HMLTD
Erika Kenis-Febles
HMLTD, the charmingly ostentatious London band, have announced details of a new album. The Worm, due April 7, is an epic saga that takes the group back in time to Medieval England, to a time when battles were bloody and, in this version, a giant worm has devoured the country whole. The soundtrack to this ancient and grotesque fantasy if part folk horror, part prog rock fantasy, and part sci-fi opera.
The first entry point into the world of The Worm is "Wyrmlands," the heavy-riffing lead single. The video, premiering below, adds to the feudal system daydream they have conjured up, with the band performing live while dressed as if they have just stepped off the set of Ben Wheatley's A Field In England. Drumming in chain mail can't be easy but HMLTD have clearly committed to the bit.
Speaking to The FADER via email, frontman Henry Spychalski, who also directed the "Wyrmlands" video, said, "‘The Worm’ takes place in an imagined future England that has been swallowed by an evil, all-powerful Worm God: this Worm is both a metaphor for inescapable capitalist realism and a projection of my own inner demons, externalised so as to make them conquerable.
As a track, ‘Wyrmlands’ tells the story of the ‘Grunter Rebels’ - a guerrilla resistance movement against The Worm. The lyrics recount their tales of subversion and subterfuge: counter-offensives, tortured confessions and haunting vignettes of the strange new land in which they find themselves: “Livestock hanging from the cranes, dancing dogs that talk like men.”
HMLTD's debut West Of Eden was released in 2020. The band will play two London shows at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on May 18-19.