Announcement for Upcoming List – Best/Favorite Metal Albums from Each Year

Hello all, I wanted to take this time to announce and introduce a new ongoing series that I will be doing. This is the grandest and most ambitious list that I have ever undertaken. In fact, it’s the grandest by at least an order of magnitude (or two).

This will be my selections for the Best or at least my Favorite Metal albums for each year. Some of you may know, but I consider myself to be a longtime lover of heavy metal music, and this will involve going deep into the well of my heavy metal history and my knowledge of the genre and its numerous subgenres. And, this will force me to push myself to listen to more albums from the bands and subgenres that I have just never developed an affinity for.

This grandiose project is inspired by the fact that this year, 2020, is the 50th anniversary of the origin of heavy metal music. For those of you unwilling to do the math there are at home, that means that we’re establishing 1970 as the first year of true and proper heavy metal music. This should be a rather non-controversial starting point as this is the consensus year given certain iconic albums from some certain iconic bands that were released that year. So what better way is there to celebrate this past half century of great heavy music than to go year by year and point out some of metal’s highlights and some personal favorites along the way. And hey we’re in the middle of a quarantine, so what else better is there to do.

So that’s what I’ll be doing: these will be separate postings each focusing on a single year at a time. I will select my personal favorite metal album from that year as well as a list (in no special rank order) of up to five honorable mentions. I will include a brief review of each album emphasizing why it is a personal favorite of mine and/or why it is an important album in metal history. So yes, this is no small endeavor. At up to six albums per year for fifty years, we’re looking at covering around three hundred albums. And I can guarantee you that there will still be beloved albums that do not make the list, and that it will pain me (and perhaps you the reader) to exclude them. But for the sake of my own sanity and your patience as a reader, we need to set that arbitrary album count per year cap somewhere. It is also likely impossible for me to finish this list by the end of the year. I would need to churn out at least one per week. That is assuming that I did nothing else for this blog for the entire year, which is not going to happen. So this mega-list will be a long time in the making, and I appreciate your patience ahead of time with that process.

This will be limited to full length studio albums (i.e. LPs). That means no EPs and no live albums. Likewise, albums will only be considered for selection the first year they were released anywhere in the world. For example, if an album was released in December 1976 in the United Kingdom but was not released in the United States until February 1977, then the album can only be considered for 1976. However, there will be no limits on the number of albums per band on either a per year or total basis. For example, if one band releases three albums in one year, then they are all up for consideration and potential inclusion. Likewise, if a band simply dominates a decade or multi-year span, then I have no problem including them on the list and selecting them as my album of the year for however many years in a row I think is appropriate.

Since this is my list of favorites, we will of course tend to lean toward some of my preferred bands and subgenres. However, I will go out of my way to listen to and acknowledge where appropriate and applicable the monumental and influential albums from other subgenres across the metal spectrum. These inclusions might also lean on some of the more famous albums from each year, rather than delving into every underground release. But hey, sometimes these albums are famous and influential for a reason. And having said that, just a heads up that I’m not the biggest fan of some of the most extreme subgenres of metal (i.e. death metal, black metal, grindcore, etc.). There will be some inclusions from these, but don’t go into this expecting every year from 1987 to the present to simply be my pick of the six best death metal albums from that year. I will also try to emphasize, where appropriate and applicable, the geographic diversity of heavy metal music. Metal music was global in some sense even in the 1970s, but especially now in the 21st century it is truly a metal world with quality music being produced from not just listened to all over the globe. Over the course of this list, I promise to include at least two non-English language albums as my albums of the year selection. There might be more than two, but I haven’t decided yet on some of the latter years.

Also, keep in mind that this list gets more difficult with each subsequent year as metal music as a genre grows larger every year. There were exponentially more metal albums released in 2019 than there were in 1970. Thus, due to the relatively low number of qualifying albums released in 1970 the vast majority of us might be able to come up with a pretty solid consensus on what the best six albums were from that year. However, nowadays there are thousands (!!!) of metal albums released each year around the world. There is literally not enough time in the year to even listen to all of them, let alone catch up on anything you missed in previous years. With that in mind, expect there to be considerable variability between listeners in the subsequent years and decades about what the best metal albums were for a given year. This brings me back to the reminder for the reader that this is my list, and these are my favorites, and obviously it is impossible to listen to every single album that has ever come out.

