my top 20 metal albums of the last decade

I made this list at the end of last year in an effort to see what the most significant albums of the first decade of the 2000’s were for me as far as metal was concerned. Looking back a year later, I’m still pretty happy with it and I think this is probably a pretty good mirror of my tastes and what it is that I want and need out of a metal album in order to really delve into it and fall in love with it.

I’ve also uploaded one song from each album that you can check out if you haven’t heard it and the description intrigues you.

Check it.

20. The Lord Weird Slough Feg – Traveller (2003)

No one managed to uphold the honor of traditional heavy metal quite like Slough Feg in the last decade. Either bands were choosing a more polished and glossy take on traditional metal like Dream Evil, or were simply cloning NWOBHM legends.

Slough Feg managed to both stay rooted in tradition and make progress with their gritty and vintage heavy metal style, coupled with folk influences and sci-fi concepts.

Slough Feg are a prime example of what classic metal should sound like today when being made by people who actually lived through the golden age and didn’t have to get their vintage concert t-shirts from EBay.

The Lord Weird Slough Feg – Vargr Theme / Confrontation (Genetic Prophecy)

19. YOB – The Great Cessation (2009)

The best American doom metal band of today was finally able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together after reforming in 2009. What YOB offer is a multi-faceted approach to doom metal that is as much “Into the Void” as it is “Planet Caravan,” both punishing the listener with super-slow and crushing riffs, but also taking them into psychedelic dream-worlds with astral passages of melodic guitar work and singing.

When YOB are being ugly, they can hold their own with the finest dirges of Electric Wizard and Acid King, but not many stoner metal bands can take the music into such a sublime and dreamy trance-like state like YOB can.

The 20-minute title track is the perfect example of this, ebbing and flowing between crushing riffs and melodic psychedelia, and earning YOB its place atop the doom metal throne.

Yob – Breathing from the Shallows

18. Devin Townsend – Terria (2001)

Townsend had already made a name for himself in the last decade and had solidified a fan base for his huge, wall-of-sound melodic metal. “Terria” was his most ambitious and sprawling landscape of metal art.

Building on the formula of layers of guitars and keyboard ambience he had already perfect with “Ocean Machine” and “Infinity,” Devin introduced a more tranquil and trippy Pink Floydian aspect to his music on “Terria,” letting the songs last as long as they needed to, and again filling them to the brim with overdubs upon overdubs of guitars, synths and vocals.

His work on his solo albums, with Strapping Young Lad, and as a producer, can probably solidify him as one of the best and most influential metal musician of the last 15 years.

Devin Townsend – Canada

17. High on Fire – Blessed Black Wings (2005)

What do you do when everyone begins mimicking the slug-paced fuzzy doom metal you pioneered with your band in the first half of your career? If you’re Matt Pike of Sleep fame, the only thing you can do is speed it up a bit.

High on Fire takes all of the brawn and depth of Sleep’s doom legacy and throws in violent bursts of Motorhead-esque double bass pounding and leaves the sea of imitators scratching their heads, wondering what Pike will do next.

Pike also strays from the minimalism of prior projects on “Blessed Black Wings,” composing acoustic passages, fairly complex song structures, and a large variety of tempos and grooves, while managing to kick serious ass all the while with gritty, no frills heavy metal, sending all the wannabe Sleep clones back to the drawing board.

High on Fire – Anointing of Seer

16. Ark – Burn the Sun (2002)

Ark was one of the rare “super groups” that actually met and exceeded their  potential. The all-star cast formed by melodic and progressive metal veterans and headed by the pipes of Jorn Lande, who was probably the most lauded singer of the decade in melodic metal and hard rock circles, created a perfect album by any standards of progressive metal.

Little of the music on the album can be defined as something inherently original, but Ark was very good at taking bits and pieces of different rock music—from Al Di Meola to The Police, Dream Theater to Kansas—and making it sound fresh in the way in which they blended it all together.

The album is topped off by Lande’s amazing performance, being able to expand his repertoire to include influences like Sting, Seal, and Bjork even, instead of remaining typecast as a Norwegian David Coverdale clone for the rest of his singing career.

Ark – Absolute Zero

15. Soilwork – A Predator’s Portrait (2001)

While many cite “Natural Born Chaos” as the album that changed Soilwork and the genre of melodic death metal for good, “A Predator’s Portrait” is really the perfect combination of what Soilwork once was and what they strove to become.

The layered melodic choruses of “Natural Born Chaos” are still being mimicked today throughout American metalcore and even by Swedish contemporaries like Scar Symmetry, and even though it is the definitive transition album for Soilwork and the genre, “A Predator’s Portrait” was simply a better album on all fronts.

