Spain’s Wormed, I can’t believe it, have already been around for 20 years.  Holy crap how time flies.  I would assume this little ditty of an ep, in the spherical form of Metaportal is a precursor to Wormed’s fourth full-length album.  I have been a huge fan of the band and have met them on several occasions and live the band demolishes.  The band was devastated in 2018 when their drummer, Guillermo Calero, from the 2014 album, Krighsu, passed away.  RIP metal brother.  The band slowly came together in strength and brought in a super young drummer, by the band name of V-Kazar.  So it’s been a few years since their last recording and this 4 song ep is just what the alien gods of the Crab Nebula needed to satiate their Wormed hunger.  Nice little digipack with another striking cover and lyrics printed on the inside panels.  Now let’s get to the music.

“Remote Void” starts with some alien screeching feedback before the tune blasts our face off and V-Kazar doing an admirable job with his punishing drum work.  Very technical in that department.  Phlegeton sounding punishing with his gurgling even sounding more fierce than the past albums, if you can believe that.  Guillemoth providing the nice undercurrent of bass heaviness and Migueloud is a genius with the guitar riffing style.  There are some monster blasting and stop n start on a dime moments to get the blood flowing and the minute mark with the insane straightaway blasting is so damn brutal and fierce, as the song fades out.

“Cryptoubiquity” is a fun word to say over and over and the song is super brutal.  Monster drum fills and vocals that just plain rule.  The slow down at the 50 second mark is super intense with the raging double bass and then going into a double pending beat before going into the grind vortex blast.  The 1.35 part is an off signature time change that for a brief second had me think of Voivod.  The song goes into an ethereal, ambient trance ending before “Bionic Relic” wakes you up with a quick slap to the head.  Monster guitar riffing and vicious vocals arrangements.  The 1.32 slow down again has me thinking for a moment of Voivod, but not for long before the punishing rhythm section takes over and bludgeons your body again and again and again and again.  This entire section has many sweeps and time changes and has this complex brutality to it that quite honestly only Wormed can pull off and still make it catchy.

“E-Xystem://Ce” starts strange like it’s going to be an instrumental but it goes right into the blasting and the music then slows back down to a weird spoken word part and then back into monster blasting with extraordinary and original guitar work with more outstanding drum fills and more time changing blasting.  The song gets back into the vortex tornado whirlwind blasting and as the song is almost over rather than the song fading out the volume continues to get higher and higher in the mix, so watch it with earbuds in, it damn near blew my eardrums from here to timbuktu.

If you are a Wormed fan than Metaportal will be a hit with you.  For any fan of early Cryptopsy and just plain brutal, technical, original death metal-no one does it better than Wormed today.  The production on this ep is the loudest and most punishing to date.  All the instrumentation is super crisp, clear and punches you in the gut so that the fist goes through your innards and comes smashing through your back spinal column.  This is savage, bludgeoning and Wormed continues to be in heavy rotation with me-all of their albums.  They are in a league all their own and Metaportal is an out of this world release, essential release.

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