General Notes on each Decade:

1970s: The selections from this decade will reflect the eclectic origins and early expressions of metal music (i.e. heavy blues, shock rock, dark psychedelia, acid rock, occult music, etc.). While heavy metal music would grow beyond and transcend these origins as it developed its own unique sound that would solidify by the end of the decade around what is now labelled as “traditional heavy metal”, these diverse origins were reflected throughout the decade. Also, in the 1970s there was no real differentiation yet between heavy metal and what we would now call ‘hard rock’. Many bands from this era crossed or lived on that somewhat arbitrary line between the two. As such, I will utilize a broad definition of heavy metal for this decade. I will tend to stick to a narrower definition of heavy metal for subsequent decades, however if one of these bands puts out a particularly heavy and quality album in a subsequent decade then it can be considered. However, that does not mean that just any band with an electric guitar will be considered for the 1970s. The bands will need to have a certain sonic grit or darkness to them. For example, a rock band like Boston will not be included even though their 1976 self-titled debut is one of my all-time favorite albums period.

1980s: This is the decade that heavy metal music got huge. We start out at the beginning of the decade with that real ‘traditional heavy metal’ sound as rejuvenated by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. We see the explosion of hair/glam/pop metal by the middle of the decade. This decade also saw the development of the more extreme subgenres of metal beginning with thrash, and then with death metal by the end of the decade. For a lot of people, the 1980s are still the pinnacle of the genre, and one could devote their life to mining all of the hidden gems of a given year. As such, the 1980s are a particularly difficult decade to create a list for because there are at least ten albums every year that diehard metalheads would consider essential listening. The 1980s also saw the origins of almost every subgenre that would emerge and rise to prominence in subsequent decades.

1990s: The 1990s are when heavy metal music got both very extreme and very weird. On the extreme side, you have the flourishing of truly extreme subgenres like death metal and black metal alongside the decline of thrash. On the weird side, you also have the crash and burn of hair/glam metal with the mainstream popularity of grunge. For the most part, I will avoid grunge albums except maybe a couple from the grunge bands that could be considered more metallic in their sound. There is an argument to be made for considering grunge as a subgenre of metal (or at least as an awkward step-child), but as I said, I will tend to avoid grunge for this list. Also on the weird side, you have the flourishing of the sped-up and over-the-top sound of power metal, the flourishing of the fusion of metal and more electronic and industrial elements that would result in industrial metal, the fusion of hip hop and metal music, and from the middle of the decade on through the early 2000s the rise and commercial explosion of nu-metal. Because the variety of albums this decade is so bizarre and diverse, and because my particular favorite subgenres were not popular at this time, this decade will involve the inclusion and acknowledgement of several albums that are outside of my comfort zone and outside of my normal listening habits. They are all quality albums and are worthy of inclusion, but this is the decade that will force me to push myself the most.

2000s: The 2000s are really my true foundation for heavy metal music. I entered middle school in 2000 and graduated from college in 2010. So many of the albums that I love from this decade are not music that I appreciate in the abstract as it may be for the previous decades. These albums are the ones that I have strong memories with and emotional attachments to. These are albums that were there as I was developing and growing as a person from a child into the adult that I became. And these are still the albums that I go back and listen to the most. As such, you can probably imagine that this decade will be the most difficult for me in terms of narrowing it down to only six albums per year. There are some exceptional individual years in some of the preceding decades, but the 2000s will be categorically the most arduous and painful.

2010s: This will likely be up there with the 1990s for the weirdest decade for me to cover. The sheer volume and diversity of metal albums released this past decade is simply overwhelming. The genre has grown in so many different directions that it is often difficult to find commonalities or points of dialogue between albums and bands within a given year. And then on top of that you have the revival of a lot of the older bands that produced some great music this decade as well as the always constant emergence of newer bands that create new sounds and even some dedicated to the revival of older styles. This is also the first decade in a long time where there was no real presence of metal in mainstream music circles. The 1980s had hair/glam, the 1990s had grunge and nu-metal, and the 2000s had nu-metal and metalcore to a limited extent. There were no new bands or subgenres that really permeated the consciousness of mainstream music this decade, which I’m sure also contributed to the weirdness of the decade. This follows the exclusion of rock music in general from mainstream music circles. This holistic push to the relative underground of not just metal music but even straightforward rock music has fractured these scenes in ways that are both good and bad–creative and regressive. My selections for this decade will surely be seemingly all over the place including old bands putting out great music late in their careers, new bands reviving an older style, new bands creating their own sound and style, and artists combining the various subgenres of metal in new ways or even combining them with non-metal styles of music. This is the decade that I expect to receive the most hate mail for.

So with that I say happy reading and horns up!