For me, there is no numerical order or ranking for these 2020 releases below. There are many more bands that I would put on here, as well. If I didn’t put your band on here, come on down and give me a good butt whoopin’, Mr. Roper, Mr. Roper.

• Sundr - I’ve Forgotten How To Be Alone (Wick Studio Sessions)
• Crystal Spiders - Molt
• Spectral Voice - Necrotic Demos
• Lucifer’s Children - Devil Worship
• Various Artists - Black Sabbath: Vol 4 Redux
• Various Artists - Best of Black Sabbath
• Jupiterian - Protosapien
• Swarming - Primeval Arteries Of the Sacred Dead

• Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean - The Vestige
• Megalith Levitation/Dekonstruktor - Split
• The Crooked Whispers - Satanic Melodies
• Caged - Stricken By Continuance
• Drought Year - The Pale End of Darkness
• Occlith - Gates, Doorways, and Endings
• WOORMS - Twitching As Prey
• Thou - Blessings Of the Highest Order
• Thou - A Primer Of Holy Words

• Primitive Man - Immersion
• Hellish Form - MMXX
• Lunar Ark - Home Coming/Apostasy
• Red Beard Wall/Opium Warlock - The 420 Raw Split
• Eremit - Desert Of Ghouls
• Seed of the Sorcerer, Witch of the Womb - Spellbook II: Colony Collapse
• Dead End Thoughts - Feel No Pain
• Waft - Shelter From Grace

The other night I watched a movie called Squirm, filmed in the late ‘70s. It involves a small town in the Bible Belt that gets hit by severe flooding, knocking hot power lines down into the soil and giving the local underground population of creepy crawly invertebrates a nice fat shoc k of juice to their systems. As a result, they become carnivorous and start turning on the local fishing population, gnawing their flesh down to the bone. Imagining these electrified critters formed a band, it would most certainly be WOORMS.

Just months ago, we got introduced to the four-year strong trio by way of their long-play premiere, 'Slake’ (2019). Now the Baton Rouge crew are ready to spit out another slimey bundle of bombastic sludge numbers in a second album, 'Twitching, As Prey’ (2020). The record is replete with resolute rhythms and riotous vocals that call to mind Unsane, thick, lumbering chords that made me think of Torche, and bold Prong-like beats. Joey Carbo (guitar, vox), John Robinson (bass), and Aaron Polk (drums) have really outdone themselves this time.

Today, Doomed & Stoned is pleased to bring you the third single from the forthcoming full-length. Frontman Joey Carbo has this to say about “Unicorn Corn”:

“So, this song started as a joke. Two jokes, actually! The title came about because of texting with a promoter friend of mine who manages our Instagram and I, drunkenly, found the two emoji things and it accidentally became a code we used for when shit was all good. If I was happy with some step we were gonna take, I just sent the unicorn and corn emojis. I promised her I’d name a song that, so I did. I heard an old dude say one time, ‘It’s all chicken but the gravy’. I love regional euphemisms. This one took me a second but I guess he’s saying that everything is good. Chicken is good and the part that isn’t chicken is gravy and gravy is still pretty damn good.

“The lyrics came about because I’d always wanted to write a limerick. The two verses of this song are a limerick. I’m pretty proud of the profound and poetic stupidity of it all. Here’s the verse limerick, for your enjoyment or my abuse and embarrassment – either is fine with me.

He who smelt your milk,
She who slept on silk,
And all those of your ilk
(-It’s not by choice.)

Slim is Jim, son of Tim,
And all who visit him
As to fit through his narrow door.
(All rot by choice.)

“Then it goes on with the chorus from line four and that’s not part of the limerick, mechanically, but more a social commentary on the people around us here. Fat, white, lumbering halfwits who kill themselves with mounds of terrible food and gallons of fountain soda. They “rot by choice.” Have you seen the size of a “small” soda at an American fast food joint? So, a lot in the deep south (and maybe where you live, too) they just swell up, buy bigger trucks, and elbow their way through life until their hearts pop. Ha!”

The band’s new album Twitching, As Prey is slated for release on Friday, March 27th on Hospital Records/Sludgelord Records. Pre-order in the US here and in the UK here.

Give ear…

Some Buzz:

Following on from the critically acclaimed release of their debut album, Baton Rouge-based colossus, WOORMS, returned with new single 'Silence and the Saints’ toward the end of last year; the first sanctioned cut from their forthcoming LP, Twitching, As Prey, due for release in March on Hospital Records/Sludgelord Records.

Formed in 2017 in Louisiana and featuring guitarist/vocalist Joey Carbo, bassist John Robinson, and drummer Aaron Polk, WOORMS has been delivering a brutal mélange of riffs and noise-rock righteousness on the precipice of significance for some time.

Yet despite only being a few years into their sonic existence they have already racked up a collection of demos, digital one-offs (‘Daddy Was A Masker,’ 'The Math Says, Yes’), a split with NOLA thrashers, A Hanging, and most recently of all, Slake; their devastating debut record.

Fully stirred from a delirious slumber, songs like ‘Mouth is a Wound’ and 'Find a Meal, Find a Bed, Find a God’ made for a devastatingly terse and perverse experience. From the pinnacle to the point of no return, WOORMS fall psychotically through the fuzz and unholy grind of bands like KARP, Jesus Lizard and Neurosis. Their debut album immediately set out its stall in the most spectacular of fashions; a lumbering, symphonic noise-rock shank fight between the fattest of riffs and the thinnest of patience with the world at large.