NEW YORK, NY.- Louisiana rap duo Suicideboys have avoided nearly all the trappings of the contemporary music machine. They rarely grant interview requests and make the occasional public appearance with their faces partially covered. Still, Scott Arceneaux Jr. (known as Scrim) and Aristos Petrou (aka Ruby da Cherry) recently celebrated their biggest opening week yet on the Billboard chart: a No. 5 debut for their fourth album, “New World Depression,” last month.
“It’s kind of hard, dude,” Arceneaux, 35, said of dealing with their ever-growing visibility as one of the biggest independent rap groups in the United States. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”
Over the past decade, a passionate and adoring fan base has been drawn to Suicideboys’ blend of Southern rap rhythms and pop-punk melodies, all cloaked in the lush, depressive fog of internet-native hip-hop. They became underground heroes by making raw music about triggering subjects, which they relentlessly promoted on their own until their fan base snowballed into a force the music industry couldn’t ignore.
In 2021, on the strength of an audience they’d bootstrapped since 2014, they signed an eight-figure distribution deal with the Orchard, a Sony Music subsidiary, that was re-upped last year. Their semiannual Grey Day Tour — a mini-festival that’s featured similarly ascendant peers like hardcore band Turnstile and Florida rap aesthete Denzel Curry — has catapulted them onto the list of rap’s highest-grossing touring acts, taking in more than $42 million and selling 431,000 tickets in 2023.
Video chatting on the day of their new album’s release, the pair were nestled in a room speckled with soundproofing materials at one of their properties deep in the Florida panhandle, their home outside of New Orleans. Petrou, with waves of dark hair cascading from under a backward baseball cap, spoke casually and with curiosity, positioned in the background, while Arceneaux often sat half-profile at the forefront, slightly bowing his bowl-cut mullet when he wasn’t speaking thoughtfully about their journey so far.
As cousins who grew up separately in the greater Louisiana area before coming together in New Orleans, Arceneaux and Petrou described their upbringings as chaotic. “Childhood was rough,” Arceneaux admitted. “There was always drama,” Petrou agreed. “Our parents would get into it. We’ve always remained close and very rarely let the family dynamic infect our relationship.”
They both barreled through adolescence — taking on dead-end jobs, selling and using drugs, and worshipping at the altars of Southern rap legends like Lil Wayne and Three 6 Mafia — before Petrou took an interest in Arceneaux’s burgeoning career as a DJ and beatmaker and reached out after getting tired of working with people in local punk bands: “I was like, ‘Dude, I could link up with my cousin.’”
The pair came up with the name for their label, G*59 (it references Highway 59, which runs through New Orleans), a year before they set forth into the rap world as Suicideboys. When they decided to get serious about music, they made a pact that their name gestures to, which has become essential to understanding the group’s lore: Become successful musicians by the age of 30, or else.
“We said, ‘This is a when, not an if,’” Petrou said.
Darkness, addiction and the language of suicide — a delicate subject they sang and rapped about in a plain-spoken, relatable manner — became embedded in the group’s identity and iconography. (Their name is styled with dollar signs, rather than the letter S.) “They’re super vulnerable,” Atlanta rapper and G*59 signee Germ, who’s known the duo since meeting them after a 2015 performance in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview. “Everybody else is vulnerable, but nobody’s going to talk about it, so they’re braver than most.”
As the group’s early aesthetic mutated across myriad EPs, one-off singles and mixtapes, Suicideboys embraced a relentless tack to self-promotion: handing out mixtapes at Louisiana State University, constantly emailing rap publications and collaborating with other web-friendly artists. The hard work paid off and their fans stuck with them, forming the kind of bonds that arise when listeners see their rawest emotions and most terrifying thoughts reflected back at them.
“They haven’t been afraid to tackle issues that are important to the youth,” said veteran tour manager Kevin Lyman, whose long-running Warped Tour was such a direct inspiration for Grey Day’s festival-circuit approach that Suicideboys almost called it “Worpt Tour” before being convinced otherwise by lawyers. “I would’ve been happy if they did,” Lyman said and chuckled during a phone call, before rhapsodizing about the pull that the duo have on their audience: “I don’t think they’ve tried to be anything more than what they are.”
That mining of emotional vulnerability — a warts-and-all approach to discussing substance abuse and suicidal ideation that, to the uninitiated, can come across as aggressive and off-putting — has resulted in intense fan interactions. Petrou recounted meeting a young woman at a 2016 show in Russia who revealed cuts indicating self-harm across both of her arms. “I grabbed her arm and I kissed it,” he said with deep sympathy, “and I said, ‘Stop doing this, please. Stop hurting yourself.’”
Both Petrou and Arceneaux are in various stages of recovery from substance abuse, including heroin. Petrou has been clean for nearly four years (he said he still uses cannabis); Arceneaux celebrated his five-year sober anniversary this year. Both relapsed in 2015 during a creative session that resulted in the submerged, aching ballad “Low Key.”
“We made this really sad song about how we felt on the inside, and it felt so good,” Petrou said in regard to the resulting emotional catharsis.
Now that both have embraced sobriety, the group is cautious not to proselytize to an audience that comes to them for a release from their own personal pain. “A lot of our fans haven’t gotten to that point yet,“ Petrou said. He called their Suicideboys personas “the Tyler Durdens of our real selves,” a reference to the anarchic alter ego in “Fight Club.” “We don’t want them to necessarily feel abandoned — like, ‘We saw the light, good luck on your own.’ We still try to dive back into what we felt years ago. We were miserable, and we didn’t realize the drugs were a big part of what was making us miserable.”
