Top 25 Metal

Now, if you had asked me two years ago if I knew enough metal to make a Top 25 list, I would have said, “No, here’s my top ten.” But, if you were to ask me now, I’d say, maybe, “Well, I just watched a little of Coverkillernation’s list of his Top 50, leading me to buy Watain’s Lawless Darkness, and he said he made a Top 25 list earlier in his career, on YouTube, and if he was well-versed enough back then, then I am almost certainly not as well-versed as he was even for that List, but I will make my own.”

I mean, it just feels right. The difference between my list and many of the others is that I will not limit it to one album per band. I get the aesthetic and presentational and fun reason why someone would do this, limit it, but I think that if it is truly your Top 25 list, or whatever It is, then you are probably going to have more than one by a certain band, and in any case, limiting it like that means that you are setting at least one boundary against it being honest. So here is what feels at least a Little honest, for me.

Just to note, I’m not sitting here saying that these are objectively the best, or the best ones that I have listened to (and the gaps in my discography are long). They are the ones that feel the most exceptional, perhaps, to me, the ones I would put on a top list. By the way, seeing that Chris Rock did a Top 25 rap list, and I have a lot more business doing one of those (despite what you may think about my darkness), I have a lot of interest in doing one of those. So, We’ll see. Let’s see

25. The Last Tour on Earth, by Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson is severely underrated, if not for their musicianship or artistry (I’m not sure I’m well-versed enough to know what constitutes good), then for their shifting into totally different styles pretty much every album. The first album was psychedelic and scary fun, like the darker parts indeed of the Willy Wonka movie, but then after sort of a collapse into something strange with Smells Like Children, they came back with a blistering, nihilistic almost death metal level of darkness with their third album, changed to sad, spacey music in the fourth, then went super dark but not hard or heavy as much as gloomy and just, dark. Then they went into a dark cabaret act in the sixth and I’m not familiar enough with the rest to say, but this album, which features stuff from the first four of those, gets everything right, with Marilyn Manson giving some of the best stage performances and banter that I’ve ever heard, and a selection of songs that is pretty great, although maybe focused somewhat heavily on the Mechanical Animals stuff (the most recent, as of this album‘s time), and other elements that make this a live album that is truly a work of art on its own, like the concert must have been, now that I think of it, to be at. One needs only hear the two most savage cuts from Antichrist Superstar, “Irresponsible Hate Anthem” and the title track, to see whether they are going to love this album. Leave your preconceptions behind, with this one.

24. Antichrist Superstar, by Marilyn Manson

This album is a blistering torpedo of aggression and abrasion. If there was one Manson album that I would point to when someone said “They’re not metal” and it wasn’t their live album, it would be this. Just the most tunneling set of songs, in “Irresponsible Hate Anthem” and “The Beautiful People” and “Little Horn” (“WORLD SPREADS ITS LEGS / FOR ANOTHER STARRR!”) and “The Reflecting God” and “Wormboy” and “Angel with the Scabbed Wings”—these sound like black metal titles, or something like Behemoth would make, anyway, and the songs kind of sound like that, too. Darkness that you could get lost in, choruses that sound like the Antichrist is rising in the darkness and it’s got a whole crowd around it and they’re all ready to march down the street in some kind of big epic movie horde. You get some of Manson’s best, dark lyrics, with a lot of his more somber, sad stuff, too, most notably on “Cryptorchild” (“Prick your finger, it is done / The moon has now eclipsed the sun, / The angel has spread its wings / The time has come for bitter things”) and the great song with a great music video (back when they were still making those things all the time, and some of them were real shooting for the Moon) “Man That You Fear,” which somehow blends the senses of some kind of dark, sort of demonic guy with the earlier memory of him, before he went down this path into something unrecognizable. Basically, this is probably the best all-around Marilyn Manson album, at least that I’ve heard, with all of his sort of feminine impulses dragged right along in line with his harsher ones, all cloaked in the darkness of something truly Demonic.

