Gen-Z, Glitch-Trap, and God

My teenage stepdaughter and I have very different tastes, and nowhere is that more evident than in the music we listen to. I realize that this is an almost universal difference between sixteen-year-old girls and forty-year-old men, but I think it’s even more pronounced in our case. This is the kid who, when we were all driving somewhere, exasperatedly sighed and said with a certain level of disgust, “Ugh, I wish I would’ve brought earbuds. I didn’t know I’d be forced to listen to old man music!” when I started a playlist of relatively hip alt-pop/indie-rock songs from my (to my mind) not-so-distant high school and college years. Aside from occasional surprises, like the time I heard her listening to the Pixies’ song “Where Is My Mind?” we’re pretty much on opposite ends of the spectrum. Case in point, she LOVES the New Orleans-based hip-hop duo $uicideboy$, whereas for me, even just typing those stylized dollar sign S’s is a little hard on the heart.

AllMusic describes $uicideboy$’ sound as a “dark blend of horrorcore glitch-trap bubbling with booming bass, ominous atmospherics, and occultist, drugged-out rhymes,” which is a description I can parse just enough to be pretty sure it’s not for me. The frequent 7 a.m. blast of their music from iPhone speakers as she leaves for school confirms this multiple times a week.

What I discovered about this duo, however, turned out to challenge some pretty basic cultural assumptions about our supposed trajectory toward ever-increasing secularism and revealed grace at work in an unexpected place.

Although the music of $crim (Scott Arceneaux Jr.) and Ruby da Cherry (Aristos Petrou) — the members of the duo — isn’t for me in any sense, I am always curious about pop culture I don’t “get.” So the day my stepdaughter was going to one of their concerts, curiosity got the best of me. Some cursory elder millennial sleuthing (read: Googling) led me down a rabbit hole that ended at their Wikipedia entry, where one paragraph caught my attention:

In April 2025, Arceneaux stated on a livestream that recovery from drug addiction led him to believe in a higher power. First, he believed in the universe as his religion, but after 2-3 years of recovery, he converted to Christianity. On the stream, he mentioned that he’s “spent years listening to debates, listening to apologetics, listening to all kinds of shit to make up my mind on if I thought the evidence of Christ was compelling enough to believe it to be true. So far, to me, I’m willing to say yes.” Arceneaux also admitted that he initially feared judgment from his fanbase, but he eventually saw “enough miracles” to feel no embarrassment.

Then I clicked over to their YouTube page, where I watched the promo videos they released in the weeks leading up to the drop date of their latest album, the miraculously titled Thy Kingdom Come. It features cover art which, aside from the (warranted) parental advisory sticker in the bottom right corner,[1] looks like a wall in your devout grandparents’ house, adorned with crucifixes and paintings/icons of Jesus and Mary, and framed family photos (the duo are cousins). But it’s not just one interview and the cover art. The videos, though still stylized in many ways to cater to fans of their older image (skeletons and violent imagery cut in a quick/bright/attention-grabbing Gen Z/YouTube aesthetic with cuss words sprinkled here and there), also prominently feature crosses/crucifixes, pictures of Jesus, a church choir, and a number of vignettes/testimonies from a diverse group of New Orleans residents, including:

A young white woman who works as a stripper, shown alternately sitting and talking and dancing around a pole (fully clothed), who tells a story about what she experienced during and following a childhood accident that nearly killed her:

The whole, your life flashes before your eyes, that’s a very true thing. Like, that really does happen before we die … I know that death as a concept can be really scary to people. It was scary to me, but that also made me start believing in God, too. That meant that I had something I needed to fulfill, because if it really was my time, it would have been my time. But God gave me another chance.

And a middle-aged Black veteran, who fights back tears as she says:

I mean, right now, I feel like all these doors that’s closing is closing for a reason, cuz I know he has something better for me. I know he does. I mean, I’ve been homeless a couple times … I’m walking down the street, tears in my eyes, I’m talking to God, he know my heart, he know what I’m going through, he know what I’m not going to do … Go to him. Pray to him. He will answer your prayers with that little, smallest bit of faith. Trust me.

If someone had told me before I watched them that the promo videos for the latest $uicideboy$ album would bring me to tears, I would not have even come close to believing them, but here I was. Sitting there wiping my eyes, I started wondering if I was seeing something that went beyond one band’s transformation.

Maybe this was part of the larger turn toward faith that we’ve been seeing from Gen Z, the generation that makes up most of the $uicideboy$ fanbase, creating space for artists of other generations (the “boy$” are in their mid-thirties) to be more open about their own faith journeys. Survey after survey shows this generation’s surprising openness to Christian faith, even as they reject almost all other traditional institutions. But why?

Consider what Gen Z has lived through: a global pandemic that disrupted their formative years, school shootings as background noise, economic uncertainty, social media’s psychological toll, and political polarization that makes adult authority figures seem unreliable. They’ve watched their millennial and Gen X parents place faith in politics, education, and other secular humanist ideals that have seemingly underdelivered on their promises.

When a generation raised on lockdown drills and constant news of violence encounters unexpected hope, something shifts. This generation didn’t choose nihilism; it was handed to them. But they’re choosing something else.

Where previous generations largely found community in physical spaces like neighborhoods, churches, and civic organizations (spaces where there was at least some incentive to find common ground to move forward), Gen Z’s primarily online communities are shaped by algorithms designed to maximize engagement through division, outrage, and despair. When artists like $uicideboy$ pivot from “Satan, please come save me” to “Jesus Christ, please come save me” in their live performances, they’re not just changing lyrics; they’re modeling a different way forward for a generation that’s been algorithmically fed hopelessness.

This phenomenon illustrates the theology of the cross in contemporary terms. That we find God in the messiness and the hardships of our lives. That Jesus is closest to us when life is hard. Gen Z is discovering faith in their struggles, speaking about God in language that reflects where they’ve been — the language of people who’ve tried everything else first. When institutions and systems fail you repeatedly, you start looking beyond them.

When a band known for nihilistic lyrics and occult references starts putting crucifixes on album covers, and their young fans respond not with rejection but recognition, what can we do but marvel at the surprising nature of grace?

The testimonies in the videos remind us that faith is more likely to come out of difficult circumstances than comfortable existences. The gospel has always traveled through unexpected messengers to unlikely audiences. That it might flow through music that, at first glance, seems antagonistic towards it, shouldn’t surprise me.

My stepdaughter still sometimes blasts $uicideboy$ at 7 a.m., a time of day when I’d much rather be gently eased into wakefulness via Brian Eno’s Music for Airports or something else equally pretty and restrained. But now when I’m suddenly jolted out of my morning grogginess by “bubbling, booming bass,” my mind turns to the veteran with tears in her eyes talking to God on the streets of New Orleans, and the unexpected connection that now exists between her and a teenage girl in suburban Minnesota made possible in part by a “horrorcore glitch-trap”-informed hip-hop duo.

The music still isn’t for me. But I also can’t dismiss what I saw in those videos, and I can’t pretend I understand all the ways grace works in the world. I can, however, be grateful that we have a God who meets us in the mess and the struggle; who, rather than leaving us alone in our pain, actually comes closest to us when life hurts the most.