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In the sweltering backstreets of New Orleans, where second lines dance beside ghosts and pain never quite evaporates in the summer heat, two cousins—Ruby da Cherry and $crim—gave birth to a musical movement that refused to flinch. The $uicideboy$ didn’t just rap; they bled into microphones. They roared their demons, thrashed against addiction, and serenaded sorrow until it sang back.

Their earliest catalog—songs like “Kill Yourself Part III” and “Paris”—bristled with deathwish mantras and nihilistic bravado. But underneath the distortion and despair was always something deeper: a search for meaning in a world so often cruel, so often godless. Fans felt it. Teenagers clutching earbuds in dark rooms felt it. Because in the screaming void, someone else was screaming too. Someone who knew what it meant to want out.

But now, against every prediction, a new refrain echoes.

“I believe that journey has led me to Christ,” $crim said quietly in a livestream earlier this year. The rapper—real name Scott Arceneaux Jr.—wasn't performing this time. There were no booming basslines or smoke machines. Just a man, months sober, trying to explain the holy ache that had started gnawing at the edges of his soul.

He hadn’t always believed. He read atheists first. Then apologists. Slowly, what started as a defense against religion transformed into a curious draw. The writings of C.S. Lewis and debates from thinkers like William Lane Craig and Ravi Zacharias led him down unexpected corridors. “I didn’t want to believe,” he said, “but the evidence changed that.” What makes his story resonate is its utter lack of polish. No altar calls. No megachurches. Just survival. Then sobriety. Then surrender.

And remarkably, the music began to shift with him.

At a Phoenix concert, fans recorded what has since become a viral moment: $crim changing the line “Satan, please come save me” to “Jesus Christ, please come save me” (Reddit). The change was subtle—but seismic. For an act built on defiance and darkness, the invocation of Christ wasn’t just a tweak—it was a turning point.

Even more telling are his Reddit interactions, where fans, far from hostile, celebrated his spiritual evolution. “He found Christ in a dark time,” one wrote, “and it’s helped him stay sober and strong” (Reddit). In a genre where vulnerability is rare and redemption often mocked, this was a small miracle in itself.

What makes this conversion so compelling isn’t the religiosity. It’s the realism. There’s no Jesus-fish on the bumper here. No easy answers. Just a man trying to live. To survive. And if God is real, then maybe survival can mean something deeper than just not dying.

Meanwhile, Ruby da Cherry remains a bit more elusive. He hasn’t publicly walked the same path. But there’s a curious peace in that too—two cousins, still united, still creating, even as their inner lives diverge. That’s what real art does. It doesn’t demand conformity. It holds space for the sacred and the scarred.

So what does this mean for a 14-year-old girl or boy who loves their music?

It means you’re not crazy for feeling both pain and longing at the same time. It means you’re not weak for hoping the people who sound most lost might someday be found. It means you’re allowed to change. To grow. To believe.

And maybe most important: it means your favorite song doesn’t always have to end in despair.

— By JS Matkowski

On a frenetic album that tests the limits of his trolling, JPEGMAFIA hints at the delicate balance of truth and fiction behind his confrontational mix of noise, rap, and punk

The exact moment that NBA player Dillon Brooks lost the mandate of heaven: After poking the bear of LeBron James in the 2023 playoffs, failing to live up to his own slanderous trash-talk while his aggressive style of play floundered on the court, Brooks unceremoniously hit free agency as the Memphis Grizzlies leaked that he wouldn’t be re-signed “under any circumstances.” Brooks’ story appears as an omen on “i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone,” the opening track on JPEGMAFIA’s fifth studio album, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU. In the first lines, the 34-year-old Baltimore rapper—whose iconoclastic presence is forged on a confrontational mix of noise, rap, and punk—likens himself to a worse version of Brooks as cymbals titter in the background. It’s an initiation to JPEG’s caustic humor laced with a smidge of accidental wisdom: You can play the role of the tireless provocateur as long as you continue to deliver.

On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, JPEG entrenches himself in the agitator role. The follow-up to his 2023 Danny Brown collaboration Scaring the Hoes is blanketed in frenetic energy, as if JPEG can’t decide where to aim first. At times his extremely online subject matter takes the bloom off his writing. But his innate ability to shift between breakneck flows amid chaotic production buoys the album.

In a 2023 interview, JPEG said that he aspires to create music that “tears you out of yourself.” On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, it feels as though he’s tearing in 30 directions at once, incorporating a dizzying mix of genres seemingly at random. The imperfect marriage of a 2014 Future sample and a persistent whirring sound on “New Black History” registers as grating rather than electrifying; his chants and growls in “vulgar display of power” are eroded by a blistering rock backdrop. At other points his glitchy, staccato raps fit seamlessly with the production’s entropy: on “it’s dark and hell is hot,” a 170 bpm Brazilian funk production assisted by DJ RaMeMes, or over a staticky Jade sample on “I’ll Be Right There.” As it did on his 2018 release Veteran, JPEG’s ability to walk the line between distortion and discord permits the industrial chaos to feel somehow familiar—as if the only thing more jarring would be unified sound direction.

