Imagine looking at your calendar, right? You
circle your 30th birthday and you make a literal
blood pact. Oh, wow. Yeah. And the terms of this
pack are just, well, they're devastatingly simple.
You have exactly 10 years to find a way to make
a living through your art. Right. And if you
fail, the backup plan isn't, you know, going
back to a desk job or moving in with your parents.
The backup plan is ending your own life. I mean,
it completely replaces every ounce of traditional
ambition with this very dark, fatalistic desperation.
Exactly. The countdown clock isn't ticking toward
a career milestone. It's ticking toward an absolute
permanent end. And that visceral life or death
countdown is exactly where our story begins today.
So welcome to this deep dive. Today our mission
is to track the unbelievable chronological and
thematic evolution of the American hip -hop duo
Suicide Boys. Which is just a massive wild journey.
It really is. And even if you aren't a rap fan,
you know, even if you don't listen to a single
note of underground or extreme music, you really
need to hear this. For sure. Because it's not
a standard music industry biography at all. No,
not even close. This is a master class in extreme
commitment. It's a study in how to build a massive
cult -like brand entirely on your own terms without
a shred of help from the mainstream industry
Yeah, completely DIY right and most importantly
It's about having the raw courage to completely
evolve your identity when your actual life depends
on it We're gonna look at how two cousins from
New Orleans built an empire on the darkest themes
imaginable and then just recently in 2025, executed
one of the most unexpected radical pivots in
modern history. So OK, let's unpack this. Yeah,
and to understand the sheer scale of that pivot,
we really have to start at the absolute bottom.
Right, before the sold out arenas. Exactly, before
the arenas, before the billboard charts. We're
looking at two cousins in Louisiana in the early
2010s, whose lives were basically heading nowhere.
And they were painfully aware of that fact. Let's
look at who these guys actually were before the
fame hit. because their early backgrounds were
this fascinating study in contrasts, I think.
Oh, definitely. So first you have Scott Arsenault
Jr., who goes by the stage name Scrim, born in
1989. OK. And he's buying his first laptop to
produce music using money he made from selling
drugs. Wow. Yeah. He's DJing parties at Delgado
Community College, working at a used furniture
store just to make ends meet until he gets fired
for a very specific reason. Let me guess. He
decided to get his hands tattooed. I mean, that's
essentially a self -destruct button for a normal
life, right? Especially in the early 2010s. Getting
highly visible hand tattoos while working a retail
job is a conscious decision to burn your bridges
to traditional employment. Oh, 100%. The physical
declaration that you refuse to participate in
the normal corporate ecosystem. And then on the
other side of the family, you have his cousin,
Aristos Petrou, who goes by Ruby to Cherry. Right,
and Ruby, born in 1990, has a completely different
upbringing. Oh, so. While his father, Pavlos,
is a Greek Cypriot immigrant who actually came
to the U .S. on an athletic scholarship for the
University of New Orleans, he became a soccer
coach. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and Ruby is working
as a waiter at his dad's restaurant. But musically,
the kid is a prodigy. He's playing the violin
at age seven, drums by ten. Quite the range.
Seriously. And by the time he's a teenager, he's
playing in local punk bands, most notably one
called Vapo Rats. Vapo Rats. Great name. Right.
But he's growing incredibly disillusioned because
his bandmates simply don't care about the future
of the group. They just lack the intensity he
brings to the table. So by 2013, you have these
They are creatively frustrated, deeply dissatisfied
with the direction of their lives, and they realize
they both want to take music seriously. Yeah.
But they don't just, you know, shake hands and
form a group. They form that pact we talked about
at the top of the show. The blood pact. Yeah.
Scrim described it later in an interview as literally
cutting their hands, bleeding, and agreeing that
if this didn't happen by the time they turned
30... they were gonna kill themselves. It's so
intense. He called it having no plan B. And,
you know, in business, you always hear startup
founders talk about burning the boats. Right,
that old cliche. Exactly. The idea that you eliminate
your safety net so you have no choice but to
succeed. But instead of burning venture capital,
they were staking their actual lives. So I have
to ask you, does starting from a place of absolute
fatalistic desperation create a different kind
of art than starting from, say, pure ambition.
Oh absolutely. What's fascinating here is that
the no plan B mentality effectively removes the
commercial filter. How do you mean? Well, think
about the mechanics of the music industry. If
your goal is to get rich and famous, you look
at what's playing on the radio, you study the
current trends, and you try to mimic them, right?
Right. You try to please a record label executive.
Exactly. But if your goal is just to justify
your own existence before a self -imposed death
sentence, you have literally nothing to lose.
