$UICIDEBOY$ — THE GREY ERA: BEFORE THE WORLD STOPPED

Before the arenas. Before Grey Day became an institution. Before the billions of streams, the massive touring infrastructure, and a new generation discovered G*59 through Spotify and TikTok, there was a version of $uicideboy$ that seemed to belong exclusively to the underground internet.

Compressed files. SoundCloud. Bandcamp. Grainy videos. Images ripped from films, VHS tapes, horror, and American decay. Beats contaminated by Memphis rap. Distorted vocals. FTP. Small houses turned into makeshift studios.

And two cousins from New Orleans seemingly convinced there was no Plan B.

This is the story of that era.

Not of everything Ruby da Cherry and $crim would eventually become, but of the years in which they built one of the most unlikely cult followings in the contemporary underground.

NEW ORLEANS, BEFORE G*59

Before $uicideboy$ existed, Ruby da Cherry and $crim already came from very different musical backgrounds.

Ruby came from a world closer to bands. He grew up immersed in punk, played drums, and spent time in projects such as Vapo-Rats. $crim followed another path: he started DJing at a young age and gradually immersed himself in production, beatmaking, and audio engineering.

That difference would eventually become one of the fundamental engines behind the duo. Ruby carried the urgency and physicality of punk. $crim carried the architecture of Southern hip-hop and a growing obsession with production.

One understood aggression as performance. The other knew how to turn it into atmosphere.

When those two worlds finally collided in New Orleans, something began to emerge that did not completely belong to either one.

In 2014, that collision finally gained a name: $uicideboy$.

The project was born far outside the traditional logic of a music career. There was no major label, launch campaign, or professional infrastructure waiting for them. Ruby and $crim were building almost everything from the ground up — music, identity, imagery, and distribution — using the internet as their territory.

Even the name carried the weight of that moment. The origin of $uicideboy$ was tied to an extreme pact between the two cousins: make music work before turning 30 or abandon the lives they were living altogether. Over time, that story would be repeated so often that it almost became mythology, but the feeling that there was no Plan B would run deeply through the duo’s earliest years.

In July of that year came KILL YOURSELF Part I: The $uicide $aga. Instead of treating it as an isolated release, they turned KILL YOURSELF into a recurring sequence of projects. Each new installment added songs, imagery, characters, and references to a universe that was still being constructed in real time.

The method was simple and brutal: produce, release, continue.

While much of the industry operated through long release cycles, $uicideboy$ did the opposite. The catalog expanded at a pace that made it difficult to keep up — and precisely because of that, discovering the duo began to feel less like finding an artist and more like falling into an archive.

The first KILL YOURSELF would not remain alone for long.

Throughout 2014, new installments of the saga began appearing in rapid succession. Instead of building a single project and waiting for it to find an audience, Ruby and $crim were assembling a discography practically in front of the people discovering them.

Another characteristic that would become inseparable from that era was also emerging: the personas.

$lick $loth. Yung $carecrow. Yung Christ. Snow Leopard. Oddy Nuff da Snow Leopard. And countless other identities that appeared and disappeared across songs and projects.

They were not simply different names. They helped fragment Ruby and $crim into distinct characters, voices, and states of mind. The catalog itself was beginning to function like a universe filled with internal codes.

For anyone arriving through a single track, there was always another saga, another alias, another project, or another collaboration waiting a few clicks away.

The algorithm did not need to explain who $uicideboy$ were yet. The discography did it on its own.

2015: EVERYTHING ACCELERATES

If 2014 introduced $uicideboy$ to the underground internet, 2015 began building their mythology.

In a single year, Ruby and $crim unleashed an almost absurd amount of material. Gray/Grey. 7th or St. Tammany. YUNGDEATHLILLIFE. High Tide in the Snake's Nest. My Liver Will Handle What My Heart Can't. Now the Moon's Rising. New installments of KILL YOURSELF. Collaborations with Black Smurf and Ramirez. And, alongside Pouya, $outh $ide $uicide.

