THE TOP 50 ALBUMS OF 2010-2019
The rules are mostly as usual. I tried to keep this metal only, but made a few exceptions purely because the crossover in fandom is substantial and honestly they're close enough. Full lengths only, which means a few phenomenal EPs were left off. And like always, there is no "one album per artist" rule, because it's not my god damned fault if one band released five amazing albums in a ten year span. However, rest assured, this will not be anywhere near as lopsided as my 90s list was, mostly because Running Wild and Blind Guardian aren't completely dominating their genres now.
Those of you who remember the first one of these Top 50s I did (for 2000-2009) might remember me ranking The Crown's Deathrace King extremely highly, just barely missing the top ten. It should be obvious that I fucking adore that band and their streak from the beginning up until their first hiatus is nothing short of magical, but since their resurgence they've been kinda stumbling a bit. Cobra Speed Venom was an amazing comeback album that was in contention for the list here, but ultimately it fell off in the last round of eliminations, almost entirely because I feel like the true successor The Crown's early/mid era isn't anything The Crown themselves put out. That honor goes to Lik, another Swedish band with an excellent pedigree, featuring members of bands as distinct as Katatonia and Witchery. Carnage, like the name implies, owes a lot to the early Swedeath classics, but like The Crown at their best, they inject the swirling darkness of the void with enough steroids to help the void bitchslap the Milky Way. The first two tracks on here are great examples of ripping death/thrash with heaps of melody and swagger, but I didn't truly fall in love and fully understand why it was so good until the third track, "Celebration of the Twisted". This track does what the best of their contemporaries do yet somehow the genre as a whole tends to shy away from doing. Lik writes extreme metal that is unequivocally fuckin' catchy. There is no fear of hooks here. From top to bottom, Carnage is loaded with genuine singalong moments alongside blistering death metal insanity. Pure speculation here, but I feel like so many bands shy away from moments of genuine catchiness because it seems so antithetical to extremity, but Lik bucks that idea and leans into it really hard. This is the same thing The Crown and Deathchain did at their peaks, and I'm all for it here. We need more bands that sit clearly in the death/thrash camp but keep the punk influence in this fashion, beyond simply abusing d-beats.
On the whole, the cleaner styles of metal like trad and power metal didn't hit nearly as hard as their more extreme cousins this decade, simply because it seems like the ability to expand and experiment had diminished and the proverbial end of history has been met with these genres. So all that's left is to try to surpass the masters from the 80s and 90s. Thaurorod managed that in 2018 with Coast of Gold. This is the Sonata Arctica album that fans have been yearning for since Reckoning Night. This is absolutely stacked with cliches, but god damn man sometimes tropes become overused simply because they fucking rule, and Thaurorod understands that. The opening run of tracks sounds like everything you've ever heard in a power metal context but they do it with so much confidence and flair that it never comes off as contrived or lazy. Tracks like "Power", "Feed the Flame", and especially "The Commonwealth Lives" are high speed double bass-filled bangers with enough hooks to finally finish off Leon Spinks. The lengthier and more progressive cuts like "Illuminati" and "24601" are, as the latter's title implies, very theatrical and just overall huge sounding. I want to find a way to namedrop every track because I just love this album so wholly, but I fear that's a formula I'll continue to milk as this goes on. The point is that Thaurorod is proof positive that you don't necessarily need groundbreaking new ideas to be great, because Coast of Gold is, on the surface, "just another power metal album". While the individual components that make up the songs are the same components we've all heard a million times by now, the quality of those parts are polished and tightened up to perfection here. So there isn't much I can say to sell you on this besides "it's really fucking good", and really that's all any power metal fan should need, because this is really fucking good.