23. Beyond the Red Mirror, by Blind Guardian

This is not Blind Guardian’s best album, but it is perhaps their most filled with magic. I like Hansi Kürsch on a bad day, and this day, he is just so all over the place that he basically hits everything I ever like about him, and even new things I didn’t know I would. Not only that, but the lyrics and the themes are just incredible. From the astonishing Game of Thrones song “The Throne” to the closing one-two from the a capella masterwork “Miracle Machine” (featuring this line that is just . . . well, it just had me in tears, after a few listens, albeit: “We must believe in something / That I would call, a Miracle “) and the great, lush, gorgeous “The Grand Parade,” a song that actually had me sending an email to Matt McKinley saying something like, “I think this world’s worth fighting for,” something that Blind Guardian actually mentions in another album (“This world is sacred!” and they are worldly people, Hansi having dissed Jon Schaffer from Demons & Wizards for being at the Capitol Protests, so I think this might be an example of how people who cherish the world too much aren’t good, but well, but Still), this album is just full of incredible little lines that Hansi embraces like a kid at the drama club trying on different performances for Hamlet. I’ll give you just one, to show you how fun this album is: From the Game of Thrones (or Song of Ice and Fire, not sure which he was really hewing to) song, “We must serve the fire / We must Confess, we are liars.” And, by the way, there appears to be a Twin Peaks song (“Sacred Mind”), too. And, like the others, it feels just packed with Magic.

22. Butchered at Birth, by Cannibal Corpse

I love this album, and I have only listened to it maybe once, possibly but perhaps not totally likely, in its entirety. Maybe it was only once. I simply don’t want to experience these lyrics too much, even though they’re delivered in a way that might be literally incomprehensible, like the bass line in . . . And Justice for All in a really tangible way: In this case, it is there, but it sounds like just growls without form or consequence. Except the consequence, when they’re mixed with what someone called the freight-train sound of their aesthetic with the stabbi ness of their drums, which I have since heard on other death metal albums, and perhaps before then, I did, but just didn’t recognize it, but never sounded anywhere near as demented and sort of delirious as it did here. This is truly enjoyable music, truly, sonically. But I want to stay away from it, far away, from it.

21. A Twist in the Myth, by Blind Guardian

This album is here almost exclusively for the song “Turn the Page,” which is just . . . there’s a line in it, which Hansi delivers like he’s on fucking fire, that goes, “There is nothing to feel / Come turn the wheel,” or at least that is according to the “Genius” lyrics page. And the thing is, I heard fear, and it just hit me, so hard. It felt like an angel descending on a golden cloud, announcing to me that I had my life back. And there was never any reason to leave it. That’s beautiful, just, just beautiful, and I’m sure that the people who are fans of Blind Guardian will kill me on the two picks I have, here, but these are the two albums that I have connected with most.

20. Mercenary, by Bolt Thrower

There is a song on here, the first song by Bolt Thrower that I really went into looking to be wowed, called “Powder Burns,” recommended by Questy, on his ranking video of Bolt Thrower. Something about this feels like just going through an hour or so of powder, that kind of stings, kind of burns, on your skin, from the Battlefield. It’s a Master.

19. Inhuman Rampage, by DragonForce

This album, as I’ve written and said many times, is something by a band described as one for whom if they played a last song at the end of the world by them, nobody would be disappointed. This was probably the case for that era of their work, which had only been preceded by two mainline studio albums, one of which I have and like (Sonic Firestorm), the other I don’t know about, that much. But, anyway, the Book of Revelation inferno that comes out of every one of these songs can be forgiven or even understood for its oft-cited failing of just being guitars noodled around really fast while there is no particular melody or at least identity to these songs. Maybe not, but for some things, it helps to be all-out Apocalypse. This one seems to me the best example I’ve heard in their catalogue to bring out the end of the World, it on.

18. Filosofem, by Burzum

Burzum’s classic album is the first album, I think, or maybe the second (after At the Heart of Winter, which just feels like walking through a beautiful frozen tundra . . . and then a storm comes), that I listened to in black metal. Or, one of them. I remember disliking the song every time I heard it when it was a Mayhem song, on the radio in jail, but maybe they weren’t playing the right ones, or what, but now I am truly getting into the black metal sound, and have been for approaching a year, really. This album I was sitting at work listening to obnoxiously from the computer, I guess because I didn’t have my headphones, there, and they would have perhaps hampered the atmosphere itself around me from soaking in this little beauty. It feels like standing on the washed-out field that character on the Cover is.

17. Spirit of Ecstasy, by Imperial Triumphant

Spirit of Ecstasy is one of those albums that sound like their titles. It is as if the Mayhem who made Grand Declaration of War cut out the blank spots, or just filled them up with droning noise and David Lynch guitars, and then put on literal Illuminati masks, from the Eyes Wide Shut party and all, on top of it. They certainly bring something to black metal that I love, because I tend to be a fan of that kind of avant-garde or artsy stuff. The scream of the instruments beyond the regular ones in places is also incredible. One of the best music videos, and the spiritual successor to, of all things, the “Pursuit of Happiness” Kid Cudi video: “Merkurius Gilded.” This band is just too cool, and they are potentially even beyond all of that a mockery or a message from the kinds of secret parties we’ve heard of. Who knows, I float that only as an idea, but in any case, their mystique comes through in the music and flushes it great.

