The new single, “Addiction/Prescription,” from poptropicaslutz! has been released. The track is off of their deluxe album, Face for the Radio: Voice for a Silent Film, out on May 10. “Addiction/Prescription” is an extremely infectious track with a contagious beat. It was produced by the band’s close collaborator, Aldrch, and mixed by Brian Moncarz and Matt Mallpass.
Poptropicaslutz! are hometown friends Christian Cicilia and Nick Crawford, who have masterfully crossed hyper-punk’s energy with catchy pop hooks and distinctive gen z angst. During the latter end of 2019, Christian Cicilia was living a typical life of Long Island-based, college-bound high school senior. His hometown friend, Nick Crawford, was one semester into community college with plans to transfer to Parsons. As March 2020 rolled around and a global pandemic upset their respective plans, the two of them decided to take advantage of the moment and form poptropicaslutz! Now at the ages of 21 and 22, the duo are genuinely living out their dream. They’ve recently signed to Epitaph Records and are actively working on the much-anticipated deluxe EP.
As songwriters, the pair have drawn considerable inspiration from a wide variety of genres and decades with elements of Fall Out Boy, Hello Goodbye, Juice WRLD, Kelly Clarkson, The Black Eyed Peas, and 2010s SoundCloud rap. Last October, they released their debut LP, Face for the Radio. Now, a deluxe follow-up is set to release in May.
Nick Crawford on the creative process of writing a track:
“When I’m sitting down to write a song, I’ll try to get inspiration from a random thing, or however I’m feeling about a specific person. If we’re writing together, I try to take something in like the room to write about. Like our new song, “bittersweet teeth,” we were in the studio with NIck Long and Andy Seltzer, and they had a photo album in the studio. Looking through it, I was like, ‘Let’s make a song about capturing a moment.'”
Nick has connected this process to another upcoming track, “Where the Wind Blows,” which he and Cicilia built out from the word “prism” being written on the studio’s wall. The last couple years of the pandemic provided ample material for poptropicaslutz! to pour into the band’s debut.
Crawford says about the debut EP:
“I feel like if COVID didn’t happen, I would never have wanted that to be the name of our debut EP, but when things started getting bad, it was like one new, terrible thing every few days. Whether it was COVID or the BLM riots, I was like, ‘Wow, the world’s really ended. It’s the end of the world.'”
EP opener “WW3” (featuring Riz La Vie & Grandma) captures the apocalyptic feeling over banging percussion and crunchy guitars, the two trade tongue-in-cheek lyrics about IRL (in real life) catastrophes seen through a virtual lens (“One day I’ll die, and you’ll just think I’m offline”).
Despite the generation-defining global events that shaped them, poptropicaslutz! also pour classic young-adult angst into their songwriting. The glitch-pop/dance-punk single “TEEN POP SENSATION,” for example, goes hard with live-for-now energy. Layering auto-tuned vocals reminiscent of Panic! At The Disco, the band push listeners to live for the present moment, even in the face of nay-sayers and outside chaos: “Then you dance, dance, hoping it’ll mask the pain/Baby, fuck it, do a handstand, go insane/Like there’s nobody watching/They’re all just critics anyway, so act out of pocket.”
Photo courtesy of poptropicaslutz!