I've struggled a bit in the sixish years since the first Top 50 feature with whether or not I snubbed Tyranny by leaving off Tides of Awakening, which is one of the toppiest of the top tier funeral doom albums in existence. However, I think I've been able to rest easy knowing that the two full time members of the band are also in Wormphelgm, who ultimately did make the cut. I lament the demise of Wormphlegm because I saw them as one of the logical endpoints of funeral doom as a genre. Nobody else managed to be quite as violently menacing while maintaining such an overwhelming smog of malice while playing at 0.0001bpm. Tyranny isn't as mean, but they are clearly helmed by people who understood what Wormphlegm was doing, because Aeons in Tectonic Interment is just as brutally overpowering as Tomb of the Unspoken King. The five tracks on display all sound like a slow motion apocalypse. Scientists speculate that it would take somewhere between 19 and 21 minutes to fall all the way down to the center of the earth, and while this album is over twice that length, I can't help but imagine that this is what you'd be hearing once you're several thousand miles underground, crushing into a sphere due to the density and boiling alive. It's a slow motion apocalypse backed by the return of long forgotten vengeful gods determined to wreak havoc and misery upon the world. There is no light, no hope, no optimism. Tyranny specializes in waves of hopeless nihility crushing your spirit throughout each of their criminally few tracks, and their second album here exemplifies such an attitude in a way that few other albums managed to capture this decade. This is another shorter entry early on because hell, what else can I really say about it? If you understand what funeral doom is and what it means, all I can say is that Tyranny is all of that amped up to a billion.
For all the shit talking I've done with regards to Overkill over the years, I really do feel the need to express that I think they've earned their legendary status and that they have four damn near flawless records. Feel the Fire (which is one of my all time favorite albums across any genre), Taking Over, Horrorscope, and, their true comeback album after two decades floundering between mediocre and flat out bad, Ironbound. There are plenty of things to criticize here. It's really long, clocking in at nearly an hour long, it's repetitive, D.D. Verni's trebly bass tone sounds like somebody saying "bong" through a talkbox, they still rip off Metallica far more often than people seem to realize, nearly every single track has a groovy, Sabbathy bridge that they transition into as gracefully as a hippopotamus, but none of it matters. This is the first time in twenty years that Overkill sounded like themselves again. Instead of chasing trends and desperately trying to stay relevant in a mainstream that left classic thrash metal behind, they finally saw the writing on the wall thanks to the booming rethrash scene and decided it was safe to play bare knuckle thrash again, and it turns out they're still really good at it. "Bring Me the Night" sounds like 90s Motorhead with a guest vocalist, "The SRC" hearkens back to the searing metal fervor that made their best 80s tracks so great, "The Green and Black" is seriously in contention for being the best song they've ever written, everything they were ever good at is finally pushed to the forefront and played with more spirit than they've managed to muster before or since. This is the first pick on the list that's actually something of a nostalgia pick, because there are things I don't like about it that I mentioned above, but I can't overstate how much of a breath of fresh air this was in 2010. For the first time in their career, Overkill was finally on top of the scene. They were always sort of beholden to the whims of their contemporaries and struggled to break out of the shadow of other classic bands in the 80s, and then here, when all of the other classic bands from the 80s were struggling to adapt to the changing landscape yet again, Overkill finally tossed all of that baggage out the window and just ripped all of the young guns to shreds while leaving the old guys in the dust.
