If you think wormrot are living high on the hog after signing to Earache, a major metal label, think again. When I talk to Rasyid on Wormrot’s second U.S. tour, the guitarist is living on $4 a day. He gives me a startlingly precise lesson on fast food economics. “With four dollars, I can buy two McDoubles and save the rest of the $4 for dinner. If not, I can buy three cheeseburgers. But we’ve been hitting Church’s Chicken. Church’s Chicken has this deal every Monday and Tuesday: 99 cents per chicken [piece]. So, we’ll get two chicken [pieces] for $2. That’s awesome, man! We are always trying to hunt for the deals.” It may seem incongruous for a grindcore band to love fast food. While Wormrot is a way for its members to vent frustrations, Rasyid doesn’t think of the band in political terms. “I’m in a grindcore band because it plays fast and it plays heavy, not because of anything else.” And poverty is the great trump card. “I have to eat, man. I’m in a touring band. I need to eat as cheap as I can.”

Maybe he’d eat better if CDs sold more. “If you’re in a band, and you’re touring, you would realize that people don’t really buy CDs; they buy vinyl and T-shirts,” he reveals. Also, Wormrot earn nothing from digital sales for their new album Dirge; to combat a leak, Earache released Dirge as a free, legal download. Rasyid agrees with the move, however. Only several days after the download went up, he says, “We noticed some people know our [new] songs already. So, that’s a good thing, man.”

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