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LARVAE
Arousal Of The Crawling Creature EP

Self-released (2025)
Rating: 9/10

For the last year or so I’ve been bothered by a strange crackling noise in my ear canal. I considered it an infection of sorts or maybe some blocked wax, but then I received an email from guitarist Lucilia Sericata, formidable frontwoman of Rome, Italy-based band Larvae. It seems that the sinister activity in my ear canal was in fact Lucilia hatching another vile product, excreting a hideous egg of sorts so that my body could become host to its eventual manifesting.

As sticky blood began to ooze down my cheek to the soundtrack of a severe banging headache, Lucilia recruited bassist Maso Alastor Desekrator and drummer Tom Coroner to aid her in her quest to once again burrow her way into the psyche of those susceptible to not only her beauty and talent, but her harrowing possessed wails.

Recorded, mixed and mastered at “The Barn” in the Czech Republic by Dan Friml, Arousal Of The Crawling Creature is the third EP from Larvae and emerges three years after the superb Acid Horror Cult. After a short intro (‘Epitaffio’) the title track showcases Lucilia’s absolutely terrifying ability to vomit up her own guts to a mulch-coated soundtrack of squelching, pustulent gore-doom. As she slurps perversely “The room is pitch black, I sense it near… it’s panting on my back. The creature is creeping down my back, it’s thrilling me”, I find myself turned on by such visions of horror, succumbing to this fetid erotica before the trio lurch into a slimy mess of entangled instrumentation of festering fuzz and fluster. “Soon, I’ll drag your carcass at the lagoon, I’ll carve your eyes under the moon, I will inhale your rotting fume,” she sneers and I’m right there with here, gorging of the mephitic, sulphuric stench, waiting for Lucilia’s demonic tongue to scoop out my twitching eyeballs.

‘Squirming Like Disgusting Maggots’ borders on goregrind; a short yet gurgled stew of spits and coughs delivered over a rank and rancid galloping. Perversely, my favourite song, and I use the term lightly, is ‘Fatal Erotic Torment’ which slithers akin to leaking acid slowly devouring the shackled, semiconscious human below. It’s not exactly death-doom, but then again none of this is because Lucilia projects the genuine nightmarish from her soul, and if anything the instrumentation normalises such abhorrent hallucinations.

‘Raise The Dead’ sees the trio at their speediest, although Mortician-styled chunks of phlegm are thrown into the gloop soup for good measure, contrasting Lucilia’s witchy snaps and oesophagus-grating bellows. “He lurks in the dark behind the graves,” Lucilia coughs and one does feel that to appreciate her crusty confessions one should spend at least a month in a morgue or in a wet cemetery to fully inhale the death. ‘Outro – Intruder’ finishes the EP as if Lucilia is literally choking on her last breath. It’s a torturous dirge wallowing in its own body scum. Indeed, listening to Larvae is akin to sharing a bath with a maggot-infested corpse whose rectal juices slowly trickle down the congealed plug hole.

Lucilia Sericata and company have no real interest in genres but simply express what they feel, the end result being a mucky trip through the slums of Lucilia’s disturbed and wonderfully engaging mind. Now, get to work on an album!

Neil Arnold

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