You aren't worried about radio play. That makes
sense. You make exactly what you want, however
harsh or abrasive or disturbing it is. And the
paradox is that this absolute unfiltered authenticity
is exactly what eventually drew millions of people
to them. Yeah, that fatalistic origin birthed
a sound that mainstream radio wouldn't touch
with a 10 -foot pole. And yet, it turned out
millions of people desperately wanted to hear
it. How did they actually build this without
a label, though? So, they built a completely
self -contained ecosystem. They didn't wait for
a label to understand them or give them a budget.
They started their own independent label, G59
Records. Wow. Just did it themselves. Yeah. And
musically, they were entirely DIY. Almost their
entire early discography was self -produced by
Scrim, operating under the producer alias Bud
Dwyer. And for those who might not be familiar
with the nuances of underground hip hop, we should
probably explain what this actually sounded like.
Because it wasn't just standard rap. Not at all.
They essentially took the heavy rattling bass
and fast hi -hats of modern trap music, but they
layered it with the agonizing distorted emotion
of 90s grunge and punk rock. Yeah, that's a great
way to describe it. It sounds like a haunted
house playing out of a blown car speaker, you
know? It's punk rap, emo rap, and it heavily
borrows from a very specific regional sound.
The Memphis rap scene, specifically the legendary
group 3 -6 Mafia, that influence is crucial.
Early on, the Suicide Boys sampled Three Six
Mafia heavily. Right. They love that dark, lo
-fi horror movie aesthetic of 90s Memphis rap.
But, you know, it caused a massive divide among
the original Three Six members. Really? Like
who? Well, Gangsta Boo was highly critical of
them, essentially accusing them of cultural theft
and appropriation. But Juicy J, one of the founding
members and absolute royalty in the Southern
rap scene, completely embraced them. I mean,
to understand how crazy that is, having Juicy
J validate you in the underground rap world is
like getting tapped on the shoulder by the Pope.
Exactly. It's the ultimate cosign. He didn't
just cosign them, though. He mentored them and
actually had the Suicide Boys produce his own
mixtapes. Yeah. But the sonic aesthetic was really
only half the equation. The content of the music
is what truly set them apart. Right, the lyrics.
They weren't rapping about clubs, luxury cars,
or wealth. They were rapping extensively about
suicidal ideation, severe depression, and isolation.
I mean, they released over 10 iterations of an
EP series literally called Kill Yourself. And
the numbers they did on these incredibly dark
tracks are staggering. Their track, Paris, has
over 184 million views on YouTube. That's wild.
and a deeply melancholic song called and to those
I love thanks for sticking around hit over 544
million streams on Spotify. Yeah, it's so important
to understand how rare that subject matter was
in the broader hip hop landscape at the time.
Scrim made a really poignant distinction in an
interview, actually. What did he say? He said,
people interpret it as negative music, but for
them, it was therapy through music. OK, I have
to push back on that idea for a second. Sure.
Because we see a lot of artists, especially in
the internet age, monetizing angst. it can become
a very lucrative aesthetic. Oh, absolutely. Sadness
sells. Right. When you realize that being sad
sells merchandise, it's easy to lean into it.
So how do you distinguish between an artist...
Using depression as a marketing gimmick to sell
hoodies versus genuine therapy through music
That is the defining question for this entire
genre I think and the proof of their authenticity
really comes down to specificity specificity
Yeah, they weren't using vague generalized sad
lyrics that anyone could project onto They were
grounding their pain and their actual grim reality
using highly specific New Orleans references
Okay, like they named songs after local streets
like Bon into Lane. It wasn't some curated hot
topic version of sadness. It was real. It was
like watching someone bleed out in real time
on a microphone. And millions of listeners who
were secretly bleeding in the same way suddenly
realized they weren't alone. The audience could
just tell they weren't playing characters. But
here is the terrifying paradox of making therapy
music, right? When you get rich and famous for
rapping about severe drug use and depression,
you suddenly have unlimited funds to buy the
exact drugs that are killing you. It's a deadly
cycle. The raw honesty that built their fan base
wasn't just an artistic choice. It was a real
-time documentary of a downward spiral. The lifestyle
caught up with them. And the reality of that
journey was incredibly grim. Both Scrim and Ruby
struggled deeply with drug addiction as their
fame skyrocketed. Scrim actually admitted in
a really raw interview on the platform, No Jumper,
that at one point his addiction was so severe
he was luring people on Craigslist just to rob
them, purely to feed his habit. That's horrifying.
It is. The morality of the situation had completely
eroded under the weight of the addiction. And
alongside the addiction came massive public controversies.
