OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 5): KANONENFIEBER, ONE OF NINE, ORDEALS

(written by Islander)

In this fifth installment of my Most Infectious Song list I’ve concentrated on tracks that create varying intersections of black and death metal. No two of them are quite alike, but all three have left lasting impressions. I’ve included the first one despite the fact that the album it comes from will be a 2026 release, because the song itself was released as a single last August.

Without further ado, let’s get straight to them.

 

KANONENFIEBER

Last August I began one of our weekly roundups of new music this way: “January 30, 2026, seems so far away as to be almost unimaginable — or at least it’s very difficult to imagine the way the world will look then. But that’s the release date for a new Kanonenfieber album named Soldatenschicksale, which translates to Soldiers’ Fate.”

Well, January 30th is more imaginable now, even if the world looks more dangerous and depraved than ever. Now there are just about four weeks left until the release of that new Kanonenfieber album (the release date was postponed until February 6th). It is described as a compilation album, but it includes “revised versions” of “Yankee Division” (2022), “Der Füsilier” (2023), and “U-Bootsmann’ (2023)”, and it begins with two new songs — “Z-Vor!” and “Heizer Tenner”. The band’s central figure Noise says those two new songs work together as “Skagerrak”, the largest naval battle of World War I.

(That clash of British and German battleships, in which nearly 10,000 sailors perished, is also known as The Battle of Jutland, and if you’d like to learn more about it, you can find an extensive article at The Font of All Human Knowledge.)

The release of the first of those two new opening songs (with a lyric video) was what prompted my writing last August. I’m still not clear about the derivation of the song’s title — which are repeatedly snarled and near-sung in the song’s choruses — but it must represent some sort of command connected to the naval conflict.

It’s hard to resist crying out that command (at least mentally) every time it comes around in the song. The music also makes it easy to envision the violent clash of the fleets, expansive in scale across in an even more vast oceanic setting. The music swirls and soars, jolts and hammers, builds tension and subsides into gloom, charges and crashes.

I’ve replayed the song in my head and through speakers many times since first encountering it. I never doubted I’d put it on this list.

https://noisebringer.de/
https://www.instagram.com/kanonenfieber/
https://www.facebook.com/Kanonenfieber/

 

ONE OF NINE

At the end of last October Profound Lore Records released the second album from North Carolina’s One of Nine, a melodic black metal band whose name refers to the Dark Riders (the Nazgûl) in Tolkien lore. That album, Dawn of the Iron Shadow, was the subject of a review by our contributor Daniel Barkasi not long after the record’s release, a review that ended by calling the album “an indelible, engrossing effort.”

I set down even more words than Dan (here) about just one song from Dawn of the Iron Shadow — its first single, “Dreadful Leap“. Many of those words were about the Tolkein story that inspired the song, the tragic tale of Túrin, son of Húrin, and his sister Nienor, who became Níniel. I won’t repeat that part here, but I will crib from the many words I also wrote about the song itself:

In this song One of Nine quickly create a harrowing experience, assaulting the listener with hammering drums and scalding demonic howls and submerging the senses in a vast wave of dense but also piercing riffage that distressingly writhes. A rapidly whirling but even more distressing lead-guitar surfaces… and then so does Hulder, the band’s guest, whose voice soars and falls, pitching the song to an even greater height of intensity; and the tragedy her voice carries is unmistakable.

The music then slows and becomes even darker, and even the bright ring of a solo guitar doesn’t dispel the sorrow, but seems to weap. Glittering and shimmering keys create a mesmerizing and mystical interlude over primitive beats, and then the whirring lead guitar retrieves the devastated melody and carries it forward as the music hurtles and expands again. The song eventually leads once again to Hulder’s rising voice in a final crescendo, though only the brittle and doleful (and maybe medieval) notes of a guitar backed by mysterious sonic mists provide the denouement.

This one has stayed in my head since I first heard it last August, long enough to earn its place here.

https://oneofnine.bandcamp.com/album/dawn-of-the-iron-shadow
https://www.instagram.com/oneofnineblackmetal
https://linktr.ee/oneofnine

 

ORDEALS

Once again we come to a song that was the subject of one of our frequent premieres, this one a track from the 2025 debut album by the New York black/death trio Ordeals, a record with the hard-to-forget title Third Rail Prayer. As I wrote at that time:

Much like the kind of mental imagery conjured by the album title, Ordeals’ new music is convulsive, but its electrified (and electrifying) spasms shake and twist in often unpredictable directions, providing a collage of dread, damnation, delirium, and doom that’s disturbingly distinctive.

The song we premiered, “Suffer Cursed Ordeals“, isn’t the only track from the album that I seriously considered for this list. Among others, the title song was also a strong contender. But I came down on the side of the one we premiered. Here’s why:

In this song Ordeals instantly reach out and send a jolt of electricity straight to the brain stem, deploying a piercing lead riff that maniacally writhes above thunderous low-end tumult, and then the twists start coming in rapid succession.

The beats thump and stomp while the broiling guitars set skies on fire. The drums blast away, and those fires expand in great swaths. A lead guitar wails in agony as voices cry out with supercharged intensity, and the riffing descends into moans of pain. Across a bridge that’s both grand and fearsome, the music takes off in a hammering gallop, with voices screaming and the guitars heating up with exhilarating, thrash-fueled fevers and even more rabid convulsions of broiling madness.

And Ordeals still have more twists and turns in store for you, introducing enormous booming drums and a swaying-cobra lead-guitar melody that sounds both exotic and increasingly poisonous — and then an eruption of volcanic violence. The vocals of Zealous Hellspell (a fitting name) are also stunning, so unrestrained and shattering they sound like a person possessed.

Ordeals’ intertwining of death, black, and doom metal creates breathtaking results, in part because the changing phases integrate so well.

https://eternaldeath.bandcamp.com/album/third-rail-prayer
https://www.facebook.com/OrdealsAscendant
https://ordealsascendant.bandcamp.com