Exclusive Track Premiere: The Last of Lucy’s “Wormhole”
Good luck and Godform.
Building on their stellar 2022 full-length Moksha, Huntington Beach’s tech-death aficionados The Last of Lucy will release their third LP Godform on Transcending Obscurity Records on May 17, 2024. We were treated to the album’s first single “Shedim Seance” back in January, a straight-to-the-point techstravaganza that featured alien sweeps, scalar runs, pinch harmonics, stop-start chugs, roaring vocals, and a generally bad attitude that barely eclipsed 2 minutes. There’s something to be said for a band so sure of their songwriting ability that they can do everything they want—explore every idea and every riff—in the time it takes some bands to get the engine running. By the time a lot of contemporaries have noodled away our precious hours of life, The Last of Lucy has shredded those hours into viscera.
“Twin Flame,” the album’s second single and a return to the band’s first LP Ashvatta, is one of those few instances where Last of Lucy takes the long route. Bringing back the proggy jazz and clean vocals that flow effortlessly throughout Ashvatta, “Twin Flame” is the sophisticate’s brand of tech death, with pleasant, sauntering trips to the lounge interposing the ricocheting Archspire-inspired brutality. The sax is so sultry that it simply works. Nothing is indulgent, nothing is imbalanced, nothing is out of place. For whatever reason, it just feels right to have that saxophone play us into an opium haze before the band closes out the track in a moshing astral chaos.
Today, we are, as we always are, stoked to bring you “Wormhole,” the third single from Godform, a track that sits somewhere between “Shedim Seance” and “Twin Flame” on the proggy-yet-brutal tech death spectrum. From Josh de la Sol’s vocal range to Josef Hossain-Kay’s precision drumming, “Wormhole” is something fans of Inferi and The Zenith Passage will find a lot to love about. Lovers of huge fretboards and finger tapping, too, will feel right at home watching Gad Gidon (guitars) and Derek Santistevan (bass) demonstrate complete control over every inch of their malformed instruments. Not unlike “Twin Flame,” the band drops out of hyper-brutality into a mellower passage, though this is less jazzy or proggy yet still feels appropriate in the general sweep and thrust of the track. Like “Shedim Seance,” the rest of the track is an unstoppable blend of tech death mastery. It’s all so much the sound of a spaceship’s control panel short-circuiting as the crew careens helplessly onto the surface of an uninhabitable lava planet that spews forth the same kind of life-ending flames that have become a hallmark of Last of Lucy themselves.
But the song itself isn’t so alien; rather, it’s grounded in the quotidian emotional reality we all face here on our own burning planet. As the band writes about “Wormhole”:
A song about abandonment, hatred, revenge, & redemption.
Absolving all adversary, as you walk a blistering torrid path of adversity.
Following critic Tony Tanner’s assertion that all novels are about adultery, fellow critic Adam Phillips wonders if there’s any literature not about exclusion. “And if all literature is about exclusion, the question is why?” Phillips posits and asks. We may wonder, too, if all music isn’t, too, about abandonment (exclusion) and our responses (hatred, revenge, and redemption, among others) to being left out. “All hope excluded thus, behold, instead /Of us outcast, exil’d, his new delight, Mankind created, and for him this World!” Satan laments to his fellow fallen angels in Paradise Lost. On “Wormhole,” we find Last of Lucy seeking Satan’s kind of absolution through the dogged, searing catastrophe of being exiled. If there is some of kind of wormhole out of this feeling, it is not one of immediacy nor of astral projection; it is a path towards self-identification, however difficult and implausible.
So here we are, on the precipice of the “Wormhole,” seeking out that self-recognition so denied us in our abandonment. Listen below!
Now head over to bandcamp and pre-order Godform as well as any piece of merch with that ludicrously sick artwork from Par Olofsson.
Godform arrives May 17, 2024,
on Transcending Obscurity Records.
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