25 Best Metal Albums Of The Decade
The best of of the best from 2010 to 2019.
How do you rank a decade's worth of music, particularly one as fertile as the 2010s?
With great difficulty. The past ten years have been ridiculously fruitful for heavy genres in general and with streaming services becoming the way to consume music and tearing down the walls of inaccessibility, making discovery easier than ever before, it's a Herculean task.
Honourable mentions are therefore legion, with Alcest's Ecailles de Lune (2010), Deftones' Diamond Eyes (2010), Ne Obliviscaris' Portal of I (2012), Mgla's With Hearts Towards None (2012) and Exercises in Futility (2015), YOB's Clearing the Path to Ascend (2014), Vektor's Terminal Redux (2016), Haunt's Burst Into Flame (2018), Judas Priest's Firepower (2018), Tomb Mold's Manor of Infinite Forms (2018) and Planetary Clairvoyance (2019), and hosts of other worthy records missing out on a spot. Please add yours in the comments section below: this is subjective, after all.
Looking back at this list, we can only hope that the decade ahead is as rich in great metal as this one was. It's been nuts.
From more recent surges like blackgaze to the classic, timeless sounds found within the old-school death and trad metal revival movements, let's dive into this impossibly deep pool...
25. Svartidauði - Flesh Cathedral (2012)
The burgeoning Icelandic black metal scene owes much to Svartidauði, whose 2012 debut, Flesh Cathedral, catapulted the movement to greater prominence, creating openings for the likes of Misþyrming, Sinmara, and Zhrine that may not have existed otherwise.
Flesh Cathedral is a dissonant, oppressive work with an intensity matched only by its complexity. Psychedelic flurries pierce the dense atmosphere on occasion, though the mood is rarely anything other than complete and total darkness. Post or blackgaze this is not. Instead, on Flesh Cathedral, Svartidauði tapped into their genre's cold, grim spirit, creating a touchstone album that knows where it came from while pushing its creators (and the scene around it) forward.