These are MY Top 250 Albums that are featured on Metal Storm in chronological order to celebrate 50 Years of Metal.

Some bands are featured on this list with more than one album, which means that they are perticulary amazing to me.

I listen to a wide spectrum of metal genres, which is why I tried to keep it diverse and not focus on one genre.

1.Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

2.Deep Purple - In Rock

3.Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV

4.Uriah Heep - Demons And Wizards

5.Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies

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1.Meshuggah - Catch Thirtythree

2.Vektor - Black Future

3.Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV

4.Opeth - Ghost Reveries

5.Opeth - Blackwater Park

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How my tastes evolved over the last two years. For the sake of comparison, I reported the original list below the updated one.

1.Warning - Watching From A Distance

2.Evoken - A Caress Of The Void

3.Cobalt - Eater Of Birds

4.The Angelic Process - Weighing Souls With Sand

5.Shining - V - Halmstad

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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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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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If you are into doom, then you are already rotten. It's like drugs-it destroys you yet you want more. You reek of hatred and death. Your life is fucked up and there is no escape for you.
Here are some albums to help you along the dive into the abyss.

1.Colosseum - Chapter 1: Delirium

2.Shape Of Despair - Monotony Fields

3.Comatose Vigil - Fuimus, Non Sumus...

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

5.Shape Of Despair - Written In My Scars

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1.Afgrund - Vid Helvetets Grindar

2.After Forever - After Forever

3.Agalloch - The Mantle

4.Agalloch - Ashes Against The Grain

5.Alcest - Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde

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Just a list of my favorite albums, mostly Black or Death Metal !

There are some albums/bands I would love to put in this list, but they are not on MS.

1.1349 - Liberation

2.Agalloch - The Mantle

3.Amon Amarth - Versus The World

4.Amon Amarth - Twilight Of The Thunder God

5.Amon Amarth - Surtur Rising

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This is not a list over my favourite albums, although some of them on the list of course are. These are albums that formed me, had a huge impact on me and defined my musical taste. Without some of these releases I probably wouldn't even be the person that I am today.

1.Metallica - Master Of Puppets

2.Iron Maiden - Rock In Rio

3.Iron Maiden - Dance Of Death

4.Iron Maiden - Killers

5.Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time

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1.Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

2.The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night

3.Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

4.The Beatles - Revolver

5.Pink Floyd - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

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1.Death - Human

2.Death - Symbolic

3.Death - The Sound Of Perseverance

4.Opeth - Watershed

5.Opeth - Heritage

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List is alphabetical

1.Behemoth - Evangelion

2.Burzum - Filosofem

3.Celtic Frost - Monotheist

4.Cradle Of Filth - Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder

5.Dimmu Borgir - Death Cult Armageddon

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A really good year, just look at the top 3! Three of the world's greatest black metal albums ever! And the six albums thereafter? Magic. All I can say is that this list was a pain to order, because there's so much great albums which deserves to be higher up.

1.Watain - Sworn To The Dark

2.Shining - V - Halmstad

3.Mayhem - Ordo Ad Chao

4.Månegarm - Vargstenen

5.Be'lakor - The Frail Tide

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1.Bathory - Bathory

2.Bathory - Under The Sign Of The Black Mark

3.Mayhem - Deathcrush

4.Darkthrone - A Blaze In The Northern Sky

5.Darkthrone - Under A Funeral Moon

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