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In late 2022, not long after the release of Worm’s Bluenothing EP, project mastermind Phantom Slaughter thought he was being phished. Someone claiming to be Marty Friedman, the former Megadeth and Cacophony guitarist and trailblazing solo artist, had apparently just heard the record, and they slid into Worm’s Instagram DMs with an all-caps reaction: “I LOVE BLUENOTHING!”
“I was like, ‘No, this is a spam account. This can’t be real,’” Slaughter recalls. “[But] it was actually his account, and I had to take maybe an hour to come to my senses and reply. He saw the guitar artistry in Bluenothing, and I guess that resonated with him. I don’t know how he found it. It doesn’t make any sense that he would even know who we are.”
A lot more people are finding their way to Worm these days. The project that Phantom Slaughter started in Miami in the early 2010s has evolved from a sludgy death/doom solo project into a conceptually and sonically ambitious black metal duo. Guitarist Wroth Septentrion (né Phil Tougas, also of Exxûl, Atramentus, Chthe’ilist, and more) joined the fold in 2021, which allowed Slaughter to fully focus on vocals and keyboards. Bluenothing was Septentrion’s first recording with Worm, and his expressive, neoclassical-inspired playing provided the breakthrough the band needed to crawl out of the swamp and ascend into the sky. (It’s no wonder Friedman, himself no stranger to neoclassicism, responded so strongly to Bluenothing.) Last year, Worm signed to Century Media, completing their ascent from the deep underground (Iron Bonehead) through metal’s tastemaker indie ranks (20 Buck Spin) to one of the genre’s marquee labels.
Nearly 15 years after Worm’s first demo, their steady evolution has brought them to the gates of the Necropalace. The band’s fourth full-length (and eighth release overall) is their crowning achievement to date. Necropalace synthesizes Phantom Slaughter and Wroth Septentrion’s myriad influences into an ornate fantasia of symphonic black metal, funereal death/doom, and face-melting shred guitar. Its entire hour-plus runtime feels like an extended flex, but it saves its biggest flex for the final track — Worm superfan Marty Friedman, who hardly ever plays on metal records anymore, contributes lead guitar work to the closing movement of “Witchmoon (The Infernal Masquerade).”
“I always had that in mind, [that] when we have the full-length, I’m gonna ask [Friedman] to be, in some form, on the album,” Phantom Slaughter says. “I have to ask him. If he says no, he’ll say no, but I have that contact. My message won't be unseen if I send that, because the Instagram chat is open. At least he’ll leave me on read, you know?”
Friedman didn’t leave him on read, and his work on “Witchmoon” wound up serving as Necropalace’s capstone. The solo section that Friedman plays on was actually written as a call-and-response tradeoff between guitar and keys, but even with Eternity’s End virtuoso Jimmy Pitts committed to play the keyboard solos, the idea wasn’t quite working.
“When we heard it, we kind of thought, ‘We need this to be a little bit more evil-sounding,’” Septentrion recalls. “I think it’s not so much the phrasing, it was just the sound. It was a worthy experiment. But Marty Friedman’s influence on this record is all over the place. Both Cacophony albums [and] all his solo albums [were a] big inspiration on all of Necropalace. Not just the leads, but how everything is: the chord progressions, the melodies, everything. So it made sense. His DNA’s all over the damn record, so let’s just make that a reality.”
Slaughter and Septentrion both contend that Worm hit a new level of compositional sophistication with Necropalace. After Bluenothing and the Starpath split with Dream Unending, they had the reps as cowriters to start communicating ideas on a deeper, almost instinctive level. Both described experiencing something like co-synesthesia, where the intended mood of a song would first reveal itself as a color, which the two would then work to express within a sympathetic musical mode. There’s no technical, theory-based link between chord progressions and colors, yet when Slaughter and Septentrion would make references to each other in those terms, they almost always agreed.
“We never got stuck, that was the crazy thing. These things were just coming out naturally. It was a lot of in-the-moment stuff,” Slaughter says. “We did have some riffs on our own sides that we presented to each other, but they would always be molded. Those riffs would end up changing at some point.”
Much of Necropalace was written remotely, with Septentrion contributing ideas from his home in Quebec and Slaughter working from Worm HQ in Florida. Still, in-person collaboration played a critical role. Since Septentrion joined the band, Worm have started playing live, which has had a few crucial effects on the way they function. First and most importantly, playing the old songs onstage allowed Slaughter to hear which parts get a big crowd response, which in turn led to Necropalace being the first Worm album with repeating parts and choruses. “In the back of my mind, when a riff was being made, I thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna crush live.’ I never thought that before,” Slaughter says.