Retained are Soilwork’s faster riffs, keeping the tempo of their heroes At the Gates, but upping the complexity and progressiveness of the guitar work. The keyboards are present, but are very secondary to the amazing rhythm and lead guitar playing that drive the album, along with Speed Strid’s vocals that begin to show their melodic side, but have yet to gain their full polished 80’s pop-influenced feel.

“A Predator’s Portrait” is the perfect balance between melodic Swedish death metal of old and the modern style that garnered popularity this decade, influencing everyone from America’s most popular metalcore groups like Killswitch Engage and All that Remains, Danish neighbors like Raunchy and Mnemic, and many others around the world.

Soilwork – Neurotica Rampage

14. Pig Destroyer – Terrifyer (2004)

“Terrifyer” is the pinnacle achievement of the best grindcore band of the decade. Pig Destroyer has the rare status of being a grindcore band with groove, and one that is both as uncompromising as any grindcore band sonically, but also infinitely more memorable than most of their contemporaries.

The big difference is the guitar work of Scott Hull, who manages to write amazingly catchy riffs within the setting of the most extreme form of metal. Who needs a bass player when you have Hull and a wall of Marshalls?

Pig Destroyer is taken over the top with screamer J.R. Hayes, who is one of the most gifted lyricists to ever grace the genre of metal. His romantic tales of horror, unrequited love and murder perfectly compliment Hull’s devastating riffs and sullen atmosphere.

Pig Destroyer – Verminess

13. Gojira – From Mars to Sirius (2006)

“From Mars to Sirius” is the album that restored faith in death metal. Since the 1990’s and the golden age of death metal, the genre has been divided, for the most part, into two separate movements.

The bands whose goal it is to one-up each other every time with speed and confusion, pushing tempos to machine-like speeds of over 270 bpms, and bombarding the listener with 50 riffs per song, each more garbled and complex than the last. The other group consisted of those that mimicked and paid tribute to the golden age of death metal, trying to replicate the sound of the forefathers.

Gojira were one of the few bands to stray from the pack and craft their own sound. Gojira focused on creating an original take on the death metal of old, writing songs that would stand the test of time, and reminding people that death metal is not a sport or athletic competition to see who can make their appendages move faster while playing an instrument, but a violent musical expression.

Taking the speed and catchiness of Morbid Angel and blending it with the hypnotic repetition of Neurosis, the gothic overtones of early Paradise Lost, and their eco-friendly lyrics, Gojira crafted an inimitable style in a genre recently known for its stagnancy and hyper-production of forgettable clones.

Gojira – From the Sky

12. Hammers of Misfortune – The Locust Years (2006)

Though many praise “The August Engine” as the band’s finest hour, “The Locust Years” is a more crystallized and better written exhibition of the amazingly eclectic metal stew only Hammers of Misfortune could stir up.

The album takes equal doses of traditional heavy metal riffing and progressive rock pomp and spearheads the catchy and well-crafted songs with the brilliant voice of Mike Scalzi. The counterpoint between Scalzi’s brawny classic metal croon and the female vocals on the album are also a nice touch.

The appeal of the band is very intangible, and relies on the classy and stylish way they straddle between vintage heavy metal and classic rock, and the way they are traditional but forward-thinking, grand and pompous but not pretentious.

Another characteristic is their consistency, since the two albums preceding “The Locust Years” could also easily make it onto any “best of the decade” list, along with the fact the band is just as consistently under-appreciated in the metal world as well.

Hammers of Misfortune – Trot Out the Dead

11. Martyr – Feeding the Abscess (2007)

Though there was a strong resurgence in the popularity and visibility of technical death metal in the second half of the decade, very few releases were good enough to stand up to the classics of the genres.

Many of the most popular purveyors of the sound completely missed the point of the sub-genre—substituting speed with actual technicality, and incoherence with complexity. But Martyr got it right. “Feeding the Abscess” can stand shoulder to shoulder with the classics of the genre, it has all the intangibles found on those records that an album needs to stand out in a crowd of boring contemporaries.

Martyr know that there is more to technical metal than non-stop blast beats, unnaturally loud and plastic sounding bass drums pounding away at 260 bpms, and fingers flying erratically up and down the fretboard. Martyr takes the best parts of Meshuggah, Cynic, Atheist, and latter day Death, and create their own definitive brand of complex and over-the-top technical death metal that makes Necrophagist sound like amateur night at the local pub. Most importantly, Martyr know how to write a song and a cohesive album that sounds like a modern metal symphony, not pots and pans falling down a flight of stairs.

Martyr – Nameless, Faceless, Neverborn

10. Sleep – Dopesmoker (2003)

Sleep set the bar for extreme doom and stoner metal with “Dopesmoker” that will probably never be outdone.

