1.

2.Mercyful Fate - Melissa

3.Anthrax - Spreading The Disease

4.Joe Satriani - Flying In A Blue Dream

5.King Diamond - The Eye

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1.Shylmagoghnar - Transience

2.Ostura - The Room

3.The Ocean - Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic

4.Rivers Of Nihil - Where Owls Know My Name

5.Orphaned Land - Unsung Prophets & Dead Messiahs

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1.Disembowelment - Transcendence Into The Peripheral

2.Weakling - Dead As Dreams

3.Greylotus - Dawnfall

4.John Petrucci - An Evening With John Petrucci & Jordan Rudess [Collaboration]

5.John Petrucci - Suspended Animation

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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.

2018 was pretty good year, some solid releases in death and Melodic death metal, Symphonic metal had a pretty good record comparing to previous years, and Judas priest released there best album in almost thirty years.


My favorite non metal albums of 2018

1. Civilisation
By Southern Empire (Progressive rock, Symphonic rock)


2. Schmaltz
By Spanish Love Songs (Pop Punk, Emo)


3. Joy as an Act of Resistance
By Idles (Post-Hardcore, Art punk)


4. TA13OO
By Denzel Curry (Trap, Southern Hip Hop, Trap Metal)


5. OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES
By SOPHIE (Bubblegum Bass, Hyperpop, Experimental)



My favorite movie from 2018

1.Amorphis - Queen Of Time

2.Rivers Of Nihil - Where Owls Know My Name

3.Crescent - The Order Of Amenti

4.Judas Priest - Firepower

5.Shylmagoghnar - Transience

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1.Slugdge - Esoteric Malacology

2.Antimatter - Black Market Enlightenment

3.Amorphis - Queen Of Time

4.Hamferð - Támsins Likam

5.Riverside - Wasteland

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1.Shylmagoghnar - Emergence

2.Galneryus - Angel Of Salvation

3.Blindead - Affliction XXIX II MXMVI

4.Batushka - Litourgiya

5.Leprous - Bilateral

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I feel like my overall favorites list is getting too long. I'm splitting it up by rating.

1.Ulcerate - Stare Into Death And Be Still

2.Madder Mortem - Eight Ways

3.Blind Guardian - Imaginations From The Other Side

4.Ayreon - 01011001

5.Igric - Svet Svetlom Stvorený

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Last updated on 11 April 2024.

1.Dream Theater - Images And Words

2.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

3.Wintersun - Wintersun

4.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

5.Iron Maiden - The Number Of The Beast

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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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2018 was a great musical year for me as I finally had enough pocket money to satisfy my CD mania... It took me only three decades...

So here is my top 50 of 2018

Album count: 140
Average rating: 7.13

1.Ihsahn - Àmr

2.Skuggsjá - Hugsjá

3.Judas Priest - Firepower

4.At The Gates - To Drink From The Night Itself

5.Antimatter - Black Market Enlightenment

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Descriptions will probably be added/edited a few times as I always write this stuff pretty quickly and sometimes can't find the right words to describe somehting so abstract as music. A lot of my taste just boils down to "sounds interesting" or "catchy". So yeah. Most of this will have overlaps with other lists I made because I have very narrow taste.

1.Gnaw Their Tongues - L'Arrivée De La Terne Mort Triomphante

2.

3.Murmuüre - Murmuüre

4.

5.The Meads Of Asphodel - The Murder Of Jesus The Jew

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1.Leprous - Bilateral

2.Textures - Phenotype

3.Jolly - The Audio Guide To Happiness (Part 1)

4.Pain Of Salvation - In The Passing Light Of Day

5.The Ocean - Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic

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I began this decade in my final year of high school, in the early phases of my metal journey (Mastodon, Machine Head, Dream Theater, Pantera and Avenged Sevenfold were still recent discoveries). One Masters degree and one PhD later, I'm now a tax-paying Londonian, and have ploughed through what must be comfortably over 2000 new releases during the previous ten years. To commemorate the end of a turbulent decade, I've put together a list of the albums that have stuck with me throughout this decade - I wouldn't consider this to be a 'best albums' list, as there have been some truly ingenious works released in more avant-garde territories, but ultimately these are the albums that have ended up dominating my listening habits, or otherwise making a sufficient impression to make this list.

1.Sylosis - Monolith

2.Sylosis - Edge Of The Earth

3.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

4.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

5.Cult Of Luna - Vertikal

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Favourite albums of 2018 (including only those which I would rate 7+)

1.Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

2.Slugdge - Esoteric Malacology

3.Rolo Tomassi - Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It

4.Between The Buried And Me - Automata I

5.Berried Alive - Bearies Alive

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1.Slugdge - Esoteric Malacology

2.The Ocean - Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic

3.Ghost - Prequelle

4.Amorphis - Queen Of Time

5.Hamferð - Támsins Likam

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