The Hottest New Trend Right Now? Worms.

Unless you’ve spent the last year burrowing underground, the chances are you’ve noticed it too. You’ve seen the “would you still love me if I was a worm” memes, Heidi Klum’s worm costume, or even the latest TikTok parasite cleansing trend, where a growing movement of users are undertaking DIY “detoxes” to rid themselves of supposed parasitic worms. In the South London music scene that I call home, in the last year alone, Black Country New Road, Sorry and Fat White Family have all released tracks or videos featuring worms. Then last week, I received a message from a friend – someone else tuned in to the wormy frequencies happening in the universe: “It’s happened again…” This time, it was Ashnikko, releasing her new single entitled – you guessed it – “Worms”.

But what exactly is the meaning of this sudden proliferation of worms, and why now? Not to get all “Sigmund Freud – analyse this”, but according to Carl Jung, our collective unconscious is populated by what he called “archetypes”: ancient primal symbols like the shadow or the serpent, which he thought explained why similar themes occurred in mythologies around the world independently of one another, and why certain ideas or phenomena may become resurgent popular symbols at given moments in time. Worms can be understood as one such archetype – but what do they actually mean?

In the words of Brenda Gardenour, editor of Parasites, Worms, and the Human Body in Religion and Culture, “the fear of parasites [and worms] - with their power to invade, infest, and transform the self – writhes and wriggles through cultures and religions across the globe, reflecting a very human revulsion of being invaded and consumed by both internal and external forces.” If you look at it this way, an obvious answer suggests itself: our current obsession with worms and parasites is part of a whole generation’s hangover from, and response to, the collective trauma of COVID-19. 

The endless morbid statistics have ceased to dominate news headlines, and our unused lateral flow tests gather dust in desk drawers and pound shop reduction aisles. But maybe what we’ve been left with is the revival of a very ancient and instinctive fear of our bodies and minds being invaded – and transformed – by something external, spreading uncontrollably from person to person. Something, in other words, symbolically embodied by worms.

This theory goes a long way to making sense of TikTok’s paranoid parasite cleansing trend, and what Ashnikko is getting at when they sing “I’ve got worms in my brains” on their new single. But not all worms are bodily parasites (or helminths, as the scientific name goes). A lot of the time when we talk about worms, we’re talking about earthworms, AKA the little pink ones in your garden. Which leads me on to another trend, less talked about and perhaps still only in its birthing pangs: Mud. 

Bear with me here. When last year – inspired in part by Balenciaga’s catwalk show – I decided to build a giant mud pit for a music video, I wasn’t expecting SZA and Caroline Polachek to coincidentally release album art and videos featuring themselves writhing around in mud. While Balenciaga’s use of mud suggests a vision of a dystopian future, brought on by the climate catastrophe and growing geopolitical instability, I was using mud – and I believe SZA and Polachek are as well – as a kind of primordial soup or bath. 

Man came from the mud, and in the age of alienation abstracted through ever-accelerating technology, mud represents a return to something real, tangible and primitive (worms too, obviously). Journalist and internet folklore Günseli Yalcinkaya writes in Dazed that these trends "signal that people are getting tired of modern-day monotony, and of chasing the neoliberal grind… Stuck in a capitalist realist loop, the future seems increasingly unappealing, our societal structures less reliable. We are craving an escape; something entirely removed from our current reality.” 

Maybe the current worm-y zeitgeist represents a desire to be closer to nature; a return to a simpler life before doomscrolling, UberEats and the grindset. This is both the lost innocence of a bygone era, but also the lost innocence of childhood – a time in most people’s lives when worms were objects of play and fascination, not disgust. Or maybe it’s not just a desire to throw off the shackles of modern, industrialised society, but to go the full hog and abandon humanity altogether (“I’m becoming a worm now!” croon Black Country, New Road on last year’s “Chaos Space Marine”). 

As the basest of god’s creatures, worms represent a kind of inverse to man. Discussing their new album Food For Worms, Shame guitarist Eddie Green tells me: “We were drawn to worms because they are, in essence, the universe’s most powerful creature.” Gardenour, noting that the worm provokes almost universal disgust, similarly argues that these squirmy little wrigglers “represent our Jungian shadow… we fear their bodies for they are our own – soft and vulnerable, powerfully destructive, mindlessly living off the corpses of others.” 

Worms are repulsive precisely because they confront us with the fact that despite all our pretensions to godliness and transcendence, man is ultimately just another creature hopelessly driven by primordial instincts to writhe blindly through life – or, as my HMLTD bandmate Achilleas Sarantaris puts it: “dancing bags of flesh, with a thin slice of the divine”. 

The idea of embracing this fact, rather than being disgusted by it, is perhaps just the logical conclusion of these newly revived primitivist ideologies. The popular “Return to Monke” meme doesn’t go far enough; we must Return to Worm. I like to think that when she decided to encase herself in a giant glistening worm costume for Halloween last year, Heidi Klum had something like this in mind.

This month, my band HMLTD releases its second album, The Worm. Essentially a concept album (even though I hate that term), the record suggests that inside of each of us, there is a worm. This worm is different for each person. It may take the form of anxiety, self-hatred, addiction, or – as with me – depression. 

Everyone enters the world full of innocence. As we get older and realise the world is actually a pretty fucked-up place, we take anything that is incommensurable with what we feel is truly part of our deepest self – and how the world should be – and castigate it as a terrifying big Other. We bundle up our flaws, shortcomings, sins and shadows, together with the violence of the external world and its difficult truths, and take uncomfortable but necessary steps towards the light as one big terrifying worm. Faced with his worm – in the form of worthlessness, hopelessness and depression – our album’s narrator projects it into a literal, physical, gargantuan worm that swallows England. 

While the worm means all this and more to me, worms ultimately mean something different to everyone, and explanations for their sudden re-emergence in the popular consciousness are limitless. “I have no idea why everyone becomes infatuated with the same phenomenon at the same time,” Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi tells me quite honestly and matter-of-factly. “Personally, I take great comfort in the worm, it’s essential formlessness – there’s a very special kind of freedom there.” 

This formlessness isn’t just physical. The worm is a universal but ultimately versatile symbol: a blank canvas onto which we can project our deepest desires or darkest fears. They may help us to understand our political reality, or our own mortality. Our inner demons, or our strength to battle them. Our essential humanity, or our own worm-ness.