billy woods is an American rapper based in New York City. The founder of the record label Backwoodz Studioz and one half of duo Armand Hammer, Woods does not show his full face in press photos or videos and his real name is unknown, a choice he explained in a 2025 interview:

In 2000, early 2001, I had some things to be concerned about as I left Washington DC. I wanted to be able to speak freely without being afraid of my words being used against me and also to speak freely about politics. I didn’t want to be associated with my family’s name or myself once I visited DC again. So I thought that this would be a safer thing to do. It’s also tied into the fact that I’ve never wanted to be [famous]. I mean, I wanted to be successful. I wanted to make music that people cared about, but I’ve never thought about being [famous]. I didn’t want to be recognized. I don’t particularly like having my photograph taken. So it wasn’t a difficult decision in that sense.

Born in Washington D.C., his mother is a Jamaican professor and feminist writer while his father, a Marxist writer and intellectual, was a political refugee from Zimbabwe who was involved in the country’s independence movement while it was still known as Rhodesia. In 1980, after peace negotiations began, the family moved to Africa and soon after his father became a member of the government who ruled Zimbabwe in the 80s. In 1989, after Woods’s father passed away the previous year, they returned to Washington.

Woods began making music in the late 1990s after moving to New York to attend college and meeting Vordul Mega of seminal underground rap duo Cannibal Ox, who encouraged him to start writing and rapping. During the 2000s he was member of duo Super Chron Flight Brothers (with another rapper, Priviledge) and collective The Reavers, as well as active as a solo artist.

Genius.com makes me very sad about the state of reading comprehension in the US. Sometimes I want to tell them: “This song is about a date I went on, not the devastating toll of capitalism and racism.” They come in with preconceived ideas and the belief that a song can only mean one thing, which is the strangest way to approach my music.

– billy woods, The Guardian

I don’t make music to make people feel comfortable or reaffirm all the things that they already thought. If you listen to a whole album and never had to question one of your beliefs or your opinions about the world, or yourself, then you weren’t really listening. I want to make the true believers as uncomfortable as the hardened cynics because both of them are doing the same thing: Trying to protect themselves from the true nature of this world, in its staggering beauty and its infinite horrors. I am here to plunge a knife into the gaps in that makeshift armor, so you can feel it, see the blood and know that there is no protection.

– billy woods, Brooklyn Magazine