This installment took a lot of time to write. These are albums that are very near and dear to me as all the albums on this list. I found these 10 to be exceptionally emotional to write about and listen to. As the list is not in order, and I make it up as I go back through my music catalog and pick my absolute favorites to fit in 100 albums. So, I hope you like this chapter of the series. Let me know what your favorites are and if you’ve checked any of these out upon reading this list.

31. Winter- Oceans of Slumber (2016)

There have been very few albums to make me speechless.  I try to describe any sound or style with emphatic diction and passion.  I have tried to experience every genre, every style, and all the different cultures of music on the planet.  It’s my passion to learn about music and try to understand why I love it so much.  My understanding of the effects of music on culture, language, mind, body, and soul runs deep.  But Winter by Oceans of Slumber is an album that transcends my passion for languages and music genres.  It is a collection of American sounds bred over a hundred years of Blues, Jazz, Rock and Roll, and Metal.  The depth of Winter is unbelievable.  The weight of it is too much for some.  It dares to be different, chaotic, and heavy-handed.  As a Musician and music blogger, Winter is an untouchable album that never got the credit it deserved.  The lack of coverage on this record stands to me as a clue that there is something deeply wrong with American Music and the media coverage of music.  Winter is as good as American Metal gets.  It honors where American music came from, the roots in the South with Jazz and Blues, and the most downtrodden musicians you’ve ever heard in your life.  It mixes the Doom Italian band Paradise Lost curated with the beauty of Nina Simone, with the Blues of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, with the Progressiveness of Evergrey, Moody Blues, Dream Theater, and Meshuggah.  It sounds crazy, maybe even disjointed, when you put all these descriptors together, but it works.  This album is a masterclass in Progressive and Gothic Metal, and offers a completely new take that I’ve never heard in my life.

Winter’s songwriting is a triumph in my mind.  It takes all these influences and adds soul.  It reminds me of so many different albums, and at the same time doesn’t sound like anything at all.  Oceans of Slumber’s aim to “redefine Southern Gothic” is achieved far above and beyond anything else in the genre with Winter, as well as all subsequent releases.  It takes the Gothic depressiveness of Evanescence, The Civil Wars, and Doom band Candlemass and adds Soul to it that I love so much.  Soul is not something I hear a lot of in Modern Music, and Oceans of Slumber gives all the soul to Winter.  It takes me to the South of Texas and Alabama on a rainy old porch in the dead of winter, and it’s a feeling that never leaves, much like the Blues and Gospel singer Cammie Beverly grew up listening to and singing with her father.  The music isn’t just technical sounds enthralling your eardrums, it’s tangible.  It’s a place, time, feeling, and mood that overtakes me for weeks on end.  The title track is an introduction to Ocean Of Slumber’s world.  Winter is a mind-blowingly well-constructed track with 50 different elements.  The range of this band is stuffed into nearly eight minutes of smoothly delivered poetry with heavy music carrying it.  This song and album deserved Grammys.  Instead, it got Indie coverage, much less than it deserved.  This song is a modern Progressive Metal masterpiece, and Winter is full of them.  

Oceans of Slumber’s cover of the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin is emotionally proficient and unexpectedly updates the classic.  It is airy, soulful, deep, and has a surprising jam-band feel.  This is one of my favorite songs on Winter, even though it’s a cover.  Suffer the Last Bridge is a more straightforward track with some of the best vocals I have ever heard.  The chorus is sublime with my beloved blast beats and speedy chugging guitars.  This is one of my favorite songs of all time.  This would be a great starter song to get into Oceans Of Slumber.  Not all of their songs are initially accessible, and that’s probably why I love them so much.  Their songs require an attention to detail and an emotional vulnerability to connect with. That depth makes Winter so personally significant to me.  Like the Blues, it captures that longing in the depths of your heart and soul.  Whether the longing is for someone, a place, a time, or fulfillment, Winter captures that with Turpentine and This Road eloquently.  There’s not a song that is like another, and yet they all have the same vibe.  Winter is an album everyone should experience at least once, especially in America.  This album is American Innovation at its finest.

Dobber Beverly, on drums, piano, and songwriting, is a mastermind of Progressive Metal.  His Classical technique, combined with his experience in Death and Extreme Metal, is absolutely genial on Winter.  These influences, combined with wife and singer Cammie Beverly’s impossibly velvety smooth vocals and talent for storytelling, create a depth in music I have never heard before.  This album is love, grief, death, loneliness, anger, shame, and healing in one technical package.  The husband and wife team have created some of the most beautiful music on the planet.  There’s nothing like this album, and there never will be again.  I love their discography, but this is still my favorite album from them.  

Favorite Songs: Winter, Sunlight, Suffer the Last Bridge

32. The Unforgiving- Within Temptation (2011)

Taking a long time to decide on my favorite Within Temptation album, I had to listen to their entire discography again.  Their catalog is so diverse.  Picking a singular album as my favorite was difficult.  I have been a fan of WT since around 2008.  I discovered them on the browser version of the Pandora Radio app.  This app introduced many new bands to my listening repertoire, as I mentioned before.  One of its biggest attractions is Within Temptation.  I heard the song Jillian off of The Silent Force, and my taste in music was forever changed.  While Epica spawned my love for all things European Metal, Within Temptation started the fire four years before  I ever heard Epica.  Within Temptation has released some of the most influential albums.  They evolve with each record in a gigantic way.  They play with Gothic Metal, Symphonic, Arena Rock, Prog Metal, and even Electronic Dance music.  It is difficult to find a band in Metal with more range.  It is even more difficult to find a band as successful whilst being emotionally connective with fans.  Within Temptation is a once-in-a-generation band.  They took a risk with a concept album, The Unforgiven, and it paid off, gaining them millions of fans, album sales, and stream plays.  The band has gone on to sell comic books and limited items based on the concept album and excels with subsequent releases, putting them at the top of Symphonic Metal.

