Sherwood’s Album Of The Year 2025: Crippling Alcoholism - Camgirl
Camgirl is a sprawling, confrontational descent into real-world darkness, as gripping and suffocating as a Darren Aronofsky or Gaspar Noé film. Built around the fictional cam worker Bella Pink, Crippling Alcoholism plunge the listener into an overwhelming soundscape where guitars, synths and voices blur together, echoing the total collapse explored on The Downward Spiral. Camgirl transforms personal shame into art so visceral it feels like eavesdropping on a breakdown, presenting a world where victim and perpetrator are inseparable, and everyone is driven by hunger, self-loathing and desperation. Vocals are buried and distorted, erupting from murmurs into blood-curdling screams as the music swells and collapses. Camgirl is a portrait of damaged lives caught between lust, addiction and hopeless yearning with a seductive surface and repellent subject matter. A gripping contradiction that’s devastating, disorientating, and disturbingly honest.
Crippling Alcoholism are a six-piece band from Boston who formed in 2022, crafting a unique blend of gothic noise rock built on a constant friction between beauty and revulsion. Earworm tunes wrapped in noisy, intense atmospheres and grotesque lyrical themes, the band smuggle disturbing content into infections forms with influences running the gamut from the doomed grandeur of artists like Nick Cave or Scott Walker to the pulsing synths of ‘80s synth and industrial music. They’ve released three full-length albums so far, with their third album Camgirl taking their genre-blurring style to new heights. The album was first released on Portrayal of Guilt records and after selling out its first vinyl pressing, the esteemed label The Flenser signed the band with plans to reissue Camgirl in 2026.
“Camgirl is my favorite album of 2025. It melds genres and moods that seem incompatible on paper to form a demented first person perspective into sex, abuse, crime, and murder with the backdrop of danceable post-punk and pop smashed up against walls of harsh noise and some of the catchiest hooks of the year. It took me a few listens to get the hang of this album but once I did, I listened non stop for days and eventually had to check myself back into AA.”
An ambitious and disturbing concept album, the record follows a fictional online sex worker charting her journey through a world of exploitation and performance, inhabiting the viewpoints of her lovers, her family, her business partners, and her stalkers to paint a multifaceted narrative of objectification and despair across 15 lurid tracks. We witness her troubled childhood and fractured psyche and the depraved characters orbiting her life in a gritty look at the commodification of desire and the toll it takes on the soul. The music blurs the lines between gothic rock, post-punk, synth-pop and extreme metal filled with danceable pop anthems interwoven with harrowing screams, abrasive noise, and morbid lyrics. A balance of ear-candy and horrors, catchy ‘80s-style synth hooks are filtered through a claustrophobic, nightmare atmosphere. Tony Castrati’s deep, theatrical baritone narrates much of the album with a detached and depraved calm that erupts into anguished shouts with an ensemble of female guest vocalists embodying characters alongside him.
Camgirl is graphic, provocative, profane and uncomfortable with lyrics about sexual violence, addiction and self-loathing delivered in first person, deliberately weaponizing pop hooks to make the dark themes hit even harder. The album has generated a tremendous buzz among those who’ve encountered it, with no huge mainstream media push, and no feature from Pitchfork or Anthony Fantano, instead becoming a word-of-mouth sensation with massive enthusiasm on Bandcamp and Reddit. Critics within the metal, goth, and alternative scenes have praised Camgirl to the skies, but the album hasn’t yet received the widespread media coverage deserving of such an accomplished record. Is this due to the extreme content and lack of a clear genre? Does the band’s off-putting name keep mainstream outlets away? Whatever the reason, Camgirl’s status as an underground cult classic only adds to its allure. The concept is original and timely, fusing styles that rarely meet, paying homage to goth forebears while sounding completely fresh and modern. The album feels like a step into uncharted territory that’s richly constructed, lengthy, dense, powerful and complex. Making you dance whilst also pondering the darkest corners of human behaviour, Crippling Alcoholism’s Camgirl is our first ever Album Of The Year.