In preparation for this list, I had to spend a lot of time digging through acclaimed albums that I simply missed at the time, considering the fact that I spend most of my time listening to the most recent stuff that's out at any given time. I wasn't really into black metal apart from a handful of bands until the second half of the decade, and I finally came around to listening to more doom even later. Because of that, one of the best bands I slept on throughout the decade was without a doubt Khemmis. I was aware of them, of course, but for whatever reason had always assumed they played some kind of Pitchforky sadguy post-doom shit like Pallbearer (who isn't very good). I've since come around to realizing my mistake, and I can say happily that all three of their albums are total stunners. But with the cards on the table, I'm going to give the nod to their third, Desolation as their best. As good as Absolution and Hunted are, I think I prefer this one for the exact reason that a subset of fans were let down, and that's that the actual doom metal quotient of their sound has waned a bit. This feels like the actualization of what they were always trending towards. Their powerful, epic approach to doom is as strong as ever, but it's blended with so much trad metal and influence from the most epic Manilla Road songs that they've sort of morphed into a Great Value Visigoth. This sort of Doomsword-meets-Iron-Maiden approach to songwriting is seen best on the most melodic cuts like "Isolation", where the band looks the very ethos-driven doom scene in the eyes and says "Fuck you guys, we're going to play faster, we're going to have a shitload of melody, and we're going to roll up all of our contemporaries and fucking hotbox them." This is the same reason Candlemass was so fucking untouchable for so long. This is still epic doom, no doubt about it, but Khemmis has only gotten more confident and more sure of themselves as time has gone on, and as of right now, this is their most powerful record. I found myself struggling to decide if this or Hunted was their best album, and what made me finally pull the trigger on deciding this one as the best is the final track, "From Ruin". There's something about that gargantuan chorus riff that just took me back to the first time I heard this style of music in the first place. It's just so... I dunno, pure in what it's doing. It's very simple, no-nonsense riffery that reels me in so much. Despite diversifying their sound here a tad, they never try to get cute with it and bite off more than they can chew. Phil's voice also blows me away too, with his clean smoothness bursting with so much power that he ends up sounding like Roy Khan with actual power or Heri Joensen with an American accent. And that's to say nothing about Ben's devastating growls he occasionally throws in. This whole thing is great, there's very little I have to say about this that could really temper my excitement for it, and the fact that it's so low on this list should really hammer home just how much I love everything else coming up.
In the final years of tech death's dominance in the greater scene of death metal before the more old school and Demilich-esque styles took to the forefront in the 2010s, Hour of Penance was more or less untouchable. Similarly to how Overkill was at their best when the scene around them was healthy, Hour of Penance was at their best when tech death as a whole was thriving. This was the perfect era for me, when it was basically just Nile songs played even faster as opposed to endless sweep picking with no riffs underneath. Paradogma, like most of the albums released around this time, was utterly dominated by Mauro Mercurio's superhuman drum performance, but the X-factor that helped Hour of Penance stand out so much was definitely the guitars themselves crafting riffs that were as ear catching as they were pummeling. It honestly wasn't even really until I started writing this blurb that I realized how perfect of a comparison Nile is to my favorites in modern tech death. Suffocation got the ball rolling back in the 90s, Deeds of Flesh and Necrophagist helped codify where the sound would eventually end up, and Origin stood as the technical benchmark everybody else needed to clear, but now, listening to "The Woeful Eucharisty" and "Incestuous Dynasty of Worms" as I type this, I realize that Hour of Penance stood out so much because they sounded like Annihilation of the Wicked but even more feral. Paradogma never fucking slows down, it's all hyperspeed blastbeats and molten steel riffage that steamrolls over your ears at warp speed. There aren't many standout tracks here necessarily, but that's because it powers forwards as one well oiled machine, devastating everything in its path like the Motor Ball. There isn't one moment of respite and god dammit I don't want one.
