Less than ten minutes into his new album, Hiding Places, the Brooklyn-based rapper billy woods is inviting you to imagine the notebooks of huddled, self-satisfied social scientists watching “negroes sell dope”:

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“‘Hand-to-hand, much as their forefathers before

It’s a good trope...

Fascinating stuff’”

The song that scene is from, “Spider Hole,” is a clean distillation of a few of the record’s key themes: the way hidden behaviors come to light and the way people try to keep them obscured; the things people leave unsaid, even to their closest friends and family; and the urge to free yourself from those ties entirely.

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woods –– who does not show his face in press photos or videos unless it’s obscured by a mask or by digitized fuzz –– has put out five solo albums in a seven-year span, along with four records with Elucid, as Armand Hammer. It’s a dizzyingly prolific run, impressive not only for the volume of inventive, expertly-written rap songs but for the way the albums delineate themselves, each distinct in shape and theme. The new record is woods’s leanest and his best, both when it leans into detailed character sketches and when it lashes out misanthropically, as it does on the “Spider Hole” chorus: “I wouldn’t be caught dead with most of y’all / ‘Don't call me again’ –– what I'll say when you call.”

Hiding Places stays coiled tightly around its title. It tucks itself behind curtains where men’s hands shake as they sweatily loading shotguns; into pulled-over cars, trembling, hoping the cops don’t find the trap door; into the crevices where Mom keeps the passports hidden; outside of hotels waiting for Reagan to show up and work the rope line; all the way to the dim arcade room at a dollar-movie theatre, fingering the joystick while there’s no money in the machine. The narrators of the songs are too nervous to finish their books, so they strip them for parts, or they’re stubbornly tethered to the past, or they’re comfortable letting old friends drift into the ether.