The Unforgiving is a high-energy, fist-pumping, and head-banging worthy album of a hundred different influences.  It blends Arena Rock, Symphonic Metal, and Dance Pop fluidly and eloquently.  This album did genre-bending before it was a widespread term in Metal media.  With this album blending so many different sounds, it’s almost a “choose your own adventure” experience.  The comic series based on the album alludes to the premise, the summary stating, “Inspired by The Unforgiving, the newest album from Within Temptation! A powerful medium, Mother Maiden recruits lost souls to be part of her wraith task force to fight evil in all its forms. They each carry a specific guilt about something they did in their lives. Mother Maiden offers them an opportunity to ‘make right what is wrong’ by giving them missions and assignments to hunt down evil as a penance for their previous sins.”  It’s a deeply interesting concept and reflects a battle between good and evil in us all.  This is a concept I am fond of, and I think the album storyboards it in both a fun and emotional way.  

Within Temptation went more “commercially Rock” with The Unforgiven, and I really enjoyed hearing this side of them.  It’s not the most grand or staggeringly huge range of Within Temptation.  It’s more subtle without so many choirs and layers of orchestra.   I hear them as a band much more on this album than on any other album.  While it’s a concept album, it shows a reinvention of Within Temptation.  While I consider Mother Earth to typically be my favorite album from them, I just keep going back to The Unforgiven.  Maybe it’s a nostalgia aspect, hearing this album in my most formative and influential years in Middle School, but there’s something deeply moving about this album.  Fire and Ice is still one of the most beautiful and bittersweet songs I’ve ever heard.  Stairway to the Skies is also a tear-jerking track that is so underrated.  The theme of a lost love one or a longing for someone gets me every time.  Maybe it’s because I am still searching for “the one,” and it feels so far away sometimes that these songs speak to me.  The songs on this album are also incredibly catchy.  Iron and Sinead are breathers of pure energy from the heavier emotive tracks, and I like the massive energy that these tracks show.  I’m not sure if this album necessarily fits on this list, but all of these aspects make it one of my favorites of all time, and I had to include it.

Overall, I think The Unforgiven is one of the most underrated albums out there.  While it sold well and did some charting, it seems to be a memory of the past.  The magic WT harnessed in that album is lost for me.  I like everything they release to an extent, but the magic of the older records feels long and forgotten by the band and fans.  This album was peak WT for me, even if it was never meant to signify their core sound or writing abilities.  It stands the test of time for me as a sign of Sharon Den Adel’s incredible range, emotive ability, and versatility as one of the greatest vocalists I have ever heard.  She is truly what makes the band special to me.  Along with husband Robert Westerholt’s incredible writing contributions, Sharon and Robert have created some of the best music I have ever heard in my life.  I will always miss Robert’s clean, Rock and Gothic Metal-inspired guitar riffs as well as his incredible growls on early records.  His contribution will never be forgotten by me.

Favorite Songs: Fire and Ice, Where is the Edge, Stairway to the Skies

33. The Offering- Lords of the Trident (2022)

Of course, there’s more Power Metal on this list!  I am a Power Metal nerd, even if my underground knowledge is seriously lacking these days.  This is probably one of the more obscure albums on this list.  The Offering doesn’t get half the love it deserves, even if Power Metal is ramping up for a huge comeback.  I was first exposed to the album when the Mad With Power Festival hosted some of my favorite bands.  I had heard of Lords of the Trident before, but the onslaught of releases buried them on my radar.  This happens to me often.  It can take years for me to rediscover a band.  Luckily, when Mad With Power came to my Twitch feed because of Seven Kingdoms, I was fully exposed to the way of the Lords.  Lords of the Trident combines Classic Power Metal with nerdom, Heavy Metal, a little Meatloaf, and some opera-trained vocals from incomparable vocalist and nice guy Ty Christian.    It’s technically perfect Power Metal with Van Halen flair and Neoclassicism from Yngwie-worthy guitar solos.  Experiencing this band at Mad With Power Fest on Twitch for the first time was a religious, transcendental moment that I will never forget.  They gave me visible chills and made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.  The power in their music is indescribable.  It’s something you just have to experience for yourself.  They’re every bit as epic as the ’80s Heavy Metal we all grew up listening to, but have the heart of Unleash the Archers.  They’re a dark horse of bombastic, emotive, and pulse-raising music.  They’re one of the best Power Metal bands around today, and this album stands as a testament to their contribution to the genre.

Read about Mad With Power and the Power Metal community here: https://wp.me/p4Zsl3-8R

The Offering is a concept album that follows a boy taken from his family to become a hero or a martyr of sorts.   The storytelling on this record is chilling, well thought out, and unbelievably emotive.  This is an Epic if I’ve ever heard one.  The tone of the album is set with one of my absolute favorite songs of all time Legend, which could easily be a Bardcore track.  This song has a cadence I’ve only ever heard in Celtic music or the legendary Power Metal band, Falconer.  This album screams a mix of Falconer, Dream Evil, Hammerfall, Tyr, and UTA all piled in together.  Yet The Offering stands apart from those bands and holds its own with epic tracks.  Acolyte is more Arena Rock with speedy dualing guitars with a Judas Priest vibe. Carry the Weight is a tear-jerker explosion of emotion rarely heard in music.  Its depth mirrors some Devin Townsend tracks like Stormbending.  It’s a beautiful song that evokes a powerful vision of losing someone you know.  Offering to the Void is a more Traditional Metal vibe, but with an epic choir-fueled bridge.  Champion could be straight out of the game Oblivion of the Elder Scrolls Series.  It is perfect with high energy and a very headbanging-worthy cadence.  Guitarist Brian Koenig shows his Neo Classicism on the solo, too, which is Twilight Force blazingly fast.  All of the songs on this record are stand-alone sing-along bangers.  The Yngwie continues on the interval, The Invitation, a hair-raising guitar interlude that blasts you into one of the Lord’s greatest tracks, Dance of Control.  Good god, I love this song.  Ty’s vocals are unbelievably good on this track, reminding me of the power of Sammy Hagar and Michael Bolton, with the expert emotive tone of Michael McDonald.  Those are strong comparisons, but once you hear this song, you’ll find it justified.

