(We concluded the rollout of our 2025 Most Infectious Extreme Metal Song list at the end of January, but our South African contributor Vizzah Harri has prepared a three-part Addendum of infectious songs that weren’t included in our main list. The complete title of this Part 1 is: “Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies – An Infectious Addendum Part 1 of 3 (Prog, tech, avant, death, schedule 1 drvgs, gospel music?).”)
2025 had a lot of people feel like it was out to get them, like we were all engineers in the Starfleet wearing red shirts (for the uninitiated: a trope oft parodied that has to do with people wearing red in a sci-fi show predestined to die before the third act). If you’re reading this, the scars might be real, hell does exist on earth, there are still monsters and beasties out there, but somehow and somewhere there is also a balancing counter effect.
The 26th year of the 3rd millennium is already well underway, and even though African shores that follow Gregorian calendars are where these words are writ, I still tend to live partially or at least in spirit, on Eastern shores where the year of the fire horse only commences in the middle of February.
Superstitions can have far-reaching effects if a whole populace gets hyped up by it. 1966, the last occurrence of the red horse, induced a significant drop in fertility in Japan because of oral traditions relating this astrological occurrence with misogynistic overtones. One origin story is of a real woman who was burned at the stake for an apparent attempt to commit arson, and though there are varying accounts, Yaoya Oshichi was born in the very metal year of the fire horse, 1666.
6 Progressive, technical, avantgarde cuts
Blindfolded And Led To The Woods- Arrows Of Golden Light.
At first this had me reminiscing of teenage forays to Blackwater Park before it really started going and god-slap (massive spoiler) pancaked me into the earth with an awfully precise onslaught of big band swing from the necrosphere. Big production prog tech death, deliciously unpredictable.
Dead and Dripping – Seeping through Ancient Transdimensional Corridors
Bass got run through a pedal with biotech enhanced by quaaludes, ketamine and mescaline. Dead and Dripping is the only known band to employ the vocals of an actual xenomorph. The music is going to hug the fuck out of your face with its delectably convoluted ventures into brutally progressive technical death.
Species – The Essence
This made me think of Death, capitally because of the structure and pacing, even the vox, but this isn’t any worship band. Proggy tech thrash with the voice of a deranged acolyte of disorder. The riffs of both drums and strings are as persistent and catching as a viral hemorrhagic fever.
Sallow Moth – Cauldron Brim Neurosilk
The prolific Gary Brents had an extremely busy year (links to the 3 EPS, 1 Split, 1 demo, and 2 of 3 other LPs they were involved in). Cauldron Brim Neurosilk provides a window into that ordered madness. Progressive that leans towards the experimentally unhinged end of the avantgarde. Thrash riffs and drum patterns run through a flux capacitor; techy, discordant consonance, busy though centered and aligned with its purpose, off-kilter in all the best ways.
Grey Aura – Waarin De Dood Haar Kust
Concept album about an artist flirting with abstraction of being and endeavors in the creation of the very void itself. Expect the unconventional. Art created for the art’s sake, not for radio waves. Waarin De Dood Haar Kust – ‘wherein death kisses her’ – is trance inducing until the trance transforms into directed sonic warfare.
Krallice – Inner Peace
Outside of working on the production of more metal albums than most normies listen to in any given year, Colin Motherfucking Marston does make time for the occasional release. This track makes it on this article for all the peaceful reasons of having two drummers. If there wasn’t a lot going on here it would not be Krallice, and like a lot in this piece it is not conventionally catchy. It acts as a cranial flush that soothes at the same time it scrapes conceptions of possibility of form, progression, tension, counterpoints, and composition overall. If you like your music on the avantgarde side, you’ll be hopelessly infected in no time.
4 we can trust in death
Prophetic Suffering – Gift of decay
Immediate and relentless pummeling, barely any surcease but for a meagre change of pacing and chords. Uncompromisingly heavy, used by torturers to break their subjects’ will, or alternatively to scare off the neighbors if they got too friendly.
Hierarchies – Entity
Extremely un-radio-friendly. Discordance ultra. Also, contender for best cover art of the year. The first 2 minutes alone could’ve sufficed to make it on any list. Sublime guitar and bass tone, captivating percussive patterning and sound, shrieking guitar solos. This is ASMR for those who have misophonia for melody and basic song structures.
Blood Monolith – Cleansing
Waiting in vain for the new Ulthar last year, well Blood Monolith’s got you covered with some deader than your granpappy from the war grinded to shreds in mills La chair à canon. Shapeshifting vibes. Ruthless battering served on plates of carrion with an atmosphere designed to induce sleep paralysis.
Demon Sluice – Sower of Dragon Teeth
The first 2 minutes are already packed with so much vitality, the weight of the sheet music for this track alone must be something in the order of at least 600 utes. How do they go for ten bloody minutes!? There is a short interval, though the vox do not get a break; if you summon the daemon that is Gary Brents to provide vox for your blackened death project, you can expect the voices of Legion to spew forth. Riffs that rip your psychopomp of choice a new one. The pilot episode of this debut would have many creatives thinking, that’s it, job done mate! At 28.7% of the whole, it does carry a lot of the weight and rightly so; if you’re gonna blow people away, bring in them corpulent Gustavs and Tsar cannons right from the get go.
