HMLTD: The Worm
HMLTD return with their second album, The Worm. Created over the course of two years with a cast of 47 musicians – including a gospel choir and a 16-piece string orchestra – The Worm is less a concept album than a fully-fledged musical universe, transcending genre and medium. Set in a disorienting anachronistic version of Medieval England – as steeped in dystopian sci-fi fantasy as it is folklore and Old English mythology – it’s part political polemic, part deeply moving psychological journey, and finds frontman Henry Spychalski drawing on his own psycho-spiritual struggles to construct a modern parable about the impotence felt by individuals stuck inside gargantuan, labyrinthine systems of power that they are powerless to change.
In contrast to their debut album, the acclaimed 2020 release West of Eden, which explored toxic masculinity and the breakdown of Western society, The Worm is framed as a spiritual quest within a delusion. In that delusion, Spychalski’s shadow self is projected and embodied as a giant worm that swallows England, and which must be slain in order to achieve salvation. The concept came to him in a fever dream back in 2020, before being fully fleshed out with the band’s recording line-up of Achilleas Sarantaris (drums), Duc Peterman (guitar/production), Seth Evans (keys) and Nico Mohnblatt (bass).
Spychalski explains,“We’re told to believe that anxiety and depression are purely material and biological – like a parasitic worm that can be removed with the right treatment. I think that really these conditions reflect the world that surrounds us – like colonies that a far bigger Worm has made in each of us – the psychological havoc wreaked by our inescapable capitalist reality and the looming apocalypse it has created.”
