Pain Olympics
Pain Olympics is the debut studio album by Canadian musical collective, Crack Cloud, released July 17, 2020 via Meat Machine Records. The album was preceded by three singles, "The Next Fix", "Ouster Stew" and "Tunnel Vision" released between May 2019 until June 2020 respectively. Promotion and release Prior to any album announcement, Crack Cloud kicked off the campaign for Pain Olympics, with the release of the album's first single, The Next Fix on May 3, 2019, along with the self-produced music video, a series of stylishly, interconnected vignettes focused on each individual member of the collective functioning through daily life in the city, amid struggles with drug use, mental health and depression. The group's drummer and lead vocalist, Zach Choy explained the single was made as tribute "to remember the people we’ve lost to suicide and drug overdose". The single was cryptically referred to as "Part One of the PAIN OLYMPICS series" upon its release. The following month, the group premiered the music video for Crackin Up, a commercially unreleased, b-side on June 27, 2019. Described by the collective as "a stylized portrait" of consumerism within a "predatory media landscape", the video touches on those themes in an abstract and