As a pretty avid gamer for the better part of 40 years, I see games… everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I can’t be in a park while playing an open world game without thinking I should be harvesting the flowers to make some potion or tonic and I sometimes wonder what passive status effects a new article of clothing will provide (metal shirts give +50 charisma, if you wondered). So as soon as I looked upon Phlegeton’s latest art for his beloved band Wormed, all I could think was that Master Chief was about to have girl troubles.
Autonomously Metamorphosis
Self-replicating
Critical entropy
The relevant part of that narrative for this band and album is the prospect of technology basically being left to evolve, devolve, degrade, and reform on its own. It might be Cortana’s rampancy, the popular hypothesis of gray goo, The Borg, or the works of authors like Alastair Reynolds and Robert Charles Wilson, but countless sci-fi minds and thinkers have tried to extrapolate both the very hopeful and very, very bad possibilities of this subject far into the future.
We’re seeing it play out right now, and it’s already horrifying enough watching generative AI replace human artists, statisticians, copy writers, and likely many other roles, but what might it be like in another, say, 10,000 years? It’s likely to be far weirder and much more unthinkably complex than Joaquin Phoenix having an affair with his iPhone, Commander Data’s “functionality,” or an army of Cylons.
Wormed ‒ specifically vocalist/lyricist/conceptual mastermind Phlegeton ‒ occupies this mindspace, contemplating not just the forms humans might take in the far future, but what the convergence of human evolution and technology (artificial life) running fully wild for several millennia might create, especially when you smash such concepts up with all the ways space is scary and spaghettifying before even introducing sentient life, organic or otherwise. Something led to the Fermi Paradox, and it’s far scarier than you could possibly imagine. Dyson Spheres are child’s play. Gravity, black holes, and spacetime are mere playthings for the galactic hiveminds. And so on in programmed perpetuity. Phlegeton thinks big and clearly has fun (there’s a “resistance is futile” line in there), even if some of what he speaks of is clearly inspired by rather alarming events of our time. After all, sci-fi should have a real world point, even if it’s fun.
A bitstream onslaught, an AI ascends
Blockchain frenzy, a network fortified
Wormed absolutely brings some good sci-fi fun, even if you might need a lyric sheet to fully grasp Phlegeton’s concepts as he delivers his lines sounding a bit like a supremely hungover and gagged Tom Hardy doing a Jabba the Hutt impression while the pitch is constantly adjusted in an attempt to match the sound of cosmic background radiation (that’s a high compliment, by the way). Wormed also brings extremely good death metal, and is one of the current kings according to their fans, which brings us back to Omegon. Why all the stuff about Cortana and robosexuals and self-replicating AI and cosmic godminds? Well, first off because sci-fi is awesome, and second because Omegon is somewhat defined by an organic-inorganic merging (of the [probably] non-sexual nature) where both of the following statements are very true:
- Wormed has never sounded so organic and natural, particularly in the drum department, courtesy of producer Ekaitz Garmendia and mix-master maestro Colin Marston (RIP Menegroth).
- Wormed is operating and writing songs at such an inhuman level that their music is finally catching up to the deep space horrors of their lyrical themes.
It’s a bit of a duality on paper but sounds seamless to the ears. Yes, the drums sound like real, actual drums that you can picture in a room with a person behind the kit with other human bandmates playing actual instruments, and yes, they’ve eased off their industrial wall of sound just so without losing the industrial technicality and execution. But ‒ and here’s the real kicker, folks ‒ Wormed has reached farther into their most impenetrable and Event Horizon LeMarchand Puzzle Box songwriting tendencies, crafting a record that might prove a mite divisive for fans that prefer things slammier but also ought to attract new ears, all while only further perplexing the crowd that already found them too weird.
The source code of creation
A labyrinth of algorithms divine
A language beyond human comprehension
A codebase beyond the confines of time
What is extra impressive is how they continue to evolve within their particular corner of the cosmos despite an ever-changing lineup. Phlegeton and bassist Guillemoth are the only original members remaining, with guitarist Migueloud (around since 2008), drummer V-Kazar (around since 2018), and guitarist D-Kazar (the new guy) completing the band. Whatever is happening with the songwriting dynamic is working. Omegon definitely sounds like Wormed, just… Wormedier.
