Track By Tracks: Worm Hero - Prewormer (2024)

The EP starts with a sample from the Nefah Nebneints advertisement for Saturation Juice - a tonic that claims it can bring a sheen to individuals' "balls" though the meaning of which is left unclear. It was created by a snake oil company from Andromeda known as the Nelleknoslo Corporation. This advertisement abruptly ends and thus begins the meat of the opening track "Close Encounters of the False Grind" which is a 300bpm horror of very angry, very aggressive, and extremely violent purposeful nonsense. The riffs are at first technically flashy whilst remaining intently emotive leaning into the horror and uncomfortable bleakness of the vague and personal lyricism I am employing on these tracks - it eventually descends into a black metal chord mashing plus intense blast beat cacophony that manages to make far more sense than the rest and leads into the uncanny valley outro sampling David Lynch's sitcom series "Rabbits".

Lyrically the track is describing a vague dichotomy of pop-culture references and something completely alien to experience, the pop-culture is dealt with a sense of urgent violence born from disgust where as the alien experience is dealt with slowly, methodically and as a "hook".

The second track is split into two parts - one of which deals with the subject matter of a reality-crushing mental illness and the depressive episodes resultant from it in a way that is open-ended enough that it might invoke the feeling of a reference to many specific singular mental illness diagnoses. The music starts groovy and unflinching in its pulse which is straight but syncopated and then mirrors itself - a riff that was written by an incredibly talented collaborator and a close friend of mine from Florianopolis, Brazil named Igor da Silva Livramento originally written over 15 years ago. The chaos that follows is all me (minus the repeated intro) and is a deep dive into a more "chordal" yet still dissonant style that I had explored prior to forming this band. It is rhythmically complex but less challenging to play both guitar and drum-wise. There is an outro to this track that was created by O'Fulchy named "The Demolished Man" which will be spoken about at the tail end of this entire thing by O'Fulchy himself.

The third track clocks in at a minute and three seconds and sits as the shortest track on the EP - it is lyrically a homage to Chris Barrie's famous portrayal of his beloved (yet often ridiculed) character Arnold J. Rimmer from the show Red Dwarf (who was also referenced in the title of the previous track). When this human form I currently inhabit was younger I had a crush on his character and this is merely those feelings but expanded upon. The music is fast, chaotic, and aggressively unforgiving, and additionally the fastest track on the EP at 315bpm with heavy death grind and mathcore leaning riffs plus a reprise of the outro stylings of the opening track.

The fourth? We spoke about the fourth before. GO READ THAT!

Oh, and the fifth is a cover of a song called "Merry Christmas, You Spineless Fuck!" by a band from the MySpace era of Cybergrind known as "Cutting Pink With Knives". The music could not be further away from the original band's creation and is uniquely Worm Hero in its idiom and idiosyncrasies - however, the lyrical content sets the tone and structure of the first half and I had always loved this song and related to the lyrics so much that I didn't care about it technically only being a cover due to the lyrics themselves.

- Miss Aleksandra Natalya Shitquark (A Not So Humble Member of the Incandescence Loptrianist Rebellion), from Trasho Compacto Capitol, Planet Junko within the Ardlick Region of the Semibona Cluster, Andromeda Galaxy (Though I actually consider myself a citizen of The X.O. City of the planet Arcadaea in the Is'co region of the Semibona Cluster... though I guess, Earth is fine for now...)

"The Demolished Man" was originally one part of an unfinished EP based on Alfred Bester's novel, an absolute classic that mixes noir, sci-fi, and Freudian psychoanalysis into an unforgettable pulpy cocktail. Every sound on the track comes from a Korg Monologue, even the drums, something I previously did for the entire "Death Begets the City" album by The Surpassment. I wanted to capture the paranoia and uncertainty of the book's main character, so there are lots of repetitive pulsating sounds, two basslines that sludge into each other, and skittery percussion. The lead sound especially sounds kind of melted and unstable: this comes from constantly fluctuating the portamento and sending the synth through a Kangra fuzz-wah. This pedal, which is an especially acidic descendant of the 70s Kay Fuzz-Tone, was used for all the studio tracks on the EP, lending the synth leads a trashy, honky quality that I hope you find suitably nauseating. In keeping with the album as a whole it's all deliberately a bit lo-fi and scuzzy, crackly, a bit rough about the edges. I'm a big fan of early DEVO, especially those stripped-down versions on Hardcore Devo, so it's a bit like that I guess. As you'll hear from the live side of the album I like to keep our live synth sound quite different, ad-libbing with primitive electronics and audio generators a la Hawkwind and Silver Apples, but the idea moving forward is for each new studio release to have its own synth/keyboard character. So after this one who knows, maybe next time we'll have brittle FM pads, or big rock organs, or one of those toy pianos that makes farm animal noises. As long as it's fairly tasteless I'll give it a crack. - Br. O'Fulchy, Tombaugh Regio, Pluto.