(written by Islander)
Well, here we are, at the last installment of this 2025 Most Infectious Song list. On the one hand, I’m breathing a big sigh of relief because I’ve been preparing these segments every weekday since January 1st, and it’s been a lot of fucking work to do that. On the other hand, even though I’ve managed to list 64 songs (including the ones today), I’ve still had to close down without yelling about all the songs worth yelling about from last year.
Given that this is the end, I expected I’d feel a lot of anxiety when picking this last match of songs. But in actuality I didn’t knot up my guts and brains over it. I just kind of let go and allowed impulse to take the wheel, content with the idea that these last four are really good and really infectious songs, even if I’ve had to leave many equally infectious ones off on the side of the road. I also think there’s a bit of a “rock the fuck out” connection between the first three, and how can you go wrong with that?, plus a “what the hell, I’m doing this!” predicate for the last one.
On Monday I’ll do a wrap-up post that lists all the songs in this 2025 collection and includes links to each segment.
PELICAN
Pelican have been a personal favorite going back to the earliest days of NCS and before, and although my personal tastes in metal have continually drifted in increasingly extreme directons since then, like I somehow fell into the River Styx while not yet dead, I still make it a point to listen to their new music, and have never come away disappointed.
We didn’t do their latest album Flickering Resonance the kind of justice it deserved. No one here reviewed it. None of the year-end lists we posted included it. I assume this was partly a matter of personal tastes diverging from that album’s music and partly a function of the inability of anyone to listen to everything, much less write about everything they do hear.
I did listen to Flickering Resonance, and was captivated by it, which is usually what happens when I listen to Pelican records. I picked a song from it to lead off this final segment of my list, but I hasten to add that it’s not the best song on the album overall. It just happens to be the catchiest one (by my lights) and one of the heaviest songs, which might be why it was a lead single released last February. To repeat what I wrote about it then:
“In this big neck-bender of a song, Pelican go dark and heavy, discharging the brutish thrust of grim and grimy riffage and head-smacking beats. The music gets even more black-eyed and ominous, and the lead guitar also miserably squirms but also seems to mysteriously beckon with its bluesiness within the hammering hostility. It squirms again even more distressingly yet also seductively when the rhythm section shift into a big rumble.
“The layered quivering sensations of the guitars begin to sound psychedelic as well as disturbing, though one might also interpret those latter maneuvers as signs of altered-state jubilance.”
https://pelicansong.lnk.to/cascadingcrescent
https://pelicansong.lnk.to/flickeringresonance
https://www.facebook.com/pelicansong/
DEMONIC DEATH JUDGE
As I said at the outset, I didn’t knot myself up over these final four selections, but instead let impulse take the wheel. And so, as a prime example, I made this next choice after checking out the song for the first time just a couple of days ago, after reading about it in Vizzah Harri’s massive post-LISTMANIA contribution to our year-end LISTMANIA series which I finally loaded up on the site just yesterday.
Before that, I hadn’t paid any attention to the album that includes this song. In fact, it’s been a lot of years since I last paid attention to anything by this band, for no good reason at all. I wondered if anyone here had ever written about their music before Vizzah Harri did, and found that it happened just once — when Andy Synn called out their 2017 album Seaweed in a post he made in 2020 to celebrate his 10th anniversary of writing for NCS (that post included a collection of 10 reviews, one for each of those years).
At that point Andy acclaimed Seaweed as “the band’s best record,” and one that “provides the best example of the group’s swaggering, riff-driven, fuzz-drenched Stoner-Sludge, which should appeal to anyone who loves getting down and dirty with a steaming blend of fat grooves and filthy vocal lines.” I don’t know what he thinks about DDJ’s latest record, Absolutely Launched, but Harri’s writeup about it was a kick to read.
I listened to every song he specifically called out in his review within that ultra-long post, and a few more from the album that he didn’t, and any one of them could have made this list. The main reason why I went with “90’s Violence” is because the video was such a terrific piece of demented nostalgia, stitching together clips from lots of ’90s action movies that I consumed back then. But hell, the song’s addictive as fuck too.
