"Mea Kulpa": WaxWorm Wanders Through a Guilty Haze (Early Album Stream)

There is, theoretically, a limit on how long one wants to hear a particular synthesizer sound for, but Australia’s WaxWorm isn’t in danger of hitting it. The ambient, electronic-tinged project’s upcoming album Mea Kulpa uses a lot of these to deliver lengthy explorative soundscapes, but shifts their formula often enough to maintain interest, twisting long-running motifs into developing themes and exploring completely separate moods as the album progresses. Stream the whole album ahead of its Friday release now:

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Mea Kulpa fits into my personal sweet spot of ambient and drone music: a space where it can envelop and satiate whether or not you’re really focusing on it. A pulsating low-end and trippy synth tones make for a texture complex and oddly calming enough for satisfying background listening, but subtle instrumentation details and gripping vocals pay back sustained focus as well. Ranging from Tangerine Dream-esque noodling to dingy industrial drum loops, harsh oscillators, and screeching feedback all within the single opening track “Mutus Liber,” there’s multiple approaches to drone, drony electronica, and synthwave within the full album. It’s probably not the heaviest release you’ll listen to this week, but its combination of a bleak outlook and gleaming futuristic tonality is a sonic weighted blanket, both comforting and stimulating.

The band comments:

It has been a joy to finally allow Mea Kulpa, with all its peculiarities and eccentricities, to take its first steps out into the harsh light of the world. The reception to WaxWorm’s dark, heavy and unconventional electronic music has overwhelmingly been one of warmth and positivity, for which we are deeply grateful. Thanks are due to Curtis, Cori and all at C Squared Music, to Dan and Trepanation Recordings, and to Invisible Oranges for setting up this full album stream. We hope that Mea Kulpa doesn’t sound quite like anything you have heard before from metal, industrial or electronica, and we hope above all that it makes you feel something.

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Mea Kulpa releases July 23rd, 2021 via Trepanation Recordings.