(written by Islander)
Today we begin the final part of the annual NCS LISTMANIA orgy:
This particular series isn’t about best albums or best shorter releases, and it isn’t even about best songs. As the title says, it’s about “most infectious” songs. Some of those might be among the year’s best songs, but in every year there are stand-out songs that aren’t immediately infectious, and actually might never be. Conversely, there are some highly infectious songs every year that most people wouldn’t critically acclaim as great works of art.
The process of compiling this list, as in every previous year, is a bit bizarre, or at least very poorly planned. Let me explain (again):
I try to keep a running list of songs I find infectious as the year unfolds, though sometimes I let a week or two go by without adding to it, so there are gaps. On top of my own list, I added a list of all the songs recommended by readers in comments responding to this invitation, as well as a group that Vizzah Harri sent me. DGR usually sends me his own recommendations, and I suspect he will eventually do that again. Andy Synn has also hinted that he may send me some ideas, or perhaps he’ll prepare his own addendum.
Leaving aside whatever DGR or Andy may contribute, what I have in front of me right now is a master list of 443 song candidates, 310 of my own and 133 suggested by others — which is what mathematicians would call a fuckload of possibilities.
As I’ve done in the past, I put that master list in alphabetical order by band name, which allowed me to see how many bands and songs got repeat mentions. As usual, there was a crazy amount of scatter, with very few bands and even fewer songs being nominated by more than one person. This did not make my selection process easier, even though this list has never been a popularity contest.
I do try to spread the picks around among different genres and sub-genres, because this list is also intended to be a reflection of all the variety that the last year brought us, but it’s inevitable that it will reflect my own particular tastes more than anyone else’s because I alone make the decisions.
As in past years, I plan to include some well-known names whose 2025 albums commanded a lot of attention and acclaim (including the first song below), but those will be out-numbered by much more obscure groups and releases. Part of that derives from the ethos of our site, but equally from my own listening habits.
Getting back to the “poorly planned” observation: If I had nothing else to do for NCS and nothing else going on with my life, I’d spend the last month of the year methodically going through that master list, listening and re-listening to everything on there, and compiling my final list so that it’s all nailed down and buttoned up before I start rolling it out here in the first week of January. But that never happens.
Instead, I just make a start and then continue to figure things out as January rolls on. That’s why I have no idea at this point how long the list will be by the time I end it. If I stick to my plan of only posting each Part on consecutive weekdays, and not on the weekends, there will be 21 Parts by the end. At this point I’ve made choices for the first 13 Parts, and each one of those includes 3 songs. But the number of songs in each Part may ultimately vary. And I might panic near the end and post on a weekend too.
As for when I will end the list, I promise to do that by the conclusion of January. Although I will number each of the near-daily installments, the list will be unranked — because ranking presupposes that I would first have a complete and final list and then be able, somehow, to compare all the apples and oranges. The first thing isn’t a reality, and the second thing is beyond my capabilities.
So, with that, here we start….
CORONER
2025’s releases included some notable “comebacks”, albums by bands that had storied histories, disappeared for quite a while, and then returned with new music. I daresay that Coroner’s comeback was the most successful of them all. Dissonance Theory has been hailed far and wide not just as a fine reminder of what the band accomplished in their early years but as an advance, an unexpected step up from where they left off in the mid-’90s.
The album has appeared frequently in the many year-end lists both here and elsewhere, and as I see it, that hasn’t been the result of businesses yielding to label pressures or people blindly following the crowd like lemmings. The album is really just that good, a refreshing and exciting work that I think most people didn’t foresee would land so damned well.
It’s sometimes the case that a particular infectious song is a “one hit wonder”, but just as often it’s true that a band capable of writing one very catchy and memorable song is likely to write many of them. That’s true of Coroner and their new album: It includes a bunch of songs that I thought were prime candidates for this list. I was especially torn between “Renewal”, “Symmetry”, and “The Law”. I finally picked “Symmetry“, but ask me tomorrow and I might point you to one of the others.
