(written by Islander)
A new week begins and so we resume the rollout of this 2025 Most Infectious Song list. With this Part 7 the number of songs climbs to 21.
For this installment I decided to lean into death metal, very different flavors of death metal to be sure, but each track a neck-wrecker. These choices ought to make my comrade DGR particularly happy, but hopefully many of you as well — though I quickly admit that the three albums from which I extracted these songs were home to lots of other infectious ones too.
CRYPTOPSY
Cryptopsy left a smoking crater right in the middle of this year with the June release of their latest full-length onslaught, An Insatiable Violence. Andy Synn reviewed it here, and unsurprisingly it landed on lots of year-end lists both at NCS and elsewhere. Here’s part of what DGR wrote when he put it on his own list:
An Insatiable Violence is only eight songs but goddamn if the album doesn’t feel like it has battered the absolute life out of you by the time it wraps up thirty-three minutes from its start. It is basically wall-to-wall insanity, wherein every member of the band is equally important as the others, because they are executing on such a high level that it just plays out like the natural order of things.
The song I chose for this list is the album closer, “Malicious Needs“. Of course, it’s viciously unhinged. The drumming is off the charts; the riffing is monstrously heavy but writhes maniacally; the vocals are berserk.
The music also clangs and thuds like a battering ram and explodes in weaponized bursts (both of them key factors in what makes the song infectious), and the guitar leads quickly spasm in ways that alternately sound miserable and utterly demented (the bursts of squealing fretwork are themselves another aspect that makes it catchy).
But it’s the song’s unusual final phase that seals the deal — the music becomes vast, tidal, and emotionally stricken, the vocals explode in tormented screams, and the album ends in ethereal eeriness. For me, that concluding segment is an important part of why the song has gotten stuck in my head.
https://cryptopsyofficial.bandcamp.com/album/an-insatiable-violence
https://www.facebook.com/cryptopsyofficial/
LIK
My next choice is a song from Lik’s 2025 album Necro. DGR landed the review of this one, and wound up putting it in the No. 10 spot of his Top 50 list of the year’s best records. As he wrote in his review:
Lik’s continual evolution into one of the meanest acts within the death metal realm has been an exciting one to watch as they haven’t put out a bad album yet. They’ve definitely become both guardian and priest of a very specific subsection of death metal, yet they’re so good at it that they are occasionally able to add a new page to the immense tome of the overall genre.
His review also included this about the song I’m now adding to this list: “‘War Praise‘ is the song that will likely win many people over, ensuring that Lik’s goal of making sure your neck hurts by song three is well accomplished.”
I took my sweet time making my way toward Necro, finally making my way through it only after we were deep into our annual LISTMANIA series. When I did, I shook my head in consternation, because I realized it was complicating my decision-process for this song list. But while I wrestled for a time over which song to pick, “War Praise” edged out others by a nose. The fact that it was packaged with a good video might have had something to do with that.
It’s a hard-charging affair, packed with thunderous drumming, maniacally roiling and viciously eviscerating chainsaw riffage, gloriously spiraling leads, and throat-cutting snarls. But the real neck-wrecking part hits at about the 2:00 mark, right before another charismatic and anthemic sequence of guitar soloing that has me mentally hoisting invisible oranges every time I hear it.
https://likofficial.bandcamp.com/album/necro
https://www.facebook.com/LIKofficial
SYNAPTIC
I did say that today’s song-list installment would make DGR happy. This next pick comes from Synaptic’s 2025 album Enter the Void, which DGR enthusiastically reviewed here. And in his year-end Top 50 list he put the album at the No. 9 spot, right next to that Lik album. In the review he devoted an entire paragraph to just one song:
We’d be remiss without shouting out the thudding heaviness of “The Lost Continent”…. Synaptic don’t stray too far from that opening volley within the song – their general formula is laid pretty clear within the opening song — but they’re definitely going to use every part of the tech-death and melodeath animal available to them on every other song. That’s how “The Lost Continent” gets to have its bass guitar brought way up to the forefront for some true concrete-punching and knuckle-cracking. Its braindead thudding rhythms punctuate the song while some heavily processed and guitar-effect-walled leads worm their way throughout. It’s a gnarlier song but this is still of the breed of face-on-fire tech-death that the guitar warriors of olde have comfortably made home.
I’m not sure I need to say anything more about why I picked the song, other than to emphasize that despite how hair-on-fire the riffing and vocals are, it’s the kind of mania and mayhem that’s also loaded with hooks. And I don’t mean just those thudding grooves referred to above — the thoroughly crazed fretwork is hook-y too, and so is the spritely guitar-and-bass melody that eventually surfaces to add engaging new spices to the mix.
This thing will spin your head all the way around. Enjoy!