The interpolation method, originally developed in statistical physics, transforms distributions of random CSPs to distributions of much simpler problems while bounding the change in a number of associated statistical quantities along the transformation path. After a number of further mathematical developments, it is now known that, in principle, the method can yield rigorous unsatisfiability bounds if one “plugs in an appropriate functional distribution”. A drawback of the method is that identifying appropriate distributions and plugging them in leads to major analytical challenges as the distributions required are, in fact, infinite dimensional objects. We develop a variant of the interpolation method for random CSPs on arbitrary sparse degree distributions which trades accuracy for tractability. In particular, our bounds only require the solution of a 1-dimensional optimization problem (which typically turns out to be very easy) and as such can be used to compute explicit rigorous unsatisfiability bounds.