I like to create playlists for fun when I'm not busy. Usually, though, I abandon them soon after. I want this playlist to be a bit different - perhaps not infinitely useful, but I associate all these songs with the season of winter and the winter holidays, and I'll be listening to all these a lot at least for a while. I thought I'd share the songs I included in my digital playlist, maybe you'll find something you like. Many of these are purposely blasphemous - I live surrounded by fundamentalist Christians and they're gonna spend the holidays singing about the birth of Christ - I need me some counterbalance.

1.Dream Theater - Awake

2.Immolation - Close To A World Below

3.Vader - Impressions In Blood

4.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

5.Emperor - In The Nightside Eclipse

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The albums below is my definition of extreme metal music, regardless of their genre. Entire list is based only on my personal preferences in metal.
Rules:
1. One album per band
2. 305 groups/305 albums

1.In Flames - Clayman

2.Metallica - ...And Justice For All

3.Chimaira - Chimaira

4.Death - Symbolic

5.Testament - The New Order

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Last updated on 11 April 2024.

1.Dream Theater - Images And Words

2.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

3.Wintersun - Wintersun

4.Dissection - Storm Of The Light's Bane

5.Iron Maiden - The Number Of The Beast

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Note: Tool intentionally ommitted because they don't consider themselves metal. Otherwise you'd see their first 4 albums in top 25.

Last updated: 27 March 2024.

1.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

2.Agalloch - The Mantle

3.Opeth - Blackwater Park

4.Edge Of Sanity - Crimson

5.Lost Horizon - A Flame To The Ground Beneath

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All my favourite songs ranked in order best down.

1.Rush - 2112

2.Deep Purple - In Rock

3.Jethro Tull - Aqualung

4.Rainbow - Rising

5.Black Sabbath - Paranoid

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1.Moonsorrow - Voimasta Ja Kunniasta

2.Primordial - To The Nameless Dead

3.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

4.Ensiferum - Ensiferum

5.Orphaned Land - Mabool: The Story Of The Three Sons Of Seven

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I'm bored very easily, and that's why I decided to do some stats about metal storm's top 20 of each year and the top 200. I don't know why I did that, but if you love stats like I do it might interest you. All of the data I collected is from November the 7th 2020.
Updated on August the 3rd 2023

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.Deep Purple - The Book Of Taliesyn

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"CALENDAR MADE OF METAL"
March = Folk Metal
Listening to as many albums as possible in said genre during said month and listing them here as I go. Suggestions welcome.

1.Vintersorg - Till Fjälls

2.Vintersorg - Till Fjälls Del II

3.Lönndom - Fälen Från Norr

4.FEJD - Storm

5.Forgotten North - Kinder Des Zorns

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Updated 14.4.2024

My rather personal and improvised take on the subject matter. The list is pretty wage, I'll be updating it a lot and the order might vary a little depending on some things, but they're all great and awesome records no matter what. If there are some great records missing, that doesn't necessarily mean I consider them bad, maybe I just forgot about them or just haven't listened to them enough to consider them personal favourites.

Limited to metal and rock albums found on Metal Storm. Most of them (at least 90%) are anyway, so doesn't matter. The absent ones are mostly more pop and synth oriented stuff and some really obscure jazz and fusion albums.

1.Marillion - Marbles

2.Anathema - Weather Systems

3.Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time

4.Moonsorrow - Voimasta Ja Kunniasta

5.Moonsorrow - Kivenkantaja

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2005-2009 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5838
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 2000 to 2004, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2000-2004.
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 +5.

C for 2000-2004 = 7.599
m = 30

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2000 - 15
2001 - 27
2002 - 14
2003 - 20
2004 - 29

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Opeth - Blackwater Park

2.Agalloch - The Mantle

3.Tool - Lateralus

4.Wintersun - Wintersun

5.Ensiferum - Ensiferum

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No particular order

1.Graveworm - As The Angels Reach The Beauty

2.Graveworm - Scourge Of Malice

3.Dimmu Borgir - For All Tid

4.Dimmu Borgir - Stormblåst

5.Dimmu Borgir - Enthrone Darkness Triumphant

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Time has moved on and so has my taste. There is music I didn't listen to back then but also albums I still love even though I don't listen to them as much anymore.

1.Agalloch - The Mantle

2.Aquilus - Cloak Of Autumn Shroud

3.Aquilus - Griseus

4.Babymetal - Metal Resistance

5.Babymetal - Metal Galaxy

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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

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1.Afgrund - Vid Helvetets Grindar

2.After Forever - After Forever

3.Agalloch - The Mantle

4.Agalloch - Ashes Against The Grain

5.Alcest - Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde

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It's always changing.

1.Moonsorrow - V: Hävitetty

2.Moonsorrow - Verisäkeet

3.Equilibrium - Sagas

4.Týr - Ragnarok

5.Finsterforst - Rastlos

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