These Tower Walls is a balls-to-the-wall Power Metal track with speedy guitar sweeps and lush double-tracked vocals. This song is one of the most technically impressive tracks in Lord of the Trident’s catalog.  But it’s not overbearing.  I also enjoy UTA’s Grant Truesdell’s growls on this song.  The Latin chanting on the bridge by Ty is also bone-chillingly good and well executed.   This song is so damn epic, I cannot recommend it enough.  Grant also lends his signature goblin mode growls on Power of Evil, which is one of their biggest songs to date.   This is one of the strongest albums that modern Power Metal has to offer.  I don’t think there’s a weak track.  It all flows together as a story and a stylistic stronghold.  It keeps your ears and mind fully engaged without being overwhelming. Everything about this record makes it special.  The guitar work is sublime.  It’s written so precisely, but not an overload of production or unnecessary layers.  This is the most accessible Power Metal album ever made to me.  It’s Modern, yet nods to the classic sounds.  It has meaning and personal touches.  The songs are made with purpose, so there’s no filler.  

The Offering is a great album that I think deserves infinitely more credit than it receives.  Whether it’s from being self-released and not pay to play or just the lack of education in Modern Music, The Offering has sadly fallen under the radar.  Their self-funded music and the fan base through Patreon are truly inspiring to me.  Their ability to create a mutual environment with heartfelt releases and events is what every artist should strive for.  While the Lords of the Trident are criminally underrated, the community they’ve created will never be dismissed or forgotten.  The Offering will remain one of my top Metal records for decades to come, as well as a testament to Ty Christian’s utterly explosive talent and heartwarming connection with fans through this incredible music.  I want to personally thank the Lords of the Trident for creating some of the most meaningful music, as well as a supportive, inclusive fanbase.

Favorite songs: Acolyte, Champion, Carry the Weight

34. The Dream- In This Moment (2008)

I’m not entirely sure when I first discovered In This Moment, but I suppose it was around 2010 to 2011 when my delve into more Metal began.  I think In This Moment is yet another Pandora Radio discovery.  Maybe it was on Halestorm radio that I first heard them.  It was love at first listen, however.  Maria Brink’s vocals are one in a million.  Much like Stevie Nicks, nobody on the planet sounds like Maria.  You can pick her out of a hundred singers in one recording.  She has a valley girl vocal fry on the end of her notes and an unbelievable amount of power and control.  She is a vocal nerd’s dream of a singer.  Mix this with incredibly unique, heart-pounding Thrash guitars, a bit of Metalcore, and an acceptable amount of ‘80s Reverb, it’s a dynamic sound that you won’t get anywhere else.  Maria and In This Moment put their entire soul into their early records, and it’s an audible masterpiece to my family and me.  This is undoubtedly one of our most listened to albums in the car for a good five years of listening. These early In This Moment records hit a musical sweet spot between Metal and the quirkiness of Blondie, Pat Benatar, and some New Wave mixes.  

The Dream is exactly how the title and album cover portray.  It’s a dreamy-sounding Rock and Metal down a rabbit hole of addictive sounds and airiness.  The music is fluid, emotional, gritty, and perfectly atmospheric.  I can’t compare this album to any piece of music ever made.  There’s nothing like it.  The closest I can get is Evanescence’s self-titled album, but it’s still miles apart in feeling.  It’s got Nu-metal groove and Moody Blues light Prog, like on Mechanical Love, and then jumps into a Bullet For My Valentine-esque solo.  Forever is a standalone Power Ballad with blazingly fast melodic guitars and impossibly soaring vocals.  This is undoubtedly one of my favorite songs.  Her Kiss is a Middle Eastern Groove Metal track with tasty triplets.  This pitch-shifting vocal ability is rarely heard in Western Music and shows Maria’s explosive talent.  Lost At Sea is another one of my favorite tracks.  It ebbs and flows between Metal and Dark Wave in some respects.  It’s very difficult to explain these tracks and break them down.  There’s simply nothing else like them on the planet, and there never will be again.  The Great Divide is a galloping high high-intensity track, another one of my favorite songs on the album.  The bass solo and tone are unlike anything I’ve ever heard, except maybe on a Periphery or Beyond Creation track.  It’s crazy.  The double-track fry screams are so good, too, as well as the double-tapping solo.  This may be one of the greatest songs In This Moment ever created.  I also love the Paramore-esque feel on Violet Skies, which provides a much-needed cool down from such intense tracks.  Maria’s tone is particularly gorgeous on this song.

Then, there’s the title track, The Dream.  This song is a stroke of musical brilliance that only comes around once in a generation.  This is a masterclass in composition, technique, restraint, and creating a vibe. It’s a track that immediately surrounds you in warm tones, much like stepping into the summer sun after six months of winter.  It is a massive song with a perfect slow-burning build-up that gives me chills.  A slow-building song is my absolute favorite style, and not a lot of artists have pulled this off.  This is a song that deserves an epic music video, but never got a visual playthrough, sadly.  This is still one of the most epic songs I have ever heard in my life.   If a song or album ever had to represent all the emotions and story of Alice In Wonderland, this should one hundred percent be the first choice.  I think it evokes the chaos, the utter desperation, the longing, and the isolation of this epic tale by Lewis Carroll.  In This Moment nailed it and created an utterly untouchable album.  

