(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 3 is: Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies – An infectious Addendum Part 3 of 3 (Shit’s about to get weird; BSL-4 entities + 1 bonus track).
A lot of work goes into art. “Good art is that which brings meaning to reality. Creation is that what brings forth substance and truth.” A lot of us who look for new music become excited with new tones akin to being painted with colors imaginary, palettes that don’t yet exist. If that is all Leet-speak to you, then I’ll just say that you don’t need to fear this turning into the wheat and chessboard problem.
There’s one writer who perpetually fails to adhere to time constraints while jokingly asserting it’s nothing but a construct in this plagued rodent race. One that in aspirational pseudo-linguistical fashion was able to fool the underground in hacking his favorite metal blog by an enforced coup d’état on the infectious series 2 years ago. Sheeit, jokes aside, this is the infectious addendum nobody asked for (except for the fact that Islander has a Desert Eagle .50 pointed at my shiny head to get this shit done before the eschaton arrives). Here are the last infectious cuts you haven’t heard yet from last year.
10 Bizarre and divergent cuts
Sleep Paralysis – Fever Dream II: Paranoia
Unsettling slasher-toned chiptune vaporwave evolves into an intricate tapestry of degraded arabesque. There are multitudes of records that came out not sounding like anything else, this one might be even further removed. Incendiary succor for those unsullied by the hebephrenic throes of a fettered pallid sensorium swearing fealty towards a thraldom of fractal insinuations.
Smiqra – po-ti-ni-ja
A track that keeps building in frenetic energy and a good clip of avant madness, “and no it is not just an endless angularly riffed ascension. The piano interludes and solos here are a welcome breath of fresh air with spoken word soothing us before the inevitable plunge back into a maelstrom of ferocity. Tribal allusions remain, like oratory renditions or a ritual chant in gang vocal style before a vocal solo, you read that right, in strained despairing wails. Who would have thought that madness sounds this good?”
StumpTail– Scripture in the Scales
Hillbillycore pioneers with foundations in southern blackened sludge. Don’t judge an album on its cover art. The first thing you wouldn’t expect are the longform compositions, the second is with how much artistry these outlaws from swamp country pack into their creations. Positively oddball, a few more shaves off the totem pole of strange than anyone can predict. From BC: “A simple road trip gone straight to hell — a drive down I-65 from Nashville to the Florida Gulf Coast. An encounter with the mythical Florida Man… who turns out to be Poseidon.” Put your croc masks on, it’s gonna be a wild ride.
Blacnk – Ash in the Mirror’s Gaze
Whereas the preceding Ordinance Unseen is tribalistic, disturbing, deranged and refreshing like coughing up ocean scum after a keelhauling; a spaciness ensconces Ash in the Mirror’s Gaze. Like going to a party where post surf punk is playing while a synthesizer and vocalist have consumed the madness of the world, condensed it, and then projected it en masse.
Flummox – Executive dysfunction
Executive dysfunction starts out with a punishing groove, perplexes with tones one didn’t expect in even a genre-bending mashup, and it keeps on confounding. Jumping styles harder than Bone Tomahawk with acrobatic finesse. This thing is fluid like the ocean, not the gods of prog, that indifferent and beauteous mass that has the power to crush, rip to shreds, and dominate the ever-breathing fuck out of you. Obnoxiously ambitious, yet captivatingly eccentric. Going to the carnival on a rainy day for the cabaret show but someone dropped a villainous dose of DMT in your tea.
Fleshvessel – Mental Myiasis
A vocal attack that hits operatic notes of falsetto highs that can unnervingly erode into gritty crust and baritone malaise. Conceptually and capriciously resolute, musically a progressive baroque ballet for the undead. The soundtrack of entropic singularity and the degradation of all.
Ashbreather – La Grande Bouffe
Preposterous subject matter, a parody, a statement and commentary – on art as well as life as far as the album cover is concerned. Nothing rough around the edges here. This is insanely well writ, planned, set up, executed, and produced. 3 musicians who listened to way too much Opeth, early- and mid-Metallica, and then threw in some King Crimson and Karlheinz Stockhausen down The Bean Pipe. Laugh at your peril, the music will rip all preconceptions away in the sheer musicality and force majeure enacted. Alarming yet soothing, a springtide flush.
