Infinite Chaos: The First Chapter
Photography: Liilia Rahkola
Sometimes a band crawls out of the wreckage of something that didn't work, and emerges as rawer, hungrier, and honest. Infinite Chaos is exactly that kind of band, and The First Chapter is that kind of debut.
The band formed in 2023 from the bones of a previous project, built around the original trio of vocalist Mika Kanerva, guitarist Jari Parkkinen, and drummer Markus Halmetoja. Three men born in three different decades — and you can hear every one of those decades in the music. There's the volcanic aggression of early-'80s Teutonic thrash, the grimy low-end crunch of Florida death metal's golden era, and every now and then a flash of something more contemporary that reminds you these aren't museum pieces. They're a living, evolving band.
The lineup expanded through a patient, determined search — one that eventually landed them second guitarist Topi Koivisto and bassist Juuso Kuivanen in late 2024. The completed five-piece then headed into Noise Floor Studio in Helsinki, where producer Mikko Herranen shaped what became this EP. The result is a record that sounds like it was made by people who've been mentally living inside it for years. There's a tightness here — not the over-triggered, pitch-corrected tightness of modern metal production, but the real kind. The kind that comes from a band that has played these songs until they are pure instinct.
Track by Track
01 — Parasite (5:02)
"Parasite" detonates from the first second — fast, blunt, and mean — before pulling back for just a breath, lulling you into exactly the false sense of security it needs in order to hit you harder on the return.
Lyrically, it’s a scream against self-enslavement dressed up as social critique. The chorus flips the accusation back on whoever's listening: it's not us, it's the structure. It's the domestication. It's the glorification of servitude with a polished brand name. Angry, yes — but not aimless. There's a thought behind the rage.
02 — The Existing Dimensions (3:37)
The shortest original on the EP, and arguably the most introspective. Where "Parasite" points outward, "The Existing Dimensions" turns the lens inward — the war being fought here is against the parts of yourself that hold you back. It's self-help written in blood, screamed over a rhythmic thrash groove that locks in for the ride. The guitar solos land squarely in the pocket of classic heavy metal tradition, and the 2:25 slowdown — where some genuinely interesting note choices surface — feels like a moment of hard-won clarity before the track slides back into the groove with practiced grace.
03 — For the Resistance (5:02)
Back to the external. "For the Resistance" is a broadside aimed squarely at power structures that sustain themselves through manufactured despair — those who exploit division, propagate gloom because it keeps people manageable, sow chaos not out of ideology but out of appetite. Musically, it's the most spacious track on the record, as the grooves breathe a little bit.
When the full band locks in at the chorus, it's one of those moments where you find yourself nodding whether you intended to or not.
04 — W.O.C. (4:28)
Full title: Whores of Chaos. And if the name doesn't tell you everything you need to know about where this song is going, the opening riff will. The track opens like something dragged out of the early '90s underground — that dark, melodic death metal crawl before the thrash engine kicks in and the body takes over. It's a formula old-school metal heads have been chasing since the days of Slayer and early Sepultura, and Infinite Chaos execute it with enough conviction to make it feel entirely their own.
05 — Blood Brothers (3:47)
A cover of Papa Roach's "Blood Brothers" closes the record — you’ve gotta understand what Infinite Chaos does with it. It’s not a faithful tribute. It's a conversion. They pull the source material through a death metal engine and what emerges barely resembles where it started. Kanerva's vocals go full demonic; the guitars bite with conviction; Halmetoja's drums are tight and insistent, shifting rhythm just enough to keep you from settling. What's remarkable is how well the song retains its melodic backbone even under all that weight. It grooves hard. It moves. It sends you out of the record on a headbang.
Covers are always a risk on debut releases — they can feel like padding. This one doesn't. It feels like a declaration: this is what we do to other people's material.
The Bigger Picture
There's something important to understand about where Infinite Chaos come from — not geographically, but spiritually. These are not young men playing metal as a career strategy. The band took years to fully come together. Songs sat unfinished because the right people hadn't walked through the door yet. A lead guitarist was found, loved, and couldn't commit. The bass problem was solved by asking the producer. Every step was harder than it needed to be. And yet here is the EP — five tracks, twenty-one minutes, November 2025 — and it sounds like a band that has been waiting to explode for a very long time.
That patience leaves a mark on the music. Nothing sounds rushed. The arrangements have been lived in. The riffs have been road-tested in practice rooms even before there were live shows to prepare for. When the full five-piece finally played their first gigs across southern Finland in April 2025, they did so with songs that had been marinating for two years. You can hear that.
Mikko Herranen's production at Noise Floor Studio deserves its own mention. The mix is honest. Nothing is buried and nothing is gilded. The low end sits where it should — powerful and present without turning into a wall of mud. The guitars have teeth. The drums sound like drums, not like samples of drums. Kanerva's vocals — ferocious, angular, occasionally touching the melodic darkness that separates the interesting death metal vocalists from the merely loud ones — are placed right where they belong: out front, daring you to look away.
Lyrically, the EP covers more ground than you might expect from a debut metal record. There's politics here, yes, but it's not party-political. It's the older, more primal kind — the resentment of anyone who has ever felt that the world was built for other people, and the stubborn refusal to accept that arrangement. That message resonates in a very specific kind of gut. The gut of a man who clocks in every day for a world that wasn't designed with him in mind, and picks up a guitar or puts on a record when the day is finally over — because that is the only honest thing left.
Verdict
The First Chapter is exactly what its title promises: a beginning. It is raw in the best sense of the word — not unfinished, not underdeveloped, but unvarnished. It is five tracks from a band that spent two years building toward a moment and made the most of it. The EP has rough edges, but the rough edges are the point. Metal that has been too carefully polished stops being metal.
Infinite Chaos say they have five or six new songs ready, with recordings planned for early 2026, built with contribution from all five members. If this EP represents what three of them produced during the formation years, the full-band material should be worth every bit of attention it gets. The bones of a serious band are here. The First Chapter closes with that implicit threat still hanging in the air:
This is just the start.
Stream it now on Spotify or Get it from Apple Music
