"We use the guitar like a sound generator"

With a bizarre new concept album, HMLTD are defying the expectations of guitar‑based music. “We get excited by very stupid ideas!” says guitarist Duc Peterman

- Ellie Rogers

When their debut album West Of Eden landed in 2020, London-based art-punk collective HMLTD established themselves as one  of the most ambitious outfits to emerge from the UK music scene in recent years. With flamboyance and wit, they took aim at toxic  masculinity and the patriarchal-capitalist society of the West. With gleeful abandon they cut and spliced elements of glam rock, punk,  EDM, and 80s synth-pop together like an iPod  Shuffle possessed. With custom-built sets,  extravagant outfits and experiments into multi-sensory stimuli (such as the smell of burning human hair), they transcended the notion of ‘the rock show’ to immerse their audiences in full-blown works of surrealist avant-rock theatre.

Now, they return with The Worm – a nine-track allegorical concept album that sets to music an absurdist horror story in which a giant parasitic worm swallows England. The story was created by the band’s vocalist and abstract thinker-in-chief Henry Spychalski. The next stage of development was for guitarist and producer Duc Peterman and keyboardist Seth Evans to take charge of imagining a musical universe wild and wriggly enough to represent Spychalski’s titular invertebrate.

As Duc recalls: “Henry came to mine one day and he told me that he’d had this crazy dream in which he was a child soldier during the Vietnam war. He was hit by a bullet and was bleeding to death. Then, suddenly a crowd of children assembled around him and ripped his belly open. His belly is full of worms and worms start gushing out. He said that he really would like to make the album about this vivid dream, and I thought it was the best idea he’d come up with.”