It’s hard to classify exactly what genre of music Crippling Alcoholism specifically play but that hasn’t stopped the band from rapidly gaining momentum since the release of their last album, With Love From a Padded Room, last year. They’re back just over a year later with a new record called Camgirl, released earlier this month, showing the band’s continued evolution. Decibel got with singer Tony Castrati to discuss the new record, concept albums and finding your niche.
Camgirl is out now.
Your new album is called Camgirl and follows a fictional character called Bella Pink. How did you decide this was the story you wanted to tell on the album?
A few things led to this. We have some friends who cam (and make good money), one of these friends was telling us about her experience and the darker side of this world. I started reading about the camming world and just the sex industry in general from the perspective of psychologists. Then right around that time, Stefan was drafting these weirdly euphoric, poppy, synth-heavy ideas and was calling them “Babygirl”, like as an adjective. The sound he was channeling was pink, glittery, kinda clubby. I wanted to write an album about a camgirl and Stefan’s “Babygirl” drafts were the perfect sonic template. We wrote a whole backstory with multiple characters and even a general plot, then overtime we worked the backstory into the songs we were drafting. We had written about a character named “Anabelle” for the songs “Tinted Civic” and “Blood Pony”, we decided to make her the main character in this camming world. Her camming name then became “Bella”. Then the “Pink” really represents two things; 1) it’s a playful, clubby, party color that deceptively invites users into the world of horror and 2) it represents the kind of fragile masculinity that a lot of male characters in the story possess.
Your last album, With Love From a Padded Room, came out in February 2024. Where do you guys find time to write? Is it something you’re always working on or do you lock yourselves away and block time out to write a record, especially when it has an underlying concept?
Yeah we go through a lot of phases. The initial phase, the “schizophrenia phase” is meant to be for uninhibited brainstorming. We split off and draft stuff independently or in pairs and the idea is that there are no limits to the sound, no rules. There’s no vision for the album at this point, so literally anything goes. We draft some pretty weird shit in this phase, with a lot of it being unlistenable. But there are always some hidden gems and key sonic ideas in there. Next we sift through these drafts and combine the good ones to get a sort of core sound. For this album, it was the “Babygirl”, the glittery stuff, mixed with some horror movie soundtrack sounds, all blended in with some hooky singer/songwriter-acoustic stuff. We also try to continue a lot of the ideas from our previous albums.
After we have a vision and a backstory, we draft tons of new songs with a central theme in mind, often amending pre-existing drafts. Once we have a lot of songs (like 100+), then we try and shrink them down into a reasonably condensed album. After that we start proposing rough tracklists. Usually we go through ten to twenty different track lists before we agree on the final one. It’s all a lot of work, a lot of late nights drafting in someone’s bedroom, drafting over the phone, editing stuff in the group chat, all while working regular jobs. It’s kind of a bitch, but we can’t not do it, we love it too much. You get addicted to it. You gotta be cool with not getting a lot of sleep and also neglecting your general health (just for a few months). Once the album is solidified, then we pull the intensity back.
On Camgirl, it seems like Crippling Alcoholism are moving further from the noise rock side of the band and further embracing the goth side of things along with renewed focus on dance and synth-driven elements. Are you consciously moving further in this direction or is it a result of the band’s size expanding?
For Camgirl, we 100% intended it to be poppier and hookier than the previous two albums. It just made sense with the backstory. We wrote these characters as extremely charming and manipulative people. The catchiness of the songs is proportional to the manipulative capacity of the corresponding character. The catchiness is supposed to mimic social manipulation and deception. These characters are so charming and so socially equipped that they can infect you with their will similar to the way a catchy earworm gets lodged in the listeners’ mind. Then you can contrast that with the harsher sections that show the characters in their true form, unshielded by their charm. There are also more tender parts that show their humanity and vulnerabilities. The general plot of the album takes place at drug parties, shitty strip joints and nightclubs so we wanted the songs to be a lot dancier in order to reflect this. That’s just what made sense for this story. There’s definitely a connection between all our albums, but we try not to make the same album twice. LP1 and LP2 exist in their own sonic worlds and the album we’re writing now (LP4) has its own world as well.
Where do the members of Crippling Alcoholism find inspiration, both musically and otherwise? Where do the ideas for concept records like Camgirl and With Love come from?
We kind of approach writing albums how I assume a writer approaches a novel. You have general philosophical ideas, but instead of coming out the gate and saying them verbatim, you create fictional characters that represent those ideas. Not exactly reinventing the wheel, but this is how we approach writing lyrics and world building. Although all the characters are fictional, the songs are very personal, we draw heavily from our own lives and shitty experiences. For musical inspiration, we just listen to a shit ton of different genres. I can’t count how many artists and albums have influenced this album, from Swans to LMFAO. The hard part is fitting that inspiration into our own sound.
There aren’t many active bands who sound particularly like Crippling Alcoholism, either within noise rock or goth/post-punk. Do you think this has made it easier for the band to stand out or does it make it harder to find a place you fit in?
It’s definitely a mixed bag. A lot of industry people will hear our music and ask “what the fuck genre even is this shit?”, which makes it hard to get on certain bills or be put on certain playlists. That being said, our core followers really strongly resonate with the sound and feel like they can only get it through us. So for them, it’s like we’re the only drug dealer on the block, which definitely allows us to stand out. It’s tough to strike a balance because the music can be perceived as too poppy for metal people and too harsh for pop people, so we don’t fit on most tour packages. You can’t please everyone. I’m just really grateful to have a growing core following. It’s literally life changing to have that kind of support and love in your life. We can’t express how much we appreciate fans reaching out and coming out to shows.
