Near the end of Wormrot’s “Hollow Roots,” front man Mohammad Arif bin Suhaimi shrieks “No point of venting for this fucking long.” He finishes that thought about 43 seconds into a 56-second track, an eternity depending on how extreme—and expedient—you prefer your grindcore. Wormrot, a three-piece that hails from Singapore, is as reputable as a modern grindcore band comes; young metal fans around the world love them as much as the crusty folks who participated in grindcore’s big bang back in the mid-80s. After discovering their music in the late 2000s, Digby Pearson, founder of crucial extreme-metal label Earache, messaged Wormrot on MySpace to ask them to sign. Since then, the label has released three of the band’s albums, including their most recent, 2016’s Voices (which includes “Hollow Roots”). Wormrot carve out vast soundscapes within seconds; guitarist Muhammad Nurrasyid bin Juraimi sends thick black clouds, jagged lightning bolts, and stampedes of rain across their songs while drummer Vijesh Ashok Ghariwala delivers blastbeats so efficiently that the jackhammering rhythms offer a sense of structure amid the band’s rapid, sometimes erratic shifts. Ghariwala joined Wormrot in 2015 during a lengthy (by the band’s standards) hiatus that was so trying the members appear almost incapable of broaching the subject in interviews, though as Suhaimi told skateboarding magazine Thrasher, he poured his frustrations into the lyrics of Voices. If the album’s sound offers any indication, their struggles have been hard as hell. v
Singapore’s Wormrot show why they’re the voice of modern grindcore on Voices
