Song of the Day: “Wormslayer” by Kula Shaker

Feb 10, 2026

Most Britpop alumni are content to drift through the festival circuit as high-end jukeboxes, but Kula Shaker has taken a different route: they’ve decided to double down on writing new music while being exactly who they were in 1996, only with better tailoring and fewer PR disasters. Their eighth studio album, Wormslayer (Released Jan 30, 2026), arrives with the original quartet—Crispian Mills, Alonza Bevan, Paul Winterhart, and Jay Darlington—firmly intact. It’s a record that suggests the band has become more comfortable with who they are, and have embraced their destiny as the house band for a lavish, interstellar, royal family we don’t know anything about yet.

The album marks a fascinating point in the evolution of the band... After the punchy, back-to-basics energy of 2024’s Natural Magick, Wormslayer feels like the band is wandering back into the “grandiose and silly” territory of Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts, but with the wisdom of middle age. They aren’t just throwing sitar notes at a wall to see what sticks anymore; there is a cinematic cohesion here. It’s a “psychedelic opera” that manages to bridge their early raga-rock roots with a newfound appreciation for gothic crooning and what Mills calls “mantra-metal.”

While the album is peppered with infectious singles like “Good Money” and the galloping opener “Lucky Number,” the title track, “Wormslayer,” is my favorite track on the record. Clocking in at seven and a half minutes, it is a glorious piece of psych-rock indulgence that justifies its own runtime. It begins with a synth texture before erupting into a thick, fuzz-drenched riff. The justification for its “best in show” status lies in its ability to synthesize everything the band does well… Alonza Bevan’s bass work is exceptionally heavy, providing a foundation for the “mantra-metal” chaos above. It moves from a thrashing rock anthem into a two-minute Indian-inspired “comedown” that actually feels earned rather than tacked on. In a world of two-minute TikTok-friendly tracks, Kula Shaker has released a sprawling epic about “slaying the worm” of materialism and ego, featuring Sanskrit chants and “Gog and Magog” references, and they’ve made it sound like a stadium hit (and… the video is pretty cool too).