Phantom Slaughter, the architect behind Worm, wants to make it very clear that his band is here to represent Florida. “The places I dwell in for inspiration are mostly deserted swamplands and heavily forested nature trails,” he told No Clean Singing in 2020, rhapsodizing about his state’s history as a former death metal mecca. The band’s breakthrough record, last year’s enveloping Foreverglade, took its name from the state’s most famous national park, channeling the region’s dank bogs and lurking fauna with its murky, noxious approach to death-doom. Chorus-soaked guitar melodies and ghastly synthesizers weaved through pillars of chugging, funereal sludge, as Phantom Slaughter’s vocals veered between guttural death metal growls and piercing black metal shrieks, swapping styles like a python veering its way through the mud.
This affinity for switching between genres might be Worm’s biggest strength, and their new mini-album, Bluenothing, charts yet another new direction, pulling from the hallowed halls of symphonic black metal. It’s a tricky thing to pull off: Without finely textured production, the style can easily sound cheap in a way that betrays its supposed epicness (perhaps the reason why the subgenre has remained largely untapped even as black metal has surged in popularity over the last decade). But the sound makes a natural fit for Worm’s gloomy, multicolored approach to metal. Bringing their lush, crystalline synthesizers in tow, Phantom Slaughter and his fellow anonymous bandmates adorn their winding headbangers with haunted artificial choirs straight out of Emperor’s 1994 landmark In the Nightside Eclipse, descending into a gothic dreamworld where virtuosic guitar shredding rules above all.
Bluenothing’s first two tracks were recorded during the Foreverglade sessions and carry that album’s looming sense of build. The title track is the standout of the two, clocking in at 11 minutes and trudging like a grim march into a thick fog. After commencing with a wickedly sleek guitar solo (members Wroth Septentrion and Nihilistic Manifesto take turns on lead guitar duty throughout the album), the track slowly sharpens its gaseous atmosphere piece by piece. Lumbering guitars give way to charging blastbeats as the band’s riffs reach a pummeling climax by the halfway point, before a sickly church organ disperses the track into the air, shrouding everything in an unholy light. Worm’s keen sense of dynamics keeps the track breathing as it winds its way through one movement after another, demonstrating all the paths their sound can take in a sweeping reverie.
Worm’s unpredictability is key to their music, which is why the doomy “Centuries of Ooze II” loses a bit of steam as it wades through its seven minutes without evolving much (despite opening with a gloriously chilling wall of cathedral organs). But on the two freshly recorded tracks, Worm push themselves to new extremes. After the misty interlude of “Invoking the Dragonmoon” sets the scene with its bewitching synthesizers, “Shadowside Kingdom” unveils Worm’s more blackened, symphonic sound. Where the music on Foreverglade took us into a world as viscous and overgrown as the marshes that inspired it, “Shadowside Kingdom” is ornate, its shimmering acoustic guitars providing a melodic anchor until three minutes in when the entire track is torn asunder. As craven guitar licks spiral around rapid-fire blast beats, the band builds to a crushing breakdown, suddenly morphing into a thrash metal group for a few bars before reaching a grand, mystifying finale, their guitars soloing as if howling at the moon. Even when they’re pulling from styles outside their wheelhouse, Worm adorn each one in glimmering color until it becomes their own.