Slower than molasses riffing, mammoth drums, layers of fuzz-engulfed guitars filling the room, with an equal parts silly and awesome lyrical concept of an ancient people on a quest to find a mythical weed stash of some sort.

Every attempt at pushing the boundaries of droning doom and stoner rock can be traced back to Sleep’s experiment on “Dopesmoker,” which their label wouldn’t even release because of its extreme nature, and although it was recorded in the last decade, it never saw an official release until the album’s cult following convinced a label to take a chance on over 60 minutes of what is essentially one riff.

“Drop out of life with bong in hand. Follow the smoke to the riff-filled land.”

Sleep – Dopesmoker

9. Spiral Architect – A Sceptic’s Universe (2000)

“A Sceptic’s Universe” is simply and plainly the end-all-be-all of technical metal. No band has come close to pushing the limits of complexity and the listener’s threshold for enduring such levels of instrumental savvy like Spiral Architect.

A big reason for the success of such lofty music was the production of Neil Kernon, who made sure that every instrument was clearly understood, and highlighted the efforts of bassist Lars K. Norberg who puts on a clinic throughout the album. No matter how complex the instrumentation is individually, the listener can focus on each instrument separately and clearly hear what’s going on.

The icing on the cake is singer Øyvind Hægeland, who is hardly the most original of vocalists, but is great at emulating great singers. In his first band Manitou (the defunct Norwegian one not the crappy Finnish one), Hægeland sang with a perfect combination of the melodic sensibilities of early Fates Warning singer John Arch and the warm, rich tone of current vocalist Ray Adler, and finds himself doing an immaculate imitation of the great Buddy Lackey (Psychotic Waltz) with Spiral Architect, while effortlessly crafting melodic, and even memorable, vocals over the most complex metal ever recorded.

Spiral Architect – Spinning

8. The Dillinger Escape Plan – Miss Machine (2004)

After the critical acclaim of “Calculating Infinity” and “Irony is a Dead Scene,” which pushed both the experimental and melodic side of the band further, Dillinger needed a grand slam with their next album, and that’s exactly what they got.

Most of the pressure was put on then new singer Greg Puciato, who not only had to live up to the brute force of the debut album, but was also following an EP recorded with none other than Mike Patton, who is both an obvious influence on Puciato and the singer who defines being multi-dimensional in a rock/metal setting.

The band, with Greg leading the way, easily overcame every hurdle, by putting together an album with complexity that further confused all the mathcore rejects trying to copy them, and a new-found melodic side that mirrored influences like Faith No More and Nine Inch Nails instead of the emo heartbreak most hardcore bands with clean vocals were spewing forth at the time.

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Baby’s First Coffin

7. Symphony X – The Odyssey (2002)

“The Odyssey” can be regarded as perfection in the realm of melodic progressive/power metal. Everything demanded by fans of the genre is encapsulated in this release.

Michael Romeo’s guitar work both demonstrates unparalleled technicality and complexity but still harnesses the power of the almighty riff, making him a force to be reckoned with, as very few guitarists can be both so technically endowed and be able to write an amazingly heavy and catchy riff that could rival the likes of Pantera and Judas Priest.

The New Jersey natives are not only blessed with the best guitar player in the genre, they also have the best singer. Russell Allen sounds like he was created in a factory for perfect singers. He has the brawn of Dio, the beauty of Steve Walsh, and the range of Chris Cornell all rolled up into one—and he uses each aspect of his singing accordingly.

Heavy, fast-paced catchy anthems, indulgent instrumental exhibitions, grandiose 25-minute-long epics—“The Odyssey” has a perfect example of every one of these, and then some.

Symphony X – Awakenings

6. Mastodon – Remission (2002)

Even though Mastodon went on to record albums that were more grandiose, conceptual and better received than “Remission,” this is the album that really kicked it off for them. Everything that is still present in Mastodon, though more prominently in the last several years, can be heard on “Remission,” but in a purer and more aggressive and primal sense.

The busy drumming, the majestic melodies, the Georgian sludge, the complex riffs and shifting time signatures, the mythology-themed lyrics—all this was introduced to the world through “Remission.”

Though the band has gone on to receive unprecedented success both critically and popularly for music so outwardly non-commercial and niche, the roots of the success and the definition of the style that would define them as one of the best, if not the best, band of the decade can be traced back to this album.

Mastodon – Workhorse

5. maudlin of the Well – Bath/Leaving Your Body Map (2001)

This double album is the crowning achievement in experimental metal of the last decade and a cross-pollination of various genres that have little to do with one another. If someone told me I would love a band that mixes Euro-doom ala Saturnus/My Dying Bride with female vocals, folk/indie acoustic passages, and prog and thrash influenced guitar solos, I would have laughed in their face.

