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2024 Metal Storm Awards Now Open (Update)


We've been working, you've been waiting, now we can all enjoy the sweet taste of another edition of the Metal Storm Awards.

Out of the approximately 2330 albums released in 2024 as far as Metal Storm is concerned (and we all know that music that's not on here technically doesn't exist), 1001 were considered for this edition, listened to thoroughly by our entire awards team, and reduced to our final 282 nominees in 26 categories and 2 special categories.

We also took it upon ourselves to completely redesign the awards for this year. While you will find a largely familiar user interface, we have made many, many of changes under the hood, to streamline our internal processes and address some of the most common community requests and suggestions over the past few years.

For starters, we will no longer delete votes from previous years. Starting with the 2023 edition, you will now be able to go back to old awards and rediscover your votes.

We have also made user nominations more prominent, and visually identical to staff nominations, and added tools to help you find the right nomination, and notify you of possible duplicates. Hopefully this will give user nominations a better chance of moving up the list of winners.

We would like to thank our tireless contributors AndyMetalFreak, F3ynman, and omne metallum for their help, and all of you for joining us each year to celebrate the awards with us.

That's all from us. Time to dig in, listen to all the nominations, vote for your favorites, and discuss everything we missed, your personal favorites, and all the fun that surrounds your favorite time of year.

— Your Metal Storm staff and elites



UPDATE Feb. 2, 2025:

In response to the revelation that Hail Darkness' release Death Divine was entirely generated by AI, we have removed it from the Hard Rock category. The nomination slot that was thus freed up, went to the runner-up nomination for that category, The Wizards - The Exit Garden.

In recognition of this situation, and the fact that it is so easy to fall for a scam like this, we have created a special category, exclusive to this edition of the awards, and nominated Hail Darkness as the sole entry and winner.
Posted: 01.02.2025 by corrupt


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Comments: 80   Visited by: 663 users
09.02.2025 - 11:36
Karlabos
Written by NastyHero on 08.02.2025 at 15:31

I think a step in the right direction would be to prevent situations like mine - one user can vote for that album in one category and that's it. I think it would not be that hard to implement (well, depends on the codebase). So I would be able to vote Ihsahn in Symphonic, someone else could vote for him in Ex-Prog, but none of us would be able to vote in both.

Yeah not being able to vote for the same album twice is a good restriction.

It's also the same restriction the staff imposes on their own selves, so it's just fair.
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09.02.2025 - 16:05
Liafev
Something just came to my mind as a potential addition for next year, what about a page that would should all categories, with the albums in them ? I often see people asking "In which category is this or that band". It would help to be able to search for an artist in the whole awards in one go. And that could also help having an overview of the whole thing without going back and forth between the 29 categories ?
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09.02.2025 - 16:14
corrupt
With a lowercase c
Admin
Written by Liafev on 09.02.2025 at 16:05

Something just came to my mind as a potential addition for next year, what about a page that would should all categories, with the albums in them ? I often see people asking "In which category is this or that band". It would help to be able to search for an artist in the whole awards in one go. And that could also help having an overview of the whole thing without going back and forth between the 29 categories ?

That's pretty much the opposite of what we want to encourage. The point of the awards is that people go and listen to as many entries per category as possible. Anything that encourages "where can I vote for my favorite band?" thinking, is something we consciously avoid. There are millions of users' choice awards out there for that and in our opinion those don't really further the proliferation of new music, or people broadening their horizons. Since our awards are curated and the team spends all year determining the most worthy (yes, this is biased, put the gun down) entries, we hope that people will simply go to the categories they're most familiar with or interested in and determine their favorite entry among the nominees. I know you do

Obviously we can't fully prohibit people voting for the most popular thing without giving any regard to anything else, but that's not what we want to encourage.
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09.02.2025 - 16:28
Liafev
Written by corrupt on 09.02.2025 at 16:14

That's pretty much the opposite of what we want to encourage. The point of the awards is that people go and listen to as many entries per category as possible. Anything that encourages "where can I vote for my favorite band?" thinking, is something we consciously avoid. There are millions of users' choice awards out there for that and in our opinion those don't really further the proliferation of new music, or people broadening their horizons. Since our awards are curated and the team spends all year determining the most worthy (yes, this is biased, put the gun down) entries, we hope that people will simply go to the categories they're most familiar with or interested in and determine their favorite entry among the nominees. I know you do

Obviously we can't fully prohibit people voting for the most popular thing without giving any regard to anything else, but that's not what we want to encourage.

