One fascinating thing about billy woods is that for all his lyrical intricacy and his ear for abrasive-but-rewarding beats — not to mention his tendency to frame his moves towards social withdrawal as a survival tactic — there’s something distinctively populist about his strain of underground rap. At least, it’s populist in the sense that he brings an incredible amount of clarity and detail to the struggles of an aging Black New Yorker scraping to get by, to the point where the familiarity of these scenarios starts to feel a lot more widespread than the home turf he chronicles so vividly. But while he’s spent decades honing his words until even his knotted press-rewind allusions feel as declarative as manifestos, he still has to reckon with what it actually takes to go out and bring that perspective to the listeners he initially just connects with on record. This touring-inspired take on trying to engage with the wider world drives Maps, his second cross-coast collab with L.A. Project Blowed/Low End Theory vet producer Kenny Segal after the bracing leave-me-alone hermitage of Hiding Places. And it still proves difficult sometimes — leaving relationships on hold in ways that fracture them no matter how many routes there are to maintain perceived contact (“FaceTime”), trying to shrug off all the obligatory rituals of touring-artist confinement (“Soundcheck”), and facing the disassociative strangeness of being bored and adrift in a part of the world that might’ve once seemed impossibly exotic and glamorous (“Waiting Around”). Then there’s the burden of knowing from the get-go that the home he left had already become harder to recognize with each passing day (“Kenwood Speakers”), and will be even more so when he returns (“NYC Tapwater”), leaving him to wonder how much time he’ll have left with the family he traveled the world to support (“As the Crow Flies”). But even as the raw, weathered sense of blunted loneliness in Segal’s beats reflects the worries and ruminations in woods’ head, he still finds a necessary solace in these places he visits. And he also finds strength in likeminded outsiders both familiar to him (Quelle Chris, Elucid, ShrapKnel) and same-wavelength vets (Danny Brown, Aesop Rock) with complex coping mechanisms of their own. Even introverts can find their people.