4 Drvgs of choice
Meth Leppard – Mind-Ctrl-Alt-Delete
With hits like Oligarchy Bukkake, Deeds of Fleshlight and HPV Lovecraft, what’s not to love but the craft of a grindcore band that I can’t find any lyrics on? A quick glance at the decidedly 2020’s titled Woke points towards a possible affinity for satire. “Grind isn’t supposed to be catchy!” one hears the Gatekeepers keening in their basements. Well fuck that noise, these Leppards of meth’v done cooked up a batch of furiously filthy paraphernalia.
Morast – A Thousand And More
If you like your atmosphere to be smothering, the type that doesn’t suffocate you slowly in your own live-burial coffin of dirt but the type that kicks each load of grit into your throat with a steel capped boot. Also for people who don’t know what ‘cavernous’ would allude to, and an aptly named album for something as messed up and hazardous as that drug. Morast’s Fentanyl is a thousand times stronger than morphine and therefore highly addictive.
Tumbleweed Dealer – Ghosts Dressed In Weeds
This is cheating, but I’m gonna have to steal from the review:
“Ghosts Dressed In Weeds is a plurality; it is one of the best tracks of 2025, transcending genre. The vocal performance by Ceschi Ramos is nothing short of spectacular, the delivery is pitch-, beat-, and rhythmically so on-point with lyrics that cut deep; it’s also prescient and dare I say sing-along-able. It can be applied to everyday ennui, it can and does reach wider though, into the landscape of where we are economically, politically, and morally in our aspiration to be human in this third decade of the 21st century.
“It’s the only track to ever contain vocals on any TD album and this elevates it even more; instead of being just a curiosity it holds steadfast as one of the biggest tracks on the record. Ranging from the fricative alliterative to internal rhymes for emphasis, the range alone of the chords they chose to accentuate and breathe fire into the 7th track could not have been more perfect.”
I don’t do drugs, I am drugs – Nemophilist
Again shamelessly lifted through digital transoms:
“The drums and rhythm section work magic in weaving a driving force compelling one even before the bridge hits leading to the chorus. The fluttering accents of alien birds, or susurrations of what sounds not like the mellow and calm swish of a breeze through a brook, but the purposeful flight of the shuriken… Few bands have been able to organically render onto vinyl that which the nature around us provides as rhythm, as largesse, as meditative food for contemplation… layered with a finesse of showcasing the shadows of towering trees with light penetrating the canopy and life ever present even in the scurrying of wasp antecedents with flurries of their avian cousins interposed with the bulk of mammalian trudgery.”
5 Gospels of beginnings and endings
Uulliata Digir – Myrthys
Ritualistic,
Shamanic meditations
Dan(ny) Carey’d away
I’m getting lazy, but Andy described Myrthys most effectively in his review more than a year ago:
“Beginning with a series of lambent, lilting chords – aided and abetted by some riveting rhythmic additions from both the bass and drums – the first few minutes of “Myrthys” cultivate a mesmerising mystique (enhanced by a series of sombre, brassy notes of tremulous trumpet) whose hypnotic slow-burn steadily grows harsher and more discordant as the minutes drift by, building up the tension with a mix of snarling, growling menace and eerie, unsettling cleans (courtesy of dual-vocalists Michał Sosnowski and Julita Dąbrowska) so that by the time the hammer finally drops your nerves are likely to already be frayed to the breaking point.”
Vauruvã – Legado
Chile had a different choice in the closer: “With one hand caressing the river’s surface and our eyes set on the constellations above, the band takes us on a transcendental journey to those hidden places that lie just west of the moon and east of the sun.
“The sound is based primarily on black metal’s more avant-garde leanings, with the band making good use of instrumentation at their disposal, with the fabulous ‘As selvas vermelhas no Planeta dos Eminentes‘ being the album’s crown achievement.”
Atmospheres channeling outer planes, don’t sleep on these hypnagogic ambrosial riff invocations. Music for the churches that are forests, those of floral nature, and those of the sparkles of dead stars winking after ours has set.
Zmarłym – Wielke Zanikanie
It isn’t easy to truly foster your own sound in a world that tends towards mediocrity and sameness. These Poles don’t have a problem with that. Their clean vox and tendencies in guitar writing are immediately distinctive. Post-black with industrial undertones experimenting with electronica within the already spellbinding main rhythm just serves to further entrance and ensnare. A mantra of incanting the very vectors of apocalypse to cant the world into oblivion.
Arrows – To Quell A Thousand Necks
This album was recommended and lauded quite extensively on this site by making both Andy’s Great List as well as garnering a radiant review from the man with a truly endless supply of metaphors in his arsenal, our editor himself. Why try and improve on what’s already been textually transmitted perfectly?
“[Creating] experiences of cold-hearted, bone-smashing cruelty; near-gothic ghostliness; sinister menace; weird ecstasy; celestial sweep; ominous haughtiness; feral lust; sprightly joy; lurching gloom; and primitive ritualism (among other things). They get heads bobbing, legs bouncing, and minds swirling. They chill the listener’s skin; they create strange dreams; they also clobber and corrode… every one of the songs elaborately incorporates many of the aspects highlighted above, and does so with such wicked inventiveness and such careful craftsmanship in both songwriting and execution that it’s very easy to lose track of time. It really is a thoroughly dazzling album, and one of the most remarkable I’ve heard in 2025.”
Pothamus – Savartuum Avur
These Belgians want you to cerebrate in meditative contemplation unto transcendent spheres by means of sonic hypnosis. The crunchy heft of the bass and guitar when it eventually catches up in intensity with the percussion is magnificent to behold. This is liturgical music, gospel for divergence.