(written by Islander)

We’re again including Rolling Stone‘s list of the year’s best metal albums because it has become a tradition, a largely comical tradition at this point which dates back to the halcyon days of 2013 when a commenter somehow just skipped past all our introductory text, looked at Rolling Stone‘s list, and chastised us for not naming Gorguts as AOTY instead of Deafheaven.

Of course, Rolling Stone hands-down qualifies as the kind of “big platform” site or zine that we pull from as part of our LISTMANIA orgy, as a way of getting a glimpse into what the top-side world perceives as great metal.

This year, Rolling Stone compiled a Top 20 list (the number seems to vary from year to year). As it often has in the past, it displays a lot of scatter, for want of a better term. There’s albums on the list (quite a few of them) you wouldn’t be surprised to see on one of the lists assembled by our own writers, and there’s others that will make you cringe, just like the ranking will. Continue reading »

Here’s another entry in the part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy where we re-post lists of metal from “big platform” web sites and print zines — the kind of places that get a lot more eyeballs on them than filthy little metal-only hovels like ours.

Rolling Stone magazine should need no introduction, so I’m not going to provide one. Last year we didn’t include a Rolling Stone metal list in our year-end LISTMANIA series — because they didn’t publish one. I thought they’d jettisoned the idea permanently, but their Top 10 metal list has made a return this year — and it’s better than I expected it would be. Continue reading »

Here’s another entry in the part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy where we re-post lists of metal from “big platform” web sites and print zines — the kind of places that get a lot more eyeballs on them than festering little metal-only hovels like ours.

Rolling Stone magazine should need no introduction, so I’m not going to provide one. Not long ago they published their list of The 50 Best Albums of 2019. The sub-headline for the article reads as follows:  “From ‘Lover’ to ‘Cuz I Love You,’ ‘Death Race to Love,’ and beyond, here are the records that defined the year”. The list didn’t exactly define the year for metal. In fact, I didn’t spot even one metal album on that list. Not one.

However, more recently Rolling Stone published a separate list of The 10 Best Metal Albums of 2019 (presented by Mercedes-Benz, because of course that’s the brand preferred by most metal bands when they’re throwing around their big piles of cash). Continue reading »

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: THIS IS ROLLING STONE’S LIST. IT IS NOT OUR LIST. THIS IS ROLLING STONE’S LIST. IT IS NOT OUR LIST.

If you thought that was already so obvious that only an idiot would need to be told, well, you obviously don’t remember the famous/infamous Comment No. 7 to our re-post of Rolling Stone’s list in 2013. Though you may have seen how that has been transformed into a running joke every fucking year since then. The only uncertainty now is who will be the first person to do it on this post. Continue reading »