Unfinished as I still have to catch up on more recent years. Also all of the places on the list are of course subject to change as I discover more music from each year.

My taste is very much centred around the power of the riff. That means most of the albums on this list are thrash, death, heavy, black, or some offshoot of those genres.

Also there is no albums listed for 1974, simply because from what I can tell there were no actual metal albums of note released that year. Some of Led Zeppelin's albums aren't exactly metal either but I think they had a large enough influence on the genre to merit inclusion.