ALBUM REVIEW: Global Worming – Endseeker
If 2021’s Mount Carcass was ENDSEEKER’s love letter to Swedish death metal, its follow-up Global Worming injects their neck-snapping intensity with an infectious dose of earworms, laying their warnings of the world’s impending doom in your brain like parasitic worms controlling your mind.
The opening title track picks up where Mount Carcass left off, laying out a fanciful feast of Swedish riffs and southern groove, with all the guts and gore for pudding. If that’s not enough, drummer Kummer delivers death by double kick. Like a primeval CATTLE DECAPITATION, ENDSEEKER don’t let up from here on out.
Hell Is Here delivers big ol’ slabs of dissonance with the intensity of a zombie ripping chunks of flesh away; Terror’s ground-and-pound vocals decimate the Octagon’s finest; and Our Only Life rips open like a bullet to a wound, static feedback and distortion fracturing into machine-gun drumming so primal you’ll snap your neck off in delight.
Where Mount Carcass held a torch to death metal’s ancestry in the purest sense, Global Worming injects its offshoots into ENDSEEKER’s DNA, so whilst the old-school slamming still slams, it’s worming their way into new realms of sonic ferocity that work best here.
Hanging Gardens embraces the sickly-sweet death-and-roll of ENTOMBED’s Wolverine Blues, whilst Violence Is Gold and Wheel Of Torture go forth to Gothenburg, merging heavyweight HM-2 tones with melodies IN FLAMES wouldn’t bat an eyelid at. At once, you’re watching a band blur the lines between old school death metal’s roots, and melodeath’s progression.
If ENDSEEKER accomplish anything, it’s their approach to their art; they create thinking man’s death metal that delivers in more ways than one. You can spend hours headbanging your way to oblivion with Global Worming, and you can spend just as many peeling away its layers and learning about the state of the union.
Take Hanging Gardens for example. On one hand, it’s an indulgent truffle of melody and groove you could greedily scoff; on the other, it’s expose on mental health makes for harrowing listening — “I embrace the darkness, my time has come / I leave this world, my journey is done / My legacy remains, my memory lives on / In the hanging gardens, I am gone”. It leaves you asking how something so serious, so sad, and so painfully a problem of modern society could be so God-damn catchy.
ENDSEEKER’s consistency should be no surprise, yet Global Worming sees the Germans push the boat out further than before. By excelling at making difficult subjects accessible through music you’d happily inject into your eyeballs for another fix, they’ve pushed ahead of their old-school death metal-loving peers.
Rating: 9/10
Global Worming is set for release on October 27th via Metal Blade Records.
Like ENDSEEKER on Facebook.