Here's my AotY for each year from 1970, with a runner up (or two) following.
Pink Floyd and Yes aren't here, King Crimson is, so I'll include King Crimson

1.Black Sabbath - Paranoid

2.Deep Purple - In Rock

3.Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV

4.Black Sabbath - Master Of Reality

5.Uriah Heep - Demons And Wizards

      View entire list ››

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

      View entire list ››

I've been listened to Black Metal since the late 2000s starting with Emperor and Dimmu Borgir. Since then, I've discover dozens of amazing bands thanks to MS and it has become one of my favourite genres, especially the more melodic/symphonic/epic bands.

So here are my favourites of the genre with my rating, its sub-genre and release year:

(Score is an average of each album's song ratings, full list located here)

If you discovered any new albums or like the same sort of black metal, be sure to give this list a thumbs-up and leave a comment so more people can find these amazing bands!

My other lists:
Top 500 Albums (ordered & rated)
Top 25 EPs (also ordered & rated)
Top 200 Overlooked Albums (with genres)
Top 200 Overrated Albums (trigger warning)
So I Heard You Like Wintersun... (Time II find new bands)

1.Agalloch - The Mantle

2.Caladan Brood - Echoes Of Battle

3.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

4.Emperor - Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk

5.Windir - 1184

      View entire list ››

Merry Christmas, my fellow metalheads!

Inspired by Qualeen's list, I meticulously kept track of how often I listened to every album this year. I present to you my top 50 most frequently listened-to albums of the year 2022, ordered by number of full listens.

In other words, here are the albums that I've been most obsessively addicted to over the past year!

1.Slayer - Show No Mercy

2.Mercyful Fate - Melissa

3.Nile - Annihilation Of The Wicked

4.Gojira - The Way Of All Flesh

5.Autopsy - Severed Survival

      View entire list ››

These are albums that I'm currently enjoying. They may be classics that I'm revisiting or new gems I've recently discovered. (Ordered alphabetically)

- A star (⭐️) denotes a new discovery that I find exceptionally special!
- A flame (🔥) denotes an album that I've heard before, enjoyed, and am revisiting this month!

1.Absu - Tara

2.ACOD - Fourth Reign Over Opacities And Beyond

3.Angrrsth - W Czeluść

4.Autonoesis - Moon Of Foul Magics

5.Baroness - Red Album

      View entire list ››

Ratings go from:

WORSHIP ❤️❤️❤️: Absolute greatness, a mindblowing album.
LOVE ❤️❤️🖤: Amazing release with very few flaws.
LIKE ❤️🖤🖤: Enjoyable but far from perfect.
DISLIKE 💔: Not very good or maybe not fitting my tastes.

I've decided to stop rating albums with a numerical value as I tend to feel uncomfortable with that. This list has a minimalistic, subjective and visceral approach, based purely on sensations and personal tastes. Mainly for personal use and doesn't pretend to be a serious ranking, but emerges from the need to remember which bands and albums I enjoyed and the ones I disliked. I constantly revisit new releases so first impressions may change over time. It usually takes 8-10 spins for me to get completely sure of a rating.

1.Æther Realm - Tarot

2.Abhoria - Abhoria

3.Acid Bath - When The Kite String Pops

4.Agrypnie - Metamorphosis

5.Allegaeon - Fragments Of Form And Function

      View entire list ››

1.All time & genre (including Non-Metal on MS)
2.Only studio albums & EPs
3.The genre is primary one.
4.Only ESPECIALLY favorite (a bit more stringently than ver1 and rating 10 is not enough)
5.The order: A to Z (initial of band's name), next release date
6.Black Wisdom, an album of Russian band Grey Heaven Fall, is deleted. When the situation gets better, I will repost.
Last modified on 3 March 2022

1.Akhlys - The Dreaming I

2.Altar Of Plagues - Mammal

3.Angra - Temple Of Shadows

4.Anthrax - Among The Living

5.Arkha Sva - Gloria Satanae

      View entire list ››

1.Deathspell Omega - Fas - Ite, Maledicti, In Ignem Aeternum

2.Deathspell Omega - Paracletus

3.Deathspell Omega - The Synarchy Of Molten Bones

4.Deathspell Omega - Kénôse

5.Deathspell Omega - The Furnaces Of Palingenesia

      View entire list ››

This list aims to be the counterpart to the Metal Storm Top 200 Albums (plus a few extras).

