[Cover photo credit to Eric DeCarlo]
Baltimore-based band Wormhole is releasing their first album with Season of Mist, described as “tech-slam”, and titled Almost Human. It arrives on September 22nd, 2023.
Guitarists Sanil “Noni” Kumar and Sanjay Kumar were inspired in their sound by thousands of hours of Metroid and Doom games and intensive musical exploration.
Sanjay shares:
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.
Noni adds:
And then as far as chasing the vibe, 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.