There seemed to be no clear separation between creation and release. The music appeared while the duo’s identity was still taking shape, and every new project added another layer to the same universe.

It was also during this period that the architecture of the $uicideboy$ sound became impossible to mistake.

Violent 808s. Dry hi-hats. Slowed-down samples. Vocals buried in the mix. Memphis rap, horror, Southern hip-hop, and fragments of a culture that seemed to have been recovered from deteriorating tapes.

Above all of that was the contrast.

Ruby often sounded like he wanted to tear through the instrumental.

$crim sounded like he wanted to disappear inside it.

The result was not simply dark rap. It was claustrophobic.

Among all the projects released that year, one collaboration would become especially important to the expansion of that universe.

Pouya x $uicideboy$ — $outh $ide $uicide.

Released in 2015, the EP brought together two names growing from different poles of the new American underground. Pouya had already been gaining ground through the Florida scene; Ruby and $crim were building their own orbit in New Orleans.

The meeting worked because neither side seemed required to abandon its own identity.

More than a simple collaboration, $outh $ide $uicide helped bring communities that were already finding each other online into the same circuit. That was exactly how this generation grew: features, reposts, tours, videos, and recommendations moved across scenes that no longer depended on the approval of a major label to exist.

And while that network expanded, one song was about to become impossible to separate from that first era.

PARIS.

PARIS

By the end of 2015, one track began to condense almost everything that first phase had been building.

“Paris”.

The instrumental was stark, threatening, and immediately recognizable. Ruby and $crim shifted between personas and flows over a production that seemed to exist somewhere between Memphis, horror, and the deteriorated internet surrounding G*59.

The music video reinforced the feeling. Nothing seemed excessively polished or distant. The camera was close, the night was dark, and the aesthetic still carried the impression that everything had been found in some wrong corner of the internet.

Today, “Paris” is one of $uicideboy$’s most recognizable songs. But seeing it only through its current numbers erases part of its importance.

In 2015, it represented something else.

It was proof that this underground sound could travel across the internet without having to stop looking underground.

2016: ANTARCTICA

If 2015 showed how far $uicideboy$’s aggression could go, 2016 revealed more clearly what existed beneath it.

In February came “Antarctica”.

The track felt frozen. The ethereal sample, dragged-out production, and verses transformed isolation, addiction, and hopelessness into something almost atmospheric. Instead of immediately attacking the listener like “Paris”, “Antarctica” slowly pulled them inside.

That difference matters.

Because reducing that era to “dark SoundCloud rap” means ignoring one of the reasons Ruby and $crim created such an intense connection with their audience.

Behind the imagery of death, drugs, and nihilism was vulnerability.

Anxiety. Depression. Addiction. Self-destruction. Alienation. Subjects that appeared without the safe distance of invincible characters.

The language could be extreme.

So could the emotions.

ETERNAL GREY

“Antarctica” did not exist in isolation. Throughout 2016, the catalog continued expanding in almost every direction.

Dark Side of the Clouds, Grey Sheep II, and DIRTYNASTY$UICIDE with Germ arrived. Alongside Getter, Radical $uicide pushed the duo toward even more explosive production, bringing that energy closer to electronic territory without dissolving their identity.

Then, in September, came Eternal Grey.

The project stands as one of the clearest portraits of the moment when the early formula stopped sounding like a collection of influences and began sounding like a language of its own.

Memphis was still there. Three 6 Mafia remained a fundamental shadow. Horror, Southern trap, punk, and the lo-fi aesthetics of the internet remained as well.

But something had changed.

It was no longer as necessary to explain $uicideboy$ by saying who they sounded like.

It was becoming possible to explain other artists by saying they sounded like $uicideboy$.

It seems like a small difference.

Culturally, it is enormous.

The reference was beginning to become a reference point for others.

The reason me and Ruby do so much music is this is our fuckin’ therapy.

THE INTERNET UNDERGROUND

But $uicideboy$ did not grow alone.

