Love songs have always borrowed the language of appetite, but few go as far as “Pag-Ibig ay Kanibalismo II”. The title translates as “Love Is Cannibalism II”, and the song lives up to it with a tale of motorbikes, a horror-movie road trip and a promise of wholeness even after being devoured. Released by the Filipino band Fitterkarma on Valentine’s Day 2025, it spent months building a following before climbing to number one in the Philippines. This article looks at what the song says, how it came about, and why such a gruesome romance has captured so many listeners. It is dark, funny and oddly tender, often within the same breath.
A Thesis Project That Went Viral
Fitterkarma began in 2023 as a passion project of Joao De Leon, a musician and producer. The song started life in 2024 as part of his thesis EP for a music production degree, which makes its eventual success feel like the best possible grade. It was written by De Leon with Addy Pantig, who also sang lead, and released as a single on 14 February 2025. For months it sat quietly among the band’s other work. Then listeners kept finding it, passing it around and streaming it, until it reached number one on both the Spotify Philippines Top 50 and the Billboard Philippines Hot 100 in December 2025.
Its rise even pushed older material up the charts, including the 2023 single “Kalapastangan”, and in January 2026 it was reported to have overtaken Cup of Joe’s hit “Multo” at the top of Spotify’s Philippine ranking. Slow-burn success of this kind is rare, and it suggests the song’s appeal grew from person-to-person recommendation rather than a marketing campaign. Nobody scheduled this. A strange, dark little song simply kept getting handed from one listener to the next.
The Story the Song Tells
The narrative is a lurid road movie. Two lovers plan a motorbike trip to Siquijor, an island in the Philippines with a reputation for folk magic, and promise to scream as if they were in a horror film. They talk about butchering a person and cooking the result as adobo, the unofficial national dish, on the condition that nobody tells the truth. A repeated vow of restoration follows: whoever is taken apart will be put back together whole, and the narrator’s heart belongs only to the lover, even if it is consumed. A line about killing sorrow, hers and her partner’s, hints at the emotional core. This is a story about two lonely people trying to destroy their loneliness together.
The chorus returns to the cannibal metaphor, where blood becomes lipstick and the mouth is full of the taste of the beloved. It is grotesque, but also strangely sweet. The word for love in the title is “pag-ibig”, a native Tagalog word, while “kanibalismo” is borrowed from Spanish, a small linguistic collision that mirrors the collision of tenderness and violence in the song. Colonial vocabulary supplies the monster, and the older word supplies the feeling.
Love as Consumption
Cannibalism as a metaphor for love is old. Lovers say they could eat each other up, folklore warns of beloveds who consume, and gothic fiction turns passion into possession. What the song does is take the idiom literally and follow it to its conclusion. It asks what devotion looks like if you stop treating it as a figure of speech. The answer is a kind of dark comedy: affection and horror sharing a plate.
There is also a local flavour. Filipino pop has a long tradition of heartbreak songs so ferocious in their feeling that fans have a word for the practice, hugot, which describes pulling a deep emotion up from somewhere private. Many OPM hits are about longing, and this one pushes that longing to an extreme. The extremity is sweetened by a pretty melody, an echo-laden arrangement and a low, tired-sounding lead voice, which one Philstar writer found punchy and infectious. It is the sound of someone describing an atrocity in a bedroom whisper, and that contrast does a surprising amount of the work.
Why It Spread
Part of the answer is the contrast. A catchy, almost romantic melody carries lyrics that would normally belong in a slasher film, and the mismatch is hard to ignore. The track is also short, running just over three minutes, which suits the rhythms of streaming and short-form video. Fans quote its imagery, parody it and make it their own. Even the numbering is part of the fun: part II arrived first, and part I followed later in 2025, as if the band wanted to begin in the middle of the story. That blend of mystery and mischief is exactly what sharing culture rewards.
The success has not been entirely smooth. The line-up has shifted since the breakthrough, with co-writer and singer Addy Pantig leaving the band during the height of its rise, and guest singers have taken on her part live. Even so, the song remains a symbol of how a modest, homemade idea can travel a long way. A student thesis became a national hit, and a band that sang about devouring found itself devoured, happily, by an audience that could not get enough.
A Band With a Taste for the Macabre
Fitterkarma’s darkness is not confined to one song. De Leon has written other tracks with unsettling imagery, among them “Sumpa”, a word that means both curse and oath, which was written a few months before the cannibal song while he was living in the United States. Philstar Life noted that it shares the vivid body-horror imagery that makes listeners squirm and swoon. Another title in their catalogue, “KAMATAYAN!!!”, translates simply as death. Taken together, the band’s catalogue suggests a deliberate aesthetic: romantic longing expressed through the vocabulary of ruin.
What keeps this from becoming shock for its own sake is the emotional logic. Each song grounds its gore in something recognisably human, such as loneliness, fear of loss or the desire to belong completely to someone. The macabre imagery works like a magnifying glass. It enlarges feelings so ordinary that we might otherwise skim past them. That may be why the band has resonated beyond fans of alternative rock, reaching people who would never normally choose a song about cooking a victim in adobo but who recognise the hunger underneath.
Conclusion
“Pag-Ibig ay Kanibalismo II” is a love song for people who find ordinary romance too tame. It takes the familiar idea of being consumed by love and plays it straight, with blood, adobo and a motorbike ride to a magical island. Beneath the shock, the message is tender: two lonely people want to end their sadness, and they will go to extreme lengths to stay together. That combination of sweetness and menace explains why so many listeners have embraced it. It reminds us that the oldest clichés about love still have teeth, and that a good song can bite while it sings.