Being on tour together has also allowed Slaughter and Septentrion to give each other real-time feedback on the music they’re working on. “Witchmoon” and the slyly proggy “The Night Has Fangs” were both shaped in the van on Worm’s 2024 tour supporting Gatecreeper, and when the band got back to Florida at the end of that run, they brought their road-sharpened chops into the final recording sessions for Necropalace.
“[Septentrion] was there when I was working on those keyboard parts, and he knows more about music theory than me, so I could pick his brain, and I could ask him for certain things,” Slaughter says. “It changes the way that I view playing synthesizers. I always have that in mind now, that there could be more theory to it, or certain melodies can be built even crazier. I think him being in the band is allowing everything to be more musical, and that’s definitely how I want things to be.”
One of the places Necropalace’s musicality shines is in the role of the guitar solos. Septentrion admits that, on Bluenothing, he let his solos drive the structure of the songs rather than making them fit within a more complete architecture. The title track of the EP, he says, “feels like it’s just going from one solo to the next.”
“I think on Necropalace, as much as there are a lot of solos, they’re treated as a point of climax, rather than necessarily being the sole focal point of a song,” he continues. “The song has a main theme that’s the main focal point of the song, and the solo acts more as a mere moment amongst others. There’s peaks and valleys in every song, and solos can act as a sort of tool, to make a movement conclude. [But] also, there’s always a youthful aggression, a youthful arrogance to it. If it doesn’t have that, then what are you doing? I think this record has that balance. There’s an element of showmanship and flash to it, but I think we were conscious about where we put these solos, and it’s often gonna be to serve the song.”
Often — but not always. An undeniable part of Necropalace’s appeal is its excess, its willingness to let a song stretch to 10 or 12 or 14 minutes as it works through a barrage of riffs, solos, keyboard flourishes, spoken-word interludes, time changes, tempo shifts, and obscure extreme metal references. Phantom Slaughter is a metalhead, first and foremost, and Worm’s songs often feel like him trying to communicate his deep, genuine enthusiasm for this music to the listener. It’s a cliché when artists say they’re just making what they’d want to listen to, but in Worm’s case, it feels apt.
The band’s Instagram Stories are an extension of that philosophy. They serve as a long-running digital zine with a circulation of 32,000, highlighting underground music that informs the Worm aesthetic in some way. A story from the day I interviewed Slaughter and Septentrion is pretty typical: Against a red velvet background, Slaughter spread his physical copies of Windham Hill Music’s A Winter’s Solstice IV compilation, Malignant Eternal’s Tårnet, Vim Patior’s Magni Nominis Umbra, and Astriaal’s Glories of the Nightsky demo tape. The song playing over that tableau was Anathema’s “Forgotten Hopes,” from the underrated Judgement album. That’s half a day’s listening sorted, if you’re inclined to follow Slaughter down the rabbit hole.
“I’m a student of all of this, and what gets me most excited is when I read about my favorite artists’ favorite artists,” he says. “I think that’s very important to give back to people. I’ve had people say, ‘This link that you showed me inspired me to start a band.’ So, I feel like it’s a genuine way of giving back and sharing.”
“And I just love the idea of people tripping out to an obscure album from ’96 that has like 100 views on YouTube. I get a kick out of that.”
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Lueenas – “Vølve” (Feat. Rikke Emilie List)
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Subgenre: drone metal/contemporary classical
Ida Duelund and Maria Jagd are twin pillars of Copenhagen’s improvisatory music scene, with bodies of work spanning (and blurring the lines between) free jazz, contemporary classical, and experimental film scores. The music they make together as Lueenas is rooted in their experiences in those worlds but wields a decidedly more metallic edge. The duo’s second album, Tender Anger, has been billed by their label Barkhausen Recordings as “string doom,” with Duelund on contrabass, Jagd on viola and violin, and no guitars in sight. It still has plenty of bite, especially on the three tracks with guest vocals by Konvent’s Rikke Emilie List. On “Vølve,” List delivers her death growls through a thicket of dissonant, overlapping string lines, with Duelund and Jagd ratcheting up the tension with each bow stroke. It’s guitarless, drumless, and totally crushing. [From Tender Anger, out now via Barkhausen Recordings.]
