1.All time & genre (including Non-Metal on MS)
2.Only studio albums & EPs
3.I DON'T modify this list. So, this list is THE FINAL edition and based on my selection on 1 April 2017. (Modified on 12 February 2022)
4.The genre is primary one.
Last modified on 1 April 2017

...NOTICE: I'm reselecting albums & EPs for "The Timeless Ver2". This will be a bit more stringently selected than "ver1".

1.Opeth - Blackwater Park

2.Emperor - Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk

3.Krallice - Diotima

4.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

5.Deathspell Omega - Kénôse

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Lots of genres, not repeating any Band (except Therion, but with 3 different styles). You cannot go wrong with this list, some nice Starts to any kind of Metal.
The list is sorted by year, but has not any particular order. Enjoy!

1.Queensrÿche - Operation: Mindcrime

2.Atheist - Unquestionable Presence

3.Therion - Symphony Masses - Ho Drakon Ho Megas

4.Cynic - Focus

5.Amorphis - Tales From The Thousand Lakes

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What seems the most important albums for me in chronological order.
I wish I could carry the list year after year to see how my tastes changed and new findings.
I can help but notice that old albums immediately strike me, while in recent times most albums are good but nothing is groundbreaking. We have a tide of releases in the last decades, and standing above the other requires an impossible lot of talent.
Or is it my listen habbits that changed ? I felts I listened to the old albums albums for a lifetime while I'm only surface checking the new ones. Too little time, too little time to truly live...
Also the mixing technology, the sound is too flat nowadays and lack impact and personnality

1.Frank Zappa - Freak Out

2.The Who - Tommy

3.Frank Zappa - Uncle Meat

4.Frank Zappa - Hot Rats

5.King Crimson - In The Court Of The Crimson King

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Here are albums (ordered by subgenre) that I want to listen to, but haven't yet.
For some albums, I've heard one or two songs, but not the entire album. Therefore, these albums still await my judgement!
Recommendations are always welcome!

1.

2.Frail Body - Artificial Bouquet

3.Ulterror - Transcendent Origins

4.Mastiff - Deprecipice

5.Verberis - The Apophatic Wilderness

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The MS top 200 is supposed to represent the absolute peak of metal music, the timeless classics. I have been listening to metal for about 6 years now and would consider myself fairly knowledgeable about the genre. Yet, I have barely heard half of what the top 200 has to offer. I am now on a quest to listen to it all and give an honest opinion on what I thought of it.
This list will show every album of the top 200 and if I've listened to it whether it's an all-time favourite of mine (+++), I really like it (++), I like it (+), it’s good (*), it’s not great (-), I really dislike it (--) or I hate it from the bottom of my heart (---). The same symbols will be used to characterize what I think my opinion of the albums I haven't heard yet will be, based on my knowledge of the bands and of the genre they play. (?) signifies that I have no idea of whether I'll enjoy it or not and (/) means that my opinion of the album is probably obsolete, and I need to listen to it again. A ★ means the album is in my own top 200.
Edit: The bottom of the top 200 has been changing a lot, with some stuff formerly in the list now closer to 240th, so this is now a top 250. I’m not sure I want to expand the list further down, but I’ll see whenever it’s completed if I feel like going for a top 300 or something like that.
Best discoveries so far: Wildhoney, Nightfall, Out Of Myself, Portal Of I, Autumn Aurora, Nemesis Divina, Abigail, V: Hävitetty, Sounds Of Pain.

1.

2.

3.W.A.S.P. - The Crimson Idol

4.Saturnus - Veronika Decides To Die

5.Ensiferum - Ensiferum

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Dream Theater are good for what they are, and what they are is a stepping stone into prog. To be fair, they have some great albums (WDADU, I&W, and Awake), but once Kevin Moore left, it's been a steady decline, leaving nothing but scattered moments.
These bands are, in a way, the 'next step.' They represent the meat of prog, in albums that showcase the range of the genre.

1.Anekdoten - Vemod

2.Arcane - Known / Learned

3.Arena - Contagion

4.Beardfish - Sleeping In Traffic: Part Two

5.Communic - Waves Of Visual Decay

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my 100 favorite metal albums of all times. Alphabetical order.

1.Agalloch - Ashes Against The Grain

2.Agalloch - The Serpent & The Sphere

3.Ahab - The Giant

4.Alice In Chains - Dirt

5.Altar Of Plagues - Mammal

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2005-2009 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5838
2010-2014 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5828
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 2000 to 2004, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2000-2004.
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 +5.

C for 2000-2004 = 7.599
m = 30

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2000 - 15
2001 - 27
2002 - 14
2003 - 20
2004 - 29

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Opeth - Blackwater Park

2.Agalloch - The Mantle

3.Tool - Lateralus

4.Wintersun - Wintersun

5.Ensiferum - Ensiferum

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1.Opeth - Blackwater Park

2.Agalloch - Ashes Against The Grain

3.Green Carnation - Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness

4.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

5.Porcupine Tree - Fear Of A Blank Planet

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1.Tool - Lateralus

2.Dream Theater - Awake

3.Queensrÿche - Rage For Order

4.The Tea Party - The Edges Of Twilight

5.Arcturus - La Masquerade Infernale

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So, the decade is about to end, and I feel like doing a list of the best albums from 2000 to 2010.

1.Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven

2.Opeth - Blackwater Park

3.Agalloch - The Mantle

4.Explosions In The Sky - The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place

5.Orphaned Land - Mabool

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A little list series where I list my top 20 favorite metal albums every year starting from the year I was born in.

2004 was a another good year, especially for my favorite genres Symphonic metal and power metal, even if it wasn't the strongest overall year for metal the 2000's started pretty slowly for metal, but 2004 was a fantastic year for other music genres

1.Haggard - Eppur Si Muove

2.Ayreon - The Human Equation

3.Orphaned Land - Mabool: The Story Of The Three Sons Of Seven

4.Nightwish - Once

5.Wintersun - Wintersun

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This is a list of all the folk metal albums I have listened to that I found to be of at least marginal quality. It is purely for my own organizational purposes and is not meant to be a definitive statement about the genre; for that reason, there are some entries that don't entirely fit the description, including some neofolk albums and bands that don't exactly play "folk metal" but are close enough.

1.Elvenking - Secrets Of The Magick Grimoire

2.Forefather - Ours Is The Kingdom

3.Forefather - Steadfast

4.Forefather - Last Of The Line

5.Dalriada - Áldás

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This is my top albums (only with those where I gave 8 or more). I will update the list now and then

1.Slipknot - Iowa

2.Megadeth - Rust In Peace

3.Opeth - Ghost Reveries

4.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

5.Slipknot - Slipknot

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The label metal includes heavy, power, black...

1.Dream Theater - Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory

2.Queensrÿche - Operation: Mindcrime

3.Rush - 2112

4.Symphony X - V: The New Mythology Suite

5.Opeth - Still Life

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