Now available on vinyl.

Avant-garde psychedelic sci-fi slam-death? One of the few contemporary bands to come out of the "brutal" death metal underground that I've found to be at all worthwhile, Spain's Wormed have been offering a very strange, ultra-complex sound for over a decade now; although they've had a couple of crushing EPs come out over the past decade (like 2010's batshit insane Quasineutrality and a three-way split with Goratory and Vomit Remnants) and have made some notable appearances at extreme metal festivals like Maryland Deathfest, this is actually the first new album from Wormed in ten years, and sees the band pushing their sound into even more dizzying extremes of complexity and heaviness. They take the slamming, bone-crushing power of that whole Suffocation / Devourment / Cryptopsy end of the death metal spectrum and blasts it through a stargate, creating a vicious strain of mutant death metal woven from quantum physics hallucinations and eldritch alien horrors vomiting out of deep-space wormholes. On the band's long-awaited second album Exodromos, Wormed's vicious angular metallic crunch is further slathered in electronic textures and glitchy ambience and fused to confusing, near incomprehensible time signatures, and fronted by a singer who shifts between bestial pig-grunt vocals and an utterly bizarre, seemingly pitch-shifted gurgle that gives one the impression that you are, in all actuality, listening to the vocalizations of a giant insect. All of that would make this stuff weird enough, and put it right up my sci-fi metal lovin' alley, but Wormed take these concepts and musical complexity into such extremes that it manages to transcend the brutal death metal sound and becomes something much more outre.

A bizarre concept album about the last surviving human being left in the wake of a universe-collapsing wormhole, this is some of the most complex, mind-melting death metal I've heard since the new Gorguts album. The songs on Exodromos spiral out into seemingly endless riff-whirlwinds, the blenderized rhythms and discordant riffing welded together with a malicious, reptilian intent, each song riddled with sudden and violently jarring tempo and time signature changes, the riffs as fucked-up and atonal as anything off of Gorguts's no wave-damaged death metal classic Obscura. But Wormed are just as skilled at suddenly dropping into a bone-crushing groove that feels like the sound of that Hadron Collidor starting to warm up, or slip into a vicious, stuttering, twisted math-metal workout. The drumming on this album is fucking mind-blowing, super technical and precise, virtuosic even, often lurching into sickening stop/start arrangements, guiding Wormed's churning deep-space chaos out of the angular, ultra-blasting progdeath and into some killer classic metal riffage or sweeping melodic guitars that offer a striking contrast with the jagged discordant blast. The album is littered with tracks like "Solar Neutrinos", which combines creepy spoken word passage and looping guitar ambience with weird synthesizer effects, an interlude amid the crushing mechanized death metal, and there are several short electronic noisescapes that start and end various tracks. On "Multivectorial Reionization", they detonate some robotic Meshuggah-esque deathchug that's so heavy that it'll rumble the walls of your stomach, and "Spacetime Ekleipsis Vorticity" slips into breathless torrents of cyborg-calliope fretboard insanity. More of that crazed prog-shred shows up on "Stellar Depopulation", and some of those rapid-fire tremolo picked melodies have a staccato feel that sort of reminds me of some of Mick Barr's (Orthrelm) stuff, like on the majestic closer "Xenoverse Discharger". These guys have turned into one of the most interesting tech-death bands out there, blending their downtuned bone-rattling extremity with epic kosmische electronics and the result sounds like nothing else. Exodromos comes highly recommended to fans of everything from latter-day Gorguts to Ulcerate and the sci-fi death metal of Nocturnus, Demilich and Timeghoul.