The more I listen to this album today, the more I realize it might fit more into the Progressive category, because of the chaotic nature of the music changes and the utter technical brilliance.  This album is everywhere on the spectrum, and it’s a little eclectic, so no wonder why I love it so.  I like anything that dares to be different, as I have probably stated many times before in this blog series.  In This Moment created a whole new vibe in American Rock and Metal.  I have never heard anything quite like this band, and never will again.  Sadly, In This Moment’s subsequent albums had very little impact on me.  Star-Crossed Wasteland is a close second and contains some more of my favorite tracks of theirs.  Blood was a very heavy and intensely catchy album with some high points.  I liked some of Ritual’s offerings.  Every other album of theirs has been a miss for me.  The band’s decision to lean into a Shock Rock bigger production show style has turned me off completely.  The emotional diction and connection are just gone for me.  They don’t even play the old songs anymore.  I love when a band can evolve and still be authentic, but this did not happen with In This Moment for me.  My theory stands that Maria Brink blew her voice out and has an undisclosed vocal injury that prevents her from singing the old, highly vocally demanding songs.  Now, her live performances contain more theatrics and costume changes than actual songs.  Nothing makes me sadder than falling out of love with a band that used to mean the world to me.  The Dream will always be one of my favorite Modern Metal albums, but it still stings to listen to.  I will always miss this version of In This Moment.

Favorite Songs: Forever, Lost at Sea, The Dream

35. Colours in the Sun- Voyager (2019)

Voyager is a Progressive Metal band from Perth, Australia, with a plethora of awards and a successful stint on Eurovision.  The band has an interesting history that spans two decades, many member changes, and sound changes over the years.  Voyager has always had a Prog Rock and Space Rock influence that sounds right out of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  When I was writing this entry for the list, I went through the band’s entire discography to get a feel for the band’s evolution to their past two releases that I fell in love with.  There’s this Sci-Fi feeling to all their releases that just hits me at my core.  Their first album, Element V, is a stunning 51-minute journey through time.  It sounds like it’s a Rock Opera companion to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.  The band mixes Power Metal and Prog Rock or Metal with New Wave style vocals.  It’s inguinal to listen to, and wakes up the neurons and gets them firing at whole new speeds you never thought were possible.  The energy vocalist, writer, and keyboardist Danny Estrin puts into this music is an explosion of electricity.    This guy’s range is truly unbelievable.  He reaches Simon Le Bon highs and Peter Steele lows with such ease.  This band is one of the most unique experiences in music I have ever had, and each album is completely different from the last.  They don’t have a bad album or song, and they show immense versatility.  

However, the current lineup with Simone Dow (Guitar), Scott Kay (Guitar), and Alex Canion (bass and backing vocals) is truly sublime.  The past two records, Colours in the Sun and the recent Fearless In Love, just tick all the boxes for Modern Prog for me.  Colours In The Sun is one of my top ten most listened to albums of all time, according to Last Fm stats.  Voyager’s entire discography is worth listening to, but there’s a magical quality to this record that combines so many of my favorite things.  Colours In the Sun is a mix of nostalgic sounds with modern Progressive Metal.  It mixes a Tears For Fears melancholic, smooth vocal with chugging Tesseract-style guitars and breakdowns. As a Djent fan, I appreciate the mix of dissonant riffs and melodic vocals.  The sound is satisfying, as it circles with a perfect closing chord.  This is brilliant writing.  The build-ups don’t leave you hanging, but still, you want more of the sound on Colours.  The flow is interesting.  No two songs sound the same, but they all go together in tone and structure.  This lets you settle into the album, and it becomes perfect to listen to in any situation.   Colours In the Sun can be part of a focused listening session, road trip, workout session, reading, or painting.  It’s an album that sounds good in any medium.  Colours in the Sun is a heart-pounding and uplifting album that has gotten me through just about everything you can think of.  Voyager captured the feelings of heartbreak, letting go, and triumph so exquisitely.  

Songs like Severomance and Brighstar are akin to their early Power Melodic days, but the instrumentals are still hard-hitting and Modern.  This led to old fans being eased into a new era, and new fans discovering how epically versatile Voyager is.  Entropy is an insane duet with Leprous’ Einar Solberg that is one of the jams of the century. Saccharine Dream is full of absolutely gorgeous guitar tone and perfect synchronicity.  The band’s chemistry shines on this song, and it is one of my favorites in the extensive catalog.  Every bend, every chuggy chord, every melodic fiddly solo perfectly matches Danny’s vocals.  This level of perfect chemistry is not a quality I hear much these days.  This band has a bond through music and personal experiences that come out in the sound of their albums.  It’s so warm tonally, and every note is perfect in its place.  They anticipate each other’s progression.  I love hearing this level of chemistry, also heard in bands I love like Leprous, Tesseract, Periphery, and Novelists.  They understand each other’s sound and music personality on a deeper level than most.  You can hear the love, respect, and camaraderie, which makes it easier to connect to the music on a personal level.

I think Colours in the Sun and all of Voyager’s discography are immensely underrated and underappreciated.  I’m not sure why more people haven’t caught on with this fun, inspiring, technically proficient Metal band with never-ending heart.  This music is the cure for any ailment and a deep level of human understanding.  You can feel the empathetic qualities of the members in the album.  That’s the kind of positivity and understanding the world needs right now.  It doesn’t need hollow breakup songs or risque lyrics generated by AI or fifty producers.  The world in all its chaos and beauty needs music that is real and wholesome, and Voyager provides this in spades.  Music should be technically proficient, not perfected by computers.  It should be emotional, cathartic, and vulnerable.  I think we’re getting away from that in modern music, but bands like Voyager stay planted firmly in their down-to-earth roots.  I cannot recommend this band enough for Prog, Metal, Rock, and Pop fans alike.  They will always remain one of my favorite bands, and this album will always be one of my favorites in Progressive Metal.

