Chelsea Grin released Suffer in Hell digitally worldwide on November 11, 2022, through ONErpm. Their sixth studio album opened a project that would span two releases, with eight tracks beginning with “Origin of Sin.” That song also led the rollout, introducing the project in August 2022.
The band had a substantial backlog to work through. Guitarist Stephen Rutishauser told Alternative Press that they entered the studio with roughly 30 song ideas, including material dating to the period around 2018’s Eternal Nightmare. The pandemic had interrupted those plans, but the songs remained in play. For Rutishauser, the quantity mattered: after the wait between albums, he wanted fans to get more music than a conventional album would offer. That ambition helped turn the follow-up into a double project.
Getting those ideas together didn’t mean everyone could write in the same room. In an interview with Heaviest of Art, Rutishauser explained that the members lived in different states and developed much of the material remotely. The studio became the place where they could finally work together on the details. Vocalist Tom Barber also had room to shape his lyrics without strict instructions from his bandmates, keeping individual expression central to the process.
Once the band had 16 songs, the challenge became how to release them. Rutishauser told Apple Music that issuing everything together risked giving individual tracks less attention and wearing listeners out. “It’s also just a lot of deathcore to throw at people,” he said. Chelsea Grin tried different running orders before settling on two groups of eight. The division came down to how the songs worked together, with each record intended to have its own flow.
The lyrics gave that compact first installment several emotional directions. In the same track-by-track conversation, Rutishauser described “Flood Lungs” as an apology for failing loved ones and “Mourning Hymn” as grief complicated by self-blame. “Deathbed Companion” approached destructive thoughts from the perspective of the voice encouraging them, while also addressing the possibility of overcoming it. Those themes gave the album’s suffering a personal dimension beyond its title.
“Forever Bloom” carried a guest vocal from The Black Dahlia Murder’s Trevor Strnad, released after his death. In the song’s announcement, Rutishauser described it as a salute to the band’s metal influences and thanked Strnad for taking part. Its video made room for humor, too: Chelsea Grin dressed as goblins, wizards and knights for a game of Dungeons & Dragons.
The connection between the albums extended to their covers. Rutishauser told Heaviest of Art that the band had considered commissioning artwork before finding Adam Burke’s existing painting Transfigure. He recognized two sections that could become separate square covers: a darker image for Suffer in Hell and a lighter portion for Suffer in Heaven. One painting supplied a visual link between the two releases.
Suffer in Hell closed with “Suffer in Hell, Suffer in Heaven,” a roughly two-minute track Rutishauser described to Alternative Press as an extended breakdown. The remaining eight songs arrived on Suffer in Heaven on March 17, 2023, completing the 16-track project.
