Worm Suicide performing at Come and Take It Live in Austin, Texas on October 21, 2026. (Photo: Ralph Arvesen)
Worm Suicide has been part of the Texas punk underground since 1996, long enough to watch scenes change, venues disappear and entire generations of bands come and go. Three decades later, the group is still making deliberately crude, fast and confrontational punk rock, with very little interest in sanding down the rough edges that defined it in the first place.
The October 21 bill at Come and Take It Live places the Austin band alongside Mac Sabbath, Clownvis Presley and Alyson Anomaly, a lineup that leans heavily toward performers who do not take conventional rock presentation too seriously. Worm Suicide fits for different reasons. There are no mutated fast-food mascots required. The band's humor has always been embedded directly in song titles, lyrics and a deliberately offensive punk sensibility that goes back to the era when shock value was still an expected part of underground music.
Worm Suicide formed in South Texas in 1996 before becoming closely associated with Austin. The band describes its sound with a collection of labels that include old-school punk, hardcore, Oi and metal, and all of them make sense without fully covering what the group does. The songs are generally short, blunt and built for a live room rather than studio perfection, with enough metal in the guitars to give the punk considerably more weight.
That combination has allowed Worm Suicide to share bills with artists from several different corners of heavy music. Over the years, the group has played alongside names including The Misfits, FEAR, Dead Kennedys, Agent Orange, Angry Samoans, D.R.I., Cro-Mags, The Exploited and Sloppy Seconds. Tribute compilations devoted to Samhain, The Misfits and GG Allin and the Jabbers further indicate where much of the band's musical DNA originated.
The early catalog established the tone quickly. Releases including The Evil Obscene, Covered in Skumm and Heathen appeared around the turn of the century, alongside recordings with titles that made it clear Worm Suicide was not chasing radio play or mainstream respectability. That approach never disappeared as the catalog expanded. Crude humor, horror imagery, deliberately bad taste and straightforward punk aggression remain recurring ingredients.
There is more persistence here than the jokes initially suggest. Worm Suicide's Bandcamp catalog now stretches across decades of studio material, singles, EPs, compilations and a surprising number of live recordings. Instead of trying to rewrite the band's past as something cleaner or more sophisticated than it was, newer releases sit comfortably beside material recorded when the group was much younger.
The strongest evidence that Worm Suicide remains a functioning band rather than simply a legacy local act came with The Thing That Died in 2025. The album arrived nearly three decades after the group's formation and included songs such as Off My List, The Thing That Died and My Dick Fell Out. The title track leans into zombie and horror imagery, while the rest of the record continues the mixture of dark subject matter and juvenile humor that has followed the band throughout its career.
The fact that Worm Suicide was still recording new material mattered more than any attempt to modernize the sound. Punk bands with this kind of history sometimes become tribute acts to their own youth, relying almost entirely on songs written decades earlier. Worm Suicide has continued adding material instead, even when the newer songs remain intentionally connected to the same abrasive aesthetic.
That activity continued in 2026. The band released Good Obscene Fun..Hell Yeah!, a three-song tribute to Choreboy, followed by a cover of Spelling Bee by The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Neither choice suggests a sudden interest in becoming easier to categorize. If anything, the releases reinforce Worm Suicide's attachment to the stranger edges of punk and underground rock.
The band's most revealing 2026 release may be Cum And Take It (LIVE). Recorded at Come and Take It Live on November 29, 2025 and released the following April, the album captures nine performances without trying to turn the group into something polished. Evil Obscene, Lead Pipe and Off My List are compressed together at the beginning, followed by songs including We're In It For The Money, Daddy Killed A Hooker, White Flag, Driveway Face and the title track from The Thing That Died.
Even the existence of that album makes the October 21 appearance feel less like an anonymous local-support booking. Come and Take It Live has become part of the band's recorded history. Worm Suicide has released more than one performance captured at the Austin venue, including an earlier live EP documenting a newer lineup there in 2020.
The band was also back at Come and Take It Live less than two weeks before the Mac Sabbath show, appearing with Blitzkid and Society's Joke on October 10. That puts Worm Suicide in an unusual position on the Oct. 21 lineup. While the touring acts bring elaborate concepts and theatrical identities into Austin, Worm Suicide represents the local punk scene that continues filling these rooms between the larger national bookings.
There is a certain logic to placing them before Mac Sabbath. Both bands understand that heavy music does not always need solemnity. Mac Sabbath builds an entire production around fast-food parody while still taking the underlying Black Sabbath music seriously. Worm Suicide has spent much longer placing intentionally ridiculous and offensive ideas inside songs that still depend on the basics of punk: loud guitars, short arrangements and enough momentum to work in a crowded club.
Thirty years is an unusually long time for any underground band, particularly one that never seemed designed around career planning. Worm Suicide has survived by remaining stubbornly recognizable. The recording quality has changed, the lineup has changed over time and the Austin music landscape surrounding the band certainly has changed, but the basic attitude is easy to trace from the earliest material to The Thing That Died.
That continuity gives Worm Suicide a different kind of credibility than a band attempting to recreate an earlier punk era from a distance. They were already doing this in the 1990s. They kept doing it through the 2000s, returned repeatedly to live recording in the following decades and entered 2026 still releasing new material and playing Austin stages.
On a night built around Mac Sabbath, Clownvis Presley and Alyson Anomaly, normality was never going to be an important requirement. Worm Suicide brings its own version of that philosophy, developed over three decades without costumes or an elaborate fictional mythology. The band's world is simply old-school Texas punk pushed through bad taste, horror, humor and the apparent belief that growing older never required growing respectable.
Worm Suicide shared the stage with Mac Sabbath, Clownvis, and Alyson Anomaly at Come and Take It Live.
Worm Suicide
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