When “Symmetry” debuted along with a good video that lets us see the guys in action, Coroner’s guitarist, songwriter, and producer Tommy Vetterli commented, “This track is about vanity, ego, and how self-obsession can be destructive. That idea shaped the way we played it too. ‘Symmetry‘ gave us room to explore, and with the rhythmic dimension Diego [Rapacchietti – Drums] brings, it pushed us further than we’ve gone before.”
The song is fast and vicious, but also technically impressive. It’s a viscerally compelling pulse-puncher but also reaches heights of sinister glory (and depths of sinister darkness when the band slow the pace in the song’s back half). Speaking of glorious, the fluid guitar solo is that too — and in fact it’s a big reason why I picked this song. We are lucky to have these dudes back in harness.
https://coronerofficial.bandcamp.com/album/dissonance-theory-24-bit-hd-audio
https://coronerofficial.com/
https://www.facebook.com/coronerband/
NITE
Compared to Coroner, the San Francisco band Nite are youngsters, but like Coroner they have an impressive talent for writing very catchy, very memorable songs, and their new album Cult of the Serpent Sun was another 2025 release that I thought included multiple tracks worthy of this list. But the song that has stuck with me the longest and the hardest is “Crow (Fear the Night)“. To parahrase what I wrote after first hearing it:
The song is fiendishly infectious. It goes off like a grand but rapidly jolting fanfare for the five-pointed heavy metal star of old, and the rhythmic punch is viscerally compulsive. Moreover, though a song like this could have been successfully accompanied by all sorts of vocals, including power-metal singing (ewww), I’m so happy that what we get are gritted-teeth gargoyle rasps that sound like they want to gnaw your bones, probably the most evil thing about this infernally glorious song. And the soloing… the soloing is just pure gold. Yet another reason why it will take a crowbar to pry this song out of your head after you hear it.
The video is cool too. What I’ve learned is that sometimes it’s the videos that lever one catchy song on an album over another one that might be equally infectious, if not more so. In a nutshell, this song was an easy choice for this list.
https://nitemetal.bandcamp.com/album/cult-of-the-serpent-sun
https://www.facebook.com/nitemetal
PIECE
This next song, “Demigod“, is one we premiered (along with a very cool video), and it won’t be the last infectious song that came to my attention that way. It’s from the second album, Rambler’s Axe, by the Berlin-base sludge band Piece, released last year by This Charming Man Records. I’ll again crib from what I’ve written about the song previously:
The video announces the song’s subject matter: an ancient (and arguably extraterrestrial) race with unusual features and apparently supernatural powers who ruled the African empire of Kitara and were worshiped as… demigods. The video both embraces the legend and provides gritty and gripping footage of the band’s performance of the song.
As for the song itself, it’s massive in every way — massively heavy, massively muscle-moving, massively infectious. Its main riff creates a menacing and propulsive throb, a braying and groaning presence that, when coupled with the compulsive rhythmic punch of booming drums and gut-slugging bass, gets its hooks in a listener’s head very damned fast.
The drumming throughout the song sounds like a boulder-throwing avalanche that got its groove on. The bass is heavy and hard enough to rumble guts and fracture concrete. The vocals are raw and ragged, expelling the words in a gnarly, gnashing howl. The riffing also changes, dismally moaning and ominously heaving but always returning to that enormously body-moving main riff. As icing on this mountainous cake, the song also brings in a hallucinatory guitar solo that doubles up and spirals high — a fittingly unearthly accent for a song about ancient extraterrestrials.
When we premiered the song I closed by underscoring the point that it’s an enormous neck-bender and “so compulsively catchy that it’s guaranteed to be on a certain list about infectious songs that we pull together around here right after year-end”. Now I make good on that guarantee.
https://pieceismetal.bandcamp.com/album/ramblers-axe-2
https://www.facebook.com/pieceismetal/