The album Kid Cudi admitted was a “cry for help”
Kid Cudi is a prolific artist, having released ten studio albums throughout a music career not yet quite 20 years old, and that’s to say nothing of the mixtapes, EPs and collaborative albums he’s made, too. But of all the albums he’s released, there’s one that truly speaks to his troubles above all others.
Cudi’s fifth album, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, came out in late 2015, and it marked a big change in his approach. Musically, it wasn’t so much a hip-hop album as an alt-rock project, while thematically, it was extremely dark.
Most of Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven was produced by Cudi himself, with Plain Pat also getting a credit for co-producing four songs. The making of the album was something of an old-fashioned process, with Cudi deciding not to use synths or other electronic techniques but, rather, to focus on playing bass and guitar himself. He even recorded onto tape.
The album came to be extremely long, playing out for over an hour and a half and split into 26 songs across two sides. Side A is the main part of the recording, consisting of 18 tracks, while side B consists of eight demos and outtakes.
Cudi described the album as being “alternative” in sound, and he wasn’t wrong. Elements of different rock subgenres, such as indie, punk and grunge, are discernible on the record, with Cudi himself citing Kurt Cobain and Nirvana as a specific influence.
A number of skits also appear throughout the album, featuring the voice of Mike Judge in character as his most famous creations. Judge is the creator and voice actor behind Beavis and Butt-Head, and the eponymous characters make their presence felt on Cudi’s record.
One might expect an album featuring the sniggering of Beavis and Butt-Head to be on the lighter side, but Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven actually deals with some very heavy subjects. Cudi works through themes of depression, self-harm, alienation and suicidal ideation on the album, which, as he later revealed, were ideas inspired by his own mental state at the time of the record’s creation.
Five years after its release, Cudi took to Twitter to reflect on his fifth album and the state-of-mind that he was in when he made it. “Speedin’ Bullet,” he posted, “was a cry for help. I was literally screamin’ out to the world that I was hurting deeply and just wanted so badly to be understood.”
He elaborated further in the documentary A Man Named Scott, released the following year in 2021. “I felt like I was living the right way,” he said of his lifestyle around the time of writing his fifth record, “but I still felt empty inside. People look up to me, but I’m not a happy person. So a lot of the time, I felt like a fraud, and that’s what drove me to the dark side of what I was dealing with.”