Around Ruby and $crim existed a constellation of artists, collectives, brands, and small scenes that the internet was bringing together at a speed that would have been far more difficult only a few years earlier.

Pouya. Germ. Ramirez. Denzel Curry. Night Lovell. Bones. Getter. FTP.

They did not form a single organized movement, and reducing all of them to the same genre would erase exactly what made that period interesting. The connections happened in other ways: collaborations, reposts, tours, aesthetics, shared audiences, and a digital culture that moved through rap, punk, hardcore, skateboarding, horror, and underground fashion.

SoundCloud was a fundamental part of that infrastructure.

One song led to another. A repost could introduce an entire artist. A collaboration connected two communities. YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, and forums completed an ecosystem where someone could spend hours descending through references without ever touching the mainstream.

For a generation that found this music between 2015 and 2017, discovering a new name could literally feel like finding another passage into an underground section of the internet.

$uicideboy$ was becoming one of its gravitational centers.

2017: FROM INTERNET TO WORLD

In 2017, the feeling of discovering a secret began to disappear.

Not because $uicideboy$ had abandoned the underground, but because the underground around them was becoming too large to remain hidden.

That year, Ruby and $crim pushed the KILL YOURSELF series even further. Parts XI through XX moved across different producers, atmospheres, and collaborations, expanding a discography that already seemed to function like an endless archive.

At the same time, what had circulated primarily through screens for years was beginning to take on a much larger physical dimension.

The venues got bigger.

The lines got longer.

The crowds knew the words.

And the two grainy figures someone might once have discovered by accident through a chain of YouTube recommendations were now standing in front of audiences on the other side of the world.

The Global Epidemic Tour turned that shift in scale into an image: North America and Europe receiving a duo that only a few years earlier had been producing and distributing music almost compulsively out of New Orleans.

But perhaps the most important detail was what did not disappear.

The shows still felt dangerous. The identity remained aggressive. G*59 remained at the center. The visual language still carried death, religion, horror, decay, and provocation.

They were growing without looking like they had ever asked permission to grow.

THE GOLD ERA

Calling this period the Gold Era does not mean saying that $uicideboy$ reached their artistic peak in 2017 — or that everything that came afterward was inferior.

It means recognizing a combination of circumstances that could never exist in exactly the same way again.

Between 2015 and 2017, there was a permanent sense of movement.

A new song could appear without warning. A new KILL YOURSELF could open another part of that universe. One collaboration led to another artist. A video appeared filled with grainy imagery, religious symbols, cars, weapons, VHS, and references that seemed to have been pulled from some forbidden archive.

Nothing seemed completely organized.

And that was part of its power.

The identity of $uicideboy$ was being constructed while the audience was discovering it.

Ruby still sounded capable of exploding through any instrumental. $crim transformed obscure samples, Memphis rap, and Southern trap into productions that were beginning to carry an immediately recognizable signature.

The aliases continued multiplying the two of them into different characters.

G*59 was becoming more than three characters associated with the music. It was beginning to represent belonging.

FTP circulated alongside that culture.

And the distance between artist and audience still seemed small enough for everything to carry the feeling that it was happening right now.

There was no retrospective.

There was no “classic era”.

Nobody knew where any of it would end.

Perhaps that is exactly why the period remains so powerful for those who lived through it.

The Gold Era only became an era after it ended.

2018: I WANT TO DIE IN NEW ORLEANS

In September 2018, after years of releasing EPs, mixtapes, sagas, and collaborations at an almost impossible pace, $uicideboy$ finally arrived at their first studio album.

I Want to Die in New Orleans.

The title alone seemed to summarize an obsession that had run through everything before it: New Orleans was not simply where Ruby and $crim came from. It was part of the project’s language.

But the record also captured something more uncomfortable.

The duo had never been bigger — and, at the same time, some of the ideas of self-destruction that had been part of their music for years were beginning to stop functioning as aesthetics alone.

On tracks such as “Carrollton”, “122 Days”, “Meet Mr. NICEGUY”, and “Long Gone (Save Me from This Hell)”, violence, irony, and characters were still there, but so was exhaustion.

