20 Greatest Metal Albums Of All Time

15. Strapping Young Lad - City (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f20L0msLsM The second Strapping Young Lad album fell somewhere between lunacy and creative genius. Which is fitting, since we could use the same description for band-founder Devin Townsend - a vividly expressive artist who's work often borders on full-blast musical insanity. His solo albums tread a more progressive, experimental path, but when he was in Strapping Young Lad mode it was sonic fury. Angrier than a bag full of catnip-deprived alley cats, City was like a blackened dystopian version of Fear Factory's Demanufacture that had the "death machine" knob turned all the way up to 11. Vocally Townsend was - and still is - in a class of his own, surely turning into a candidate for the first larynx replacement surgery had the group not disbanded. This was the scientific opposite of easy listening, an album packed with explosions of gritty jackhammer beats from ex-Death skin-beater Gene Hoglan and industrial distortion which challenged listeners in the kind of in-your-face style that SYL has become famous for. Corrosive chord structures charged through track after track of exhausting firebomb metal, with only the roof-shaking Detox coming anywhere near marketable as a radio unfriendly unit shifter. City was a psychotically delicious slab of aggressive destruction which many say Townsend is yet to top.