Crippling Alcoholism, the Boston outfit formed in 2022 by vocalist Tony Castrati and drummer Danny Sher, have spent the past three years cultivating a reputation for turning ugliness into cult fascination. Their first two records — When the Drugs That Made You Sick Are the Drugs That Make You Better (2022) and With Love From a Padded Room (2024) — carved out a niche where synths, sludge, and grotesque narratives coexist uneasily, earning them a small but devoted following.
On Camgirl, their third album and debut for Portrayal of Guilt’s label, the band attempt their boldest step forward. At the center is a concept: the figure of a digital sex worker and the orbit of obsession, voyeurism, and power that surrounds her. It’s not quite a celebration, nor a condemnation, but a mosaic of voices on the margins, each reflecting the push-and-pull of desire and disgust. Musically, the template remains familiar — noise, synths, guttural growls, and occasional pop hooks — but the contrasts are heightened, sharper, and more deliberately seductive.
Camgirl often feels like a black-and-white film interrupted by flashes of pink neon. It invites you behind the curtain of a culture already unraveling: a woman becomes a character, seen, consumed, desired, and destroyed by her own masks. Inside these songs lies both disdain and twisted affection for American life in its current form — obsession with spectacle, commodified sexuality, despair, loneliness. It’s unsettling, and it lingers.
When the record leans into this tension between horror and pop, it works brilliantly. bedrot sticks in your head like a corrupted jingle; Pretty in Pink begins almost tenderly before collapsing into chaos; LADIES’ NIGHT sounds like The Cure reimagined by a Midwestern noise collective. In those moments, Crippling Alcoholism find a strange alchemy: grotesquerie rendered seductive, club-ready music that still reeks of the morning after.
But at fifteen tracks, Camgirl overstays its welcome. Some songs feel like filler, others retread old ground. The lyrics, too, veer between sharp vignettes and indulgent smut, at times more provocation than revelation. The band often seem torn between embracing their knack for grimy synth-pop hooks and clinging to their noise-rock roots.
Still, Camgirl is hard to dismiss. It’s a neon sign flickering in the night, daring you to step into a room you’d rather avoid. It isn’t a masterpiece — it stumbles, it sprawls — but it captures something raw and authentic about obsession and decay in contemporary culture.
Ambitious and intermittently compelling, Camgirl shows a band still in transition. If Crippling Alcoholism can trim the excess and more confidently balance their dual identity, they could yet become one of the most vital voices in the American underground.