But motW successfully blend dozens of influences from old Katatonia to Ween so amazingly well that it’s hard not to be impressed and enthralled by the level of complexity and care for attention put into these twin albums musically, lyrically, conceptually, and even in the artwork and production that accompanies the music.

Everything is intertwined so naturally and easily, making motW pass the crucial test which most bands with similar aspirations fail—motW were not trying to be different, they just were.

maudlin of the Well – Gleam in Ranks

4. Strapping Young Lad – s/t (2003)

Devin Townsend and company had the difficult task ahead of them of topping what was arguably the most innovative and visceral expression of the prior decade in metal, the “City” album.

Despite the objections of many fans who wanted to hear “City 2,” Devin still managed to create an album that stands the test of time and can easily be pronounced the heaviest album of the decade.

The violence and sheer heaviness of “City” was retained, but with the industrial and electronic confusion that made “City” so one-of-a-kind pushed deep into the back of the mix, allowing attention to be focused on the amazing performances of the band instead of the genius of Townsend’s abstract vision.

The album is just as relentless and punishing as “City,” and blends together genres of extreme metal so perfectly and effortlessly that it renders at least 90 percent of all current death, thrash and black metal albums absolutely unnecessary.

Strapping Young Lad – Dirt Pride

3. Isis – Oceanic (2002)

Every band that makes a change in their musical landscape to make room for more melodic visions and a more varied approach tends to have that one album that sets the bar, with the rest just following suit and building on that initial idea. “Oceanic” is that album for Isis.

It is arguably the album that ushered in the age of so called post-metal—the meeting place between the doom influenced hardcore of Neurosis and the swelling crescendo of reverb-laden guitar work associated with the likes of Mogwai and Sigur Ros.

“Oceanic” is the best Isis has ever been at balancing the two, combing the heavy and beautiful with an audible Tool influence that would emerge more prominently after touring with the Californians.

Though most similar artists of today will cite Neurosis as their prime influence, it is no coincidence that literally hundreds of similar sounding bands came out of the woodwork after “Oceanic” gained critical acclaim and widespread success.

Isis – False Light

2. Meshuggah – Nothing (2002)

After the sonic shitstorm that was “Chaosphere,” Meshuggah needed to come up with something new that would continue their trailblazing path and take their polyrhythmic assault and battery to an all new level of brutality and complexity. Enter the 8-string guitar and the juggernaut known as “Nothing.” Using their signature brand of crushing odd-time signature guitar rumblings and caustic screams over a fat 4/4 groove, Meshuggah detuned their sound, essentially making them a band of three bass players, slowed down their attack to a plodding musical equivalent of collapsing buildings, and invariably changed the face of metal for the second time in their careers.

“Nothing” bludgeons new listeners and tests the patience of Meshuggah’s old fans with hammering mid-tempo horror—each note feeling like a methodically-placed kick in the stomach, each riff as complex as ever, each solo more intergalactic and brooding than the next.

Years later, an arsenal of new technical metal playing, 8-string slinging youngsters, often said to be part of the so-called “Djent” movement, continue to musically bow before the throne of “Nothing’s” uncompromising onslaught, but few will ever come close to topping it. It is Meshuggah we are talking about, after all.

Meshuggah – Perpetual Black Second

1. Cynic – Traced in Air (2008)

There are many reasons why this is the best metal album of the decade. “Traced in Air” was, in some way, a first in metal—a reunion album recorded for all the right reasons and in all the right ways. This isn’t, as it is in many cases, some band setting aside their differences in hopes of making a few quick bucks and rehashing their old sound, masking it with modern production, and declaring a comeback in order to capitalize on the resurgence of a sound they once pioneered.

This is a group of musicians who stayed in touch, grew as people and musicians over the last 15 years, and converged after a decade and a half to reignite the musical flame they once shared. This album does not sound like middle-aged men trying to relive their glory days, it sounds like friends whose musical chemistry never faded away, jamming and making music that would present a logical continuation of where they left off many years ago. This is the same band that recorded “Focus,” working within the same headspace and still unafraid to follow their hearts and disregard everything else happening around them musically.

Despite not being death metal influenced any longer, (and how could it be with the genre plummeting into an abyss of stagnancy and blandness over the last ten years?) the music is just as exciting and vibrant as it was on “Focus,” and without youthful mistakes such as less-than-stellar production present this time around to tainted the musical perfection.

Cynic’s story transcends metal and gives hope to all who believe in the permanence of expression and connections between human beings, and to all those who dare to believe that people playing music they believe in—from the heart and without compromise—is something that still exists.

Cynic – The Space for This