To get things started, could you tell us more about your respective musical backgrounds and what led you to make music together as Crippling Alcoholism?
Danny and I met in the mathcore scene.
I was in a band called Needle Play and we were on a mini-tour with a few other mathcore bands on the east coast.
When we played NYC, Ashleigh (from the band Thin) introduced me to Danny and told me we should collaborate.
Danny was playing shows in NYC with his avant garde mathcore project Horse Torso.
Both Danny and I originally come from the jazz world.
Danny is actually professionally trained, whereas I just played the occassional dive bar jazz gig in high-school. Coincidentally, Danny and I had the same musical trajectory.
We both started out as amateur jazz musicians, then slowly gravitated to the hardcore punk-inspired experimental world.
Jazz is insanely cognitively stimulating. It’s beautiful, it has unparalleled complexity and nuance, it’s rich with theory and history, etc. but it doesn’t have the same raw catharsis that punk has. At least that’s how I felt in my early twenties.
After feeling dissatisfied playing jazz, Danny and I both continued to play technical music, but we tried applying technicality to heavy music. For both of us, mathcore was a no brainer. Although mathcore can be extremely technical, or at least it was (back in the MySpace days), it’s also unapologetically raw and dissonant. We found the latter very attractive.
We were both the primary writers for our respective bands.
I can only speak for myself, but when I wanted to write the most insane mathcore I could, I wanted people to think their brains were malfunctioning, to feel like they were having holes drilled into their heads. I think Danny had a similar approach to his writing/playing.
That being said, by the time we finally got together after years of saying we would do a technical, mathcore project together, we ironically wanted to move away from the hyper-technical standards of MySpace-era mathcore and towards something more subdued and emotionally diverse. We were both in the perfect headspace for Crippling.
We wouldn’t have had the patience for this type of music a few years ago.
We had to get all that technical energy out of ourselves via the mathcore scene.
Why choose Crippling Alcoholism as your band name?
Crippling Alcoholism was stolen from a subreddit of the same name.
This was a subreddit I frequented years ago. I think they’ve actually made it private recently, but back in my prime drinking days, it was a safe haven for self-hating degenerates like myself.
I really resonated with the honest accounts of suffering and decay.
In a way it funnily contributed to me getting my back together.
Although our lyrics deal with some addiction/substance abuse, we mostly stray away from that lyrical content. The references to drugs and alcohol in our band and album name are supposed to be representative of something larger.
I’m not really interested in drug addiction itself so much as what leads to drug addiction and what drug addiction tells us about the human condition.
We seek to hijack our brain chemistries in order to deal with an increasingly dark reality, but often that coping mechanism brings even more untold misery than we could have imagined. This state of being punished by your own means of escape I see as an integral part of modernity.
For me my escape was alcohol, but everybody has their own escape, and everybody is tortured by one.
One thing that really surprised me while listening to the album was the fact that all of this was the work of only two people; could you tell us a little bit about the songwriting process and who does what exactly in this project?
I was drafting on my own for at least a year before I came up with anything remotely good. Danny and I would talk about vague ideas of what we wanted to do, but we still really didn’t know what we wanted to write.
I was worried that I had lost the ability to write “songs” and could only write avant garde, experimental mush.
We wanted to write catchy songs with hooks and jingles, but we didn’t want to lose any of the dark vibes in the process.
I was drafting and trashing ideas left and right until finally one night I started singing what would become “Group Home” to myself, in the shower.
I jumped out of the shower and proceeded to record that song in a towel.
I sent it to Danny and we both agreed that this song should be the starting point for the rest of the album.
I would draft a bunch of vague ideas, record them and send them to Danny.
I would bombard that poor man with barely coherent ideas (often recorded on my phone). Danny would then sift through them and pick the ones that he felt had potential.
I would then go back to try and take that idea for a spin.
Sometimes I was able to record a whole song out of it, sometimes it was a dead end.
I have a decent home recording space in my apartment, it’s good enough for our drafting purposes.
After recording the full song, Danny would write drums beats in his tiny NYC apartment, on his bed, using only his drum pad.
We had never played together until it was time to record in the professional studio we rented out.
Danny had never even played the drum parts on an actual drum kit until the day of recording. Luckily this music isn’t too technically demanding.
Is there one single narrative behind “When The Drugs That Made You Sick Are The Drugs That Make You Better” or is each song its own story? What is it all about?
All of the songs wrestle with the same few themes, but the main theme is definitely domination. The opening track is supposed to spell this out.
That song talks about political, authoritative domination, but the other songs try to explore other forms. All the songs weave into this theme, but they are each a separate vignette.
Each song is supposed to teleport you to a different character in a shared city.
Some of these characters are inspired by real people I’ve met, others are inspired by characters I’ve read about.
The lyrics for each song has a literal and symbolic component.
For example, “Group Home” is about a husband who tracks down the man who raped his wife, brings him out to a cabin for a weekend and slowly flays this man alive.
That is what the lyrics are literally about, but symbolically they’re supposed to be about how excessive cruelty is celebrated when it is in the pursuit of vengeance or ethically sanctioned retribution.
The structure of that song was intentionally built so that at first the listener hears about this dangerous lunatic who is “violence and death”, but then the listener is supposed to side with the narrator after they discover that his victim “hurt somebody close to me”.
That’s one example, each song is a different narrator.
The goal was to have the symbolic components of each song weave into an overall statement about domination/power.
I can’t really spell out that statement because it’s sort of ambiguous to me.
I feel like the songs can express something I don’t have the intellect to express via language.
What compelled you to write an album that touches on such dark and sometimes downright depressing topics and what do you think about the correlation between such existentially bleak subjects and “heavy” music as a medium to express them?
Our music is definitely dark, but it’s a fucked up world we live in.
