All that build-up, all that preparation, and once again the month of February seemed to fly right by (being the shortest month, it's probably entitled to do that). We hate to see the Awards go after such a fleeting adventure, but this is what the whole shebang leads up to: determining the champions of the year's metal offering.

It's quite common that we get one album nominated for everything (by the way, uh, don't do that). Last year, it was Death Grips's Bottomless Pit (first of all, she doesn't even go here); this year, it was Igorrr's Savage Sinusoid, an album that, if nothing else, is actually featured on Metal Storm. Now, Savage Sinusoid is a great album - some would say an exceptional album - some would say a wicked pissah album, but they all live in Boston - but no album can be the best in EVERY category, and if it were, we'd put it in Avant-Garde and call it a day. Our other contender for "Unseemly MSA Perpetrator of the Year" goes to the knobhead who wrote in a trap album for every category. Please learn to read.

Moving right along, as always, y'all could have predicted the winners in most categories within the first five minutes. Gothic was pretty close, Ex Prog was neck-and-neck for a while, and Power had enough big names to make pretend competition, but Alternative, Death, Heavy, and others fell to comfortable leads. Thrash got annihilated, as expected, and poor Extreme Doom never stood a chance, even with the success of last year's #AddSpectralVoice2017 campaign. You guys can be viciously decisive sometimes. One of these days, we're just going to give Septicflesh the "Permanent Victors of Symphonic Metal Forever" award and move along. Biggest Letdown was almost interesting: we had Ensiferum, Arch Enemy, and Anathema, three titanic presences of sadly dwindling report, all vying for the lead - or second place, rather. You'll remember why once you see who won. They might be nothing more than a big inside joke at this point, but? we'll have to let you guys have it this time. It's a genuine homespun tradition.

Speaking of Arch Enemy? color us shocked, because our prediction turned out to be embarrassingly incorrect. What was seemingly the unquestioned biggest contender in Melodeath (a category that gets brutally swept up every year) has, in fact, been overtaken. At the end of the day, it's still Mors Principium Est - it's not as though a serious underdog like Duskmourn or Noumena came up to swipe the gold - but, hey, an upset's an upset, no matter how small.

Equally unanticipated was Dream Theater's fifth-place run in Biggest Letdown, with their (read carefully) 2016 album The Astonishing. Come on, guys. It was two years ago. Get over it. Biggest Surprise, meanwhile, fell to Trivium. Fair play, we suppose; The Sin And The Sentence ain't exactly Shogun, but it was admittedly unexpected of a declining metalcore-turned-hard rock band to put out something actually pretty okay. The real Biggest Surprise, though, was, as one sagacious write-in put it, "Wintersun - Releasing something other than a statement about why they haven't released anything."

We've given away some of the exciting bits, but there are more categories than we care to mention all at once here, so by all means continue your foray into the MSA results and start complaining about who got robbed and who's overrated. Remember: it's not about who won or lost; it's about discovering new music. Just because the voting is closed doesn't mean you can't keep listening.