Crippling Alcoholism
With Love From A Padded Room

Murder Pop does not exist, at least not as a technical term or musical genre label. There is no dedicated Wikipedia page or formal definition. Web searches confirm this absence, although the term appears, I believe with a hint of irony, in the Instagram profile of Crippling Alcoholism and as the name of a synth-pop group from Philadelphia. Some posts on Bluesky and albums on Bandcamp use the label, but with a connotation that seems more promotional than substantial.

But if it did exist, what would Murder Pop be? We could define it as a collection of songs that deal with macabre themes – death, murder, violence, madness, the supernatural – with the typical catchiness of pop. In other words, a hybridization between the storytelling of murder ballads and the catchy arrangements of pop.

Ideally, this combination would create a dark and unsettling atmosphere, exploring the dark emotions and deviant behaviors of tormented characters through sound and textual imagery.

And after this imaginative reconstruction, I drop the bomb: "With Love From A Padded Room" could represent the archetype of this phantom genre.

Tony Castrato and Danny Sher, respectively singer and drummer, were so dissatisfied with jazz that no longer provided the catharsis they sought, that they tried to find it in Mathcore, through which they met during a mini-tour of their respective bands in NYC. An encounter, blessed by the devil, that was the starting point of a creative partnership that, on the second attempt, found the perfect formula for a masterpiece of grace and malevolence.

In other words, a concept album set in an imaginary prison where each song tells the personal hell of an inmate.

The common setting is a rather effective solution to unite different stories (ranging from drug abuse to contract killings, self-hatred to Satanism) with the common thread of a garrotte, on which the Boston band strings, as if they were beads of a macabre rosary, a row of drops of dark and coagulated blood.

The result is an album with an aura so shadowy that even bringing together Swans, Type O Negative, and a bad-tempered Wednesday Addams wouldn't match it.

The lyrics give the impression of being written in the grip of a clear madness, one that grasps the essence of negativity only to distill it into ink.
Yet they go perfectly with the paralyzing catchiness of this record. They blend with its dark vibrations to invite the listener to immerse themselves in the stories and understand their essence, in an exercise of empathy.

Sure, you might consider Murder Pop a stretch. In part, you are right. It's more of a suggestion, a shadow that stretches over certain songs and to which I tried to give a more defined shape. In the end, more than a name, what counts is that sensation, that shiver down the spine that gives us the certainty of having found something special.