The addictive qualities include burly riffs that throb and snarling riffs that sizzle, skull-smacking beats, huge bass pulsations, weirdly warping leads, and a lysergic acid solo. Heads will move, legs will jump, and you might could imagine the song playing in hard rock dance clubs and even on the radio, except for the screaming vocals, which would cause most people (but not you people!) to recoil in disgust and run for the exits. Hell yeah.
https://demonicdeathjudge.bandcamp.com/album/absolutely-launched
https://www.facebook.com/demonicdeathjudge
BEWARE OF THE GODS
Here’s one more song that jumped out at me as I was scrolling through my list of choices for the last time a few days ago. When I add songs to that typed list as the year crawls ahead, my habit is to add a certain number of asterisks next to the choices, as some kind of sign of how infectious I thought they were when I first heard them. The number has no coded numerical significance at all — I just hold my finger on the key until it seems right to take it off. I saw a lot of asterisks next to this next song, listened to it one more time, and was happy to stick it in here next.
This song, “Temple of Thieves“, is one I premiered, and so once again I can crib (extensively) from what I wrote before:
In a nutshell, “Temple of Thieves” is a stunning song, a big scary beast of a song with a heavy-muscled punch, a malignant and unearthly mien, and a chorale of vocals that will light up your eyes and send shivers down your spine. It’s primally compelling, immediately addictive, and continually rewarding, the kind of thing your enraptured reptile brain will want to go back to over and over again.
Only a dead man’s muscles wouldn’t move to the song’s massive, thrusting grooves, propelled by big booming drums and a lead-weighted but fuzzed-out bass. And the shaggy, blaring, moaning, and undulating riffage, accented by squalling leads, does conjure menacing beastly visions.
The vocals are damned scary too, and remarkably varied. This one-man chorale delivers sinister but soulful singing in captivating tones, gritty soaring cries about to come apart at the seams, the snarls and screams of a demon that’s caught the smell of blood, and something like the grim pronouncements of a street-corner prophet.
As if the song weren’t frightening and exhilarating enough, it also includes a weirdly warping and shrieking guitar solo, dismally writhing and gruesomely growling notes, and brazen melodic swirls way up in the rafters.
https://bewareofgods.bandcamp.com/album/upon-whom-the-last-light-descends-ii-amnesia-island
https://www.instagram.com/beware_of_gods
https://www.facebook.com/bewareofgodsband
DAWN OF A DARK AGE
This is the first installment of my list that includes four songs instead of three. Because it’s the last installment, I thought I ought to squeeze in something more than the usual number. After toying with varying numbers above three, the small rational part of my brain reminded me that I would need to write something about each additional song, so I deeply exhaled and decided on one — just one more. But which one?
The asterisks for this one jumped off the page at my eyeballs again (see the writeup of the immediately preceding song above), and then there’s the fact that I’ve always admired the musical idiosyncracies and unusual ingredients of this band. I do enjoy keeping our visitors off-balance, and I thought, what the hell, that’s what I’m going to do in this final selection!
This choice — “Il Rito Della Consacrazione” (The Rite of Consecration) — also allows me to include in this list one more excellent video, and to borrow again from something I wrote before:
In this song, from their album Ver Sacrum, Dawn of A Dark Age incorporate mysterious acoustic picking, even more mysterious shimmering tones that sound like ethereal choirs — and an unusual amalgam of deep, gravel-toned words (which resemble throat-singing) with soaring song. Vittorio Sabelli also brings one of his clarinets into play, creating a slow and entrancing melody, as well as abrasive notes which give the music a darker and more depressive shade.
Shimmering and sizzling tones create both greater intensity and greater mystery, and the steady drums accelerate, adding to the building tension. A clarinet harmony (perhaps with a flute in the mix) enhances the tension further. Strangled screams join in with those monstrous, abyssal vocals. The music rings and scathes, becomes ominous and frightening, and very much sounds out of this world.
When the tension breaks, the clarinet again takes the lead, reminding us (along with the video) that we are still in a realm of magic, myth, and mystery.
https://mykingdommusic.bandcamp.com/album/ver-sacrum
https://www.facebook.com/dawnofadarkage
https://www.instagram.com/dawn_of_a_dark_age