Favorite songs: Colours In The Sun, Runaway, Now or Never

36.Hermitage: Daruma’s Eyes PT 2- Temperance (2023)

2023 was a packed year for Metal releases.  It was almost impossible to keep up.  With releases from In Flames, Crypta, Enslaved, Sylosis, Beyond the Black, Xandria, and so many more favorites, I was like a kid in a candy store.  It was an insane year for heavy music, but an unforeseen underdog took over my listening habits for the remainder of the year.  I’d been a fan of Temperance since 2018 with Of Jupiter and Moons.  I was tiring of Amaranthe’s formulaic writing a bit and not completely happy with their latest releases.  So, I was looking for a band that has similarly stratospheric energetic music.  The blend of Electronic, Symphonic, and Power Metal just hit me right in a niche spot.  Temperance was recommended to me on YouTube, and I immediately fell in love with the incredibly emotive and powerful track Pure Life Unfolds, which stands to be one of my favorite songs of all time.  The band parted ways with their female singer in early 2023, and I was brokenhearted.  I thought surely that it was the end for Temperance, and they kind of fell under my radar.  The turnaround was incredibly fast, however, and fans were quickly reassured that the band was in good hands.  Little did I know, they would get one of the greatest vocalists of all time to fill the female vocal void.

Shortly after the departure of beloved vocalist Alessia Scolleti, Temperance found a replacement for the ages.  Accomplished Opera Singer and YouTube star Kristin Starkey was announced as the new female counterpart to the great Marco Pastorino and Michele Guaitoli.  Kristin is a singer who can sing pretty much anything.  She’s not afraid to explore any aspect of the human voice and all the emotions that can come out of it.  She is proclaimed as the only singer who could ever fill in for the likes of Floor Jansen and Brittney Slayes, two of the greatest female vocalists of all time.  She is impossibly talented, hardworking, and wears her heart on her sleeve.  Kristin is a once-in-a-lifetime Contralto with an infinite range.  To say she is an upgrade or perfect for the likes of Temperance and Twilight Force is an understatement.  Hermitage was one of my most highly anticipated albums of all time, and it blew all expectations out of the water.

Hermitage is a musical journey, almost a Rock Opera of sorts, akin to the whimsy of Rocky Horror Picture Show or Meatloaf records.  But Hermitage is also incredibly emotional and deep in its roots.  I didn’t read the accompanying novella for backstory, but gathering the meaning and emotions from the lyrics is still humongously powerful.  It deals with loss, self-doubt, being stuck in an unfortunate situation, and companionship through time.  It is immensely profound and beautiful in its anthemic qualities.  If you need an album to get you through a myriad of life’s obstacles, Hermitage is a mainstay for any metalhead’s collection.  After COVID-19, losing a cat, losing my grandma, grandpa,  uncle, and more losses and troubling situations, this album was a breath of life into me.  This album is a shot of adrenaline and a Rolodex of everything beautiful.  It paints a storyboard of conquering everything and keeping your head up to the sky.  The emotion in it is explosive at every turn in such an incomparable way.  I’ve never heard anything like this album besides maybe Devin Townsend’s Epicloud or Z2 when he turned them into live Rock Operas.  That is probably the highest level of praise I can give any album.

I can’t talk about Hermitage without mentioning the mind-blowing vocal performances on it.  I have loved singing since I was a kid and consider myself a “vocal nerd” of sorts.  I like to find the best singers in the world and exalt them, as many people will never hear these vocalists due to the lack of radio play or media coverage.  Society has changed with exalting true talent, partially due to the lack of education and over-commercialization of music, where having technical ability is much less important than making sales.  When I say that Hermitage has some of the best vocal performances I have ever heard in my life, I am not exaggerating or playing it up from bias.  This album truly has unbelievable vocal performances that blew all my standards out of the water.  Not only are the individual performances from trio Starkey, Pastorino, and Guaitoli genial, but the group vocals and playing off of each other are brilliant.  The chemistry is explosive and is an emotional overload in the best way.  The music sounds like they put everything they had into it.  It’s stacked in guest appearances, layers, and melody.  It’s a stark contrast to AI music, computerized auto-tune voices, and algorithm-laden music on the radio today.  This is the kind of album that should be winning Grammys.  Everyone should listen to Hermitage at least once to understand what music should really sound like and the emotion it should provoke.  

Favorite songs: Darkness is Just a Drawing, Glorious, Where We Belong

37.Isolation Songs- Ghost Brigade (2009)

Ghost Brigade is one of the most unheard bands in Melodeath, and yet they have released some of my favorite music to date.  Although they are now sadly disbanded, they have some of the best Melodeath records I have ever heard.  Ghost Brigade was a Finnish Melodeath band that combined the riffs of In Flames’ Clayman with the decimating Doom sound of Paradise Lost.  They were utterly nihilistic and full of resounding despair, the perfect mix of catharsis for us Death Metal heads.  Their songwriting was masterclass worthy. Every song they created had perfect flow and a genial rhythm.  The clean vocals were full of tone and unique vibrato, sitting perfectly in the center of the music.  You could hear each musician individually, as if they were playing right in front of you with a huge PA system.  It was a wall of sound, but it wasn’t overwhelming.  It was just the right level of heavy, atmospheric, Doom-inspired, and gritty.  Ghost Brigade never got the credit they deserved, but their cult following still reveres their albums as being some of the best of all time.  Their riff-heavy and raw music stands the test of time and rivals any Melodeath being put out today.

Isolation Songs is a genre-defining album for me.  Whenever I think of the best Melodeath albums, this is certainly one of the first.  It’s brooding, heavy, atmospheric, and musically interesting.  This album is so unique, despite having such familiar influences.  It’s not heavy and dark just for the sake of brutality.  The moodiness and song structure are deliberate.  It feels handcrafted, instead of being quickly digitally thrown together and finely produced.  The rawness is on purpose, much like Black Metal’s white noise.  This makes for one of the most immersive experiences in an album I have ever heard.  It has a live-in-studio sound to it that I love.  I love it when albums sound like they’re directly ripped off the mixing board.  Nothing is keeping you from hearing the musicians’ natural tones and the crackle in distortion.  Not everything is always perfectly aligned.  Sometimes the drums are behind in a swing time with chugging guitars, which adds to the “Dirge” feel to the album.  This is highly evident on opener Suffocated, which is one of my favorite GB songs.  My Heart Is a Tomb is a classic Melodeath track.  It opens with clean chorus filtered guitars and downtrodden clean vocals.  It explodes into one of the best pre-chorus and chorus combos I have ever heard.  The single song that makes the whole album for me is Into the Black Light.  This song is an explosion of beauty and overcomes all of your senses.  The bass line is perfectly groovy and sharp, it draws you in.  The vocals are classic to Finland’s Nihilistic influences, yet there’s such a gorgeous, unique tone.  This song is an explosion of emotion, and I wish I could experience hearing it for the first time again.  It was a trip through time at one in the morning that I will never forget.