Flagman – The Punishment Committee
Quirk levels turned up past tolerable dosages employing mutant Dermaptera, aka earwigs, to burrow into skull-holes and lay eggs of insufferable infectiousness. Not conceived as a companion piece to Dr Strangelove: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb; Before the Blast would however make a nice companion piece to Laurie Jones’ The Bomb Run as its opening and coda pieces fantasize lost-cause conflicts.
The Punishment Committee video wins a place on the infectious addendum for ideas and sounds fresher than that post Tsar-bomba glowing grin, as well as extra points for the most innovative zero budget video. Spasmodic rhythm grind, glitch rap core, cathartic cranial vicissitudes. The other choice was a song 47 seconds long, but on my count more than half of those seconds contain no vox. 79 words Warthog-gatling gunned over 23 seconds.
Beach Gore – running through the castle under a blood moon in my jordans
Quaint, whimsical, that lightness on the shoulders with the weight of all the fucks that weren’t yours to give raptured into a blackened sun blanketed in clouds of post-punk glazing a sea of royally purple synth pop.
Ciśnienie – My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell
Infernal post jazz with talons dipped in hemlock and pincers laced with high-order psychotropics. There isn’t anything soothing about this one, its unsettling meter got maxed out walking through the nuclear dust of continents flattened in parallel dimensions. Tension plays more than one role, though the kind that breathes down your throat here is that which can rise in frenzy unto a fever pitch. The composition has a disquieting sweep and grating insistency with a bass binding a spell so flush that you cannot but commit to more of the violence it seeks to administer through the demons on violin, keys, sax, and drums. None of the tracks are short, it was recorded live, it’s not conventionally catchy but it not so much creeps but pierces under the skin.
8 Entities classified as biosafety level 4 threats
I shit you not:
Scat detected! Very obviously faked cos of the blue grammar lines the MSpaint ‘shartist’ forgot to take out. Tsk tsk. Actual BSL-4 list here.
Crippling Alcoholism – Mr. Sentimental
Gothic postpunk darkwave gutterpop. The catchiest melody they’ve ever put to tape was that of With Love From A Padded Room’s opener, I’ll pay you more if you let me watch, so they seem to lead with their most melodic hook-friendly tracks. Once you open up on the lyrics there’s no turning back. These New Yorkers might not bring the distorted tremolos and blasting ferocity that you’d equate with heaviness. The play on the antithetical is something they excel at. It’s a ballad, and as far as the subject matter for the rest of the album goes, this is not as suffocatingly dark in crushing (fvck, I used the word, it’s my turn to fix the printer) emotional weight. Riding murky waves of dark synths with flashes of poetic brilliance crooned in gravelly baritone.
King Kong Company – The Machine
Even though we didn’t get any new Bobby Fingers content last year, yeah the Black Keys Bro Roadkill vid kinda counts, the best prankster on the tube joined King Kong Company for some video action. Two absolute bangers in the abrasive Wrecked with God and The Machine, the latter of which is shared below (I realize a bit late that they’re older vids, but you might not have seen them yet, so it counts). The lyrics are equal parts hilarious and horrifying depending on your parental status. It is not metal in sound, the entity that is Bobby Motherfvcking Fingers however, is what you get if Irvine Welsh’s Filth, Solefald’s last opus, and a honey badger had a baby. Art of the highest order, rib cracking hilarity, too fiendish for their own good, and metal as fvck. Oh, and this track will get stuck in your head.
The Callous Daoboys – Distracted by The Mona Lisa
There might be many other candidates on these nu-math/post-core marrowsky-ing jesters’ record like Two-Headed Trout (uhm, that hyperlink is a sick music short film though) to have made the list. Distracted by The Mona Lisa was chosen for vocal melodies and soundscapes more catching than anything you’re gonna hear on any pop radio station and even more for the glitch-core rhythm distortion nearing the end. For a band that defies boxes of quantum superposition in elegantly abrupt feline fashion, they have a penchant for writing insanely catchy melodies. A good way to describe their sound are the very genre tags on their BC account; post- mathy- metalcore partyviolence, with an emphasis on both the party and the violence.