16. Ashes of the Wake, by Lamb of God

This is one of two albums on this list that just got me thinking, “Metalcore is the best genre ever.” Of anything. Now, I think that Lamb of God are considered more groove metal, like Pantera, and they are also eerily close (close enough for Alyssa White-Gluz to have lead singer Randy Blythe in her list of her favorite “Death Metal” vocalists, a list that had people in the comments of that video on YouTube joking about other “Death Metal” musicians were our favorite singers, like Bruce Dickinson, from IrOn Maiden!) to death metal, at least if you consider Randy Blythe’s wintery screams and rasps as similar to Amarth’s Johan Hegg’s. Anyway, whatever the genre, but the breakdowns here have me feeling closest to metalcore, this album is like pulling the outlet cover off the wall and sticking a metal baseball back into the wall socket. And then just holding on for dear life. It takes a little while to get into it, but once you do, you realize that “The Faded Line” is the most awesome song, you’ve ever heard.

15. Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death), by Marilyn Manson

If Antichrist Superstar is what I would point to under the dirt of this list to show you the metal of Marilyn Manson (just put your metal detector over here, and it’ll beep, probably), this is what I would point to to show you his darkness. Yes, I’ve been talking about the darkness, but whereas his other albums are plenty dark, from what I’ve listened to, this one is just like an unpleasantly dim room as the sun goes down, and you’ve got to wait all night for that baby to come back, again. And it is a long night. There are few albums that feel longer than this one, whether in Marilyn Manson’s discography (maybe Smells Like Children?), or even elsewhere. There is sort of a metronome clicking off its way in “Count to Six and Die,” and it feels like you’re just waiting for the end of the album, but in that way, it feels like you’re waiting for the end of Andrei Rublev (the four-hour or so Russian mostly-black-and-white art movie about a Renaissance painter in the inhospitable middle-ish Ages), where everything you know is artistic and wonderful and deep, but you’re just still on your way to liking it all, totally.

14. In the Court of the Dragon, by Trivium

And, this is the second metalcore album here that feels good enough to just turn around and say, “They hit the peak with metalcore, guys.” Now, this one is more closely fitted into the metalcore category, sounding a lot more like Killswitch Engage with their clean vocals, which sound kind of, almost, like emo vocals from a band like Modest Mouse or Franz Ferdinand, that kind of unpleasant, cranberry-juice style of vocals that sound kind of sour, but kind of sweet. I think it might just be that they are feeling that way. Anyway, this album, like the Lamb of God one here, feels like the sea churning behind you as someone lifts up a spear from the ocean, and, yes, it is Leviathan

13. Powerslave, by Iron Maiden

Iron Maiden has a big presence on this list, and the reason for that is their incredible presence in the music. This band is just, as I said in my Top Ten Bands over on MattThoughts, just the king’s English of rock n’ roll. They are the most elegant, with the best singer, and the craziest guitar harmonies, and the most incredible solos, sometimes, and the most incredible singalongs. I just realized how close “Hallowed Be They Name” is to “Stairway to Heaven,” in various ways, and this is just a band with nothing but riches. One popular album of theirs that deserves the credit, maybe we’ll call it their Rust in Peace, is Powerslave. Not in terms of it being their best, but in terms of how solid hard rock stone of metal it is. I think anyone in the world would like Iron Maiden. Why would you not?

12. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, by Iron Maiden

And here’s the album where they did a progressive thing like the other ones I’ve been Talking about, here, but they did it in a truly connected way, musically, where Everything, the whole thing, feels like just one big, long track. There’s a track, “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son,” on here where they hit a nice center of the song and it sounds like a band of angels playing their guitars, and that’s just the kind of climax and integration that this album, and this band, is working with, here. A very mystical-sounding Iron Maiden effort with songs that don’t generally sound as ready for the radio as their classic but more sing-songy early eighties output. This was, as people sort of seem to acknowledge, the beginning of what would become the later Iron Maiden, along with Somewhere in Time, and it’s probably where they hit it the best, their progressive Stuff. Nothing feels quite this concentrated, in its Mystery.

