We provide sufficient criteria for explosion in Crump-Mode-Jagers branching process, via the process producing an infinite path in finite time. As an application, we deduce a curious phase-transition in the infinite tree associated with a class of recursive tree models with fitness, showing that in one regime every node in the tree has infinite degree, whilst in another, the tree is locally finite, with a unique infinite path. The latter class encompasses many models studied in the literature, including the weighted random recursive tree, the preferential attachment tree with additive fitness, and the Bianconi-Barabási model, or preferential attachment tree with multiplicative fitness.