Camgirl, the sprawling new album from Boston’s Crippling Alcoholism, is a descent into real-world darkness as disturbing and gripping as a Darren Aronofsky or Gaspar Noé film, building a seedy, suffocating atmosphere around the fictional cam worker Bella Pink.

From the opening clangs of Mr. Sentimental, twisting guitar tones into the sound of cracked bells, this is a plunge not into gothic-dress up and vampire theatrics, but the ugly truths of modern addiction to sex, drugs, screens and shame. You’re immediately submerged in an overwhelming soundscape where it’s impossible to tell what’s a guitar, what’s a synth, and what’s a voice. Much like Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, Camgirl is a concept album that refuses comfort, pulling those same themes of drug addiction and total collapse into 2025, holding a mirror up to the bleakest corners of our current reality.

The music is harrowing but never one-note, oscillating between suffocating noise and velvety synth washes, drawing heavily on the bleak grandeur of Swans, the lush, apocalyptic synth-rock of Killing Joke, and the morose drawl of Type O Negative’s Peter Steele. Saran Wrapped Cash drags forward at a snail’s pace, soaked in gloom and feeling like pouring rain, whilst LADIES’ NIGHT is the closest thing to a single, bouncing on a hypnotic groove that feels both seductive and sickly.

Standout Bedrot might be the record’s most affecting moment, as Tony Castrati shrieks “I fucking hate the way I look, I look like a fat fucking scumbag” over tender synth lines in a collision of vulnerability and violence that makes you flinch whilst keeping you deeply entranced. Camgirl’s modus operandi is to turn real insecurities into art so visceral it feels like eavesdropping on someone’s breakdown. The seven and a half minute title track crystallises the album’s central metaphor in its refrain “I’m just a user craving over you” with the image of a human being transformed into a drug being at once both grotesque and frighteningly honest.

Camgirl gives the watcher, the exploiter, the addict and the reluctant friend each a voice, presenting a world of contradictions where victim and perpetrator are entangled and every character is driven by hunger, insecurity and self-loathing, communicating its horror primarily through sound with buried, distorted, murky vocals but undeniable emotions. Murmurs suddenly give way to blood-curdling screams as synths swell and collapse. Even when the words aren’t clear, you can feel the anguish, the paranoia, and the lust running through it.

Where many gothic acts lean on theatricality, archaic language, and retro aesthetics, Crippling Alcoholism root their work firmly in the present. This is devastation as art that unsettles you, shakes you, and makes you extremely grateful you’re not a part of the story.

Despite its oppressive weight, Camgirl isn’t just an hour of flatlined despair. Rather it’s a portrait of complicated lives caught between lust, desperation, addiction, fleeting tenderness, and hopeless yearning. The record never romanticises its subjects, but neither does it caricature them as villains. Instead, it offers sketches of people trapped in cruel, pathetic and pitiable cycles, whose humanity still bleeds through the smears of noise. This uneasy ambiguity leaves you walking away unsettled and unavoidably aware that for many, this is their reality.

Crippling Alcoholism resist easy genre classification. It’s gothic, carrying echoes of doom, noise, industrial and shoegaze, with some songs leaning into groove and catchiness, and others abandoning structure altogether in favour of oppressive textural washes. The production envelops you in clangs, echoes, and smears of sound that swallow the vocals into the mix, using the same technique shoegaze would use to create bliss, but to disturb, disorient, and trap you.

With a prettiness that draws you closer, and a subject matter that repels you, Camgirl is a gripping contradiction, rooted in a disturbing reality, staring directly at the world as it is in 2025. It’s a piece of art that dares you to confront the shameful corners of society we prefer not to acknowledge. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s a gripping one that deserves to be recognised far beyond the goth underground.