My top 50 of 2013. Rated 8 and above.

The year we said hello again to Carcass and farewell to Jeff Hanneman

Album count: 150
Average rating: 6.97

1.Summoning - Old Mornings Dawn

2.Carcass - Surgical Steel

3.Leprous - Coal

4.Oranssi Pazuzu - Valonielu

5.Arx Atrata - Oblivion

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A little list series where I list my top 20 favorite metal albums every year starting from the year I was born in.

2013 was one of the best, possibly the best of the decade until now, definitely one of the best for black metal, Experimental, Progressive and Doom metal.

My favorite non metal albums of 2013

1.Stratovarius - Nemesis

2.Summoning - Old Mornings Dawn

3.Queens Of The Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork

4.Caladan Brood - Echoes Of Battle

5.Gris - À L'Âme Enflammée, L'Äme Constellée...

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1.Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)

2.Riverside - Shrine Of New Generation Slaves

3.Caladan Brood - Echoes Of Battle

4.Omnium Gatherum - Beyond

5.Haken - The Mountain

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This list is meant to be an extensive, but by no means exhaustive, collection of the greatest (modern) metal albums and eps. Running the gamut from avant-garde to trve norweigan black metal. *As someone who is young in age, my tastes tend to revolve around the period of the 80s to the present.* Although certain metal albums from before will certainly be featured, the period of the 60s-70s will be under-represented. I refer you to this excellent list to gain a better appreciation for some of the best metal from that period: https://rateyourmusic.com/list/freis/martin_popoffs_the_top_500_heavy_metal_albums_of_all_time/

1.Gaerea - Unsettling Whispers

2.Galadriel - World Under World

3.Galaktik Cancer Squad - Celestia

4.Galar - De Gjenlevende

5.Gallowbraid - Ashen Eidolon

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I joined Metal Storm in late 2010 and throughout the years I have discovered so many incredible bands and albums thanks to this site.

My taste in music has changed considerably during this decade so putting together this list was not an easy task. This is the result but I will continuously update it as I revisit albums and discover new ones.

Let's see what the next decade brings! \m/

1.SubRosa - More Constant Than The Gods

2.Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss

3.Nhor - Within The Darkness Between The Starlight

4.Trees Of Eternity - Hour Of The Nightingale

5.Agruss - Morok

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100 full length albums that I favor in approximate order of preference plus 10 non-LP releases at the end. Limited to metal albums and albums featured on the site.

1.Indesinence - Vessels Of Light And Decay

2.Mitochondrion - Parasignosis

3.Murmuüre - Murmuüre

4.Deathspell Omega - Paracletus

5.Ustalost - The Spoor Of Vipers

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I will most likely look back at this decade as the dark ages of popular music. A time where mainstream music was largely dominated by talentless pop/hip hop music with less memorable songs than the previous decade. However, that doesn't mean that metal music followed the same path. While it was largely dominated by metalcore during the beginning of the decade, I started to grow to love more music in this decade for metal music than I initially did during the beginning of the decade. This was the decade where I became a metalhead, where I became who I am today and started expanding my horizons musically and learn to appreciate a lot of metal music released during this decade and that will be something I will look back at fondly. As the 2010's comes to a close, I decided to make a list of the top 50 metal albums of the decade that I would consider the best. NOTE: this list might change if I discover more music from this decade that I thought are amazing.

1.Trees Of Eternity - Hour Of The Nightingale

2.Kauan - Sorni Nai

3.Angellore - La Litanie Des Cendres

4.Les Discrets - Ariettes Oubliées...

5.Woods Of Ypres - Woods 5: Grey Skies & Electric Light

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2000-2004 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5844
2005-2009 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5838
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 2010 to 2014, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2010-2014.
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 +2.

C for 2010-2014 = 7.478
m = 20

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2010 - 24
2011 - 28
2012 - 16
2013 - 22
2014 - 12

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Gallowbraid - Ashen Eidolon

2.Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini

3.Aquilus - Griseus

4.Ne Obliviscaris - Portal Of I

5.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

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1.Deafheaven - Sunbather

2.Bring Me The Horizon - Sempiternal

3.Gorguts - Colored Sands

4.Ghost - Infestissumam

5.The Dillinger Escape Plan - One Of Us Is The Killer

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This is a list of the bands and albums I listen to most often. The order in which they are listed was only determined by the order I was able to recal them. I suspect most of them wont be archived on MS. The Thumbnail for this list is my own work entitled "Essence".

~Jacob Britt

1.Circle Takes The Square - Decompositions: Volume Number One

2.Gris - À L'Âme Enflammée, L'Äme Constellée...

3.Ibrahim Maalouf - Kalthoum (Alf Leila Wa Leila)

4.Mars Red Sky - Mars Red Sky

5.The Mars Volta - The Bedlam In Goliath

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As is the case with my other lists, this is for my own organizational purposes and is designed purely to help me keep track of all the many black metal bands and albums that I enjoy, since I can't keep all of this information in my head. It has no other benefit whatsoever and will likely result in tantrums should anyone else see it. I'm aware that I haven't listened to every black metal album that I should have. I only went down to the 6s on this list, so it's possible that I have listened to your favorite black metal album that you desperately need to suggest and I thought it was terrible. There are a lot of heinously incompetent black metal bands out there.

On the off-chance that you've found this and actually care about what I think (you shouldn't), be advised that my favorites come first. Some are favorites in the general sense; some are favorites within black metal. The first few of those are in some order and not so much after that.

Because this is for my own purposes and not intended to be a definitive list of pure black metal, there are some black metal-adjacent bands, or albums by black metal bands that may not themselves be black metal. That's why you'll find so much Sigh clogging up the top of the list. I prefer to keep whole discographies together on one list. I used to include Primordial, Forefather, and other such bands, but a while back I created a list for folk and I decided that those artists would fit better there.

I update these lists very infrequently. This was last updated December 7, 2022.

1.Sigh - Imaginary Sonicscape

2.Sigh - Graveward

3.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

4.Sigh - Heir To Despair

5.The Meads Of Asphodel - The Murder Of Jesus The Jew

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1.Persefone - Spiritual Migration

2.Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)

3.Caladan Brood - Echoes Of Battle

4.Leprous - Coal

5.The Ocean - Pelagial

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In alphabetical order by album title!

1.Gris - À L'Âme Enflammée, L'Äme Constellée...

2.Obsidian Tongue - A Nest Of Ravens In The Throat Of Time

3.Finnr's Cane - A Portrait Painted By The Sun

4.Sun Devoured Earth - A Static Life

5.Agrypnie - Aetas Cineris

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Here are my top 20 metal albums of this year (without any order).

* The list's title in eng means: "decent year".
** To create the thumbnail I used Sky Ferreira's cover art for Night Time, My Time, shot by Gaspar Noé.

1.Gris - À L'Âme Enflammée, L'Äme Constellée...

2.Obscure Sphinx - Void Mother

3.SubRosa - More Constant Than The Gods

4.Tribulation - The Formulas Of Death

5.Funeralium - Deceived Idealism

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There is no real arrangement here, apart for the top 3.

1.Ayreon - The Theory Of Everything

2.Summoning - Old Mornings Dawn

3.The Vision Bleak - Witching Hour

4.Avatarium - Avatarium

5.Black Sabbath - 13

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