Rappers $crim and Ruby da Cherry, the duo known as $uicideboy$, are both recovering opioid addicts, and they treat their battles with drugs, depression, and suicidal ideation as a flex. Not to put too fine a point on it, their 20-part mixtape series is titled Kill Yourself. And the New Orleans pair’s fourth studio album, the aptly titled New World Depression, delivers even more posturing.
$uicideboy$’s rapid-fire flow, defined by thick Southern accents and sudden shifts from rapping to singing, harkens back to Memphis horrorcore, though they’ve moved away from the Three 6 Mafia imitations of their early music. The tense piano and scratching of the catchy “Us Vs. Them” is a clear pivot toward a ’90s New York hip-hop sound.
While $crim and Ruby are now in their 30s, tracks like “The Thin Grey Line” have a teenage edgelord quality to them: “Talking about killing got my dick getting hard.” The group’s attitude remains similar, with brash boasts mixed with equally extreme evocations of outrageous violence and drug use. Over the course of an entire album, this grows monotonous, just as their relentless, exaggerated misogyny quickly becomes grating.
Horrorcore isn’t known for tasteful lyrics, but even its uglier moments have been a way for artists to express their struggles with addiction and mental health. The fact that, for $uicideboy$, these experiences are so closely tied up with how they treat women makes New World Depression a harder pill to swallow. “If I got to pick the drugs or a bitch, you know what I’m choosing,” goes one lyric on “Misery in Waking Hours.”
The album’s best songs bring out an emotional rawness that all the machismo seems designed to hide. “Trangressions” gazes unblinkingly at problems that success can’t overcome: “Hurts too much to give a fuck…Demoralized, always lying, telling people I’ll be fine.” New World Depression blows $uicideboy$’s feelings up as the material for a gleefully offensive horror movie, but it also highlights the bleak reality that remains after the credits roll.
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