The chaos was beginning to sound tired.

That contrast makes I Want to Die in New Orleans a decisive point within the Gold Era.

It confirmed that what had begun as an almost entirely DIY operation had survived long enough to become a full-length album distributed to an international audience.

But success had not solved what the earliest songs had tried to numb.

The dream was working.

That did not mean Ruby and $crim were okay.

THE DARKEST POINT

There is an easy way to read the first era of $uicideboy$: drugs, death, depression, and self-destruction as components of an extremely effective underground aesthetic.

The problem is that, at a certain point, the distance between aesthetics and reality almost disappeared.

Especially for $crim.

Years of addiction began demanding a price that no expansion of G*59 could compensate for. The catalog could grow. The shows could get bigger. The numbers could rise.

The person behind $lick $loth continued deteriorating.

And that creates a brutal contradiction when revisiting that period today.

Some of the most romanticized images of the so-called Gold Era belong precisely to a period when its protagonists were going through situations that had nothing romantic about them.

The dreads. The cups. The smoke. The heavy eyes. The chaos backstage.

Everything became iconography.

But iconography can hide a cost.

By the beginning of 2019, the story was finally reaching a point where continuing in the same way no longer seemed possible.

For years, the possibility of destruction had been embedded in the identity of $uicideboy$.

Now a much more difficult question emerged:

what happens when someone builds part of their art around self-destruction — and decides to survive?

For $crim, getting sober also meant confronting the fear of losing what had made him creatively productive. He would later explain that during the first months of sobriety, he sometimes sat in the studio unable even to open his laptop, convinced that perhaps the drugs had been responsible for his creativity.

That makes 2019 a particularly fascinating boundary.

The personal transformation had begun.

But the classic image of the first era had not yet disappeared.

For a few months, the two versions of $uicideboy$ would exist almost simultaneously.

LIVE FAST, DIE WHENEVER

Three months after the date $crim would come to recognize as the beginning of his sobriety, $uicideboy$ reappeared in territory that, despite seeming like a rupture, had always been hidden inside their music.

Punk. Hardcore. Metal.

On May 24, 2019, Ruby and $crim released LIVE FAST DIE WHENEVER, a six-track EP built alongside Travis Barker.

The collaboration made sense.

Barker’s frantic drumming pushed the production beyond the more familiar boundaries of trap, while distorted guitars and aggressive structures brought the project closer to something almost physical.

On several tracks, James “Munky” Shaffer of Korn pushed that collision even further.

But for Ruby especially, it did not feel like simply experimenting with rock.

It felt like a return.

Before $uicideboy$, there had been drums, bands, and punk. Now that origin resurfaced inside a project that had spent five years building its own language within hip-hop.

Nothingleftnothingleft practically dismantled the boundary.

Killing 2 Birds With 22 Stones attacked.

Aliens Are Ghosts retained part of the duo’s familiar atmosphere while the instrumentation around it transformed.

This was not $uicideboy$ trying to abandon what they had built.

It was proof that their identity had become strong enough to absorb other languages without disappearing inside them.

GREY DAY 2019

In 2019, the network that had existed for years scattered across SoundCloud, YouTube, small venues, collectives, and different scenes finally gained a territory of its own.

Grey Day.

The first Grey Day Tour did not feel like simply a $uicideboy$ tour with guests.

Its lineup placed artists side by side that the traditional industry would probably have separated into different categories: underground rap, hardcore, punk, trap, and different branches of a generation that had grown up crossing genres through the internet.

Denzel Curry. Turnstile. City Morgue. Germ. Trash Talk. Shakewell. Night Lovell.

The lineups could vary between dates, but the message remained.

The boundaries were becoming irrelevant.

What Ruby and $crim had been doing musically for years — Memphis rap alongside punk, horror alongside trap, guitars alongside 808s — could now physically exist within the same event.

And another transformation was happening.

G*59 no longer represented only the identity surrounding two cousins from New Orleans.

It represented a community large enough to occupy physical spaces.