If you discover a new band or already like any of ones here, please give this list a thumbs up and/or leave a comment so we can get these overlooked gems in front of more people.

Criteria:
• High-quality musicianship (i.e. 9-10/10 IMO)
• 1 album per band

Ordered by number of votes then MS rating.

As these are albums with a low number of votes, the rating is likely to change frequently. I will update this list as often as I can.

Updated: 29-Jan-24

My other lists:
Top 500 Albums (ordered & rated)
Top 25 EPs (also ordered & rated)
Top 200 Overrated Albums (trigger warning)
So I Heard You Like Wintersun... (Time II find new bands)

1.Solipsist - The Human Equation

2.Ayahuasca - Beneath The Mind

3.Cryptomnesia - Primordial Oddity

4.Element (USA) - The Energy

5.Telepathy - 12 Areas

      View entire list ››

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

      View entire list ››

I've been listening to Metal since 2005 and it has become my biggest passion in life.

Rarely a day goes by where I don't listen to it in one form or another. The bands I listened to in my teens inspired me to pick up the guitar (and later drums) and start making music of my own.

So here are the albums that have stood out and made the largest impact on me. To be as transparent as possible, I've labelled albums as 'nostalgia bias' where my memories of the album give it an advantage over others.

(Score is an average of each album's song ratings, full list located here. There are a ton of albums that I've rated 9/10 in the 'TBR' tab that may never make it to this list, be sure to check those out.)

If you discovered any new albums or like the same sort of metal, be sure to give this list a thumbs-up and leave a comment so more people can find these amazing bands!

My other lists:
Top 25 EPs (ordered & rated)
Top 200 Overlooked Albums (with genres)
Top 200 Overrated Albums (trigger warning)
So I Heard You Like Wintersun... (Time II find new bands)

Genre-Specific:
Top 50 Black Metal Albums
Top 50 Melodic Death Metal Albums
Top 45 Thrash Metal Albums
Top 40 Power Metal Albums
Top 30 Doom Metal Albums
Top 30 Heavy Metal Albums

1.Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

2.Opeth - Blackwater Park

3.Metallica - Master Of Puppets

4.Edge Of Sanity - Crimson

5.Opeth - Still Life

      View entire list ››

Obviously, a list of my favorite songs, or songs that mean something special to me at least. I don't remember them all of course so I'll be adding more as soon as I'm reminded of them.
I wanted to pull this off on Spotify but I'm missing a whole lot of songs, so I figured this would be a good place to save it.

1.After Forever - Decipher

2.Ahab - The Giant

3.Amesoeurs - Amesoeurs

4.Arcturus - The Sham Mirrors

5.Between The Buried And Me - The Great Misdirect

      View entire list ››

Are you addicted to the eerie sound of Deathspell Omega, Ulcerate and Portal? Then this list is for you.

1.Above Aurora - Path To Ruin

2.Abyssal - Antikatastaseis

3.Ad Nauseam - Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est

4.Ad Nauseam - Imperative Imperceptible Impulse

5.Akhlys - The Dreaming I

      View entire list ››

1.Ulver - A Quick Fix Of Melancholy

2.Dream Theater - A Change Of Seasons

3.Cradle Of Filth - Vempire

4.Vader - The Art Of War

5.Darkestrah - Khagan

      View entire list ››

1.Bathory - Under The Sign Of The Black Mark

2.Bathory - Blood Fire Death

3.Master's Hammer - Ritual

4.Darkthrone - A Blaze In The Northern Sky

5.Immortal - Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism

      View entire list ››