The eternally cynical will find it perhaps a little too easy to be put off by the seeming videogame-isation of Wormed here, that cover art looking more like the endless Transformers live-action movie series than the work of a misanthropic Spaniard brutal death collective. Still, the band haven't let their audience down yet and Omegon, their first album in eight years and just their fourth full-length in nearly thirty years of existence, makes your ears bristle with anticipation even before listening, readying themselves for an aural feast of violence. Which is delivered almost immediately upon pressing play, slamming opener Automaton Virtulague bursting forth in a bizarre blend of deep grunted vocals, spastic guitar patterns, and insane drum beatings. The band are a well-fuelled machine and make a machine's noise, technical and hard to fathom with human instincts, barely music in the sense that anyone normal would understand it.

Yet death metal is beyond human and Omegon is certainly that, not least when you've given it enough time to recognise a Meshuggah-esque groove here or a Cryptopsy-esque flourish there as the hooks that they can be. The stop-start relentlessness of Pareidolia Robotica has both infectious riffs and moments of comparative stillness, where the atmosphere that has always been Wormed's secret weapon presses in on the listener - not to mention the incomprehensible spoken word passages and downright alien closing burst of noise, messages from the void. Protogod is amongst the more straightforward tracks relatively, hitting you with mind-bending groove upon groove, building up the tension and releasing it. The Suffocation-heavy pounding handed out by the likes of Pleoverse Omninertia here is matched in impact by the strange ambience and almost blackened rumble of Malignant Nexus, both acting as mere intro pieces next to the crushing dominance of Virtual Tetratogenesis.

Here the album takes a turn into realms even darker, more extreme. Where bands loosely comparable such as Defeated Sanity take experimental passages into worlds beyond, so too Wormed leave this existence in favour of a sound that is extreme but also something entirely other. Switching from post-tech-death beatdowns to obliterating grooves to creepy ambience, there seems little human intelligence behind the madness, leaving you on edge even more than you already were. As if showing off, the exhibitionistic nature of Wormed comes out with the dementedly technical Aetheric Transdimensionalization, a jazzy breakdown taking you by the hand before throwing you back into the maelstrom. You have been chewed up and spat back out, and the process has never been more enjoyable.

As if that wasn't enough, the closing one-two of Gravitational Servo Matrix - upping the intensity even more and building until collapsing into noise - and the title track are beyond dominating. The latter is the longest piece present at over seven minutes, and after some initial electronic weirdness soon launches into one of the more Meshuggah-esque pieces, all twisted grooves and deranged jazzy melodies hanging in the air alongside, not to mention some of the most technical drumming on the album. It ends in whooshing ambience, leaving you wanting more, and as with all Wormed albums that crush the spine and ruin the ears, the experience is delightful. Perhaps not the best, most inhuman material that the band have produced in their surprisingly long career, yet still more than enough to destroy the organic matter that it is subjected to. Humanity is the worm, the universe is the gut; stare into the abyss and know your place.