Today, HMLTD return with the announcement of their second album, The Worm – due for release on Friday 7th April. To coincide with the news, the London collective have shared lead single “Wyrmlands” and an accompanying video directed by frontman Henry Spychalski.
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 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.”
Released today, first single “Wyrmlands” and its accompanying video – directed by Spychalski himself – introduces the world in which The Worm takes place: one where England has been swallowed by The Worm and renamed ‘Wyrmlands’, along the way regressing to a Medieval, feudal society.
“‘Wyrmlands’ tells the story of a guerrilla resistance movement against the Worm” he notes. “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.”
The video is intended to explore the liminal space between the fantasy world in which most of the album takes place (“Wyrmlands”), and the base reality which births that delusion: a violent collision of the real and the unreal; of our delusions and the traumas that create them.”
By conjuring a parable of human struggle and salvation – of a society impotent and festering inside the intestines of a giant parasite – HMLTD visualise capitalist realism and spiritual alienation as a mythological beast. And with its hopeful resolution, this utterly unique exercise in world-building might just help inspire alternative realities, or at least offer a spiritual crutch to all of us within this one.
HMLTD will also play two special live shows at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on Thursday 18th & Friday 19th May. For tickets, head to the band’s website.
