WORMED – OMEGON

(DGR dives over the event horizon of the new album from Spanish cyber-slam destroyers Wormed)

There was a sort of mad cackle that emerged from me after the first few runs of Wormed‘s newest issuance from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

It was maybe after the third spin of Omegon that I couldn’t help but laugh, a semi-rueful one somewhere between Ralph Wiggum’s “I’m in danger!” chuckle and one that was in awe of the band somehow managing to unleash yet another disc of mind bending tempo shifts and instrumental destruction.

Honestly, what it comes down to is the question facing every writer when they’re handed a Wormed released (Omegon being my second) which is… “how in the unholy hell am I even going to describe this thing?“.

So we start from the start: Wormed are the sort of hybridized Death Metal band, whose sound – which lies somewhere in a malformed and twisted sphere comprising Tech Death, Brutal Death, Slam, dissonance, and even some strangely proggy synth sections – could best be described simply as “Extremity”.

2024 marks twenty-five years of existence for the band, but the Wormed that you know of now really came into its own within the last decade and a half, beginning with 2013’s Exodromos.

Prior to that the group had only issued forth one album (2003’s Planisphaerium) and you’ll hear a lot on that album which the Wormed crew would eventually cement into their sound on 2013’s Exodromos – neck-snapping time changes, hurricanes of guitar, relentlessly brutal drumming, and vocals that promise they’re dealing with high-minded science-fiction concepts bur verge on sounding like cars being launched through the tail end of a wind tunnel.

It was 2016’s Krighsu – written about here, because we’re old – that took that sound and launched it into the stratosphere. The group not only refined the sound of Exodromos but also somehow transformed it into something even more unrelentingly-precise, technically-proficient, and dark-matter dense (with 2019’s Metaportal EP subsequently delivering another four songs of endless musical maelstrom and blue-hued cover art that we also took the time to write about).

And it becomes pretty fucking clear from moment one that Wormed really aren’t interested in deviating much from that approach with this album. It’s still an unstoppable, high-intensity, high-minded grey goo apocalypse but, by that same coin-flip, Omegon is a far more free-wheeling and loose album than you might expect, packing in a few surprises along the way and even allowing the instruments to have a little breathing room.

That being said, Wormed waste little time getting right to it – there’s zero build-up, no lofty scene setting, the band just kind of crash through your apartment wall yelling “fuck you, let’s go!” and launch right into the album’s opening number “Automaton Virtulague”.

You can somewhat guess what Wormed are doing by choosing to open Omegon like that – part of it is the ‘welcome back to the fray’ songwriting, which breaks out everything Wormed are known for and crams it all into one song for a densely-packed “four minutes in a dryer with a cinder-block” style Death Metal experience, in the process laying the groundwork for “Protogod” and “Virtual Teratogenesis” to follow.

The other part is something new to Omegon, as Wormed are using “Automaton Virtulague” to lay the foundation for much of the album – in particular, one of the things you’ll note is how the drumming has received some serious spotlight this time around.

Wormed have had some incredible drummers in their time – it’s a requirement really, to hang with music like how they write – but it is both surgical and constantly focused on throughout Omegon this time around.

At the same time, there’s a sort of free-wheeling chaos to Omegon this time – while previous discs turned on a dime and snapped necks with how sudden the machine-like tempo changes and song shifts were, this time around the band seemed to have breathed a little more organic life into them.

It’s still mind-bogglingly heavy – Wormed exist in supernova state almost all the time – but Omegon is surprisingly pliable and bends a little bit away from the expected formula at times, to the point where certain songs here might actually catch you off guard following the eight-year gap between this album and Krighsu.

Omegon‘s earliest surprise comes in the pairing of “Pleoverse Omninertia” and “Malignant Nexus” – the former oscillating between knuckle-dragging slam sessions and high-speed cyber-theatrics only to take a sudden turn, just when you think you have a handle on things, with a combination of multi-angled melody and actual spoken lyrics that you can easily understand(!) while the latter then expands on this further before launching listeners back into the hydrogen storm for one final minute of apocalyptic ass-kicking that ends on a pretty fucking hard stop which tells you that part one of the album is definitively over.

Save for that mid-section, Wormed still keep things neatly tucked into the three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half minute range, and the only time the group truly stretch beyond this is with the titular “Omegon” which closes out the album with a full seven-plus minutes of musical hailstones the size of buses slamming into the side of your house, even resurrecting the slowly eerie, bent guitar effect and synth-bending ambience of “Malignant Nexus” to tie the record together even more tightly.

Sure, “Aetheric Transdimensionalization” errs a bit on the longer side, both in title and time – it’s one of two to brush up to near-five minutes – but Wormed make full use of that opportunity to build upon the album’s defining impression of bellowing vocals and baffling drum work by morphing and mutating the ground underneath the song constantly (something which is fully in line with the band’s ongoing trend of getting a little more experimental in the back half of all their releases).

Ultimately, though, Omegon is Wormed at the nexus of being both chaotically free-wheeling and so surgically precise that they could qualify for employment at a hospital, and while there’s a sense of familiarity to it (the core of the Wormed songwriting style is still here and makes up about 90% of the album’s weight) somehow even the smallest of iterations within the overwhelming brutality still manage to surprise.

A whole discography run of Wormed is almost an exercise in listening to a combination of pulsar recordings and a churning gravel pit, and while Omegon retains that suffocating atmosphere by sheer virtue of the band constantly applying pressure on the listener – whether with some new thing coming out of left field or just through sheer, battering brutality – there’s a loose deftness to this album, especially when compared to the nanomolecular precision of their previous records, which indicates that the group have finally let some of their more chaotic musical ideas expand into their own star nursery.

At forty-minutes, Omegon seems to go by in a bit of a blur at first – there’s so much happening within each song that it feels like you don’t really find your feet with it until you’re on listen number four or five.

Thankfully this is something you’ll probably achieve surprisingly fast because by the time the title track finally spins down the band are already spinning back up to wreck your speakers with “Automaton Virtulague” all over again!