Steve 'Flash' JuonTo date Ramirez was the closest I had gotten to reviewing an album from the Suicideboys, as he’s friends with them and/or partially behind their G*59 record label. I’m now one step closer with Scrim’s “Lonely Boy” as he’s one half of the group — the Scott “Scrim” Arceneaux Jr. half — with his cousin Aristos “Ruby da Cherry” Petrou being the other half. Will I reach the core of this apple eventually? I’m sure I will. I’m just not in a huge hurry to do so. Their sudden ascent to popularity in the late 2010’s was impressive, but both then and now I found it hard to distinguish their vocally modulated singing and bass driven beats from dozens of acts that blew up around the same time.
“Night Gallery” isn’t changing my opinion. Scrim didn’t need to say “Yeah I’ve been on them drugs” or “Yeah way too many Percs” for me to believe him. Even though he released this side project in 2024 it could have just as easily been recorded six years earlier. The sound of emo rap calcified around the tenets of abusing drugs without worry, singing your lyrics as opposed to saying them, and relying on pitch correction to make it all sound good. Who am I kidding? It does sound good — just in the exact same way any track from the late Juice WRLD sounded good. There’s no need to scratch beneath the surface for deeper layers from Scrim though. This is skin deep music. The song titles tell you everything you need to know.
Not only is “I just hope that my death makes more cents than my life” an unwieldy title it’s a perfect example of emo rap contradiction. The booming Budd Dwyer track is hypnotic, Scrim is bragging about “all these bitches on my wood like a tree” (uh okay) and the presentation is hugely profitable for everyone involved. I don’t expect morality from rap stars, but I at least hope for originality, and there’s nothing original about singing your way through self-destruction and nihilism while cashing the checks. The real danger is when rappers try to prove the point by doing so much lean and pills in real life that they accidentally overdose. If this was an isolated problem I wouldn’t even need to mention it.
You can almost feel Scrim reaching for some depth with “all graves go unvisited in the end.” Almost… but not quite. Despite the visualizer and the song title, he’s still talking about living hard and fast, not trying to stop his hedonistic life from heading to an early grave. “Like fuck withdrawals, I’d rather OD.” Come on. I’m supposed to hear you say that on a song with this title and let it slide? This is where you start to question whether or not rappers are letting ChatGPT write their songs. I have to believe a human being would actually look at the song title, read that line, and NOT think twice about whether or not to say it. Scrim just says “fuck it” and says it anyway.
The whole thing reaches peak fuckery for me on “Chrome Cowboy.” Here we have an archetype from the 19th century that was fictionally exaggerated and mythologized by Hollywood in the 20th century, combined with the kind of baller status recognized from the West to the East coast in the 1990’s. It becomes a babbling brook of lowest common denominator appeals to superficiality dressed up as counter-cultural swag. You can’t buck the mainstream when you’re swimming in it (or lean) cowboy.
“I’ma just talk my shit, ayy
I’ma do what it take to win
Shawty, I’m way too sick, ayy
Why I’m sippin on medicine”
You do just talk your shit Scrim, and for what it’s worth, you do it well. There’s nothing more to glean from “Lonely Boy” here. He’s “lonely” by choice. He’s either pretending to be a drug abusing emo kid despite now being in his 30’s (yikes) or he’s actually out here vacillating between fucking as many women as possible and numbing the pain of his celebrity lifestyle. Some would say it’s a cry for help but I think it’s a cry for dollars. That’s all that really matters here. It’s almost 80 minutes of well produced music with inane lyrics that say nothing about the man or his group other than a desire to keep those checks coming in.