11. St. Anger, by Metallica

I have had a really soft spot for this album for a few years, or so, now, a little less than that, which grew from liking the title track and “Sweet Amber” (enough, for the latter) already, as well as tracks like the other single, “Frantic” (I remember my friend saying how funny he thought the line “My lifestyle determines my deathstyle,” or how cool he thought it was, or something; I guess wildly different things, but looking back on it, I’m not sure which one he was), but not truly even giving the time of day to most of the rest of the album, most of the time, unless I was better about it than I think I was, then. Anyway, after my life fell apart and things got really bad and stayed pretty bad for a long time, and during part of the latter stages of that stuff, which ended not long ago from writing this, I really had an appreciation for the level of trapped rage in this album. It feels to me, and it comes off to be, in the lyrics, as well, and in the video, as I always say, where Lars is crying for how into the song he’s gotten in “Shoot Me Again,” that this is perhaps the most deeply connected Metallica album there is. The other ones feel performative, whether better or for worse. But this one feels truly integrative. Or, really, maybe, just integrated within itself. I mean, they are being sincere about the feeling of having been wronged and being able to do nothing about it because of the power of everything around you and the relative insignificance of you up against the whole world, basically, and there’s just a pressure-cooker behind all of these songs, periodically shooting out steam or fire. “Shoot Me Again,” by the way, is perhaps the best song on this album, with an incredible bridge of “All the shots I take / I spit back at you” as he repeats over and over again the title of the track, creating an impression of just a wall of oppression and attack all around him that he then confidently responds to in some kind of angry triumph. It’s a really, really uncomfortable album, or at least one where it feels like the experience of just being slowly destroyed for years and having just nothing but walls around you. It’s a hell of an exploration, and one big favorite of mine, in Metallica.

10. A Matter of Life and Death, by Iron MAiden

This one is both the sprawling story of a war, from the opening track that does seem like the song in a CW title sequence but still evokes the perfect feeling of not particularly being invested in your own life, and that, that’s influence, leading this character to being wrapped up in a war, to the tracks that follow like burning husks on the battlefield. It’s not only a great sort of Oscar movie story of World War One from various points of view, it seems, but also what feels like an extended jam session for almost every song, or maybe every one, where they found a mountain of a melody or a rhythm, and then they climb it, for like seven to eight minutes. It takes a while to realize how great this stuff is, to sink into the Slowness of it all, but once you do, you find that it’s like sitting back and really getting invested in a high-quality movie.

9. Versus the World, by Amon Amarth

This is probably the most solid of the Amon Amarth albums, and it takes everything good about their middle style and mixes it with a sort of more concentrated roughness, from their earlier one. It is Nine tracks of just burning stone underneath the tracks of their endless marching.

8. Brave New World, by Iron Maiden

And then, for Iron Maiden, you have an album that feels like a particularly stormy or fun day at the Beach. There seems to be something just oceanic about this album, not in a slow or a sort of massive way (although the sound is massive, at points), but a refreshing kind of seabreeze about it. Even with the sort of sweltering desert vibes of “The Nomad,” which feels like Powerslave on a more spread-out Perspective, the album just goes from refreshing breeze to refreshing windstorm. Bruce’s voice perhaps hits its most happy medium, here, as well.

7. Senjutsu, by Iron Maiden

If you had said the newest Iron Maiden album would have very little to do, at least overtly, with what I would have liked them to address (imagine how cool it would have been for them to have had a cover, for example, just a Cover, that treated 1984 the way they treated Blade Runner with Somewhere in Time‘s cover), which wasn’t nearly as egregious as the year-later Megadeth album doing the same thing while having a band history of directly addressing events, this still hits hard, and perhaps hits all the harder because it just feels like ten of the most organically long Iron Maiden tracks in a row, or most of them on the second disc, anyway, while you have some of the most poetic lyrics, at least with Bruce’s delivery of them and the titanic sort of atmosphere of the music, that this one literally had me loading it up (into my portable CD player, before they let me have my phone back, I think, or no, before they let me have my computer back to load the iTunes into my phone, with, on probation, on the probation train) basically every day anew, even multiple Times a day. “The Parchment” is, by far, one of the best songs Iron Maiden has ever done, to me. And the lyrics, like the thing about sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind on “Darkest Hour,” just really work well. It’s all just such a great album, and a Monumental piece of Work.