No matter the subject, JPEG’s raps never shy away from confrontation (he described the Drake disses on “New Black History” and “it’s dark and hell is hot” as “throwaway bars”). On I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, he continues to hip fire with an air of superiority: “Fake-plug-talkin’ Tubi rappers/Got a machine behind ’em, and still they can’t fill up capacity with they raps,” he spits on “SIN MIEDO.” There’s room to take aim at white people who act Black and shit-talkers with their own skeletons in the closet, all while keeping pace with a fun Denzel Curry appearance. His pop culture references are simple and high-powered: Calling himself the “Black Michael Phelps” is objectively funny. The nonstop airing of grievances is entertaining, but eventually it can feel like JPEG’s off-the-cuff trolls are reaching critical mass. There’s wanton carelessness in using “African booty scratcher” as an insult while also claiming that he scares people “that ain’t got no Black friends.” He’ll go and liken himself to the IDF on the five-minute opus “Exmilitary,” then name the next track “JIHAD JOE,” not bothering to adjust for the contradictions between his personality and political commentary.

It would be less honest for JPEGMAFIA to shy away from those contradictions. His general state of defiance—molded by his honorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force and his experiences with racism growing up in Alabama, filtered through his fluency in meme culture—informs the best aspects of his artistry. In trying to parse through the idea of being a Black man, a Black artist rapping to a predominantly white fanbase, in an online landscape full of censorship and disinformation, the line between performance and survival is razor-thin. Sometimes the shocking statement is a method of protecting one’s true self; other times it’s an actual window into the artist’s soul. “I’m so terminally online, goddamn, I gotta check myself,” he raps on “JIHAD JOE.” The musical highs of I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU lift JPEG above the potential pitfalls of this highwire act, but the cautionary tale of Dillon Brooks is never far from mind.

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the creative force behind the Brooklyn-based black-metal band Liturgy, has gone to extravagant lengths to ensure that the hardcore metal community utterly loathes him. The band performs black-metal festivals in jeans and street clothes, instead of the normal corpse paint, to heckling and jeers. In interviews, he talks about metal's ability to induce "disorientation from ordinary, end-directed existence" like some black-metal David Foster Wallace. He uses the music, which has virulent opposition to Christianity encoded in its DNA, as a vehicle to explore Big Ideas about, among other things, Christian redemption. Aesthethica, their second album, comes out on Thrill Jockey, home to the Sea and Cake, High Places, Fiery Furnaces, and absolutely zero other metal bands. Oh, and if you ask, he's also happy to share stories about hanging out with Ezra Koenig when they both went to Columbia University.

He and Koenig would probably still get along-- they both seem to take a perverse joy insouciantly baiting the easily riled. The hatred Liturgy have incurred is white-hot and laser-focused, as the Google search for "Liturgy black metal hipster assholes" eloquently attests. As it is with any genre, black metal "authenticity" is basically a smell test: It's black metal if it feels like black metal. It's an unassailable, indefinable, and profoundly inarguable criterion, but there it is. And it must be said that, in the end, Liturgy just don't feel like black metal. Somehow, you can hear the jeans.

Luckily, this doesn't matter in the slightest. In fact, it's Aesthethica's primary sense of strength. Without "reinventing" black metal, Liturgy have successfully refashioned its basic components-- the thundering, all-sixteenths assault of blast beats, shredding tremolo guitars, and boiled-pitch vocals-- in their own willful image and directed its energy toward the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ir own idiosyncratic ends. Hunt-Hendrix might be the kind of guy who says things like, "The meaning of black metal has something to do with a longing for ecstatic annihilation, a perfect void," in interviews, but he's also the kind of musician who pursues these thoughts just as enthusiastically in his music. Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career.

The idea of "a perfect void" can be heard in Liturgy's complicated relationship with momentum. Many songs here settle into a mesmerizing stasis as often as they barrel forward. Songs that seem to be gearing up for a stratospheric takeoff instead harden into a rhythmic lockstep. "Generation", for instance, grinds out a series of syncopations on a single thudding power chord for a mind-obliterating seven minutes. It resembles Steve Reich's 2 x 5, in which two rock ensembles face off onstage and play highly mannered figures at each other, more than the work of any metal band.

The echo of Reich isn't incidental; even more than their debut Renihilation, Aesthethica feels like black metal by way of the conservatory. Hunt-Hendrix, it turns out, studied composition at Columbia with spectralist composer Tristan Murail, and guitarist Bernard Gann is the son of the post-minimalist composer and former Village Voice critic Kyle Gann. You can hear the sound of A-students getting loose in some of Aesthethica's wilder moments: the glimmering fugue of guitars buzzing like mechanized locusts on "Sun of Light", for example, or the perpetual-motion keyboard canon that opens "Helix Skull". Hunt-Hendrix's words, which are utterly indistinguishable sans lyrics sheet, point determinedly toward the same transcendence the music seems to be aiming for: "Floating upwards/ Lungs filling up with air/ As God inhales me/ Into the impossible," Hunt-Hendrix screams on "True Will".

None of this will endear Liturgy to black-metal fanatics, of course. But every insular scene needs its carpetbaggers and interlopers, and Liturgy can hardly be accused of disrespect; you just don't make something this joyful out of music you hate. Without interested outsiders peeking their nosy way in, we would have never seen David Bowie, or Elvis Costello, or the Beastie Boys, or Bad Brains. Liturgy, for their part, seem more than willing to take their lumps for what they believe in. As Hunt-Hendrix recently told Time Out New York, "We are really willing to suffer being hated for doing what feels right aesthetically." If that isn't fucking kvlt, nothing is.

Frozen red wine popsicles are distributed as cocktail refreshments to art gallery attendants, inviting them to “drink the Kool-Aid.” The artist claims he previously carried the frozen wine popsicles to church, concealed inside a cooler, where they were then inadvertently blessed by the priest while he was turning wine into the blood of Christ during the Eucharist.

The holy blood popsicle and its uniquely designed cross stick is a comment from the artist on the close relationship between extreme religious fanaticism and religious bloodbaths throughout history.