Marty Friedman doesn't lend his guitar to just anyone. The former Megadeth soloist turned up on Necropalace after finding Worm through social media and falling for their 2022 EP Bluenothing, and by the time he plays out closer "Witchmoon: The Infernal Masquerade," the cameo feels less like a coup than an inevitability. Everyone, eventually, seems to get pulled into Phantom Slaughter's world.
Phantom Slaughter started Worm alone in Miami in 2012, after watching the Norwegian black metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us and falling hard for Fenriz's reverence for Bathory, Celtic Frost and Venom. What began as a solo tape project grew into a full band once guitarist Wroth Septentrion joined, and across Evocation of the Black Marsh in 2017 and Foreverglade in 2021, Worm settled into a self-branded style: Nekromantic Black Doom, heavy on swamp-thick riffs and Floridian dread.
Necropalace, the band's fourth album and first for Century Media, doesn't so much continue that style as detonate it. Symphonic keyboards, cavernous doom-death low end and full-throttle black metal tempos sit inside the same songs without crowding one another out, and Wroth's playing has become the record's other lead voice, closer to Andy LaRocque's work on King Diamond's records than anything the vampiric black metal scene usually produces.
None of the record's references are accidental.
Phantom Slaughter is a self-confessed student of metal's back pages, and Necropalace is built to reward listeners who chase its footnotes: Cradle of Filth's gothic theatre, Necromantia's Ravenloft worship, the world-building of Diabolical Masquerade, the melancholy of Deinonychus, even the raw scrape of Mütiilation, all folded into a single hour without any one influence swamping the rest. "That's all to leave you breadcrumbs to follow these things," he says of the album's references. "We want to be influenced by the past, but we want to put our own spin on it as well."
Necropalace was recorded and engineered by Charlie Koryn, Worm's own drummer and a Morbid Angel touring alumnus, and mixed and mastered by Arthur Rizk, whose credits include King Diamond and Blood Incantation. That's serious company for a band that started as one man's cassette obsession, and it shows: Necropalace sounds enormous in a way Worm's earlier records, for all their character, never quite managed.
Whatever comes next will have to clear a genuinely high bar. Phantom Slaughter sounds unbothered by it. "It's truthful, organic, and you can like it or you can not like it, but it's just a guy obsessed with his schemes, just going mad with his ideas," he says. "One green light leads to another green light, and you say yes to certain opportunities, and you open your ears to certain things, and just be in the moment, and that's how we've taken this."