Fair enough. I didn't really thought of it as "the fastest way to find that one band and vote for it", but I can defintely understand that'd be used like this yeah.
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09.02.2025 - 19:01
BitterCOld
The Ancient One
Admin
Written by Liafev on 07.02.2025 at 20:06

Hey Metalstorm friends! I am a bit late this year because I was travelling, but here are the usual Spotify playlists for all MS Awards categories. Happy listening, and hope you'll vote for the best, not the most popular!

We at MS owe this fine upstanding individual a beer. Or three.
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Beer Bug Virus Spotify Playlist crafted by Nikarg and I. Feel free to tune in and add some pertinent metal tunes!
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09.02.2025 - 23:15
theFIST
Written by nikarg on 08.02.2025 at 18:20

I, on the other hand, reckon that death metal knocked it out of the park last year with many great releases that unfortunately didn't make our final cut, because we can only nominate ten albums. For example, Maze Envy, Defilers Of The Light, Duck Face Killings, Lifeless Birth, Sanshi, The Underworld Awaits Us All, More Insane, Unicursal, The Skorian // The Greyleer, EPIC, Emerald Fires Atop The Farewell Mountains, Infinite Mortality, and my personal favourite, Caverns, could have easily been nominated and for a good reason.

Death Meatal is a pretty tough category for narrowing down to a nominations list with how broad it is.
To me, whenever Wormed release something, they have earned that vote, but someone else might very much prefer a different style, be it dissonant like Ulcerate or Portal, or old school, or something extremely technical. The latter would probably be something i"d vote for in other years as well.
But how do you judge those different styles, that have different standards for what"s good, against each other?
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Written by Warman on 07.11.2007 at 22:39
Haha, that's like saying "compose your own Metal album and upload it here, instead of writing a review of an album". :lol:

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09.02.2025 - 23:34
A Real Mönkey
Written by nikarg on 08.02.2025 at 18:20

I, on the other hand, reckon that death metal knocked it out of the park last year with many great releases that unfortunately didn't make our final cut, because we can only nominate ten albums. For example, Maze Envy, Defilers Of The Light, Duck Face Killings, Lifeless Birth, Sanshi, The Underworld Awaits Us All, More Insane, Unicursal, The Skorian // The Greyleer, EPIC, Emerald Fires Atop The Farewell Mountains, Infinite Mortality, and my personal favourite, Caverns, could have easily been nominated and for a good reason.

For me, it has been one of the poorest years in black metal. In general, I think there is way too much black metal out there, but not much good black metal. "Uninspired" is the word that comes to my mind when I listen to most of it.

Don’t mind me; just quoting this post for archival purposes.
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10.02.2025 - 14:02
musclassia
Staff
Written by theFIST on 09.02.2025 at 23:15

Death Meatal is a pretty tough category for narrowing down to a nominations list with how broad it is.
To me, whenever Wormed release something, they have earned that vote, but someone else might very much prefer a different style, be it dissonant like Ulcerate or Portal, or old school, or something extremely technical. The latter would probably be something i"d vote for in other years as well.
But how do you judge those different styles, that have different standards for what"s good, against each other?

Death might be the category that most suffers from this - black at least gets stuff like atmo-black funneled off into the Meloblack category, but actual Melodeath is usually far more removed from death metal. Personal preferences for particular niches definitely influences how you judge the different styles against one another, and for the staff nominations, the ones in recent year probably betray that there's not a load of major OSDM revivalism fans among us, but the more lauded ones in the OSDM (classic or revivalist bands) niche usually stand out enough to make it in (thinking of Immolation and Asphyx in recent years and Gatecreeper this year)
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10.02.2025 - 17:30
gavdann
I was beating myself up, deciding who to vote for in the DM category. I am a fan of OSDM and disso-death, but how can you compare the Fulci album (which I played a ridiculous number of times) with the latest Ulcerate and Mitochondrion magnum opus? They're so completely different.
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10.02.2025 - 18:15
nikarg
Staff
I get what people are saying (mainly theFIST and gavdann), but it is not just death metal that is diverse and with different sounding nominations. It's not that albums like Die Urkatastrophe, Die Berge, and Black Terror Genesis have that much in common, but they all belong in black metal. The same applies to Untouched By Fire, Fire Blades From The Tomb, and Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran in doom metal. Even thrash, which by definition is always more straightforward, features albums like Bleed On My Teeth, Maze Controller, and When Time Becomes Loss, and they sound nothing alike, despite all falling under the thrash umbrella. I personally prefer it if we have albums worthy of nomination that also cover a wide sonic range of a certain style. The umbrellas are fairly large, yet still we end up with so many categories that, in all fairness, is a real headache for us. You do not want to know what is going on in the "genre debate" thread that we have, where we discuss where a certain album belongs to, style-wise.
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10.02.2025 - 19:18
Liafev
Written by BitterCOld on 09.02.2025 at 19:01

We at MS owe this fine upstanding individual a beer. Or three.

