Wormed

Krighsu

Shedders and shredders

dB Rating: 9/10

Release Date: March 18th, 2016
Label: Season of Mist

Wormed have managed to place themselves in the small company of interesting tech-death bands that don’t release yearly wankfests and call them “albums.” With their latest, Krighsu, it’s likely that metal’s most be-sweated subgenre will have its “fuck calculator death metal” detractors, but Wormed’s clout isn’t just about obvious skill. It doesn’t require much effort for a metal band to look up and use the weirdest terminology from science fiction’s robotic underbelly, or scavenge the last few unused microscopic scraps of Lovecraftian mythos left for the pickin’. In similar fashion to genre icons like Gorguts—who have ended up on the “memorable” side of tech-death’s relatively brief history—Wormed’s music is executed with such technical mastery that it becomes something else altogether.

Any fussiness over the “too much tech, not enough heart” aspect of Wormed makes absolute sense, but when your music/theme revolves around the concept that you/your band are, in fact, creating a science fiction mythos, it’s not exactly far-fetched to assume that your music will likely and hopefully sound like the score to a Xenomorph art house film. There is no blending or godforsaken fusion of raw and rigid with Krighsu. With Wormed, there is an exact methodology to the music so calculatingly implemented and with such dominating force that does, in fact, sound completely and distinctively alien.

—Jonathan K. Dick
Review originally printed in the April 2016 issue.