So here are some Brutal, Technical, Progressive and sometimes Atmospheric death metal works I enjoy or that I believe should be given a try because they're unique and interesting, almost an essentials list when it comes to that style. There are some unorthodox choices as well in the mix that aren't just full-on tech death, some bands also incorporate grind, black, core elements or even jazz. Hope you'll all find something that suits your taste! The list is ordered by years. Feel free to comment and give recommendations! Just refrain from telling me an album shouldn't be featured here... All the albums here are deliberately hand-picked and if it made the list, it's for a reason.

Personal absolute favorites of mine have a ★ beside the genre. And my pics of best album for each year are identified by (best of xxxx) beside the albums.

🇨🇦 = From Canada, My Country! We're quite good at Technical and Brutal Death Metal... Trust me. I mean, you'll see for yourself.

-Guib-

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Guib's Best Tech/Brutal/Prog Death Metal Album Picks

Best Of 2023:
The Zenith Passage - Datalysium

Best of 2024 So Far:
Exist - Hijacking The Zeitgeist

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TAGS: Technical Death Metal, Melodic Tech-Death, Brutal, Atmospheric, Progressive, Blackened Tech-Death, Technical Thrash, Deathgrind, Deathcore, Symphonic, Dissonant Tech-Death, Experimental, Avantgarde, Grindcore, Jazz

Last Updated: April 21st, 2024

1.Atheist - Piece Of Time

2.Nocturnus - The Key

3.Atrocity - Hallucinations

4.Death - Human

5.Suffocation - Effigy Of The Forgotten

      View entire list ››

A collection of metal albums that use Arabian, middle-east and far east folk elements. Recommendations are welcome. Image is the cover artwork of Shangren's Warriors of Devastation.

1.Acyl - Algebra

2.Aeternam - Disciples Of The Unseen

3.Akvan اكوان - شکوه فراموش شده / Forgotten Glory

4.Al-Namrood - Estorat Taghoot

5.Al-Namrood - Kitab Al-Awthan

      View entire list ››

I've been listening to Metal since 2005 and it has become my biggest passion in life.

Rarely a day goes by where I don't listen to it in one form or another. The bands I listened to in my teens inspired me to pick up the guitar (and later drums) and start making music of my own.

So here are the albums that have stood out and made the largest impact on me. To be as transparent as possible, I've labelled albums as 'nostalgia bias' where my memories of the album give it an advantage over others.

(Score is an average of each album's song ratings, full list located here. There are a ton of albums that I've rated 9/10 in the 'TBR' tab that may never make it to this list, be sure to check those out.)

If you discovered any new albums or like the same sort of metal, be sure to give this list a thumbs-up and leave a comment so more people can find these amazing bands!

My other lists:
Top 25 EPs (ordered & rated)
Top 200 Overlooked Albums (with genres)
Top 200 Overrated Albums (trigger warning)
So I Heard You Like Wintersun... (Time II find new bands)

Genre-Specific:
Top 50 Black Metal Albums
Top 50 Melodic Death Metal Albums
Top 45 Thrash Metal Albums
Top 40 Power Metal Albums
Top 30 Doom Metal Albums
Top 30 Heavy Metal Albums

1.Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

2.Opeth - Blackwater Park

3.Metallica - Master Of Puppets

4.Edge Of Sanity - Crimson

5.Opeth - Still Life

      View entire list ››

*** MAX 3 ALBUMS PER ARTIST!!! (Except Death) Also... While extra weight will be given to classic death metal albums, this list will also include exceptional examples of melodic death, death-grind, technical/progressive death, death-thrash, and blackened death. LPs ONLY. *** /\ UNDER CONSTRUCTION /\