I don’t think another band reached this level of darkness and the utter pit of despair, except for While Heaven Wept, who will be on the list somewhere.  Ghost Brigade combined Death Metal, Melodeath, Doom, and Post-Rock to utterly destroy emotions, I believe. They so effortlessly captured the “Finnish sounds of sorrow” one may feel during a long Finnish winter with little sunlight. Some people may wonder why others seek out music with such a heavy, soul-crushing feel, but it’s all in the name of catharsis.  I think experiencing music like this, which reflects that feeling Empaths get when they’ve given up on humanity, is an important thing.  I think a lot of people may be feeling this way these days.  Some days, Ghost Brigade and their Nihilism reflect the state of the world, and it’s okay to feel that way sometimes.   If this was their intent with their music, they succeeded in reflecting the sad decay of humans caring for each other in such a beautiful way, and it impacted me forever.  I don’t know if everyone felt this deeply when listening to Ghost Brigade, but I certainly felt it.  It sounds negative on the face of it, but once you come out at the end of this listening experience, it’s like the light at the end of the tunnel.  By experiencing such a despairing auditory piece, I saw that light.  I found peace and solace in it, and it became less despairing and more inspiring.  I saw that if others cared so deeply about the decline in authentic human connection and the collapsing belief in believing in something bigger than yourself, then there are still people who care and aren’t running on autopilot.  That’s the power and meaning of Isolation Songs.

Don’t give up on humanity yet.  It’s just getting started.

Favorite Songs: Into the Black Light, Suffocated, My Heart is A Tomb

38. Eclyptic: Wake of Shadows- Illumishade (2020)

Illumishade made its debut in one of the most incredibly difficult situations.  Illumishade was a concept born out of Fabienne’s time in music school and joining the creative mind of guitarist Jonas Wolf.  I consider this band to be a super-group of sorts, and hearing this album, it might be pretty evident they’re all immensely talented.  Illumishade is a special project and band that is very difficult to describe.  It’s deeply rooted in Symphonic Metal and mirrors the cinematic brilliance of Tuomas Holopainen and Nightwish, but Illumishade is vastly different.  It has a mind-bending quality only heard in Hans Zimmer or Trip Hop or Bjork works.  Illumishade has endless atmospheric qualities, but combines the Symphonic mind of German Music Award Winner Mirjam Skal, who has composed for films all over the world, and then the heavy grooviness of Progressive Metal like Jinjer or Evergrey.  This band is an experience like no other.  It’s a completely immersive experience in a completely otherworld.  They created a whole lore and backstory, and divided people into tribes based on personality, and each member is an archetype of the tribe.  It’s so brilliant, it just blows my mind every time I think about it or listen to Illumishade.  If I could pick any band to create a soundtrack for a Fantasy movie, Illumishade would be the number one choice.

Eclyptic is a musical journey through nature, time, and space.  It genre blends in every way you can imagine.  It has no boundaries.  It dares to be out of the box, atmospheric, creative, and even a bit strange.  There’s no formula.  There’s no basic music construct.  It defies everything I have ever known about music and explodes with technicality, emotion, and inventiveness.  Eclyptic is utterly indescribable to me.  I could write about it all day and never even scratch the surface of it.  It is so diverse, expansive, interesting, and layered.  The fact that any of it is recreated live is a human feat beyond measure to me.  This album is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard in my entire life, and still so tastefully heavy.  It is perfectly balanced, as the concept of Illumishade suggests.  It combines the words Illumination, to illustrate the heavy energy, and the shade, as the quieter, softer songs.  Music needs balance, as does everything in life, but rarely is it ever this profoundly beautiful.  Eclyptic blazes by you, seeming like it lasts only half an hour. It goes by so fast, and yet its impression on me has lasted five years now.  It’s comforting and hits me at my core every single time I listen to it.

World’s End is one of my most played songs of all time, according to Last FM Stats.  I listened to this song endlessly when it came out, probably much chagrin of my parents during lockdown.  I think it painted the portrait of how we all may have felt during the COVID-19 lockdowns.  The news and our government made us feel as though the world was literally at its end.  This song was the ultimate catharsis at the time, and the rest of the songs were more immersive, comforting, or distracting from what was happening.  I think Illumishade, at the heart of it, are empaths who truly care about people.  This shows in their music and their ability to make it connect deeply on an emotional level.  Much like Devin Townsend, who was an inspiration to Jonas and Fabienne and the band Voyager, Illumishade strives to go as deep as possible.  World’s End will always be one of my favorite songs and a reminder of that hellacious period. 

What impressed me most about this album, above the fantastic instrumental, song structure, and epic technicality, is the vocal composure of Fabienne Erni and how well the other musicians complement her.  Having such a powerhouse of versatility, sometimes the vocals overshadow the music for me, but not in Illumishade.  Their musical chemistry is what makes this band truly special.  I feel like every aspect, the heavy and melodic guitars, the Prog Bass lines, the piano and huge orchestrals, and the melodic, almost Broadway style vocals interlace together so effortlessly.  I think when you have a vocalist so versed in multiple styles, they fit into the sweet spot or pocket of music, rather than egotistically overblowing it.  Fabienne is a superb vocalist who never gets the credit or praise that she deserves.

