OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 20): PSYCHONAUT, YAROSTAN, FLUISTERAARS

(written by Islander)

We’re getting very close to the end of this list. There’s today, there’s tomorrow, and that’s it. With so little time left I’ve been repeatedly scanning through my giant list of song possibilities and just grabbing things that jump out at me from memory — but also still listening to things recommended by others that I’ve never heard before.

That process resulted in choosing the three songs below. There’s not a straight through-line connecting all three, but I do think the first two, one of which is a song I’d never heard before, fit together pretty well.

 

PSYCHONAUT

Psychonaut’s latest album was warmly greeted by fans and writers alike, judging from how often I’ve seen it on various year-end lists. In his own Top 20 list here at NCS our friend Gonzo gave it his album of the year award, and as he did there I’m going to quote from his review that we posted early last November:

Few bands can skate their way across the subgenre divide as skillfully as Belgium’s Psychonaut. And with World Maker, they’ve not only expertly navigated subgenre divisions, but they’ve also raised the bar for anyone who tries to follow.

Albums like World Maker, in which the incredibly talented trio out-maneuver themselves in every musical effort, just don’t come around very often. It’s a perfect nexus of doom, psych, post-metal, and prog. Tracks with monumentally complex but still catchy grooves like “Endless Currents” wouldn’t sound out of place on a Leprous album. Others like “You Are the Sky” feature the paint-peeling roar of vocalist/guitarist Stefan de Graef, also of Hippotraktor, as he expertly trades rounds with the cleans of bassist Thomas Michiels.

It was Gonzo’s review that propelled me into World Maker, and when I came out the other side I was particularly stuck on one of those songs in the above quotation — “Endless Currents” — though it’s not the only one on the album that was sticky.

As in other cases, one factor that drew me back to the song (repeatedly) is the video through which the band first presented it — it’s a lot of fun to watch. By itself, the song is also a lot of fun to hear. It’s heavy and squirmy, head-rocking and smoothly flowing, gravel-toned and glistening, twitchy and catchy. The clean vocals are seductive, the harsh ones explosive — and the harsh ones announce a tremendously exhilarating finale.

https://psychonautband.bandcamp.com/album/world-maker
http://facebook.com/psychonautband

 

YAROSTAN

Up above I mentioned that even here near the end of this list I’ve still spent some time listening to songs recommended by other people that I hadn’t heard before. This next song is one of those, a track by this post-hardcore band from Marseille that was recommended by our contributor Vizzah Harri. He called it a “slowburner with great sound design and reminiscenct of Cult of Luna filmic aesthetics”. As also mentioned above, I think it flows rather well from the Psychonaut opener, though it becomes much darker than that one before it ends.

“Godot” is indeed a slow burn. If you listen right after the Psychonaut song, it will pull you back, with ethereally shimmering keys and a brightly ringing guitar, which flow and glisten around a deeply humming bass and mid-paced, muscle-moving beats.

But while that opening phase is very seductive, the song’s intensity does gradually increase. Screams can be heard in the distance; the drums begin rumbling; that glittering guitar-riff and musing bass become more feverishly distressing and thunderous, respectively; and near the song’s mid-point the screams explode and the music starts vehemently braying and pugnaciously slugging.

Yarostan do pull back again, slowing the pace and deploying their collage of ringing notes to cast spells, but they also unchain their fury once more, hammering and searing the listener but also both expanding the music’s scope and deepening its feelings of despair.

Back and forth they go, like a pendulum of intensity, and eventually they bring in dramatic singing voices, which soar as the song reaches its own pinnacle of emotional catastrophe. I venture to say that once you’ve heard this song, you won’t soon forget it. I sure haven’t.

P.S. The song is from Yarostan’s album III. I was curious about their name, and saw the band identify it as “also a character in the epistolary novel Letters of Insurgents.” I looked that up and found that it’s a novel by Freddy Perlman (1934-1985) which takes the form of letters exchanged by two anarchists, Yarostan and Sophia, who meet in a factory in eastern Europe, and begin their correspondence about 25 years later, long after Sophia had escaped to a western country.

https://dancingrabbitrecords.bandcamp.com/album/drr018-iii
https://yarostan.bandcamp.com/album/iii
https://www.facebook.com/yarostanband

 

FLUISTERAARS

This last song today doesn’t have any clear musical connection to the first two, but was one that jumped from my memory as I made my way for the 100th time through my enormous list of possibilities. It’s from a 2025 Fluisteraars EP titled Grunsfoort, the final installment in the musical sequence they named De Kronieken van het Verdwenen Kasteel.

I found both songs on the EP to be magnificent, and multifaceted. Among those facets in the first song, “Sediment der Impressies“, are sequences of vaporous and glistening mystery, of fire-bright splendor accompanied by racing drums and raging screams, of towering and daunting bass-led majesty accompanied by twinkling sonic starshine, stalking beats, and lilting folk instrumentation.

In all its phases, including the even more vaporous and cosmically mysterious penultimate one (a prelude to a catastrophic finale), the music sounds otherworldly. And, much like the second song, it got stuck in my head. But it’s that first one I want to add to this list today.

https://fluisteraars.bandcamp.com/album/de-kronieken-van-het-verdwenen-kasteel-iii-grunsfoort
https://www.facebook.com/Fluisteraars/