Style: Post-Metal, Progressive Metal, Black Metal, Hardcore (Mixed Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Venom Prison, Rolo Tomassi, Svalbard
Country: Norway
Release date: 6 March 2026

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The EP can be a tricky thing. On one hand, the format allows bands to compile and release smaller slices of music faster than assembling a full-length album, feeding both the desires of their creative output and satiating an ever-ravenous audience. Bands like Spiritbox have taken advantage of this model with positive results: between debut full-length Eternal Blue (2021) and follow-up Tsunami Sea (2025), they released Rotoscope and The Fear of Fear in 2022 and 2023, respectively—not to mention their initial audience-building run (Spiritbox (2017) and Singles Collection (2019)). While this is a great strategy in a content-hungry world (who doesn’t love more of a good thing?), there are, of course, downsides. Chiefly, that the EP often exists as a mere musical snapshot, often lacking the focus and staying power of the fully-formed LP, and as such risks feeling incomplete comparatively as a cover-to-cover listening experience.

Coming fresh off their 2025 full-length debut Man Under Erasure, post-prog quintet Feversea have returned in lightning time with a little EP by the big name of Wormwood in the Veins of the World, keeping their vitriolic, fatalistic, post-y blend of black metal and hardcore present and pleasant. Man Under Erasure was an engaging blender of post-infused styles ranging from black metal, doom, even occasional bursts of punk, fronted by a properly vicious and ethereal vocal performance courtesy of frontwoman Ada Lønne Emberland. However, despite a forty-four-minute runtime and enough variety to keep things interesting song-to-song, I found my attention occasionally threatened. Sometimes, tighter constraints force an artist to distill until only the essential essence remains. Packing an eighteen-minute runtime across four tracks, does Wormwood in the Veins of the World offer Feversea at their purest form of expression, or has this accelerated timeline left impurities lingering?

Feversea waste none of their limited space; from the opening title track all the way to “Sounding the Third Trumpet”, these nihilistic Norwegians whip up a frenzy of piledriver blastbeats, larynx-shredding screams, and roiling, white noise riffwork. They sound ready to herald the extinction of Humanity,¹ soundtracking the event with bursts of searing black metal amidst funereal dirges of Gothic post-metal and doom. Flecks of Svalbard’s post-hardcore / blackgaze fusion emerge within the strident wailing of the guitars on tracks like “Bileblack” and in drummer Jeremie Malezieux’s punky rhythms (“Wormwood in the Veins of the World”, as well). Emberland’s cleans take on an almost hymnal or ritualistic delivery a’la Forlorn, pressed back behind the production’s warm gray haze, while her harshes cut through the fuzz like a sacrificial knife through the heart of the world. A particularly tasty moment is Aleksander Johnsen Solberg’s grinding basstone as he pulls an almost upbeat hardcore groove alongside Malezieux’s drums (“Bileblack”), before guitarists Isak Lønne Emberland and Alexander Lange blow in like a sandstorm, chipping and slicing new grooves into the mix with their aural assault.

Bearing in mind that Wormwood in the Veins of the World was recorded during the Man Under Erasure sessions, it’s worth noting how the EP avoids sounding like Man 2: The Erasening, thanks to the heightened focus on hardcore elements that invite favorable connectivity to last year’s Fleshwork (Pupil Slicer), and a vicious streak of mournful aggression that made Svalbard’s body of work so winsome. Like the wormwood infesting the earth’s veins, Feversea infuse their compositions with a caustic woe, a sense of anger, despair, and resignation that is felt across all four tracks, creeping and clasping with relentless engagement. As a result, there’s less of the overt doom tendencies found on the debut, with the atmospheric synthwork taking a backseat as well, but the band make a solid case for this slight re-tuning.

My only real complaint with Wormwood in the Veins of the World is that by the time “Sounding the Third Trumpet” rounds out, I’ve found myself wishing for one more song to complete the experience. Wormwood… whips by in a rush, and “Sounding the Third Trumpet” feels abrupt in its conclusion, as if maybe the band had to transmute it into a final song in an effort to convey an end to the EP. As it stands, Wormwood in the Veins of the World feels like a teaser trailer to a larger body of work; entertaining to engage with yet feeling tantalizingly incomplete on its own. Again, given these tracks came about during the recording of their debut, this feels like a natural and understandable consequence. But with the EP seemingly signaling a pivot towards harsher waters for Feversea, I can’t help but wish that this felt like more of a short film than a trailer.

So, in short, does Wormwood in the Veins of the World beat the EP allegations of feeling incomplete? No. However, that’s light bruising considering the general success of Feversea’s slight tweaking to their post- blender of nihilistic sonic soufflé. I’m a big fan of the brash and the bleak, and if future Feversea is looking like something filtered between the rocks of Svalbard and Pupil Slicer, then those are waters I will very much look forward to wading through.

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Recommended tracks: All Gall is Divided, Bileblack
You may also like: Forlorn, current Pupil Slicer, …And Oceans
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Dark Essence Records

Feversea is:
– Isak Lønne Emberland (guitars)
– Ada Lønne Emberland (vocals)
– Alexander Lange (guitars)
– Jeremie Malezieux (drums)
– Aleksander Johnsen Solberg (bass)

1. They wrote a nice little bit about it on their Bandcamp. ↩︎