After 15 years of listening to metal this is my current top 15 albums.

1.Opeth - Blackwater Park

2.Bloodbath - Resurrection Through Carnage

3.Agalloch - The Mantle

4.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

5.Devin Townsend - Ziltoid The Omniscient

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My top metal album's from 2000-2009

1.Agalloch - The Mantle

2.Shining - V - Halmstad

3.Opeth - Ghost Reveries

4.Corrupted - El Mundo Frio

5.Rotting Christ - Theogonia

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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.

2007 was a really good one, possibly my favorite of the 2000's until now, a lot of great release in Progressive metal, Black metal and Doom metal had a really strong comeback that year, overall a really great year for metal

1.Devin Townsend - Ziltoid The Omniscient

2.Epica - The Divine Conspiracy

3.Ensiferum - Victory Songs

4.Symphony X - Paradise Lost

5.Moonsorrow - V: Hävitetty

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1.Devin Townsend - Ziltoid The Omniscient

2.In Mourning - Shrouded Divine

3.Circus Maximus - The 1st Chapter

4.Threshold - Dead Reckoning

5.Seventh Wonder - Mercy Falls

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most memorable releases sorted by year
* - especially interesting albums

1.

2.Ashenspire - Hostile Architecture

3.Soen - Imperial

4.Thy Catafalque - Naiv

5.Kayo Dot - Blasphemy

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1.

2.Fates Warning - The Spectre Within

3.Slauter Xstoyes - Winter Kill

4.Watch Tower - Energetic Disassembly

5.Trilogy - Life On Earth

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This is my personal selection of albums (with specific songs) that you'd like to play in your next metal party.
The songs are sorted so the more powerful and energetic songs are equally spread all along the list, except the last songs, which are softer than average.

I'm currently working in this list (well... in my spare time), so it's not the final one.

1.Unexpect - Fables Of The Sleepless Empire

2.Korpiklaani - Karkelo

3.Solefald - Norrøn Livskunst

4.Mastodon - Crack The Skye

5.Kvelertak - Blodtørst

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Now that was an excellent year, gems dropping from all corners, and I'm certain I still have a lot to discover! The amount of great stuff was indeed staggering.

Off with the ramblings, on with the albums:
- the first 7 albums are those I consider to be this year's ultimate best, but they're in alpha order as I couldn't make a preference order out of them

1.Alchemist - Tripsis

2.Dødheimsgard - Supervillain Outcast

3.Machine Head - The Blackening

4.Mekong Delta - Lurking Fear

5.Neurosis - Given To The Rising

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1.Megadeth - Rust In Peace

2.Judas Priest - Painkiller

3.Dream Theater - Images And Words

4.Metallica - Ride The Lightning

5.Pain Of Salvation - The Perfect Element, Part I

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Top 50 of 2007. Rated 8+.

Only LPs.

Album count: 193
Average rating: 6.96

1.Porcupine Tree - Fear Of A Blank Planet

2.Moonsorrow - V: Hävitetty

3.Alcest - Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde

4.Rotting Christ - Theogonia

5.Machine Head - The Blackening

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My favorite metal albums sorted alphabetically by band name and chronological by release date.

1.Æther Realm - Tarot

2.Acid Witch - Witchtanic Hellucinations

3.Allegaeon - Proponent For Sentience

4.Amorphis - Tales From The Thousand Lakes

5.Amorphis - Silent Waters

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1.Porcupine Tree - Fear Of A Blank Planet

2.Antimatter - Leaving Eden

3.Moonsorrow - V: Hävitetty

4.Riverside - Rapid Eye Movement

5.Dark Tranquillity - Fiction

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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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List of my favorite concept albums. Feel free to drop any suggestions if you think something great is missing here!

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

2.Queensrÿche - Operation: Mindcrime

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

4.Iced Earth - The Dark Saga

5.Opeth - Still Life

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1.Porcupine Tree - Fear Of A Blank Planet

2.Pain Of Salvation - Scarsick

3.After Forever - After Forever

4.Dream Theater - Systematic Chaos

5.Sonata Arctica - Unia

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