Hehe, beer is my favourite kind of compensation!
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10.02.2025 - 20:01
X-Ray Rod
Skandino
Staff
Written by nikarg on 08.02.2025 at 18:20
For me, it has been one of the poorest years in black metal. In general, I think there is way too much black metal out there, but not much good black metal. "Uninspired" is the word that comes to my mind when I listen to most of it.

Goes to show how much difference in tastes we have within our staff***. For me, literally half the death metal nominees are "meh". The other half is pretty good though and my favorite 2024 metal album is in the death category. Has to do with the fact that I'm mostly into cavernous death metal so naturally I'm missing some albums that didn't make it like Concrete Winds, Saevus Finis, Black Curse, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Wrathprayer, Pentagram Chile and Invocation.

You know what? Screw it: Chilean death metal won the MS awards in death metal category. Period. I still haven't checked out Meridion though. Need to get do that asap.

Wheareas the black metal catergory has 7 albums I could easily see myself voting for and the other 3 are respectable choices. The only black metal bands I feel are missing are Antichrist Siege Machine and Akhlys.

*** = That's a great thing btw.
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Written by BloodTears on 19.08.2011 at 18:29
Like you could kiss my ass

Written by Milena on 20.06.2012 at 10:49
Rod, let me love you.

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11.02.2025 - 11:02
nikarg
Staff
Written by Liafev on 09.02.2025 at 16:28

Fair enough. I didn't really thought of it as "the fastest way to find that one band and vote for it", but I can defintely understand that'd be used like this yeah.

For what it's worth, some of us also did not think of it at all either, and we had this discussion internally, but we decided against it for the reasons that corrupt explained.
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11.02.2025 - 20:36
corrupt
With a lowercase c
Admin
We added another moderation tool to our toolbox. We will now disable user nominations if they don't meet the criteria for the current awards, or violate our terms. This had to be introduced for a mis-nomination in best cover song (a song from 2025). Disabling nominations allows us to prevent further voting for them, without having to delete existing votes.

If this happens to one of your votes, you will get a notification about it and you can go and remove your existing vote, just not vote for the same item again.

We hope this is a good compromise between outright deleting users' nominations and votes, and not dealing with misplaced nominations at all.
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12.02.2025 - 07:25
M C Vice
ex-polydactyl
Saw Borknagar written in in 5 categories, so now I'm curious as to which it most fits: black, meloblack, folk, prog or extreme prog?
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" 'Tis a lie! Thy backside is whole and ungobbled, thou ungrateful whelp!"
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12.02.2025 - 17:29
Dinruth
The Extreme Prog category was extremely tough to decide with Orgone, blood Inc, iotunn and hail spirit noir putting out fantastic albums and all of the rest being good to great
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12.02.2025 - 18:19
Cynic Metalhead
Ambrish Saxena
Written by M C Vice on 12.02.2025 at 07:25

Saw Borknagar written in in 5 categories, so now I'm curious as to which it most fits: black, meloblack, folk, prog or extreme prog?

Extreme prog for me.
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12.02.2025 - 18:48
Rage10000
Written by Liafev on 07.02.2025 at 20:06

Hey Metalstorm friends! I am a bit late this year because I was travelling, but here are the usual Spotify playlists for all MS Awards categories. Happy listening, and hope you'll vote for the best, not the most popular!

Hey! I noticed you'd posted them a couple of days ago because I'd been checking back to your stuff from 2023. It's such a great way to listen when I'm in the car or on a walk. Thanks for doing it. It's awesome.
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12.02.2025 - 18:51
Rage10000
I went into Meloblack thinking Gaerea or even hitting the Kvaen write in vote. But now I'm thinking Wormwood. Really solid. Love every song, especially Galactic Blood. Great use of synths.
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13.02.2025 - 22:17
Nick Carter
Written by Archie 666 on 08.02.2025 at 19:11

Written by Nick Carter on 07.02.2025 at 02:45

Is there some post or an official image that we can share in social media (instagram) so more people come and check them out? I truly believe this effort is outstanding and it helps a lot of people know a looot about metal.

Don't think Backstreet Boys fans are very big on heavy metal music though.

Sorry for not being trve enough for you.
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