Review: Wormed- Omegon

Style: brutal death metal, technical death metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Origin, Suffocation, Cryptopsy
Country: Madrid, Spain
Release date: 5 July 2024

The Spanish death metallers Wormed have returned from 2019’s Metaportal with Omegon, the latest installment in their sprawling brutal death metal space opera dubbed for the universe-altering substance central to its plot. Civilizations vie for power, galactic battles ensue, and the fate of the universe lies in the hands of Krighsu, a timeline hacker. But who are we kidding? We’re not here for convoluted sci-fi stories. I can’t even follow the lyrics if I’m staring right at them! We’re here for the convoluted brutal death metal! Thank goodness Wormed is just as good at it as they are at making my eyes glaze over from album liner exposition.

From the first notes of “Automaton Virtulague,” the type of album the Omegon is gonna be becomes immediately apparent; your neck will be sore by the time you’re done listening. Every riff locks into place with a neck-snapping heft, and each transition is punctuated by a piercing groove thanks to V-Kazar’s tighter-than-a-camel’s-ass-in-a-sandstorm drum fills and Guillemoth’s low-key bass grooves. In fact it’s these transitions, like in the ripper “Pleoverse Omninertia” and the standout “Protogod” that became my favorite moments on repeat listens. They always groove so damn hard. Admittedly, much of the content here is familiar territory for Wormed, but the level of maturity and nuance that each moment is approached with makes them worthwhile.

Recorded by Ekaitz Garmendia and mixed by the ever-amazing Colin Marston, Omegon is an utterly stellar and natural sounding album. Every song and moment has a veritable sheen of quality as each note played rings out clearly and each drum head hit reverberates organically and beautifully. However, this is where some of my issues with the album begin. While the mix found on Omegon may be technically sound (and is something that countless other underground bands would kill for), I do not think it is the best fit for a band like Wormed. For one, I can count on one hand the amount of times that the riffage on this album rises above the lowest octave possible on guitar; for the vast majority of the album, the guitars stay low, accenting the admittedly wicked drum patterns but the melodic content from one moment seems practically interchangeable with any other. With such a natural mix, the inconsequential nature of many of the riffs stands out in a way that I feel could have been avoided had a more heavy-handed production style been employed. To most, the organic mix will be non-factor and even more likely a plus, but I’d personally like to reserve this mixing style for the Ad Nauseams and Heaving Earths of the world. One positive of the mix, however, is that when Wormed chooses to add some melody back into their brutal death metal mixture, the result is often stellar.

There was a point in my first listen through of Omegon where I was completely enraptured by the potential of what Wormed had created thus far. The album’s first four tracks had been fairly straight ahead (at least in terms of technical brutal death metal), each building on the last’s complexity and intensity, but the interlude track “Malignant Nexus” showed a marked change. It took the deluge of riffage and blast beats that had run through the previous tracks and infused it with a vivid sense of atmosphere and melodicism. The blast beats were still there—this is Wormed we’re talking about—but they were now recontextualized. And this trend continued in the next track “Virtual Teratogenesis” which saw Wormed try their hand at a more straight ahead style melodic groove that I feel paid off immensely, mostly thanks to its masterful placement within the album.

Unfortunately, the trend signified by the previously mentioned tracks does not continue into the back half of the album, which instead feels comfortable treading the same territory as the front. On shorter tracks like “Gravitational Servo Matrix,” this is mostly fine; the music that Wormed creates is still high quality stuff, but on longer tracks like the closer and title track “Omegon” the formula becomes stale when surrounded by intros and outros seemingly padded for length than for any other creative reason. In a perfect world, Omegon would have been one or maybe even two tracks shorter and it would have delved farther into the melodic aspects that I felt it began teasing at its midway point, but as it stands the album is just decent, content treading similar territory to the band’s previous outputs and not adventurous enough to distinguish itself in its own merit.

Recommended tracks: Protogod, Virtual Teratogenesis
You may also like: Replicant, Malignancy, Afterbirth, Cytotoxin
Final verdict: 6/10

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Label: Season of Mist – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Wormed is:
– Phlegeton (vocals)
– Migueloud (guitars)
– D-Kazar (guitars)
– Guillemoth (bass)
– V-Kazar (drums)