In an era where the world feels like it’s rotting from the inside out, Paranormal Arson has delivered the perfect soundtrack to that slow decay. The debut full-length album Noxious isn’t just extreme metal for the sake of extremity—it’s a searing critique of 2025’s grim realities, conveyed through filthy sludge riffs, punishing industrial drums, distorted growls, and oppressive noise. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s not supposed to be.
Paranormal Arson is the project of Jamie MacDonald from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, a one-person wrecking crew armed with rage, riffs, and the raw will to say what others won’t. With Noxious, MacDonald channels the anxiety, frustration, and deep moral sickness of our world into a sonic onslaught that’s as thoughtful as it is brutal.
The album opens with “Administrative Message,” an intro that hijacks the familiar sound of an emergency alert and corrupts it—setting the stage for the chaos ahead. This leads directly into “Hook, Line, Sinker,” a track that takes aim at political manipulation and cult-like rhetoric. The “us vs. them” mentality is dissected and destroyed through blast beats, lurching riffs, and MacDonald’s venomous vocals.
“The Suffocating Doom of Nothingness” is a standout instrumental—less a song, more a musical panic attack. Built around a slow, crushing groove and layers of creeping noise, it captures the bleak helplessness of living paycheck to paycheck while the world collapses around you. It’s a piece that’ll hit hard for anyone trying to breathe under the weight of late-stage capitalism.
“Air Quality Advisory” and the title track, “A Bloated Sac of Noxious Gas and Bile,” shift the target to the toxic influence of media and fascist ideologues, their bile seeping into the public consciousness. Here, the vocals are unhinged and the riffs are even sicker—think early Godflesh meeting Deathspell Omega in a gas chamber.
If there’s a single track that embodies Noxious’s intent, it’s “Ad majórem Dei glóriam.” It’s a harrowing denunciation of the Catholic Church’s historical and recent abuses, especially within Antigonish, where the album was born. MacDonald doesn’t shy away from naming names or confronting horrors like the Residential School system. This track isn’t just brutal—it’s righteous.
And then there’s “The Leech,” a blistering indictment of Canadian grocery magnates like Galen Weston Jr. and others profiting while people starve. With a sludge-punk backbone and bile-filled lyrics, it’s one of the rawest cuts on the record—and also one of the most cathartic.
But Noxious doesn’t stop at attacking outside systems. “The Echo of Shredded Vestibular Folds (Swallowed in the Deep Abyss)” turns inward, mocking the gatekeepers of the metal scene who hide bigotry behind faux-authenticity. The breakdown is pure nu-metal sarcasm, crashing into a Demilich-style riff flurry before finishing with gang vocals provided by none other than Andre and Travis Pettipas of Andre Pettipas and The Giants. It’s the strangest, most delicious flex on the record.
“Emergency Action Notification” is exactly what it sounds like—a final alarm before the end. Its tempo shifts and pummeling thrash sections lead to one of the album’s biggest choruses before collapsing into chaos.
But it’s the closer, a cover of Bad Religion’s “You,” that brings the deepest surprise. Reworked into a nine-minute funeral doom epic, this version trades the punk urgency for sorrow and rage. Celine Myette’s angelic lead vocals lull you into a false calm before everything crashes down again in a droning wall of devastation. It’s haunting, beautiful, and soul-destroying in the best way.
Paranormal Arson’s Noxious is a furious, suffocating, and absolutely necessary album. It’s not just a metal record—it’s a protest, a purge, a warning siren from deep within the core of a collapsing system. Every note drips with frustration, every lyric with truth that’s hard to swallow but harder to ignore.
This album doesn’t just reflect the horror of the times—it amplifies it, forces you to sit in it, and challenges you to scream back.
Follow PARANORMAL ARSON on