Very much Wormedier, even if “Automaton Virtulague” kicks Omegon off in very familiar way for the band’s fans: the blasts are relentless, the riffs thicker than Uranus [editor’s note: the Last Rites team voted to keep that line in so it’s everyone’s fault], and the vocals sound like they’ve just hit the gravity well of a gas giant. But the song never quite allows you to get comfortable, or at least as comfortable as you would expect to be while listening to Wormed, as the band’s proggier tendencies are on overload, hitting the stops and starts with extra intensity, while using shimmery, crystalline hooks more than in the past. “Pareidolia Robotica” pushes this even further, being as heavy as Decapitated but also opening up into wider, stranger spaces. Later, some Meshuggah-y riffs are paired with V-Kazar doing preposterous things to his drum kit, and at one point a rather catchy part is slightly deconstructed as part of the song, as if one tiny part of the background code was altered to give it a different perspective. Plus robot vocals. Gotta have those. It’s a lot, and it’s wild.
Reshape cosmos
Multiply and expand
Conflicting
Reshape cosmos
Multiply
Which really is a good way to describe Omegon as a whole. Even at just under 41 minutes this is Wormed’s longest record, and they pack every second with details. Riffs range from the delightfully knuckle dragging to blindingly technical, with staccato pick scrapes and lightning fast widdles and flashes of shreddy leads tossed in for style; V-Kazar’s drumming is positively insane, using varyingly delivered blasts (lots of transitions from 16th notes to triplets), snare rolls, hi-hat shuffles, and a zillion other tricks to add impacts and nuance to every passage; and Phlegeton gives his most diverse vocal performance to date, adding more textural moments and “space spoken word” to his already gloriously deep gutturals and nutty “OOHREEHRUUHHHHRR” lines. It’s also stupidly brutal, with the extra touch of eerie space only further emphasizing how heavy this band can hit when everything is pounding like the Late Heavy Bombardment.
It’s a pretty relentless onslaught, but Wormed is also finding little details to distinguish between their songs more than ever, or at least to help lead you through this labyrinthine nebula. (Every sci-fi plot with a nebula: “We can’t go into that nebula… …well, I guess we have to go into that nebula.) “Virtual Teratogenesis” is as neck-wrecking as anything here (aided by an irresistible, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it thrash hook), but also features parts of actual, honest-to-goodness beauty, even with the blasts. “Protogod” goes crazy thick and mechanical as if its willing something into existence all before dissolving into the digital everything. “Pleoverse Omninertia” pulls the band more to a Gorguts-by-way-of-Artificial Brain vibe, again deking the listener into thinking an idea is there to stay instead of just another piece of code pushing the program forward.
On the atmospheric side of things, the use of clean guitars in “Gravitational Servo Matrix” and the title track pushes Wormed into interstellar space perhaps more than any other touch, making them almost (almost) sound like what you’d expect Esoteric to be if they were a brutal, technical death metal band. Seem like an odd connection? Maybe it is, but that’s the beauty of insane music that allows an insane mind to wander, insanely. They at least share a mutual love of the absolute horrors of space.
Disrupting, destroying with force
With arcane keys unlocking gates, unseen
Disjointed remnants
If the point hasn’t been emphasized enough, Omegon is a complex and dizzying album. It’s easily the most demanding of Wormed’s already rather perplexing output and yet also likely their most mature and accomplished work. They were always a really unique band operating pretty far from standard brutal death metal, but their increased adoption of eerie dissonance and space, vocal layering, and wacky/whiplashing song structures has only furthered their stylistic separation from the pack. Omegon might take more spins than Exodromos or Krigshu to fully sink in, but once it does, set course directly for the V-Ger cloud and get ready to sacrifice some Redshirts to the whims of some very ancient and incomprehensible plans for mankind.
After all, Wormed is not concerned with your earthbound worries about AI like the “blurring of artistic credentials,” “rapid advance of late stage capitalism’s tendency for trimming all labor costs,” or simple things like the “potential downfall of the criminal justice system.” (Scream if you’re ready for inadmissible video evidence!) Well, they probably are concerned with such things (as we all should be), which is why they make this music, but their concepts extend millions of lightyears into the farthest reaches of space and across such supposed barriers as time. So let the sweetheart bands write songs about Master Chief being lonely. Leave the galactic techno-godbrain pulsar-punished sagas to a band that has the unflinching vision and deadly death metal worthy of handling such material.
Wormed’s evolution continues. Long may they reign
In the Pleoverse Omninertia
Where galaxies and code collide