ‘of the people’

Tonight’s set showcased the experimental side of her music. The first fifteen minutes was a virtually beatless continuous passage of frazzled ambience with bursts of darbuka, violin and Arabic speech breaking through like distant transmissions on a long wave radio.

The second half included some more familiar tunes. The industrial flavoured Lifelike grooved hypnotically, Haram’s vocals bringing to mind Lydia Lunch as she deadpanned “I see God and I can’t stand him”.

The eerie Distress Tolerance veered from bleak sarcasm to political defiance as the screen behind the stage showed woozy cut-ups of texts and videos addressing everything from gender politics to the nightmare in Gaza.

DJ Haram is a mould-breaking artist who demands engagement.

Her music is radical and she’s not afraid to be political

While not a household name, billy woods is one of his generation’s finest rappers, with complex flows and allusion-rich bars in which the personal, cultural and political are intertwined.

He’s fiercely independent, preferring to keep music production in-house at his own label Backwoodz Studios. His quality control has rarely dipped in 20-odd years with many of his strongest releases coming later in his career.

Golliwog – one of his best albums to date – has a horror theme running through it, both sonically and lyrically, with reference to cinema, folklore and the real life terrors of global capitalism.

Tonight’s show leant strongly into that theme, as selections from Golliwog are interspersed with similarly gothic-toned material from classics like 2019’s Hiding Places and 2022’s Aethiopes.

The pair have collaborated several times, including on billy woods’ latest album, which has a central horror theme running through it

The rapper’s set was accompanied by clips from horror films including Jordan Peele’s Get Out, interspersed with archive footage of global conflict and colonial outrages.

At one point the screen displayed a map of Africa showing rare minerals extracted in place of national boundaries. At others the album’s title was invoked with imagery ranging from old time minstrelsy to the once ubiquitous collectibles of Robertson’s jam.

Early in the set woods asked the sound engineer to turn up both the mic and the beats. The live show should be “a physical experience”, he said, and it was, with bass you could feel in your chest and an artillery barrage of words as disorientating as it was exhilarating.

It was a hell of a performance, as a near constant stream of syllables poured from the rapper’s mouth as – on the oustanding BLK ZOMBY – “staggering post-colonial African zombie states chase the people into the waves” while “Moet Chandon bottles bust against the bows of boats”.

Golliwog has been received as woods’ best album of a career spanning two decades

Highlights included STAR87‘s queasy, broken tape machine nightmare and the Bob Marley quoting spaghetti western chiller Christine. Best of all was the funereal Pollo Rico, its gorgeously sad vocal sample floating over drums as dry as ashes.

The show ended with Born Alone. The track’s warped piano and fatalistic words provided a fitting end to a set that looked horror in the face and got out alive. For now.

All images: Adam Burrows

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