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Bloody Keep – “A Death Alive”
Location: San Francisco, California
Subgenre: raw black metal
Bloody Keep’s lone full-length, 2024’s Rats Of Black Death, was so good it felt like a prank. The prolific musician Abysmal Specter (Old Nick, Curta’n Wall, a dozen others) is synonymous with an ultra-lo-fi, chopped-and-screwed black metal aesthetic that remixes corpse paint, cheap synths, and Web-1.0 graphic design, and he tends to rush out music by the barrelful. Rats Of Black Death, by contrast, was a thoughtfully composed, immaculately produced quasi-symphonic black metal album, epic in its scope and authoritative in its musical heft. Even Curta’n Wall’s scaled-up full-lengths kept a lot of the chintzy charm of the EPs; Rats Of Black Death sounded more like Abysmal Specter making a point. Bloody Keep’s new three-way split with Keys To The Astral Gates And Mystic Doors and Sanguine Wounds is both a return to raw form and a shrewd recapitulation of the ambitions of Rats. The two Bloody Keep tunes here aren’t as produced or as complex as anything on their full-length, but they’re the best, catchiest songs on the split by a mile. “Students Of The Scholomance” and especially “A Death Alive” suggest a new path forward for Bloody Keep, one that honors the project’s hissing, vampiric roots while celebrating the songwriter that Abysmal Specter has become. [From the split with Keys to the Astral Gates and Mystic Doors and Sanguine Wounds, out now via Grime Stone Records.]
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Domhain – “Footsteps II”
Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
Subgenre: post-black metal
“Footsteps II,” the nearly 10-minute centerpiece of Domhain’s debut full-length, took a circuitous journey to reach its final form. The Belfast band wrote it in a moody, atmospheric black metal milieu, but the first time they recorded the song, it was as an acoustic reworking. That version appears, simply titled “Footsteps,” on a 2025 split with the German dark folk band Ephemeral. Only by playing the song acoustically did the band discover the key melodies and atmospheric elements they wanted to bring forward, and when “Footsteps” was finally recorded as a metal song, it had been transformed. There are two cellos on the recording that appears on In Perfect Stillness, played by in-house cellist/drummer/vocalist Anaïs Chareyre-Méjan and guest musician Raul Andueza, plus a prominent piano part played by John Wilson. With its twinkly guitars, shoegaze-y sense of dynamics, and breathy French vocals, “Footsteps II” certainly owes a debt to Alcest. But Domhain have managed to transcend their chief influence through sheer hard work, by putting their best song through its paces until it was as good as it could possibly be. [From In Perfect Stillness, out now via These Hands Melt.]
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Venthiax – “Rites Of Ra”
Location: Huskvarna, Sweden
Subgenre: thrash metal
I’ve been hyping the up-and-coming Swedish thrash scene as one of the best regional metal scenes in the world for several years now. Young bands like Sarcator, Eternal Evil, Atonement, Bloodstain, and Hostilia have returned the country to thrash glory, decades after the peaks of Merciless, Nifelheim, and Antichrist. Slightly late to the party are Huskvarna’s Venthiax, who have just released their first proper EP after a string of demos and live bootlegs. Rites Of Ra announces them as perhaps the brashest, most unrestrained metal band in Sweden, with bug-eyed vocals, lacerating riffs, rumbling, gut-punching bass lines, and some truly wild drumming. This isn’t the most original music in the world, but Venthiax bring the verve and commitment necessary to make their Sodom/Slayer worship work. They get all the little stuff right, both musically and culturally — just check the band photos with bassist Wendy Juneström sitting astride her custom midcentury chopper. This is as real as it gets. [From Rites of Ra, out now via Dying Victims Productions.]
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Exhumed – “Crawling From The Wreckage”
Location: San Jose, California
Subgenre: death metal/grindcore
Red Asphalt has a hell of a hook: The 10th album by venerable California deathgrinders Exhumed is all about the highways and byways of America, specifically the vehicular carnage that unfolds therein. As someone who insists on running outdoors almost daily in a car-first Midwestern city, I’ve seen my life flash before my eyes enough times to be an expert in Red Asphalt’s subject matter, and I’m pleased to report that Exhumed have delivered an album that sounds like being flattened by two tons of galvanized steel. Most of the album hurtles down the road at 90 mph, but the sludgy, fume-choked “Crawling From The Wreckage” depicts the gory aftermath. Ross Sewage’s off-kilter bass line seems to stagger away from the scene, Matt Harvey and Sebastian Phillips’ guitars find a sickly lockstep groove, and the song patiently makes its way to a revved-up climax from there. It’s nuanced work from these old masters. [From Red Asphalt, out now via Relapse Records.]
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Twilight Force – “Magic Of A New Dawn”
Location: Falun, Sweden
Subgenre: symphonic power metal
You either love Twilight Force, the elaborately costumed, lore-rich Swedish “adventure metal” band, or you hate them. I love them, heaven help me. They sound like Rhapsody Of Fire covering an unreleased Alan Menken/Howard Ashman soundtrack, and they make me want to stay up all night drinking Mountain Dew and playing The Bard’s Tale on PS2. Standalone single “Magic Of A New Dawn” launches a new era for the freshly Napalm-signed band, but the fundamentals are the same as ever — dramatic swells of violin, hyper-melodic guitar leads, layered choral vocals, fantasy-audiobook narration, and a Disney Parks-style mandate to be cheerful and inspiring at all times. It’s power metal toxic positivity, and against my better judgment, it works on me. [Single out now via Napalm Records.]