Of the dozens of Leviathans that exist, I think almost everybody can agree that the project with the truest claim to the name is Wrest's seminal USBM project. I've actually never been all that much of a fan of his, believe it or not. Most of his albums are fine but beyond The Tenth Sub Level of Suicide and Massive Conspiracy Against All Life I really haven't found myself able to grasp onto too much of his work. Scar Sighted is, to me, the true followup to Conspiracy and the culmination of everything Leviathan has done up to this point. All of the shit Wrest had dealt with in his life came to a head here, as opposed to the previous True Traitor, True Whore, which was technically the first album to react to the rape charges brought against him (that were later dropped). Scar Sighted sounds like the response he really intended. The preceding album may have been a more visceral reaction straight from the gut, but this album sounds like he had time to separate himself from the swirling miasma of bullshit surrounding him, get himself in a creative headspace, and really express his emotions in the most capable way possible. Everything he had ever done and more is represented here, with the howling wails of The Tenth Sub Level of Suicide contrasting with the strong malevolent ambience of A Silhouette in Splinters and the oddly pleasant dissonance of Tentacles of Whorror, all intertwined seamlessly with a new heightened presence of death metal that really shines in tracks like "The Smoke of Their Torment" and "Within Thrall". I've read that one of the things that makes this album so interesting is that it sort of works in reverse to most black metal albums, where the focus isn't on black metal itself, but moreso on death, doom, drone, and noise, with black metal merely being a tool used to tie the room together. I'm not entirely sure I agree, because the black metal portion of the sound is doubtlessly the most prominent, but it's an interesting way of interpreting this work that pulls from so many disparate fields of agony. Everything that appears here is in service of expressing all of the negativity in the world. All of the pain, failure, heartbreak, and frustration that comes along with it. Between the morbid darkness of the ambient tracks and the monolithic dirge of the ten minute title track, every single moment is crafted to most exemplify the bleakness and unfairness of life, and it deals with these things by stabbing itself in the stomach and pressing the record button as its innards pile on the floor. Life handed Wrest a massive pile of shit, and on Scar Sighted he took a huge bite of it and spat it back in life's face.
Just like with the 2012 list, I found myself wondering if Niji Yuugou even deserved placement at all. In essence, you can reduce this down to "just a bunch of rerecordings", which wouldn't necessarily be untrue, per se, but it would definitely be missing the forest for the trees. To let my insufferable teenage gamer side surface for a second, that's the kind of mentality that allows people to condense Shadow of the Colossus down to "a bunch of boss fights with long walks in between them". That sort of reductionism eliminates all the nuance that the creators intended. It'd be easy to say the journey between each boss is pointless if you don't pay attention to the sheer amount of effort put into the world itself and the lush atmosphere that mixes so well with the foreboding and the niggling feeling in the back of your mind that you might be the bad guy here. That's what Niji Yuugou is to me. It'd be easy to ignore this as a simple collection of old songs if you don't pay attention to how much love and effort was put into this love letter to the old fans of their work from the 90s. You do not write a track like the title track without putting serious effort into it. Yeah it's got riffs from old songs like "GUSH!!", "Ese Gari", and their all time best, "Shouryakukeitachi Yo", but the fact that the solo is pieced together from the solos of "Atama ga Kowareta", "Fugutaiten", and "Spark", the main melody being taken from the solo of "Algolagnia", and even the old bridge riff from "Dogma" coming back at a time when the band had more or less replaced it with the heavier "Super Dogma" just speaks to how much love was put into it. And that's just the title track. The rest of them aren't medleys, but they are updated versions of Gargoyle classics from the soaring power/thrash of "Kaze no Machi" to the blistering riff fiesta of "Nounai Jisatsu". When they're not just taking old tracks and beefing them up like those two, they're taking a previously one minute long collection of thrash riffs like "Execute" and building an entire four minute song around it, or taking the melodic intensity of a ripper like "Shi Ni Itaru Kizu" and changing it into a soothing acoustic number fit for a college campus. Hell sometimes they even say "fuck the classics" and reach super deep to grab obscure tracks that only appeared on limited splits like "Guuzen To Hitsuzen No Tochuu" and present them as the anthemic destroyers they are in a context where fans can actually hear them. This isn't the best Gargoyle album, but ironically it wound up being the one they probably tried the hardest with. There was no laurel-resting going on with Niji Yuugou, and that's why it stands as a canonized standalone instead of a lazy cash grab.
