1.Primordial - Redemption At The Puritan's Hand

2.Sólstafir - Svartir Sandar

3.Ghost Brigade - Until Fear No Longer Defines Us

4.Draconian - A Rose For The Apocalypse

5.Kypck - Ниже

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This was probably the second-best decade in music for me (with the first being 2000s). There were albums that changed my perspective on how to perceive the world and helped me dive deeper into this neverending journey of discovering music. It always felt like there is a unique world hidden in every album and that makes me want to discover as much as possible to broaden my horizons.

1.TesseracT - Altered State

2.Behemoth - The Satanist

3.Wintersun - Time I

4.Septicflesh - The Great Mass

5.Myrath - Legacy

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1.Summoning - Old Mornings Dawn

2.Amorphis - Queen Of Time

3.Moonsorrow - Jumalten Aika

4.Septicflesh - Codex Omega

5.Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

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2000-2004 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5844
2005-2009 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5838
2015-2019 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=6722

I sure do love this site and it's rating system, it makes finding great music so easy and, even more importantly, when an album is overlooked for a while but starts getting a buzz a few months later, boom, there it appears in the top 20.

All that being said, I still wish there was some way to get a weighted ranking that not only takes the rating of the album into account, but also the number of votes that were cast. For example, an album with a rating of 8.8 and 1000 votes would rank higher than an album with a rating of 8.9 and 20 votes. So, I scraped all the albums on the site with at least 1 vote into a database. Then, taking a leaf out of IMDb's book, I used Bayesian estimation (like the IMDb's Top 250) to calculate a weighted rating for each album based on its Metal Storm rating and the number of votes it had received.

The formula for calculating the Top 100 Albums gives a true Bayesian estimate:
Bayes rating (BR) = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) where:
C = average expected rating given...
m = minimum number of votes
R = average rating for the album = (Metal Storm rating)
N = number of votes for the album = (votes)

The way the Bayesian estimator works is that all albums in the database are given and additional m fake votes with an average rating of C, irrespective of how many true votes it already has. Then a new weighted rating is calculated...
If the album has no true votes ( N = 0 ), then BR = ( C × m + R × 0 ) ÷ ( m + 0) = C × m ÷ m = C (the average expected rating).
If the album has a number of true votes equal to the minimum ( N = m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × m ) ÷ ( m + m ) = ( C + R ) × m ÷ 2m = ( C + R ) ÷ 2 (halfway between the two ratings).
If the album has a very large number of true votes ( N >> m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) ≈ R × N ÷ N = R (the Metal Storm rating).
This means that the Bayes rating will never equal the Metal Storm rating but will approach it as the true votes grow arbitrarily large.

Now that the maths bit is out of the way, here was my methodology:
Only Studio and EP album types, from the years 2010 to 2014, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2010-2014.
The minimum number of votes (m) was determined by calculating the 75th percentile of the votes, rounded to the nearest 10.
I also decided that if an album's Bayes rating was within 0.005 of #100, it would be included too; hence the +2.

C for 2010-2014 = 7.478
m = 20

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2010 - 24
2011 - 28
2012 - 16
2013 - 22
2014 - 12

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Gallowbraid - Ashen Eidolon

2.Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini

3.Aquilus - Griseus

4.Ne Obliviscaris - Portal Of I

5.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

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No particular order

1.Graveworm - As The Angels Reach The Beauty

2.Graveworm - Scourge Of Malice

3.Dimmu Borgir - For All Tid

4.Dimmu Borgir - Stormblåst

5.Dimmu Borgir - Enthrone Darkness Triumphant

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I think this will be a collection of albums I dig. They're in no particular order either

1.Dark Fortress - Ylem

2.Dominia - Judgement of Tormented Souls

3.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

4.Darkthrone - Transilvanian Hunger

5.Darkthrone - Panzerfaust

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Based my choices on which tracks I enjoy listening to the most

1.Septicflesh - Sumerian Daemons

2.Septicflesh - Communion

3.Septicflesh - Titan

4.Septicflesh - Codex Omega

5.Septicflesh - Sumerian Daemons

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1.Wintersun - Wintersun

2.Be'lakor - Stone's Reach

3.Ensiferum - Ensiferum

4.Septicflesh - Communion

5.Insomnium - Above The Weeping World

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best album of each year from 1967 onwards

1.Wayfarer - American Gothic

2.Grima - Frostbitten

3.Beast In Black - Dark Connection

4.Havukruunu - Uinuos Syömein Sota

5.Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

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1.Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory

2.Slipknot - Iowa

3.Summoning - Stronghold

4.Septicflesh - Communion

5.Summoning - Old Mornings Dawn

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1.The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre

2.Septicflesh - The Great Mass

3.Insomnium - One For Sorrow

4.Anthrax - Worship Music

5.Arkona - Слово

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1.Fleshgod Apocalypse - Agony

2.Desolate Shrine - Tenebrous Towers

3.Septicflesh - The Great Mass

4.Lvcifyre - The Calling Depths

5.Autopsy - Macabre Eternal

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My personal favorite studio albums of 2011

1.Ghost Brigade - Until Fear No Longer Defines Us

2.Haken - Visions

3.Moonsorrow - Varjoina Kuljemme Kuolleiden Maassa

4.Machine Head - Unto The Locust

5.Mastodon - The Hunter

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1.Jinjer - Cloud Factory

2.Sylosis - Dormant Heart

3.Trials - This Ruined World

4.Baroness - Purple

5.Thy Catafalque - Sgùrr

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1.AC/DC - Back In Black

2.AC/DC - High Voltage

3.AC/DC - Highway To Hell

4.Accept - Blood Of The Nations

5.Allen/Lande - The Showdown

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