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Fossilization – “Disentombed And Reassembled By The Ages”
Location: São Paolo, Brazil
Subgenre: death/doom metal
I’ve had my eye on Brazilian crushers Fossilization since the release of their debut EP, 2021’s He Whose Name Was Long Forgotten. Their niche – doomy, dissonant Incantation worship – is a crowded one, but their command of the vocabulary of the genre was immediately evident. They’ve only grown sharper with time, and sophomore full-length Advent of Wounds marks a real leveling-up for the band. It’s thick with evil guitar riffs and tunnel-boring drum bombardments, but the production leaves enough room for the instruments to breathe. “Disentombed and Reassembled by the Ages” is one of the album’s high points, a masterclass in death/doom dynamics that enshrouds its relentless, stomping gait in a fog of eerie atmospherics. [From Advent of Wounds, out now via Everlasting Spew Records.]
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Converge – “Force Meets Presence”
Location: Salem, Massachusetts
Subgenre: metallic hardcore
You should never, ever doubt Converge, but be honest — nine years after The Dusk In Us and five after the Chelsea Wolfe teamup Bloodmoon I, did you think they’d come back sounding this furious? Love Is Not Enough sounds like it’s making up for lost time and lost rage, with the metalcore greats ripping through 10 ass-beating songs in about half an hour, only occasionally pausing to scratch their gray beards with a noise rock groove. “Force Meets Presence” isn’t one of those beard-scratching moments. A friend described it as having a Metallica riff, and yeah, that’s what I’m hearing around the 30-second mark, too. While Kurt Ballou goes full “Dyers Eve,” Nate Newton finds a little Cliff Burton in his low-end assault and Ben Koller flies around the kit like a man half his age (not very Lars-like). Jacob Bannon, of course, does what he was born to do, locking eyes with death and snarling at it like a rabid Doberman. When Converge set out to write Love Is Not Enough after spending years on the collaborative Bloodmoon project, they knew they wanted it to just be the four of them. “Force Meets Presence” illustrates how they still bring out the best in one another, 25 years after Jane Doe. [From Love Is Not Enough, out now via Epitaph Records.]
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Ponte Del Diavolo – “Spirit, Blood, Poison, Ferment!”
Location: Turin, Italy
Subgenre: blackened doom metal/post-punk
The bill at Ponte del Diavolo’s record release show in Turin earlier this month is instructive about their place in the heavy music universe. Joining the band in celebration of De Venom Natura were Messa, the shapeshifting doom band led by powerhouse vocalist Sara Bianchin; Ottone Pesante, the so-called “brass metal” band centered on trumpet and trombone; and Nubivagant, the hypnotic solo trad/black metal project of Darvaza mainman Omega. You can hear bits and pieces of all those acts in Ponte del Diavolo’s wide-ranging sound, though they effortlessly fuse them into a sound that’s entirely their own. Sometimes, Ponte del Diavolo sound like a squiggly post-punk band with a serious mean streak; other times, they sound like a mysterious, esoteric black metal band with an unusual interest in synthesizers. On “Spirit, Blood, Poison, Ferment!”, they whip black metal guitar into a groovy, doomy churn while the commanding voice of frontwoman Erba del Diavolo leads the band in witchy ceremony. The song features trombone work from Ottone Pesante’s Francesco Bucci, whose pre-chorus part I can only describe as an evil fanfare. [From De Venom Natura, out now via Season of Mist.]
Location: Miami, Florida / Longueuil, Canada
Subgenre: symphonic black/doom metal
Worm guitarist Wroth Septentrion: “Originally, the song started with just the acoustic part, the part that comes in after the intro. But then, Phantom [Slaughter] was like, ‘We need a more dramatic entrance.’ And then he came up with another part that we made it fit before this part. And that part, when we came up with it, we decided, ‘Oh, you know what? We’re gonna bring it back at the end of the song, too.’ So there’s four movements in the song. Originally, there were two. It came from the idea that we need to make this entrance more dramatic, more grandiose and dark. The song needed this, and at the end of it, we noticed, ‘Oh, it’s 10 minutes.’ But it wasn’t our goal to make it 10 minutes. Our goal was to make the song hit more, make it more cinematic. There was no cap on the length, and let’s say the label wasn’t too happy about that at first. [Laughs] But that’s the thing. Sometimes you can’t put a cap on creativity. You’ve got to just let it flow.” [From Necropalace, out now via Century Media Records.]
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