39. Periphery- Hail Stan (2019)

Progressive Metalcore is one of my favorite subgenres.  Whether you think Metalcore is actually Metal or not is just based on preference.  There are no absolutes when it comes to such a subjective arena as music.  I believe that Prog Metalcore has the best guitarists and the best writing in music in a decade, and that it is a fantastic example of everything Metal has to offer. Music is always based on personal taste.  So, if you hate Periphery for whatever reason that the internet tells you to hate them, just skip this one.  Periphery is either a band people love or hate.  Much like Tool or Rush or even Nickelback, this band is highly debated.  I don’t know whether it’s the fact that Reddit promotes a “hive-like” mentality, or if people just don’t like the music, I see a lot of hate for Periphery.  Their unserious album titles, song titles, and overall attitude might come off as cocky or stupid, but I don’t see this at all.  I often see people use the Reddit term “bro-Metal” to describe Periphery.  This suggests the band lacks emotional and musical sophistication.  I think this term is unjustified and infantile.  Periphery is a band with immense talent, emotional diction, and incredibly intelligent music.  I love this band at its core, even with the goofiness and the meme-like titles.  They are unpretentious.  They truly care about their core fans.  They write incredibly complex music and are very transparent with meanings.  I think they show a lot more heart than people realize.  Songs like It’s Only Smiles, Lune, and epic Sattelites are incredibly emotional and cerebral.  I think more people should dig into the band and not take everything at face value.  

Their starting point should be the electrifying album Hail Stan.  This album defies all constructs within the genre of Metal, hence the title’s playful take on “hail Satan”.  The album is full of addictive riffs.  The build-up to the breakdowns reminds me of early Tesseract albums, but blends more texturally interesting qualities to the “Djent” style of Progressive Metal.  Hail Stan is as heavy as Meshuggah, but breaks up the heaviness with Spencer Sotelo’s cleans vocals and atmospheric instrumentals.  It also has some catchy pop-based choruses that are right for singing along to at shows.  This album is impossibly technical.   The three guitarists of Periphery all have individual styles.  They play fluidly within each other’s spaces, rather than playing on top of each other.  Normally, I’d think three guitarists are too much, especially within such a chaotic theme as Prog Metal.  But Periphery knows how to construct songs that are both intense and have breathing space in the music.  Many Prog bands I’ve listened to over fifteen years lack the ability to use Rests, which are not uncommon in Classical and Jazz music.  Periphery pulls song structure and writing improvisation solos from Jazz.  This keeps the music from becoming predictable or too entropic, as experimental Jazz and Prog Metal can be.  This album shows a lot of maturity and dynamism.  

Hail Stan is a journey of human existence.  It goes from a Reptile man acting as God to control people and a stoner attempting to save the planet, to the brutal battles of Vikings and the English, to personal struggles with suicide, to a song from the point of view of Earth.  It is thematically all over the place, and so is the music.  This album is jam-packed with many elements that don’t normally go together.  Periphery takes so many ideas from each of their musicians, who like drastically different music, and combines them with intricacy.  There’s glue that holds this all-expansive puzzle piece together, and I think that is Matt Halpern on drums.  He holds this insane amount of energy and keeps a calm throughout the music that ties the three guitarists, the chuggy bass lines, and the intense vocals together.  The attack and nuances he puts into the drum parts for Hail Stan is unlike anything I’ve ever heard.  I love the way he plays with groove and swing in such a rhythmically heavy band as Periphery.  Instead of just using blast beats and playing straight, he plays on the backbeat and a bit behind.  It creates tension for the breakdown, but also creates a smoothness the music desperately needs.  This is evident in songs like Follow Your Ghost and Sentient Glow, where he creates each section of music with different parts of his kit.  It’s technically perfect and passionately done.  I think Matt Halpern deserves much more credit than he receives for being one of the most emotive and technically sound drummers in Metal.  Every hit he performs fits each section of the music.  It feels just right, but also adds unpredictably.  I think he is an utterly brilliant drummer who makes this band great.

I cannot talk about Periphery without mentioning Satellites.  This is one of the most incredible songs I have ever heard.  Every song on Hail Stan has value and is musically interesting or thought provoking, but Satellites is Periphery’s magnum opus for me.  This song shows maturity, emotional diction, empathy, and incredible composition.  It’s about the Earth looking at man and seeing humanity unbiasedly for what it is.  The lyrics are the Earth asking people to take care of it and also each other.  It’s incredibly poignant from a seemingly silly band.  This is one of my favorite songs of all time.  The buildup of it is so satisfying and electrifying.  It gives me chills and butterflies every time I hear it.  It slowly builds up into this rhythmic thrashing explosiveness on the bridge and outro, and features more of Spencer’s tonally great clean vocals.  There’s something epic about this song, like it should have a cinematic movie to it of the Earth changing and eventually destroying the human race to “reset” things.  This is a special song.  I can tell Periphery put everything they had into it, and I will always appreciate the massiveness and message of this song.

Hail Stan is a record people slept on and discarded for whatever ridiculous reason.  I think it’s an utterly brilliant album.  If people would open their minds and not let the hive mind mentality of the internet dictate their tastes, they’d find this album to be a hell of a huge offering to Metal and music in general.

