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Thumbs up: +5
Top 30 Doom Metal Albums

Doom Metal is one of those genres that I'd never really taken much notice of until I started working my way through the MS top 200 albums. I'd listened to Black Sabbath when a teacher at my school gave me his copy of Paranoid to borrow around 2007/08, which I highly enjoyed! Since then, Over the last few years, I've discovered so many great doom metal bands such as Slumber, Doom:VS, October Tide and Swallow the Sun.

So here are my favourites of the genre with my rating, its sub-genre and release year:

(Score is an average of each album's song ratings, full list located here)

If you discovered any new albums or like the same sort of doom 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 500 Albums (ordered & rated)
Top 25 EPs (also 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)

1.Black Sabbath - Paranoid
2.Black Sabbath - Master Of Reality
3.Slumber - Fallout
4.Doom:VS - Dead Words Speak
5.October Tide - Rain Without End

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Created by nonZero on 18.03.2024



AJ's Ranking Of 2008

Top 50 of 2008. Albums I rated 8 and above.

Album count: 210
Average rating: 6.84

1.Septicflesh - Communion
2.Opeth - Watershed
3.Amon Amarth - Twilight Of The Thunder God
4.Ihsahn - AngL
5.Dornenreich - In Luft Geritzt

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Created by AJ The Great on 09.01.2024



Thumbs up: +4
Metal Albums Ranked From WORSHIP To DISLIKE

Ratings go from:

WORSHIP ❤️❤️❤️: Absolute greatness, a mindblowing album.
LOVE ❤️❤️🖤: Amazing release with very few flaws.
LIKE ❤️🖤🖤: Enjoyable but far from perfect.
DISLIKE 💔: Not very good or maybe not fitting my tastes.

I've decided to stop rating albums with a numerical value as I tend to feel uncomfortable with that. This list has a minimalistic, subjective and visceral approach, based purely on sensations and personal tastes. Mainly for personal use and doesn't pretend to be a serious ranking, but emerges from the need to remember which bands and albums I enjoyed and the ones I disliked. I constantly revisit new releases so first impressions may change over time. It usually takes 8-10 spins for me to get completely sure of a rating.

1.Æther Realm - Tarot
2.Abhoria - Abhoria
3.Acid Bath - When The Kite String Pops
4.Agrypnie - Metamorphosis
5.Allegaeon - Fragments Of Form And Function

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Created by Rinbel on 14.03.2022



Thumbs up: +1
Top 100 (+8) Of 2005-2009

2000-2004 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5844
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 2005 to 2009, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2005-2009.
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 +8.

C for 2005-2009 = 7.593
m = 20

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2005 - 26
2006 - 20
2007 - 23
2008 - 17
2009 - 23

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Agalloch - Ashes Against The Grain
2.Opeth - Ghost Reveries
3.Be'lakor - Stone's Reach
4.Gojira - From Mars To Sirius
5.Saturnus - Veronika Decides To Die

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Created by Crys1s on 19.09.2019



Thumbs up: +21
Top 500 Albums of All Time

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

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Created by nonZero on 06.10.2018



Thumbs up: +18
Top 50: My Favourite EPs

1.Ulver - A Quick Fix Of Melancholy
2.Dream Theater - A Change Of Seasons
3.Cradle Of Filth - Vempire
4.Vader - The Art Of War
5.Darkestrah - Khagan

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Created by Hex_Omega on 18.09.2014



Thumbs up: +21
Doom...

Slow/Post/Depress/Funeral/Love/Gloom/Beauty/Sorrow/Obscure/Cold/Avantgarde/Atmospheric/Diferente...

1.A Forest Of Stars - Opportunistic Thieves Of Spring
2.Ablaze In Hatred - Deceptive Awareness
3.Agalloch - Pale Folklore
4.Ahab - The Call Of The Wretched Sea
5.Ahab - The Divinity Of Oceans

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Created by Amo del Merol on 08.07.2011



Thumbs up: +5
All Time Metal/Symph Top 100, still working on it

1.Iron Maiden - Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son
2.Marillion - Brave
3.Iron Maiden - Powerslave
4.Amorphis - Tales From The Thousand Lakes
5.Insomnium - Across The Dark

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Created by Marillion on 11.03.2011



Thumbs up: +28
Pain, Grief & Sorrow: Highlights of Doom Metal

1.40 Watt Sun - The Inside Room
2.Ahab - The Call Of The Wretched Sea
3.Anathema - The Silent Enigma
4.Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
5.Candlemass - Epicus Doomicus Metallicus

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Created by ~Starchild~ on 27.01.2011



Vonpire's 2008 Best

1.Draconian - Turning Season Within
2.Cradle Of Filth - Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder
3.Moonspell - Night Eternal
4.Therion - Live Gothic
5.Heavenwood - Redemption

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Created by Vonpire on 26.10.2010



Thumbs up: +6
Essential EPs

Some EPs out there are really just throw away tracks, and others are just demo tracks, but there are some EPs that are pure gold. These EPs are albums that despite lacking in song count, lack nothing in quality, and become an essential part of the bands discography, these are the EPs that I believe belong in that last category. These appear in no specific order.

1.Apothys - Advent: Doom
2.Disillusion - The Porter
3.Disillusion - Three Neuron Kings
4.Dream Theater - A Change Of Seasons
5.Ensiferum - Dragonheads

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Created by MeloDeathViking on 11.03.2010



Thumbs up: +5
Best Swallow The Sun Albums

1.Swallow The Sun - New Moon
2.Swallow The Sun - Hope
3.Swallow The Sun - The Morning Never Came
4.Swallow The Sun - Plague Of Butterflies
5.Swallow The Sun - Ghosts Of Loss

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Created by krapril620 on 08.03.2010