Poor, poor Dying Fetus. The mere fact that they have an album on this list signifies that I clearly like them quite a bit, but it's kind of a fun fact that they just barely missed both of my previous Top 50s, with Destroy the Opposition and Killing on Adrenaline as the respective candidates for their decade. Oddly enough, that's kind of how I feel about Dying Fetus in a nutshell. They are always so close to being the best but never quite get over the hump set by their contemporaries, despite occasionally spitting out a few Best Songs Ever like "Praise the Lord". They were the Washington Capitals of my metal rankings. And, just like how the Caps finally took home a Stanley Cup in 2018, Dying Fetus finally made the final rankings with Reign Supreme. This might seem like an odd choice, but really Fetus's career hit one hell of a second wind this decade, with Wrong One with Which to Fuck also being way better than it has any right to be. The reason their 2012 effort gets the nod as the superior album for me is simple: it has more individual standout tracks. Dying Fetus has usually been an "album" band over a "song" band, where albums as a whole carry a specific mood that run as one cohesive unit, as opposed to a collection of individually great tracks that unify into a great album. Reign Supreme is the one exception to me, because I can easily pick out tracks that are ever-so-slightly more great than the great songs surrounding them. "Second Skin" and "From Womb to Waste" are the two most obvious, being the live staples spawned from this album, but I'd give special mention to "In the Trenches" and "Revisionist Past" as well. The latter of those two actually has some of the best fucking riffs the band has ever written, particularly that first tremolo riff eleven seconds in. This is, compared to the utter chaos of blasting and slams that make up their previous albums, a very "normal" Dying Fetus album, but it turns out that when they just hunker down and knuckle up, they finally manage to come out on top as one of the best bands in the scene.
This probably means nothing to anybody but me, but when I first told friends I was working on this, I mused that I hoped there weren't just a few years that completely eclipsed the rest of the field, and noted that if any years were in danger of doing so, it'd be 2012, 2015, or 2018. And so to kick this off, I wound up with only four years being represented in the first segment, and they were... 2012, 2015, and 2018 (plus 2010 as an outlier), with 2012 hitting three in a fucking row. I guess I can't say I'm completely unpredictable. Anyway, I like every Cannibal album to some degree, and I think the three released in this decade are all good, but there wasn't a doubt in my mind that Torture would eventually be the legends' representative. This is stands as (and probably will forever stand as) their last truly great album. It's already impressive that they were nearly 25 years into their career playing extreme metal, but to also tear out rippers as relentless and impressive as "Demented Aggression" and "Intestinal Crank" is just fucking absurd and unfair to their contemporaries, who have been struggling to catch up with them ever since 1990. This ticks all of the boxes when it comes to a typical Cannibal album, from the pounding mid paced devastator in "Scourge of Iron", to the frantic thrash-infused insanity of "Demented Aggression", to the random bass solo in "The Strangulation Chair", the only thing they don't have this time around is the sub-two-minute maiming like "Savage Butchery" or "Scalding Hail". Honestly I don't even miss it. All twelve tracks here are so fucking good I don't even really know what to say about them. This is business as usual for Cannibal Corpse, but they've once again upped the ante by simply outpacing the death metal scene as a whole and staying perpetually relevant with their unparalleled tightness and polish with regards to their songwriting. Not a single second is wasted, Corpsegrinder sounds as ferocious as ever, Alex and Paul remain as one of the most confusing rhythm sections in metal, with everybody rightfully recognizing Alex as the inspirational bass wizard he is while simultaneously shitting on Paul's drumming despite him being one of the tightest and most instantly recognizable skinbeaters in the genre. Either way, this may not bring any new ideas to the table, but Cannibal have proven time and time again that they're so good at the niche they practically helped invent and definitely helped popularize that there's no pressing need for them to try to outsmart themselves. They know what they do best, and Torture is exactly that.
And that's all for now! I'll be uploading a new segment every day leading up to the final installment. Let me know any early fuckups I may have made and I'll be quick to tell you how much of a dunce you are for disagreeing with me.
Kudos for correcting the grammar on the title of Dying Fetus' most recent album.
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