Listen to metal for more than the half of my life, here is the list of my favorites albums of all time.

1.Alcest - Les Voyages De L'âme

2.Alcest - Kodama

3.Alcest - Spiritual Instinct

4.Alestorm - Sunset On The Golden Age

5.Alestorm - No Grave But The Sea

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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.

2015 was a great one, I honestly forgot how good that year was for metal, black metal had a strong showing and Symphonic was not that far behind, Progressive and gothic had great releases and the great return of Iron Maiden.

1.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

2.Ghost - Meliora

3.Mgła - Exercises In Futility

4.Draconian - Sovran

5.Swallow The Sun - Songs From The North I, II & III

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Must Listen: The First 2

1.Soilwork - The Ride Majestic

2.Jorn Lande & Trond Holter - Dracula: Swing Of Death

3.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

4.Kamelot - Haven

5.Civil War - Gods And Generals

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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
2010-2014 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5828

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 grows 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 2015 to 2019, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2015-2019.
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 2015-2019 = 7.422
m = 20

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2015 - 31
2016 - 24
2017 - 18
2018 - 12
2019 - 17

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Mgła - Exercises In Futility

2.Insomnium - Winter's Gate

3.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

4.Vektor - Terminal Redux

5.Trees Of Eternity - Hour Of The Nightingale

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1.Paradise Lost - Obsidian

2.Tribulation - The Children Of The Night

3.Moonspell - Alpha Noir / Omega White

4.Paradise Lost - Tragic Idol

5.Paradise Lost - The Plague Within

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1.Amorphis - Queen Of Time

2.Moonspell - Extinct

3.Ghost - Meliora

4.Ulver - The Assassination Of Julius Caesar

5.Soen - Lotus

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Yes, I decided to do another gothic metal list because it been rapidly changing since my last two lists. I love revisiting this kind of list because of how different my tastes have changed withing this genre of music I'm passionate about.

1.Anathema - Eternity

2.Draconian - Arcane Rain Fell

3.The Foreshadowing - Days Of Nothing

4.Monumentum - In Absentia Christi

5.Tiamat - Wildhoney

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1.Moonspell - Wolfheart

2.Heavenwood - Diva

3.Desire - Infinity... A Timeless Journey Through An Emotional Dream

4.Moonspell - Irreligious

5.Bizarra Locomotiva - Bestiário

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1.Moonspell - Wolfheart

2.Moonspell - Under The Moonspell

3.Moonspell - Night Eternal

4.Moonspell - Memorial

5.Moonspell - Irreligious

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My favorite albums from various genres

1.Slipknot - Iowa

2.Nirvana - Nevermind

3.Summoning - Stronghold

4.Septicflesh - Communion

5.Anathema - Judgement

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1.Moonspell - Extinct

2.Mgła - Exercises In Futility

3.Ghost - Meliora

4.Helloween - My God-Given Right

5.Enslaved - In Times

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1.Batushka - Litourgiya

2.Ghost - Meliora

3.Swallow The Sun - Songs From The North I, II & III

4.Paradise Lost - The Plague Within

5.Moonspell - Extinct

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Good musical pieces are those that initiate an emotional reaction or a subconscious shift of your subjective perception. The best music are those that elicit the most positive or dramatic of changes to our psyches. This is a list that I return to occasionally for these effects.

It is subjective of course.

1.Agalloch - The Mantle

2.Agalloch - Ashes Against The Grain

3.Amon Amarth - Twilight Of The Thunder God

4.Arcturus - The Sham Mirrors

5.Atoma - Skylight

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1.Symphony X - Underworld

2.Pressure Points - False Lights

3.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

4.Phantasma (NED) - The Deviant Hearts

5.Draconian - Sovran

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A bit late in coming, the top ten albums of 2015. I had many close calls, as few albums almost made to the list. Edited to the new format I used across all the platforms.... it's very unbalanced list, cause it has too much power and doom, but I picked albums that I either really enjoyed or listened to really really much.. hence on of the honorable mentions were left out, they are good, but I simply didn't listened to them as much as I did to this...

1.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

2.Draconian - Sovran

3.Swallow The Sun - Songs From The North I, II & III

4.Nightwish - Endless Forms Most Beautiful

5.Månegarm - Månegarm

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