What had begun as a digital archive had become a crowd.

The internet had found an address.

THE DREADS WERE NEVER JUST HAIR

There is one visual detail that can divide the eras of $uicideboy$ almost instantly.

$crim’s dreads.

For those who followed the duo during those early years, they became inseparable from the classic silhouette of $lick $loth: face partially hidden, oversized clothes, tattoos, heavy movements, and an appearance that perfectly matched the state of deterioration present in the music.

So when that image began to disappear, the change felt larger than a simple haircut.

Not because the dreads carried some official meaning that needs to be invented retrospectively.

But because photographs, music videos, shows, and covers had transformed that appearance into an involuntary marker of time.

For many listeners, looking at $crim with the dreads still means immediately looking at that $uicideboy$.

The problem is that the image preserved by nostalgia also belongs to the period when he was closest to his own destruction.

And perhaps that is the definitive contradiction of the Gold Era.

Some of the images fans romanticize the most are images of a life their protagonists had to leave behind in order to stay alive.

BEFORE THE WORLD STOPPED

By the end of 2019, $uicideboy$ was in a strange position.

The duo had never been bigger.

Grey Day had transformed a community scattered across the internet into something physical. G*59 had an identity of its own. The catalog accumulated since 2014 was already enormous. Ruby and $crim had crossed countries, genres, and audiences without surrendering control over what they had built.

But internally, the first great era was already ending.

$crim was sober.

His relationship with his own creativity had to be rebuilt.

The aesthetic that for years had accompanied addiction, chaos, and self-destruction was inevitably beginning to acquire another meaning.

And then the world stopped.

When the pandemic halted touring and isolated millions of people in 2020, it created a historical boundary no one could have planned.

For $uicideboy$, that boundary coincided with another transformation that was already taking place internally.

When the project fully emerged on the other side, much would still be recognizable.

The voices.

The symbols.

G*59.

New Orleans.

The obsession with death.

The morbid humor.

$crim’s production.

Ruby’s unpredictability.

But they would no longer be exactly those two characters we had found in the underground internet in 2014.

The Gold Era did not end with one specific song.

It disappeared during the transition.

OLD, BUT GOLD

Maybe it is impossible to return to that version of $uicideboy$.

And maybe that is exactly the point.

The Gold Era does not matter because Ruby and $crim should have remained trapped inside it. It matters because it documents a period when two people built a language of their own while still trying to find out whether they would survive long enough to watch it grow.

Between 2014 and 2019, everything happened too fast.

The first KILL YOURSELF projects.

The dozens of aliases.

SoundCloud.

G*59.

Pouya.

Germ.

Ramirez.

“Paris”.

“Antarctica”.

Eternal Grey.

The tours.

The dreads.

I Want to Die in New Orleans.

Sobriety.

LIVE FAST DIE WHENEVER.

Grey Day.

Each element accumulated until what had once seemed like an underground anomaly became a culture with its own language, symbols, and audience.

Today, it is easy to look back knowing the outcome.

We know $uicideboy$ did not disappear.

We know G*59 continued growing.

We know Grey Day would outgrow that first scale.

We know Ruby and $crim would continue making music.

The people who were there, however, did not know.

And there is something impossible to reproduce about that uncertainty.

The feeling of finding a song that seemed too wrong to ever reach the mainstream.

Of discovering there were twenty more projects hidden behind it.

Of recognizing `$B` or `G*59` somewhere and immediately knowing that someone else had found the same hole in the internet.

Of watching two cousins from New Orleans build something without knowing exactly how far it could go.

That is why calling 2014–2019 the Gold Era does not have to mean wishing $uicideboy$ would return to what they were.

Survival also means change.

Perhaps the true value of that era lies precisely in the fact that it cannot be repeated.

It belongs to a specific moment on the internet.

To a specific version of the underground.

And to two versions of Ruby da Cherry and $crim that had to disappear so the people behind them could continue to exist.

Old, but Gold.

Not because it was better.

Because it could only happen once.