The 2020s File Feature
Thorns
Thorns: $uicideboy$ and the Sound of 2024's UndergroundThere is a corner of American music that has been operating on its own terms for a decade now, buildin…
01 The Story
Thorns: $uicideboy$ and the Sound of 2024's Underground
There is a corner of American music that has been operating on its own terms for a decade now, building an audience through streaming platforms and a devoted fanbase that treats mixtape drops as events. That corner belongs to $uicideboy$, the New Orleans duo whose career arc reads less like a conventional rise to fame and more like the slow accumulation of a cult following large enough to fill arenas.
From New Orleans to the National Chart
$uicideboy$, the project of cousins Ruby da Cherry and $crim, emerged from the New Orleans underground in the early 2010s with a sound that blended the gothic textures of Three 6 Mafia with a confrontational emotional rawness that connected immediately with listeners who felt on the margins of mainstream culture. By 2024, the duo had built one of the most loyal streaming audiences in rap without significant traditional radio presence, a testament to the shift in how music finds its listeners in the post-streaming landscape.
The Arrival of Thorns
Thorns arrived in 2024 as part of the duo's continued output during a remarkably prolific period. The track carries the sonic signatures that have defined the $uicideboy$ catalog: murky, low-register production that feels intentionally claustrophobic; vocal deliveries that slide between melodic resignation and rapid-fire rhyme patterns; and a thematic weight that leans into grief, self-destruction, and survival with equal intensity. The production creates a world that feels genuinely uncomfortable, which is precisely the point.
A Week on the Hot 100
Thorns debuted at number 91 on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 29, 2024, spending one week on the chart. In the streaming era, a single-week chart appearance from a track by an act with no major label machinery behind it represents something meaningful: pure audience demand translating directly into chart mathematics. The duo's releases regularly debut this way, powered by a fanbase that streams immediately and often obsessively on release day. The track has accumulated approximately 8 million YouTube views, consistent with the deep-catalog engagement that characterizes the $uicideboy$ audience.
The Emotional Register of the $uicideboy$ Sound
What distinguishes $uicideboy$ from many of their peers in the darker wing of underground hip-hop is an almost confessional quality in their best work. Ruby da Cherry in particular has developed a lyrical voice that addresses mental health, addiction, and a persistent sense of being out of step with the world around you, subjects that an enormous number of young listeners recognize from their own interior lives. Thorns sits in this tradition; a track that finds beauty in difficult emotional territory without softening the difficulty itself.
Underground Giants With Staying Power
Few acts in recent hip-hop history have built a following of this size on such independent terms. $uicideboy$ have resisted the pressures to sand down their sound for mainstream palatability, and their audience has rewarded that resistance with fierce loyalty. Tracks like Thorns are documents of that relationship, recordings that exist for people who need exactly what $uicideboy$ offers and find it nowhere else. As the 2020s have progressed, their place in the lineage of American underground music has become increasingly clear.
If you have been sleeping on the darker corridors of 2020s rap, Thorns is a good place to start listening.
“Thorns” — $uicideboy$'s singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Thorns: Pain, Persistence, and the Language of the $uicideboy$ Inner World
The title alone signals where Thorns is headed. In the vocabulary of $uicideboy$, beauty and pain are almost always inseparable, and a track named after the sharp edges of something that also flowers is exactly the kind of contradiction the duo has built their entire aesthetic around.
The Aesthetic of the Wound
$uicideboy$ have spent their career mapping an interior landscape where the dominant weather is grief, self-recrimination, and a dark form of resilience. Their lyrics do not argue for recovery in any traditional sense; they document the experience of surviving without necessarily flourishing. Thorns exists within this world. The imagery the track deploys is tactile and bodily: pain that is physical in its specificity, emotions that manifest as sensations rather than abstractions. This is one of the duo's consistent strengths as lyricists.
Survival as a Theme
One of the persistent tensions in the $uicideboy$ catalog is the contradiction between nihilism and endurance. Songs that seem to embrace self-destruction are often, on closer examination, about the fact of having survived it. Thorns carries this tension. The track describes damage without resolving it neatly, which is part of its honesty. A great deal of music about psychological pain reaches for catharsis or redemption by the final chorus; $uicideboy$ are more interested in the texture of the damage itself, and that refusal to tidy up the experience is precisely what resonates with their audience.
Who Is Actually Listening
The $uicideboy$ fanbase skews young, and a significant portion of their listeners have spoken publicly about finding the duo's music during periods of genuine crisis. That dynamic comes with real responsibility, but it also reflects something important about what the music does. When Ruby da Cherry or $crim describe feeling broken and out of place, they are not performing alienation for effect; the conviction in the delivery is palpable. Thorns speaks to the experience of carrying something painful that does not show on the surface, which is a loneliness many young people know intimately.
The Sound as Meaning
In $uicideboy$ tracks, the production is never neutral. The murky low-end frequencies, the deliberately lo-fi textures, and the way vocals sit inside the mix rather than rising above it all create a specific emotional atmosphere: submerged, pressurized, slightly unreal. The production on Thorns reinforces the lyrical content at every turn. You are not meant to feel comfortable listening to it. The discomfort is the message: this is what living inside a certain kind of pain actually feels like, and the music refuses to make it prettier than it is.
Why It Matters in 2024
As mental health has become a more openly discussed dimension of public life, music that takes psychological difficulty seriously rather than sentimentalizing it has found a wider audience. Thorns is part of a broader shift in what young listeners expect from the music they connect with most deeply. They want honesty over polish, complexity over resolution. $uicideboy$ have been providing exactly that for a decade, and Thorns is a precise distillation of why that offering continues to matter.
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