20 Greatest Metal Albums Of All Time

8. Death - Symbolic (1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q94MrZdTMXg Few bands have gone through as many member shuffles as death metal founding fathers Death. Over the course of the bands' seven studio album career, no less than twenty five musicians featured at some point - either as fully fledged members, touring members or studio implants. Guitarist and vocalist Chuck Schuldiner was the only common denominator from start to unfortunate end. Through all the changes, it was with the 1995 configuration responsible for Symbolic, their penultimate album, which saw Death forged into its most focused form factor. By then the early years of gore-inspired metal had been whittled down and redirected into deeper lyrical themes and vastly improved instrumentation, sharpening their sound from its brutal roots to a cutting edge of technically flawless death metal. Spanning close to an hour of exhausting tempo changes and a guitar assault somehow both scattershot and exquisitely detailed, this was the culmination of years of development - a development possibly taken a little far with the overly ambitious follow-up The Sound Of Perseverance - leaving Symbolic as the pinnacle of Death before Schuldiner's own death a few years later.