WORM Vinilo y CD

Review: In 2021 and 2022 respectively, extreme metal label 20 Buck Spin closed out their year of releases with firstly, a full-length from melancholic dream-doom death metallers Dream Unending, and secondly, the complex, blackened prog-death outliers Worm. In a conspiratorial twist to round a trifecta of year-ending projects, Starpath offers a split LP of sorts boasting 20 minutes of new material from both acts. The A-side delivered by Dream Unending imbues gothic post-punk melodies into their cosmic compositions whilst Worm pour their oily, grim malevolence over towering monoliths of cavernous doom.

Review: Following up 2021's exceptional breakthrough album, Foreverglade, Floridian death-doom hybridisers Worm return with the four track 26-minute mini-LP Bluenothing, which majorly increases focus on their more atmospheric tendencies. While the cavernous despair and cosmic horror remain firmly intact, the band embrace the echoing abyssal sonics with moments of delicate despondency from acoustic segments to neo-classical arrangements, serving as a distorted epilogue to its malevolent predecessor.

Review: It took just a year and a half for Florida's Worm to follow up their widely acclaimed doom, funeral, scary-men-grunting-over-engine-room-guitars album Gloomlord with this latest effort. In the world of modern music, that's actually relatively rapid (long gone are the days when rock bands would pump out one LP per year minimum), and yet the contents of Foreverglade feel remarkably un-rushed and, perhaps not patient - that would be a misleading way to describe such commanding and uncompromising sounds - but nevertheless meticulous in planning and production. While the uninitiated may be tricked into believing that this kind of heavyweight, oppressive-sounding noise has one track, the truth is what makes Worm's new offering so refreshing and essential is the way it pays respect to a gamut of metal, playing with tempos and time signatures and generally wanting to f*!k stuff up in a way that only true artists seem capable of.