Don’t Forget About $uicideBoy$

$uicideboy$ are a unique case. They are influential and foundational to understanding more immediately accessible emo rap icons like Lil Peep and XXXTentacion. They hew closer to the raging SoundCloud rap spurred on by artists in Southern Florida, and, though they hate this term, horrorcore, than the melodic whirl that had slowly taken over emo rap by the group’s inception in 2014. They pack out shows. Their release schedule is frenzied. Their name strikes a chord with conservative critics. By all accounts, $uicideboy$ should be the most recognizable names in their genre. They clawed their way out of the underground and, with bloodied knuckles and broken fingers, found themselves leading one of the largest enterprises in the emo rap sphere, with few critical looks and even less so in the way of contemporaries singing their praises.

Cousins from Louisiana, rappers Ruby da Cherry and $crim follow in the lineage of BONES and Xavier Wulf, with their deep and disorienting discography and gruesome lyrical content. Their music is a direct descendant of ’90s Memphis hip-hop culture. Ruby and $crim came together after a long and arduous stint of Cherry attempting to break out in the underground punk rock scene as a drummer and $crim looking for a way out of dealing drugs to get by. “It was pretty much like cutting the hand, bleeding, and making a pact that there’s no plan B, that if this doesn’t happen by the time we’re thirty, I’m blowing my head off,” $crim told Mass Appeal.1

The duo’s moms were sisters, raising them each on Cash Money records. Ruby da Cherry explained in an early interview with XXL, “As I got older I wasn’t allowed to listen to rap anymore because apparently it influenced me in a bad way and then I got into punk rock.… Then I got subwoofers in my car and I was like it’s back to rap. I was listening to some Curren$y, some Souls of Mischief, some Pharcyde, OutKast is my favorite group ever. I took it back and tried to dig deep for old New York shit, old West Coast shit. [$crim] shed the light on me as far as new school rap goes.”2

For Ruby da Cherry, playing music was fundamental to his childhood. As early as seven years old, he was playing violin, dabbling with drums, and eventually picking up skills with lead guitar, piano, and bass. $crim, by contrast, got into DJing and production in his early teens, mixing in selling pills with producing for other artists and releasing beat tapes by nineteen. In 2013, the cousins each reached breaking points. It felt as though nothing was working for either one of them—and there was a dire sense life was seconds from being upended for them both. It was at this point that the cousins came together to form the most successful emo rap group since the genre’s inception in the early 2000s.

The scope of their desperate beginnings develops a compelling narrative for the duo as the underground, independent rap heroes they eventually grew into, selling out large shows constantly, and helming their own festivals, to the bewilderment of critics.3 That is, the boys are easy to root for and identify with. Their original story boils down to a sense of, “Fuck! Nothing is working, we have to keep trying,” which feels uniquely American in its insistence on bashing your head into a wall until either your head cracks or the wall breaks down. There is an overstated intensity to the $uicideboy$ narrative, and the way each member presents themselves in press and to fans.

Constructing a neat history of $uicideBoy$’ discography is a fraught experiment. The duo’s online presence is packed to the brim with fan theories and alter egos to complicate the flurry of EP, mixtape, and album releases. Of note, they have an early feature from BONES, a breakout moment in 2015 that caught some press attention, and an early co-sign from underground Florida rap pioneer Pouya. Otherwise, $uicideBoy$ largely achieved success in a vacuum. The quick pace of $uicideBoy$’ growth as hip-hop artists feels like a rebate for all the time the duo spent breaking their brows in other, lesser endeavors.

Their music is fiery and raw. They flay themselves open and scoop out their guts and organs to be used as decoration. The biggest song of their career, “…And to Those I Love, Thanks for Sticking Around,” is a shouty emotional fight song clearly pulling from the Southern rap tradition. It is a series of convincing and well-constructed wails, crescendoing into “I’ll be dead by dawn.” The vocals here are nearly too sweet to be so bone-rattling, so intent on seeping into and overtaking the listener’s bloodstream.

In that breadth, their best album to date, 2022’s Sing Me a Lullaby, My Sweet Temptation, features the lightest touches of the duo’s discography. This gives way to a greater emphasis on the pained melodies honed in the latter half of their career. Two years earlier, on “What the Fuck Is Happening,” which lands on the same album as “…And to Those I Love,” Ruby appears just as bewildered by his and his cousin’s success as every critic. The difference, of course, being that Ruby da Cherry and the conceit of the song rests on a joke. Of course they’re globetrotting overachievers. There was no other outcome for $uicideboy$ when they joined forces a decade ago.