Early on, they leaned heavily into satanic imagery,
which obviously alienated a massive portion of
the mainstream public. Right. Predictably. Now,
Skrim later explained that this wasn't literal
devil worship. He said it was a madey -nim, a
symbol used to represent the negative, manipulating
effects of money and drugs, and a reflection
of his deep dislike for organized religion at
the time. But you know, when you're touring the
world with inverted crosses, the nuance of a
metonym is usually lost on the general public.
Exactly. And they were also facing devastating
professional hurdles around this time, too, right?
Yeah, huge ones. In 2016, the massive EDM producer
Deadmau5 accused them of copyright infringement
over their breakout song, Antarctica, which sampled
his track, I Remember. For an independent artist,
a copyright strike isn't just a slap on the wrist.
It chokes off your revenue stream entirely. Deadmau5
publicly lambasted them, and the song, which
was one of their biggest hits, was forcibly pulled
from the internet for four years. Yet, despite
all the industry pushback, the real crisis was
internal. By 2018, they released their debut
studio album, I Want to Die in New Orleans. A
huge milestone. It's a massive commercial success,
hitting the top 10 on the Billboard 200. But
right at the peak of this breakthrough, rumors
start swirling through the fan base that the
duo was breaking up. Yeah, I remember that. There
are all these ominous, fragmented tweets being
posted. But it turns out they weren't breaking
up. The tweets were a public manifestation of
Scrim's severe personal issues and his addiction
reaching an absolute boiling point. And if we
look at the mechanics of fame, this is the ultimate
trap of the extreme artist. You build a massive,
fiercely loyal following by sharing your darkest
thoughts and your self -destructive behavior.
Right. The audience bonds with your pain. They
feel seen by your suffering. But what happens
when that pain starts actually shutting down
your organs? What happens when the aesthetic
is no longer sustainable? It's the classic tragedy
of the tortured artist. I mean, here's where
it gets really interesting. When your fans love
you specifically for your darkness and your substance
abuse, how on earth do you step off the ride
without losing the very audience that put you
there? It's almost impossible. If you get healthy,
do you lose your brand? Do you lose your livelihood?
Audience expectations can become a cycle. psychological
prison. Breaking that cycle requires risking
everything you've spent years building. The fear
is that if you change, if you go to rehab, you
risk being called a sellout by the underground
community that demands authenticity. But the
grim reality is, if you don't change... you die.
So faced with the reality of that 2013 death
pact essentially coming due just in the form
of an overdose instead of a bullet they chose
life. Thank goodness. And over the last few years
they executed a radical almost unthinkable thematic
pivot. They stepped out of the prison. They really
did. And it began with doing the incredibly hard,
unglamorous work of recovery. Scrim got sober
first in February 2019. He stepped away, utilized
12 -step programs, and went into intensive therapy.
And what about Ruby? Ruby followed about a year
and a half later. He checked into a drug rehab
facility in October 2020 after a serious intervention
by their management team. You know, a lot of
artists fear that getting sober will kill their
creative edge. But for the Suicide Boys, removing
the drugs basically remove the ceiling on their
work ethic. Oh, they entered this massive creative
renaissance. Totally. They dropped the album
Long Term Effects of Suffering in 2021. In 2023,
they released a four -part EP series called The
Yin Yang Tapes that flawlessly captured that
90s Memphis rap sound they had always loved.
Yeah, that was huge for them. And they both launched
major solo projects, too. Yeah. Ruby doing actual
punk rock under the alter ego Duckboy and Scrim
dropping a massive, sprawling 44 -song solo project
in 2024 called Lone But the most profound shift
wasn't just musical productivity. It was a deep
philosophical and spiritual shift. Yeah. The
duo that had built an empire on inverted crosses,
pentagrams, and themes of eternal damnation began
experiencing a very public, very earnest spiritual
awakening. It is wild to track the physical manifestation
of this. I mean, Scrim literally had an inverted
cross tattooed on his forehead. A pretty permanent
statement. Right. In 2017, he covered it up with
a tattoo of a pitchfork. But then by 2024, he
was openly considering covering the pitchfork
with the traditional crucifix. Talk about a 180.
And 2025 is really the watershed year for this
evolution. In April of 2025, Scrim does a live
stream and officially confirms his conversion
to Christianity. Yeah. And he doesn't just say
he found God, he explains the mechanism of his
conversion. He tells his fans that he spent years
studying Christian apologetics, listening to
theological debates, actively trying to see if
the historical and philosophical evidence of
Christ was compelling. And he concluded that
it was. He explicitly stated to his audience,
I believe that journey of sobriety has led me
to Christ. It's amazing. He even admitted on
that stream that he initially feared judgment
from his own fan base. He was terrified of how
the underground edgelord culture would react
to him finding religion, which makes sense. Yeah.