There is no shortage of inspiration for dark subject matter. All you have to do is look outside, it’s all-consuming.
Hell, even look inside. This existential realization can be irreversibly debilitating, especially because any attempt to help people or protect your own family seems so futile.
If you have any semblance of empathy and you think about what real people are enduring in real time, if you are really to take that in and try to imagine their experiences, then you can become overwrought and bombarded with dread.
I think “heavy” music can help us channel these responses in a healthy way so that we’re not constantly held hostage by them.
It’s a way for us to break free of that emotional stranglehold without actually turning to violence. Most of the art that improves my quality of life tackle extremely dark subject matter.
I think “heavy” music can be a very profound medium for dealing with dark content just because of how the harsh nature of the music itself mirrors the cruelty and brutality of the world.
Sometimes, however, heavy music can be too affectatious and will tackle dark content for the sake of seeming badass or “hard af” without actually saying anything insightful.
Often times, less heavy songs, even poppy songs are more successful in tackling existential bleakness.
For example, I’ve been listening to a lot of “narcocorridos” or Mexican cartel folk songs.
These songs seem so jovial and festive, but when you actually read the lyrics, they’re singing about horrific acts of violence and domination.
The juxtaposition is way more impactful to me than the heaviest deathcore song.
Crippling Alcoholism already makes quite the impression as a band name but the album’s artwork is especially striking.
Could you tell us about the idea behind it and your collaboration with artist Gina Skwoz?
Honestly, I don’t know Gina very well. I just have loved her work for a long time and finally reached out to her on Instagram.
Her art visually captured what the music was trying to go for.
I scour Instagram for “dark art”, but 90% of it is the affectatious bullshit I was talking about in the previous question.
It’s all just random dark vibes for the sake of seeming edgy, badass, gothic, or philosophically deep. It has no emotional resonance and is just designed to obtain quick likes from Hot Topic teens or adults who haven’t outgrown their hot topic teen cognitive prisons.
Gina’s art is so unique and emotionally raw, I really feel her agony when I see her work.
Yes it’s disturbing, but it’s authentic and it’s brave. Go follow Gina’s work, if you haven’t already.
Is Crippling Alcoholism just a one-off spontaneous project or can we expect more material from you guys in the future?
This is definitely my new baby. It would be very hard to give this project up.
I have two new albums written (in draft form) and I want to get to the studio has soon as I can front the cash. I definitely have to see how far this project will go.
Are there any plans to bring this project to the stage? If so, how would you go about it?
Definitely. Danny has been touring and I recently got married so we put rehearsals on hold. Hopefully we’ll be getting together in November.
Because there are so many synths and guitar layers, we’ll probably have to play with backing tracks.
I played all the guitars, synths and bass on the album and I really just want to solely sing/yell on stage. I think it’s good to have a singer who can engage with the crowd and I can’t do that if I’m stuck also playing a fucking guitar or synth.
That being said, we are hopefully bringing on a few new musicians to help us play live shows and maybe even contribute to the writing/recording process.
We’ll announce that in the up-coming weeks.
Every performance on the album really pulls the listener in, whether it’s the odd dissonant twangy guitars, growling bass, snappy drums and of course the very singular sounding deep vocals; what were some of your influences, musical or otherwise, while writing music for Crippling Alcoholism?
The dissonant sections are all coming from the mathcore world.
I wanted to channel a lot of that mathcore energy, but with a cleaner guitar tone.
Honestly, a lot of the poppier stuff was mathcore-inspired.
The best mathcore bands have a unique way of writing dissonant passages.
They’re often the perfect balance between tonal and atonal in a way that conveys a strong sense of evil. I was also channelling a lot of Danny’s writing style from Horse Torso.
The vocals come from listening to a lot of Scott Walker and Lee Hazlewood.
The main inspiration for that type of vocal “crooning” comes from the song “The Electrician” by Scott Walker.
The synthier elements are partially inspired by a lot of newer post-punk songs.
I listen to a lot of post-soviet post-punk (Molchat Doma, a lot of the other bands I can’t pronounce because I’ve only seen them shown in the Russian alphabet).
I listen to a lot of more electronic synthwave songs (Pastel Ghost, Mareux).
Some of the more evil sounding synth parts were influenced by Memphis rap (Three 6 Mafia) and Soundcloud rap (Fat Nick).
That type of production has such a unique portrayal of synth hell.
I also can point to a lot of standard noise rock bands as an influence : Chat Pile, Daughters, Jesus Lizard, Shellac, Arab on Radar, Child Abuse, black midi, The Birthday Party, Ex Models, Coughs.
Coughs is a lesser-known noise-rock band, but they are fucking insane.
A lot of the guitar pedal work was inspired by Alex from Willzyx.
If you haven’t checked out Willzyx, do yourself a favor and follow all their shit.
Also definitely Swans and Michael Gira’s other works.
Finally, what have been some of your favourite music releases so far this year?
I recently go into Chipeo. It’s electronic dance music from the Dominican Republic.
Check out El Alfa, El Jefe's new song “Lebron En El Bameso”. Shit fucks.
Again, been listening to a lot of “narcocorridos”.
Check that shit out, but don’t look into what the lyrics mean.
Some amazing noise rock releases. One of the bands that comes to mind is STILL/FORM.
They win the award for the greatest song title “God Will Understand Why You’re Horny For Kids”.
Their album “From the Rot is a Gift” is really innovative and raw. It’s a fucking amazing release.
“God’s Country” by Chat Pile is just unbelievable. I’ve loved that band since their first EP.
They have such a unique and authentic way of tackling the end of the world.
black midi’s newest release is phenomenal. They are intimidatingly talented.
That’s just naming a few, there have been so many amazing releases this year.
Thank you so much for taking some time out to answer these,
all the best for whatever comes next for you guys!