One of my favorite bands in extreme music today is dropping their 3rd full length album Friday and I couldn’t be more excited. Wormhole is back with “Almost Human” after absolutely obliterating our earholes with the sophomore release “The Weakest Among Us”. After loving the debut “Genesis”, I was even more obsessed with TWAU. It’s heavy, slammy, a bit technical and a bit dissonant. Well, the boys upped the ante yet again in an even more concise matter. “Almost Human” leaves you longing for more after its almost 26 minute run time split between 8 songs. Wormhole mixes a lot of death metal subgenres and most notably is a top band when it comes to tech slam.
“The tech slam imagery is based on Metroid lore, Doom lore, and we haven’t written a song about it yet, but Alien as well. Those three things are brutal sci-fi universes, so we’re trying to embody that sound. The slam riffs, you can connect the brutal killing of stuff with the brutal chunky riffs; that’s been a match that’s existed since the nineties. So that’s the slam part, and then the tech part was harder to fit that vibe, so we kind of do it differently. I lean into very dissonance-vibe stuff, like Artificial Brain and Dysrhythmia. I think disso-death and heavy, they aren’t usually paired together, even though they should be.”
“And then as far as chasing the vibe,” Noni Kumar adds, “I kind of go about it two ways. With the Metroid soundtrack or universe, that vibe, there’s some dark and gloomy atmosphere, but there’s a lot of pretty imagery as well. We wanted to find a way to match that very pretty, kind of out-there sound cohesively in songs with a very aggressive and guttural approach.”
As a fellow guitarist I have been intrigued at what the Kumar brothers (Sanjay and Noni) come up with each Wormhole release. Well, I’m loving every bit of it. There’s some stellar, melodic guitar solos that caught my ears. The riffs are heavy, dense and extra dissonant. This is what Wormhole was and is, so none of it should be shocking. New to the fold is vocalist Julian Kersey who shines like crazy on this album. The energy he brings is awesome and is undecipherable as ever vocally. Yes, there’s also more Spongebob samples amid their sci-fi and video game themed lore.
“Almost Human” showcases all of Wormhole’s strengths and their best effort yet. The rhythms are great with a solid rhythm section that Wormhole enlists again. Every release has gotten better and improvements have been made. People have different taste(s) when it comes to music and the arts, that’s noted. But man, you can’t go wrong with any of the band’s 3 releases. They are insanely entertaining live, and safe to say I have caught them on every run but one tour.
This high quality slab of tech slam is also their first with legendary record label “Season Of Mist” and is quite the debut for said record label. It packs a serious punch and at the same time is very musically interesting. “Almost Human” showcases how talented they are and how underrated they are. This album should bring them the long deserved death metal street cred they deserve. They have such a large and unique roster Wormhole is another band on an impressive list of bands. This album is out on Friday September 22nd and is best listened to very loudly on high quality speakers.
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