Where metal goes from here is anyone’s guess, but it’s an exciting time to be a hesher. These 66.6 entries are what we consider the best metal albums of the 21st century. There are definitely albums we left out that we didn’t want to, and as a rule we set a cutoff at two albums per artist-otherwise we would have had a list unusually heavy on Converge, Mastodon and Neurosis.
One of the important objectives in making our list of the best metal albums of the millennium was to capture as much of a diverse spread of music as possible, from the more mainstream releases of the likes of System of a Down and Deftones to the underground cult-favorites such as Yellow Eyes and Zeal and Ardor. Since 50 albums seemed like too few to fully capture the diversity of the past 16.6 years of metal, we chose the next best thing: 66.6-the fraction of the beast. Yet the longer the wait, the harder it is to narrow down, and as it is, this list was hard enough to rein in. The timing of this list is arbitrary we could have waited another three years to have a solid 20 years of music to pull from. Metal is always changing-that’s what makes the present such an embarrassment of riches for fans. And as more and more artists experiment with heavy music styles and approaches, it becomes harder to draw the line of where metal ends and another genre begins, whether it’s Alcest’s ethereal blast-beat shoegaze, Jesu’s dream-doom or whatever Blut Aus Nord is doing at any given moment. Literal thousands of metal records are released every year, and true to the form of a style of music whose aesthetics are steeped in the occult and the esoteric, many of the greatest are obscure, overlooked gems. That’s in large part due to the sheer volume of it. Charting the best metal is a lot harder than it used to be.
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