Favorite songs: Satellites, Reptile, It’s Only Smiles

40. Shoganai (Mini album)- Ankor (2024)

I originally wasn’t going to include this on the list, because it’s more of an EP or a first installment of an album.  But to leave out one of my absolute favorite pieces of music would be inconclusive.  This list would feel unfinished without this album.  I could’ve included their full albums, White Dragon or Beyond the Silence of These Years.  I love those first albums with Jessie Williams at the helm vehemently.  White Dragon is such a fantastic album with something for everyone to sink their teeth into.  Ankor echoes the intensity of early Linkin Park and Enter Shikari records, mixing multiple genres like Rap, Metalcore, and Electronica to create a sound that is so unique.   This band is almost impossible to pin down.  Not two songs in their entire catalog sound alike.  The amount of different sounds this band packs into one song, let alone a whole album, is utterly staggering.  They have Pop Punk, Paramore-like songs that are so endearing and addictively energetic. They have Progressive Metalcore songs echoing the proficiency and intensity of Periphery or Spiritbox, or Falling In Reverse.  They are endlessly inspired by Japanese music and culture.  No matter what the influences are, Ankor has its sound that is emotive and musically mindblowing.  The talent of this band blew me away just this year in March, and now they are one of my favorite bands of all time.

2024’s Shoganai is one of my favorite pieces of music ever released.  It came to me in March when Sirius XM Octane played the single Prisoner.  I was sitting with my mom in the grocery store parking lot, waiting for my dad to come back.  It was a dreary day for many reasons, and I was in a mentally difficult place with my anxiety. I felt hard times were on the horizon.  I was dreading having to have two more wisdom teeth removed, and my family and I were worried about my grandfather’s state of health.  Prisoner came on, and it utterly overwrote the dark narrative in my mind.  The anxiety just melted away.  The pain went away.  There was something idyllic about this song in that moment.  I believe it came on when I needed it the most.  Ankor came into my life at the singularly perfect time.  I don’t believe in coincidence.  Ankor came on the radio at the perfect time for a reason.  I truly don’t know what the past couple of months would have been like without them.  Their music, especially Shoganai, is like a painkiller or Xanax, but without any side effects or toxicity.  This album is one of the most impactful records in my entire life.   Upon listening to them more, they became an integral part of my life and a muse of passion.  

Ankor and their release, Shoganai, are a catalyst for healing and/or overcoming everything.  Shoganai in Japanese lore translates to “it cannot be helped”, to signify the horrible and beautiful events in one’s life that cannot be stopped or changed.  This can relate to death, love, health problems, your dreams coming true, or just anything that inevitably happens.  Ankor perfectly captured all of these things with this mini album in such a raw and cathartic way.  Every song on it is an explosion of emotion.  It is intense.  It is hair-raising, heart-pounding, and a complete rush to listen to.  Ankor put everything they had into Shoganai and used it for their catharsis to get through their struggles.  What makes this band is the heart they put into every single note, every song, and every second of their performance.  Their energy reminds me of Paramore, but their sound is truly like nothing else in this world, and the heaviness of Shoganai more suits Architects or Periphery.  Their chemistry with new drummer Eleni Nota on this album is spectacular.  She took Ankor and helped raise it to its full potential.  Her drumming is like a stopwatch or a countdown to self-destruction.  She is cataclysmic in her attack and unbelievably fast and technical.  Venom is one of the most impressive drum tracks I have ever heard.  I show the live performance of it at Wacken to everyone I know.  She is the reason Shoganai was able to go to the height the band wanted.  Ankor now feels like a complete band that complements each other.  It takes a hell of a good band to stand with such a dynamic vocalist as Jessie Williams.  I love the guitars, the bass tone, the chaotic structure, and the passion that each member exudes on this album. 

Jessie Williams is one of my favorite female vocalists to ever exist.  When I think about her, it’s impossible to just classify her as a “Metal vocalist” because she is so much more than that.  She can sing in literally any genre and blend into any genre.  Her voice is multi-faceted and multi-ranged.  Her voice and delivery are what make Ankor a GREAT band and what makes Shoganai one of the best releases of the 2020s and of all time.  Her delivery is aggressive, and then gentle and soft, and then explosive.  She defies everything I knew about vocals in Metal and what can work.  She ranges from a J-Metal approach, to Celine Dion level belting to perfectly delivered and intense fry screams.  It blows my mind every single time I hear her sing Darkbeat.  It is unbelievable to me that Darkbeat is sung by one individual.  I’m no stranger to dual-style vocals with Devin Townsend, Corey Taylor, Tatiana Shmayluk, and Floor Jansen, but Jessie’s just seem so drastically far apart in tone and range.  And Jessie makes the switch look completely effortless.  Her vocals are shocking, intense, and then soft and soothing within one second.  Songs like Oblivion, which is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, show this duality eloquently.  This is a singer with both perfect language diction and emotional diction.  Oblivion is an overlooked gem of a song in Modern Metal, and so is Jessie Williams as one of the greatest singers of my generation.  Venom also shows her intensity and quickness with words and ability to stay in the pocket. Her performance on Shoganai is one for the ages.

Shoganai is a special (mini) album.  Each track is a part of a storyboard and an actual mini-series on YouTube.  This is such a brilliant, emotive, and smart creative venture.  It completely immerses you in these characters that all signify love, loss, healing, and most importantly, hope.  I think this album stands to be a beacon of hope.  “The World is A Cruel Place, and it is also Very Beautiful” is the opening track and the overall arc of the album.  It sends the message that pain is inevitable, but so is love and happiness.  This message resonates with me emphatically.  It is something I believe at my very core.  I believe that pain is utterly part of life, and we all have to learn how to overcome it.  Drowning in pain is not an option.  It is giving up and going backwards in human evolution.  This album sends the message that there’s always something on the horizon.  “I’ll be okay” is a phrase said throughout the album as a reminder that no matter what happens, we’ll be okay.  That message is so simple, and yet so incredibly powerful.  This has impacted fans endlessly.  Many have gotten the phrase tattooed on their bodies permanently.  The crowd even holds up signs at Ankor shows that say “We’ll All be Okay”.  That sentiment is truly beautiful and beyond heartwarming.  It stands as a testament to Ankor’s impact as a band and wonderfully empathetic human beings who wear their hearts on their sleeves.  There are a million reasons why I love this band and Shoganai, but there just aren’t enough words to convey that.  Please, go listen to Shoganai with an open heart.

Favorite songs: Darkbeat, Oblivion, Embers