1.Cryptopsy - None So Vile

2.Death - Symbolic

3.Suffocation - Effigy Of The Forgotten

4.Carcass - Necroticism: Descanting The Insalubrious

5.Death - Human

      View entire list ››

These are my top 100 favorite albums - they are the reason why I love metal!
Enjoy!
Format: Band | Album | (genre, release year, country) What I like about the album; Favorite songs
Statistics:
Genre:
Death: 28
Black: 20
Thrash: 19
Heavy: 15
Progressive: 9
Power: 4
Doom: 4
Symphonic: 1
Years with most album favorites:
1995: 8
1996: 7
1990: 7
1984: 5
Countries with most album favorites:
USA: 35
Sweden: 20
UK: 16
Norway: 6

----Last Update: June 15, 2022----

1.Judas Priest - Painkiller

2.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

3.Megadeth - Rust In Peace

4.Metallica - Ride The Lightning

5.Death - Spiritual Healing

      View entire list ››

1.Behemoth - Evangelion

2.Bloodbath - The Fathomless Mastery

3.Dismember - Like An Ever Flowing Stream

4.Grave - Into The Grave

5.Behemoth - Demigod

      View entire list ››

All my favourite songs ranked in order best down.

1.Rush - 2112

2.Deep Purple - In Rock

3.Jethro Tull - Aqualung

4.Rainbow - Rising

5.Black Sabbath - Paranoid

      View entire list ››

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

      View entire list ››

Merry Christmas, my fellow metalheads!

Inspired by Qualeen's list, I meticulously kept track of how often I listened to every album this year. I present to you my top 50 most frequently listened-to albums of the year 2022, ordered by number of full listens.

In other words, here are the albums that I've been most obsessively addicted to over the past year!

1.Slayer - Show No Mercy

2.Mercyful Fate - Melissa

3.Nile - Annihilation Of The Wicked

4.Gojira - The Way Of All Flesh

5.Autopsy - Severed Survival

      View entire list ››

I love instrumentals (songs without vocals)!
One doesn't need words to convey a message and evoke emotions. Instrumentals also show how metal is very closely related to classical music!
These are my favorite instrumental songs. (There are some songs that contain a few spoken words. These I denote with *)
Suggestions are appreciated! Enjoy!

1.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

2.Metallica - Ride The Lightning

3.Summoning - Minas Morgul

4.Metallica - ...And Justice For All

5.Judas Priest - Screaming For Vengeance

      View entire list ››

An ongoing list for personal use as well as for reference for beginners (& veterans alike). This is solely my personal opinion and taste (Death & Prog mostly but do give every genre a try). Basically will include albums I've rated 8 & above. Sorted by year since I'll need a Venn diagram to sort by genre (seriously MS please make it happen if possible). Will feature multiple releases per year (obviously) and per band (since if a band is putting out better albums it deserves more recognition). Keeping the metal faith alive from India

1.Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin

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

3.Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III

4.Black Sabbath - Paranoid

5.Uriah Heep - Look At Yourself

      View entire list ››

Note: Tool intentionally ommitted because they don't consider themselves metal. Otherwise you'd see their first 4 albums in top 25.

Last updated: 27 March 2024.

1.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

2.Agalloch - The Mantle

3.Opeth - Blackwater Park

4.Edge Of Sanity - Crimson

5.Lost Horizon - A Flame To The Ground Beneath

      View entire list ››

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

      View entire list ››

This is a list of all the death metal albums I have listened to that I thought were at all worth remembering. Like my other genre lists, this is just a record of my own listening experience that I use for personal organization, not a definitive account of the best or all of the death metal out there; there will probably be albums or bands that are not death metal in the strictest sense. You'll find some OSDM, melodeath, tech death, death-doom, maybe a bit of deathcore, I don't know. Maybe some non-death metal albums by death metal bands that I put in here just because.

1.Death - The Sound Of Perseverance

2.Death - Symbolic

3.At The Gates - With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness

4.At The Gates - Slaughter Of The Soul

5.Amon Amarth - With Oden On Our Side

      View entire list ››

Loose order. Not complete

"Extreme" metal albums only

Updated 10/1/22

1.Disgorge - Consume The Forsaken

2.Origin - Informis Infinitas Inhumanitas

3.Immolation - Unholy Cult

4.Severe Torture - Misanthropic Carnage

5.Nile - In Their Darkened Shrines

      View entire list ››