But he noted that he had seen enough miracles
in his own recovery, you know, surviving when
he mathematically shouldn't have that he felt
absolutely no embarrassment anymore. And it wasn't
just Scrim having a solitary experience in July
of 2025. The duo does a major interview with
Billboard magazine. Ruby is sitting there wearing
a camo cap with Jesus on the front and Christian
fish symbols all over it. Scrim tells Billboard
that it's his genuine belief God put them in
this massive position of influence specifically
to help people out of the dark. And Ruby agrees,
adding a detail that would have been unthinkable
five years prior. They actually pray together
before every single show now. This completely
redefined their artistic output. Just look at
the timeline of their releases last year. In
August 2025, they release a highly anticipated
album titled, Thy Kingdom Come. The album art
isn't gothic horror. It features orthodox Christian
iconography and a wall of crucifixes. They promoted
the album with long form YouTube episodes featuring
actual church choirs and testimonies of local
New Orleans converts. Then out of nowhere on
Christmas Day 2025, they drop an unannounced
project called Thy Will Be Done. I look at this
and I think of it as a reverse Faustian bargain.
You know the old blues myth of selling your soul
to the devil at the crossroads to get famous?
It's like they used the darkest, most demonic
imagery possible to get the world's attention.
And once they had the biggest underground megaphone
on earth, once everyone was listening, they used
that exact platform to promote recovery, sobriety,
and faith. That's a great analogy. But I've got
to ask. We all know how deeply cynical the internet
can be. Why do you think their incredibly loyal,
edgy, underground fan base accepted this massive
pivot to Christianity and sobriety? Why didn't
the fans just riot, write them off and call them
sellouts? This raises a vital question about
what audiences actually connect with in the long
term. The through line here isn't the aesthetic
of darkness. It's the mechanism of authenticity.
Their fans didn't fall in love with them just
because they talked about the devil or did hard
drugs. They fell in love with them because they
were brutally, uncomfortably honest about their
internal state. When they were suicidal, they
rapped about being suicidal. When they realized
they were entirely powerless over their addiction
and needed a higher power to survive, they were
just as brutally honest about that. So it's the
honesty that stayed the same. Exactly. They didn't
change to be more commercial. I mean, if anything,
dropping a Christian -themed album with Orthodox
choir samples in the modern rap scene is deeply
anti -commercial. Very true. They changed to
survive. And the vulnerability of a tattooed,
hardcore rapper admitting he needs God is, in
its own way, just as raw and punk rock as their
early lyrics about depression. The fans recognized
the truth in it because it was the same truth
-teller on the microphone. So what does this
all mean for us? If we zoom out and look at the
entire arc, we're talking about two cousins who
started in a basement in 2013 with a literal
suicide pact, a hard deadline to die. Yeah. They
descended into the absolute worst depths of addiction,
built a multi -million dollar cult falling out
of their misery, and then, against all mathematical
odds, chose to live. It's incredible. And not
just live, but completely dismantle and rebuild
themselves. By 2025, they're commanding the Billboard
chart entirely on their own terms, dropping albums
named Thy Kingdom Come and praying before they
walk out to screen their lungs out to arenas
full of fans. It stands as the ultimate study
in radical personal evolution. It proves a concept
that many people struggle with. You are never
locked into your past brand, especially if that
brand is destroying you from the inside out.
I think the big takeaway for you... listening
right now, whether you're trying to build a business,
navigating a complex relationship, or just trying
to figure out your own life, is that true lasting
connection doesn't come from maintaining a polished,
consistent facade. It comes from radical, sometimes
deeply uncomfortable honesty. If you're struggling,
be honest about it. Let people see the mess.
And if you find a way out of the dark, have the
courage to be honest about that too, even if
it confuses or alienates the people who only
knew the old you. You do not have to stay in
the dark just because that's where people are
used to finding you. It is a powerful real -world
lesson in giving yourself permission to survive,
regardless of the expectations placed upon you.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
the incredible evolution of the Suicide Boys.
But before we go, I want to leave you with a
final thought to mull over, one that we haven't
entirely answered today. OK. It goes back to
that original desperate countdown clock. Now
that Scrim and Ruby have achieved long -term
sobriety, found their faith, and have publicly
stated they are actively trying to save souls
through their platform, what does the name Suicide
Boys actually mean today? That's a good question.
Does it stand as an ironic relic of who they
used to be? A name they are just stuck with?
Or is keeping that dark, violent name a permanent,
necessary reminder to their fans and to themselves
of exactly how deep the hole was that they managed
to climb out of? That is something worth thinking
about. We'll let you sit with that one. Take
care, everyone.