Announced in April 2015 and completed in October of that year, the album was primarily produced by Cudi, with Plain Pat co-producing four of its tracks.

Cudi would later call the period surrounding the writing and recording of Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven one of his darkest times and described the album as a "cry for help".

Cudi abandoned his plans to release Man on the Moon III after Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven due to its poor reception, in favour of Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin' (2016).

[1] By January 2014, Cudi had expanded the EP into an album,[2] which he surprise released the following month as Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon.

[3] In January 2015, he hinted at the possibility of releasing another album before Man on the Moon III in an interview with Billboard at the Sundance Film Festival.

[20] The Michigan Daily's Matt Galatin felt that Beavis and Butt-Head's "irreverent and self aware comedy" was at odds with Cudi's "self-riotousness" and noted how they would sometimes appear to mock him "without his realization".

[19] Matthew Ramirez of Pitchfork considered it to be a more "unfiltered and unpolished" album compared to WZRD,[29] a sentiment also shared by David Jefferies of AllMusic, who noted its minimalistic production.

[22][23][34] In discussing the album, Maxwell Cavaseno of HotNewHipHop and Tim Coffmann of Far Out both noted Cudi's past admiration for the band's frontman Kurt Cobain,[24][32] whom is given a shout out on "Man in the Night".

[29] In 2024, Cudi credited the Brett Morgen documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) with inspiring Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven and "[expanding his] mind as an artist.

In an 2016 interview with Billboard, Cudi called Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven his "last outing as the dark, depressing character people place me as", stating that he "didn’t want to come back to hip-hop making that type of music".

[46] "Fade 2 Red" features a looping, droning riff and "shout-sing[ing]" vocals from Cudi, whose lyrics Adam Kivel of Consequence of Sound described as "mashed together with unrhymed lines about dealing with idiots.

[29] "Handle with Care" is an acoustic number[30] that sees Cudi warning a potential lover of his "delicate heart, essential to his capacity to love and at the same time a liability in terms of his behavior", according to The Hollywood Reporter's Lovia Gyarkye.

[34] Jefferies described "Fairy Tale Remains" as sounding like "Death Grips [attempting] to make a My Bloody Valentine album" without "the chops".

[22] Kivel compared the "groaning-over-acoustic-guitar" song "The Return of Chip Douglas" to a joke warm-up by Gordon Gano at a Violent Femmes rehearsal.

[52] On October 2, 2015, following delays related to iTunes and his record label,[48] Cudi released two new songs, "Wedding Tux" and "Judgmental Cunt", on his SoundCloud page.

He wrote: "I got a lot I'm dealing with at this time in my personal life too and in order for the shows to be the best experience possible as well as keeping my sanity intact, I need to regroup.

[68] Troy L. Smith of The Plain Dealer called the album "a poor man's Yeezus - a baffling case of experimentation without any of the sonic depth.

"[26] Adam Kivel of Consequence of Sound criticized its formularic songwriting, "ultra-repetitive guitar riffs" and skits, though he commended the "passion and intensity" at which its ideas were presented.

[33] Although he found it sonically "strong", Jason Bisnof of HipHopDX felt that the album was lacking in identity and believed many of its songs were "repetitive and better suited for a singer and a voice more typical to [rock music]."

[32] The Michigan Daily's Matt Galatin said that the album "removes everything that once made Cudi unique and popular—ease of listening, productive strength, etc.—and replaces it with his best attempt at replicating the ’90s grunge movement", which he found to be "superficial" and disrespectful to Nirvana's artistry.

[74] Vice's Adam Downer considered the album to be a work of "so bad it's good" art, comparing it to Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film The Room.

[75] Chris Mench of Complex called the album "ultimately messy, challenging, and rough around the edges (perhaps more so than anything Scott has ever released), but there's also something about it that's admirably unique.

[79] In a 2022 listicle covering "Hip-Hop Albums That Didn't Live Up to the Hype", XXL wrote the most of the album's songs lacked "enough oomph to make them remarkable" and remarked that although "Day-one Cudi fans would argue that his project wasn’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be", fans that "[knew] the full extent of his artistic talent [...] would say otherwise.

[39] He said that the response to the album "tore [him] up" and that its poor commercial performance led him to "[question] my fan base and if I even have one at all"; at the same time, he considered it to be "the best thing to happen" to him in 2015.

[64] In 2016, Cudi released his sixth album, Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin',[82] which Uproxx described as a "musical mea culpa" for Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven.

[83] Cudi later he revealed that the album was intended to be Man on the Moon III but wanted to "be in a better place" when he ultimately released the final installment of his trilogy, which arrived in 2020.