OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 2): DORMANT ORDEAL, ANCIENT DEATH, ASIDHARA

(written by Islander)

As a reminder, I plan to post a new installment of this Most Infectious Song list every weekday until January ends, and so here’s another one to begin the first full week of the month.

If you’re like me, this is a dismal day. The holidays are over, jobs command obedience again, and the calendar just seems to stretch endlessly ahead into this new year, one footfall after another into whatever new miseries or joys 2026 holds for us. (Hopefully it won’t bring a war in Venezuela, but bozos are running this country so who knows?)

However, although the day has a dismal cast from that perspective, these next three songs in our list should brighten it, and by “brighten” I mean bust it into fragments and set it on fire.

 

DORMANT ORDEAL

Dormant Ordeal’s Tooth and Nail made a resounding impression on lots of listeners last year, including many of us around here. It landed high on the year-end lists of DGR and Professor D. Grover the XIIIth, and Andy Synn named it one of 2025’s “Great” albums. I wrote about individual songs from the album, including one we premiered, but it was DGR who landed the full review (here).

Early on in the write-up he acclaimed the band’s talent for ending songs in eye-popping fashion: “Tooth And Nail is a story of erecting new towers over and over, only to annihilate the very foundation underneath just to watch them collapse, as the final sendoff and closing seal that fully implants the song in the listener’s head.” Of course, he went on at considerable length to praise other aspects of the album too, eventually summing it up as “a relentlessly intense experience, and mournful at times, isolating in its aural suffocation and immense in its movements”. But he did nail it when he wrote, “Few of the songs on Tooth And Nail ever fade out, instead choosing more to accelerate themselves off the side of a highway overpass each time.”

There are no weak links in the album, nothing forgettable, but the first single — “Halo of Bones” — is the one that got stuck in me the hardest. Here’s what I wrote soon after hearing it:

Before the 3:40 mark Dormant Ordeal discharge a bludgeoning and battering attack spearheaded by dissonant tones that both maul and ring, and soloing that wails. Soon enough they stomp the pedal on their musical Autobahn and suddenly we’re going at 100 mph (I’m American and don’t understand kpm) with a brutal growler behind the wheel.

Very damned exhilarating. The fretwork maniacally veers and viciously scissors; the drumming is jet-fast; all the sounds are gloriously unhinged. And then the machine radically slows; a miserable siren dismally pleads for attention; the vocals gasp; but at that 3:40 mark the band suddenly stomp the accelerator even harder and things get even more insane.

https://dormantordeal.bandcamp.com/album/tooth-and-nail
https://www.facebook.com/dormant.ordeal

 

ANCIENT DEATH

Not every song on this list comes from an album that made lots of year-end lists — in fact most of them won’t — but my next pick did. I count no fewer than five year-end lists we published from writers and friends at this site that named Ego Dissolution one of the best albums of 2025, and it also appeared on the YE lists we shared from Bandcamp Daily, Stereogum, and Decibel. Our Norway-based writer Chile reviewed the album for us, hailing it for achieving “a rare feat of managing to reach for the stars through a hole in the closed casket of a genre starship.”

The Ancient Death song I picked for this list is “Breaking the Barriers of Hope“. At full speed, it’s a hard-charging fretwork freakout. In a slower lane, the mind-spearing guitar work is still freakish but the music is also dismal — and the roaring and screaming vocals could be described the same way.

In yet another phase the riffage feels like a sewing machine vigorously stitching some arcane pattern across flesh, while the lead guitar echoes and wails like a suffering ghost from another dimension and then explodes in another freakout. After that, the band lock into a highly headbangable pavement-cracking groove while the soloing continues, popping eyes and dropping jaws. It’s all absolutely electrifying… and fiendishly infectious.

https://linktr.ee/ancientdeath
https://ancient-death.bandcamp.com/album/ego-dissolution
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063961366741

 

ASIDHARA

I discovered Asidhara (from Cardiff, Wales) and their self-titled debut album thanks to Andy Synn’s review in one of his “Best of British” features last fall. He described it as “all killer and zero filler”, but specifically called out “March of the Bastard Reich” as “a sub-three-minute barn-burner whose viciously virulent riffage, scorching solo, and climactic chug-a-thon will absolutely embed themselves in your sub-conscious for the long-term.”

That album is indeed one that hits very hard from beginning to end, and although you could throw a dart at the track list and likely strike something that could earn a place on this list, it’s “March of the Bastard Reich” that (as Andy promised) embedded itself in my head most strongly for the long term.

That climactic chug-a-thon Andy mentioned is one big reason why this song is here, but it’s not the only one. The song hammers like a nitro-fueled piston right from the start, and there’s a mad pulse to the blaring riffage that sticks its gnashing fangs in a listener too. The woozily whirling and vibrantly sparkling solo is another attraction, and the multi-toned vocals are also terrific. My only complaint is the song is too short, because I could have done with a lot more of it. Fortunately, the rest of the album feeds the need.

https://asidhara.bandcamp.com/album/asidhara
https://www.instagram.com/asidhara.band/