Throughout their ups and downs, Suicideboys have focused on retaining control over how their music is made and distributed, which has been essential to staying true to themselves. “Everything that we can do as independently as we can, we do it,” Petrou said, noting that they do still have to play ball with touring behemoths AEG and Live Nation when it comes to booking events like Grey Day. Otherwise, “Labels don’t see a share of our profits, and we don’t really work with other artists. You’re not going to see us at the VMAs. Scott and I just keep to ourselves.”
When they have crossed paths with the conventional music industry, they’ve rankled the powers that be. Offered a chance to fly a flag of their choice atop Los Angeles’ famous Capitol Records tower, the group requested an unprintable song title referencing their distaste for the music industry itself. The offer was quickly rescinded.
Arceneaux regards the music business — artists, labels, awards committees, the whole lot — as “a little too narcissistic for our taste.” “We never wanted to rely on anybody for anything,” he explained. “We’ve had enough experience to know that was no good.” Petrou said he wouldn’t name any names, but when it comes to the current pop landscape and the machine that keeps it moving, “a lot of them seem a little too full of themselves.” He added, “At the end of the day, you have a lot of people that make you ask yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
One answer is the fans that have supported them throughout the years, becoming a core part of the group’s life in the process. In a constantly changing speech that Arceneaux has made during every Suicideboys concert since getting sober, he recounts his struggles and emphasizes that even when awash in life’s lowest points, “There’s hope that life can get better.”
“I never had no one that I looked up to who were like, ‘Actually, bro, it doesn’t have to be like that,’” he said. Petrou added, “I get told literally by everyone that we meet that as a fan, 10 times out of 10, that we saved their life.” He reflected on the clearly unmeasurable impact Suicideboys have on their listeners: “It’s such a heavy statement, and we get told it so often that both of us completely deflect it. We say, ‘Well, thank you, because you saved our lives, too.’”
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If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to
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GOING THEIR OWN WAY
Two more acts who have followed unconventional paths to building loyal fandoms.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
WHO: A Melbourne, Australia-based psych-rock sextet formed in 2010, fronted by multi-instrumentalist Stu Mackenzie.
THE VIBE: A catalog that refuses to be pinned down to any single genre. One album may give off Tame Impala aesthetics (the Moog-heavy “The Silver Cord” from last year), while its predecessor, “PetroDragonic Apocalypse,” is a thrash-heavy metal record akin to early Mastodon. The group has made pastoral folk pop (“Paper Mâché Dream Balloon” from 2015), and fuzzier, psychedelic garage and surf rock (“Willoughby’s Beach” from 2011). When you’re listening to “the Gizz,” the only constant is change. “Every single record is reflective of whatever phase of life we’re in, whatever made us creatively most inspired at the time,” Mackenzie said in an interview.
The band’s lyrics are frequently socially conscious, often tackling the dangers of environmental collapse and dominant figures in the media industry. Threads of cosmic existentialism, doom and longing for escape are often intertwined with inspiring messages of hope and a desire to change the world for the better.
HOW DID THEY RISE? Through sheer force of will. The group has released 25 studio albums over 14 years, plus more than a dozen live albums, compilations, remixes, boxed sets and some 60 videos. That prolific output, combined with relentless global touring, gave rise to a rabid fan base around the world that has created avid online communities on Reddit and Discord to dissect lyrics, thematically connected albums and intricate song structures.
Fans love the untraditional approach Mackenzie and his crew have taken to putting out records. One member of the band started his own label in 2012 to put out King Gizzard’s early releases after failing to gain attention in the industry, and the group has bootlegged many of its own live shows and put them online for download. In 2017, when the band released its 12th studio album, “Polygondwanaland,” it put its master recordings online and encouraged record labels to produce their own vinyl copies of the album for free. Hundreds of independent releases of the LP are said to exist, though even the band does not know the definitive number.
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Viagra Boys
WHO: A six-piece rock outfit out of Stockholm formed in 2015, fronted by American-born tattoo artist turned musician Sebastian Murphy.
THE VIBE: Pummeling post-punk fused with jazz and synthesizers, undergirded by groove-forward bass lines and Murphy’s guttural, Nick Cave-meets-Tom Waits baritone. Much of their early work has all the trappings of classic punk themes: drug-fueled binges, anti-social behavior, why they can’t get their act together — or, in “Common Sense,” at least clean the broken glass off their apartment floor. But unlike much of punk and hardcore, Viagra Boys eschew the familiar thrash of lead guitars for swirling saxophones and siren-like synths. Albums like “Street Worms” from 2018 are sprinkled with surrealist, spoken-word narratives and mini skits; the track “Best in Show” features Murphy describing an intergalactic cocker spaniel taking home the top prize. His world building is often dark and weird, which is exactly what works for the band’s absurdist tone and finger-in-the-eye class consciousness.
HOW DID THEY RISE? In 2018 they had a breakout moment with “Sports,” a self-conscious critique on hypermasculinity that spirals into a screaming fit of repetition — “Baseball, basketball, wiener dog.” New fans began buying up loads of vinyl and merch at their raucous tours in Europe and the United States.
They’ve also built an entire world of wacky lore across YouTube, where their fictitious hypercapitalist company, Shrimptech Enterprises, puts out “research chemicals” for customers while its executives spend their riches on online gambling and cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes. And they’ve leaned into their native knowledge of social media, posting their way to fame with tongue-in-cheek memes and late-night Instagram Stories sessions of Magic: The Gathering card games.
“People thought that we were just kind of freaks online,” Murphy said in an interview. “But I think we like to take a guerrilla-style approach to it, and to how we approached shows and touring in general. It’s been very DIY from the beginning.”
— MIKE ISAAC
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