6. . . . And Justice for All, by Metallica

This album is Metallica going the most DragonForce they ever do (with the possible exception of either Death Magnetic or Kill ‘Em All, which in their own ways go hard as much as possible, in as many ways as possible), with a song like “One” being a classic in video-game and other circles (its having been on I think at least a Guitar Hero game being prominent in my memory of their inclusion memorializing songs) as much as DragonForce’s, from that album I included here, “Through the Fire and Flames,” had been. Or, at least, almost as much. And it is just as wandering, or not just, but similarly so. The difference with . . . And Justice for All is that both lyrically and musically, each song does have a pretty distinct identity, when you let yourself through the gates without being kept away about the sound of the guitars, and the rest of it, including James’s voice, on the singing. Whether it’s the title track, which was long and perhaps still is my favorite metal (and Metallica) song, which has one of those guitar lines that sounds like patriotic music, perhaps even just American patriotic song melodies, but you still can’t quite place it, similarly to Trans Siberian Orchestra if they weren’t specifically playing Christmas sounds, but it still sounded like they were, or the incredible one-pointedness of “Blackened,” or the sort of wandering-away and coming-back nature of “Eye of the Beholder.” The fact that each of these songs has a lyric that you can put at the beginning of a stateless-society essay (“Freedom with their exception,” “Pull your strings, justice is Done!”) just brings this home as being one of the greatest freedom albums of all time, although one that is definitely unpleasant to listen to, especially without having gotten into each of the Songs, yet. But this is also thus one of those albums where you can just listen and find new things and just integrate a lot more of it, a lot.

5. Alpenpässe, by Minenwerfer

This is truly one of my favorite albums, and it’s the rare one that you find on a Black Metal Promotion video on YouTube. That cover, with the soldier standing with his rifle drawn at the top of a mountain, aiming down at the cloudy abysses below, is just one of the best photographs I’ve ever seen. (It is a photograph, right? Like the Covenant cover for Morbid Angel, there’s a quality to it that feels more like a painting, to me. But, like that one, I think it is supposed to be a photograph. And the album has all of the airiness that you would expect from a cover like that along with all of the intensity, like a stream of cold air coming through the sky as you peer down your sights and hope you can just hold it out, on this mountain, here, at last. It is truly a black metal classic, even though Questy just barely mentioned it not only in his video about the 2010s metal scene but also in his video calling its successor one of his favorite albums of March 2023, but unlike that album, which I have and do like, this one is not so incredibly soaked and choked in darkness that it is unpleasant. It’s actually quite beautiful.)

4. Transilvanian Hunger, by Darkthrone

This is the black metal album (other than Filosofem, I guess, or At the Heart of Winter!) that will get you into black metal. That opening track is like a preview to the whole genre, and it’s just so good. And then the rest of the album, along with the rest of their “Unholy Trinity” (with Under a Funeral Moon and A Blaze in the Northern Sky), comes off to me like a hand reaching out from harder stuff, leading you in. If you will take it. All screaming in the darkness and droning guitars, and interesting words, when you can hear them and understand them.

3. Frances the Mute, by the Mars Volta

Here you get an idea, along with the Hansi Kürsch and the Marilyn Manson one, that I like cabaret vocals. I like my metal musicians acting like they’re up there singing showtunes, sometimes. And like Gerard Way on the microphone for My Chemical Romance, Cedric Bixler-Zavala Soars here, into purple.

2. Jomsviking, by Amon Amarth

This of all the Amon Amarth albums is the one I have returned to most, putting it on like putting on Lost in Translation in the background on a dark night, like I used to do while I was drinking coffee and writing about Cowboy Bebop, or something. It’s just what I have called the Disney album of their catalogue, and it feels like a story told by a really snappy, if not particularly artsy, at all times, storyteller who knows how to play up what and when. You get just suitably epic and even Iron Maiden–Brave New World–like guitars (I think not only does this emulate their sort of singular feel, from that album, but it twists it and alters it to fit Amon Amarth’s aesthetic, and singing, with Johan here sounding to me the best he ever does, and allows them to wash over the intensity of the Music, like a true relief)

1. Symbolic, by Death

This one is on their way to becoming my favorite band, with Leprosy also awesome and the other two I have by them feeling like they’re going to be growers (their first and Fifth). But Symbolic, well, it has probably become my favorite metal album. There’s a certain raw rage to Chuck Schuldiner’s vocals, and as the Dave Mustaine of this band, he might as well be credited for the rest of the Sound, to some extent, too. And boy, if this doesn’t hit hard, for me. The last line of “10,000 Eyes” says it all: “We are enslaved now!” Raw, Truther lyrics, and raw morality, unapologetically moral. This isn’t a guy who’s going to say, “Hey, man, everything is religion when it concerns morality, because it’s Unverifiable.” He’s going to say, in a raspy wail, “A serpent spews out fantasy, unjustified blasphemy / That cannot be condoned” or “This is not a test of power / This is not a game to be lost or won / Let justice be done.” And those are both from the same song.