Year of the Cobra – War Drop
Bass and drums, some vox. If your reality is stuck in a world centered around guitars for your sonic palette, just like most of us seeing apes get stuck on visual stimuli, allow yourself to be beguiled by what can be done with just 3 elements. It’s not the number of elements you have at your disposal, it’s what you do with them, and Baal’s balls be braided but the bouldering bass, vivacious vox, and decompression-inducing drums on this kicks the need for 6 strings in the teeth.
Kalaveraztekah – Nikan Axkan (El Aquí y El Ahora)
These progressive Mexican death dealers deal in sweeping riffs of scintillating grandeur, Mesoamerican themes of Aztec cosmogony, and a shitton of percussive flair. This whole godforsaken album is infectious as fuck. I am wholly ignorant of the instrumentation devised, but I’m here for all the fiendish flute and pipe interplay with the belligerent strings and transmissible taps of whoever knows how many drum instruments. Folk, progressive, or death sure are labels one can tag this with, Kalaveraztekah just ushered in the trve sound of Aztec metal.
Zeicrydeus – Ten Thousand Spears Atop The Bleeding Mountains
Going for the big kill, incorporating NWOBHM sensibilities, stadium heavy metal hooks, and just a hint of an Obsequiae sound. This blackened metallic thrash behemoth that gets compared to the Greek scene quite a bit does something that we don’t hear enough of; ludicrous and profoundly sick bass solos. You don’t need any patience to sit through this sub ten-minute beaut. By the time you get to the third act you’ll be asking why you didn’t know about this band. Hails.
Lycopolis – Eldest Son
I’m still hooked to this track since I first heard it. Does not get old. You’re supposed to use magick for longevity on flesh, not on media. I guess this is what infected me the most in 2025. Hands motherfucking down, cos I can’t stop playing it: “Making an entrance with immediate urgency and import, a gravitas met not soon after by a guitar tone and melodic phrase most guitarists could only dream of, and after the pay-off riff finally and unequivocally shatters any low expectations, I was converted 400 times over already. There have been infectious as fuck compositions so far this year, but Lycopolis prodded the bar up quite a few notches with their bronzen khopesh swords on ‘Eldest Son.’”
Grayceon – Thousand Year Storm
In order to bring in the necessary brush of a peaceful zephyr, only for a short while. Going from true Arabic scaling all the way to San Francisco where this trio not so much as interpreted but embodied it within their storm of a muse. This track got sanctioned by the WHO for its capacity for volatile communicability. If your body survived the onslaught of foot stomping and neck-snapping reverie you’re bound to go through when the winds turn; the demented screams, ridiculously catchy cello, guitar and drum effects do retreat back. For contemplation’s sake, and a gorgeous interlude. No cruel master, the tempest heeds your yearning for more and delivers. Best album opener I’ve heard in a minute.
This is the END
No, seriously;
Meer – This is the end
“Wait, what!? 2024 was ages ago!!!!”
Trust me on this.
This is the end enters the prog rock arena with indications of reverbed HM2 and then go full on Kashmir in no time. ‘Kashmir’ comes from ‘desiccated from water.’ A land that previously was a lake. And so, the reference makes all the more sense for the lyrics in This Is The End referencing from its opening lines those beings and objects that have dissolved and crumbled to dust of the past.
The lyrics are intelligent and vocally excellently constructed. “We are the children of our time” seems like it won’t stick as a line at first and then, man they hit Loïc Rossetti levels of vocal melodic acuity. The highs seem impossible yet sustained to almost screeching heights before the song rests in a glade of pianic percussion. I’m not sure what mood this music would work for, but as a whole it is a mood of its own.
With an epic finale to an album that had ideas piercing the stratosphere yet grounded in terrestria for its humanistic themes; one that is as soaring and alluring in its melodic prodigiousness as its cover suggests for being a nebula of sound spells for a mini orchestra that certainly shouldn’t be taken for granted, but cherished for the love they’ve shared in this opus.
