Wormogenic Turns Girlhood Grief Into Cathartic Alternative Pop on ‘Apocalypse Queen’
Losing a friend when you're young can feel less like the end of a relationship and more like the end of the entire world. On ‘Apocalypse Queen’, Wormogenic refuses to minimise that feeling with the wisdom of hindsight, instead returning to the emotional intensity of girlhood and allowing it to be every bit as catastrophic as it once seemed.
The latest glimpse of forthcoming EP Bandaids follows debut single ‘Rip Off The Bandaid’, but shifts the emotional target. Where that track confronted self-sabotage and the fear of happiness disappearing, ‘Apocalypse Queen’ turns outwards, capturing the particular devastation that comes when a friendship once assumed to be permanent suddenly falls apart.
Wormogenic gives that experience appropriately enormous surroundings. Grunge guitars collide with shimmering synth textures and melodic alternative pop, moving between brooding passages and explosive choruses that mirror the transition from private hurt to outright emotional release. There's anger here, but vulnerability never disappears beneath it.
What makes ‘Apocalypse Queen’ particularly compelling, however, is that its perspective hasn't been rewritten with adulthood in mind.
The earliest version of the song dates back to Wormogenic's late middle-school years, and rather than revisiting those lyrics to make them sound wiser or more sophisticated, she deliberately preserved their youthful perspective. It's an approach that could easily have felt naïve. Instead, it becomes the point.
“There’s definitely something cathartic about describing a complex situation in the way a child would,” she explains.
She's right. Adults have a habit of retroactively reducing adolescent emotions because the problems that caused them eventually appear smaller. ‘Apocalypse Queen’ pushes against that instinct. It doesn't ask whether losing a childhood friend still seems apocalyptic years later; it remembers that, at the time, it genuinely was.
That distinction gives the song much of its emotional power.
Female friendships during adolescence can become intertwined with identity, confidence and belonging. Losing one isn't necessarily just grieving another person; it can mean losing routines, shared histories, secrets and even the version of yourself that existed alongside them. Wormogenic doesn't intellectualise those ideas so much as capture the emotional aftermath they leave behind.
“The song is very sincere and apocalyptic because, in a lot of ways, that's how it feels to lose a friend,” she says. “Female friendships are an integral part of girlhood, and that's one of the EP's main themes.”
The production understands the scale of that statement. Guitars provide the grit, synths bring flashes of brightness and the choruses offer the cathartic release promised by the song's title. The record can shimmer one moment and snarl the next, giving its sadness enough volatility to feel convincingly adolescent.
Wormogenic's influences provide some useful coordinates. There are traces of the emotional directness associated with girl in red, the colourful possibilities of contemporary alternative pop represented by Chappell Roan, and an appetite for unusual textures that makes Caroline Polachek another understandable reference point. Yet ‘Apocalypse Queen’ increasingly sounds like an artist assembling those ingredients into her own emotional language.
That emerging identity is becoming clearer through Bandaids. With songs originating in different stages of Wormogenic's youth, the project appears less interested in presenting a polished retrospective on adolescence than preserving an emotional archive of it.
That makes the title ‘Apocalypse Queen’ especially fitting. Adolescence is dramatic because everything is happening with an intensity that hasn't yet been dulled by repetition. First betrayals feel enormous. Friendships can feel permanent. Their endings can seem impossible to survive.
Wormogenic doesn't treat that intensity as melodrama. She treats it as emotional accuracy.
Rather than laughing at her younger self or correcting what she once believed, she gives that version of herself the microphone. The result understands something adults frequently forget: an emotion doesn't become less real simply because you eventually outgrow the circumstances that created it.
‘Apocalypse Queen’ turns the collapse of a childhood friendship into the catastrophe it once genuinely felt like. Explosive, melodic and refreshingly sincere, it's another compelling glimpse into Bandaids and a reminder that growing up doesn't make our younger emotions less real. Sometimes the end of the world is simply losing the person you thought would always be there.
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