Currently, $uicideboy$ have over eleven million sustained monthly listeners on Spotify and a handful of Gold and even Platinum RIAA-certified plaques. It jars the mind how a group who made a blood pact to achieve something in rap together, a group whose entire image is based on suicidal ideation and the perils of addiction, is lapping nearly every other artist and group in their class. Still, their influence on the emo rap scene (“Peep was a huge fan of us. He was hitting us up when we had like 3,000 followers on SoundCloud offering to pay us $100 for a feature”; “We brought [XXXTentaction] on his first tour, the Southside Suicide Tour,”) is largely discounted or overlooked by critics.4 Naturally, after a decade of grinding in the punk circuit to no avail, this incenses Ruby da Cherry, who shared the sentiments with Complex in 2018: “I feel like we’re ignored a lot. We don’t get a lot of credit that’s due and I think it’s bullshit.”

Prospecting on the supposed ignorance of critics to the $uicideboy$ franchise obfuscates the larger point Cherry and $crim make with their fastidious presence in hip-hop: emo rap, like emo rock, thrives off being ignored and maligned by the establishment. No doubt, a significant part of the $uicideboy$’ appeal comes from how off-putting they are both in presentation and to the key cultural players in the hip-hop space.

Getting middling reviews on Pitchfork is a badge of honor for fans, who take the anger Cherry expressed back in 2018 and use it to mount a defense for their favorite group. In short, it is easier to treasure something that is misunderstood by an institution than it is to like the thing everyone else likes. To be a $uicideboy$ fan is to find yourself in a sea of equally tasteful weirdos, people who suffer and succeed alongside you, who get it, just like you. And though there are at least ten million folks who understand the duo at any given moment, they present themselves as a basement band running through the DIY circuit and crushing shows at the bottom of the bill.

While credit from critics feels like a losing game, the $uicideBoy$ fanbase is oak-strong, spurred on by the brutalist honesty Ruby and $crim apply to their music and live shows. “I saw the $uicideBoy$ tour last year [in 2021]. Thinking about that in terms of Atmosphere shows in 2003, it makes me think about going to see Promise Ring versus Fall Out Boy,” author and Stereogum editor Tom Breihan recalls. “It got so much bigger and they’re doing different things. $uicideBoy$ are more about ‘We’re all going through this,’ and it’s less jokey—but still kind of jokey. The dynamics are kind of similar. This was a relatively underground thing that got super popular.”

$uicideboy$’ curious popularity suggests they are on the cusp of mainstream success. Yet, their essence remains underground. Everything down to their tour flyers appears intentionally grimy, as though they are salt-of-the-earth artists who got a little mud on their good karma. Their music has no air of the radio hits you’d expect from a duo running an empire of this magnitude. That is, $uicideBoy$ moves bodies with their music, and they have achieved something monumental for artists who blew up online, getting scores of people into seats for shows.

Their numbers speak to the dissonance between critical reception and fan loyalty. It is easy to write off Ruby and $crim—two white rappers who could easily be labeled as appropriating Southern rap for financial gain—but a more charitable approach to their artist personas reveals there is no persona at all. $uicideBoy$ began with an all-or-nothing promise of seeing dreams through to the bitter end, and there is little in the music that suggests this promise has been broken.

“$uicideboy$ aren’t showmen in a traditional sense,” Breihan wrote of the 2021 concert he attended. “They dress bummy. They don’t wear jewelry. They look like guys who have been through some things, which is what they are. But they can own a room.… And they have a real empathetic connection with their audience, the kind of thing that can’t be faked. $crim told the crowd, ‘We may be up here, but we struggle. We all got our mental health problems. We got our addiction problems. We got problems in general.’ I believe them. Maybe $uicideboy$ are hitting new levels right now because everybody has fucking problems, because some of us aren’t even trying to pretend otherwise. Maybe the world needs a rap group that’s ready to wallow in it with us.”

On paper, then, $uicideBoy$ make perfect sense in the history of emo rap. They take the DIY ethos of early Atmosphere records, blend it with the necessary elements of Southern rap history—though they’ve been slammed with lawsuits for sampling Three 6 Mafia5—and avoid any potential grandstanding in the face of their incredible success. They’re with you, and on stage, they make you feel like the only person in a sea of hundreds. They preach reciprocity and sobriety.6 Their music is a tour of the gallows—but is also a vehicle to heal. In much the same way XXXTentacion spoke directly to his fans to establish a sense of family, Ruby and $crim use their music and live show to extend a hand out to anyone who is struggling, including each other. In 2020, the pair recommitted to sobriety and therapy.

“I was a junkie five years ago, and if it weren’t for this kid right here, I’d be dead. But he pulled me out of that rut,” $crim said two years prior to their recommitment, referencing Ruby da Cherry, in 2018. “And it all correlates to the whole dying-before-thirty thing because we literally made a blood pact and were like, ‘We’re gonna make this happen by any means necessary. We’re not giving up on one another.’ We stuck to it and that was the hardest I ever worked in my life.”