If this is just a "great albums that are above the rest of the bands in said genre and and are kind of well known in their scene even though they may be kind of their own niche subgenre" my vote goes for the following. Completely subjective list.

Cultes des ghoules - Henbane, or Sonic Compendium of the Black Arts
Deathspell Omega - Paracletus
Funereal Presence - Achatius
Gris - À l'âme enflammée, l'äme constellée...
Mgla - Exercises in Futility
Misthyrming - Söngvar elds og óreiðu
Nightbringer - Ego dominus tuus
Paysage d'Hiver - Das Tor
Sinmara - Aphotic Womb
Svartidaudi - Flesh Cathedral
Urfaust - Der freiwillige Bettler

Ad nauseam - Imperative Imperceptible Impulse
Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race
Dead Congregation - Promulgation of the Fall
Gorguts - Colored Sands
Grave Miasma - Odori sepulcrorum
Obliteration - Black Death Horizon
Suffering Hour - The Cyclic Reckoning
Swallowed - Lunarterial
Teitanblood - Seven Chalices
Teitanblood - Death
Ulcerate - The Destroyers of All
Ulcerate - Stare into Death and Be Still

Is it really that difficult?
According to Google: "judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind."

I'm not sure 13 years or less is enough to determine any of those things. Maybe in 2030.

I can google too, you know. None of it is valid though in this context of metal music, neither in terms of time frame nor in being particularly outstanding. What's YOUR definition of a classic album?

Quoted for truth.

Albums that stand out within their (sub)genre both in terms of quality and impact on other bands. Transilvanian Hunger is a classic within, even if you personally hate it. What does quality and impact mean? Well, at some point you reduce definitions to arbitrary subjective categories. Nature is apparently continuous, while our categories are necessarily discrete. You can read some postmodernist philosophers if you want, but I'll just rely on common sense meaning of words to have a productive non-metal discussion.

Classics albums are just really well-liked albums that have been influential in some way. If you don't agree that enough time has passed for this to apply, then just skip this one I guess.

You give me Transilvanian Hunger. Ok.
But can a 13 year old album be dubbed as classic though? I don't know.

I think Mastodon's Crack the Skye is generally regarded as a classic in its genre, and that's only 14 years old

Gojira From Mars To Sirius it’s a classic

I mean albums like DMDS, Transilvanian Hunger, Storm of the Light's Bane were all considered classics in the mid 2000s, were they not? That's about the same time frame we're discussing here. It's not like people were waiting until the 2020s to judge whether or not they deserved that tag.

Yeah I think over 10 years is a fine place to draw the line. It shows well enough if a record is still garnering the same amount of buzz as it did when it first came out, or if it just fizzled out of most people's consciousness as new records were released.

Yes, to both!



I think it's easier to judge what is a classic and what is not with some substantial amount of time having passed. However, there are always exceptions. Especially in a young genre where an album is released that just kickstarts a whole movement. That kind of impact will probably be felt way quicker than something released 30 years into a genres existence. I think it was easier in the late 90's to judge which black metal albums from the early 90's were considered classics compared to us now trying to decipher which black metal albums from the mid-late 2010's which could reach classic status for example.

Agreed! I feel that Blood Mountain also deserves to be considered a classic.



Most definitely! Gojira has released quality material before From Mars To Sirius, and they have released quality material since. But nothing had the same impact as this one. It's heavy, it's crushing, the production is tight, metallic and hard hitting. The song-writing is on point... It's the msot Gojira that Gojira ever was.

Must confess that I agree with your list at 95%

I'm gonna have to go with a couple of albums from 2010 that I think were benchmarks in their own style :

Ghost - Opus Eponymous

Alcest - Écailles De Lune

Ghost's album pretty much launched them into superstardom (as much superstardom as you can get in hard rock/metal from 2010 onwards anyways) and Alcest's album was pretty massive for Blackgaze when it came out from what I remember and it became the trend for a little while there.

These two aren't personal favorites of mine. I think it's my most objective answer possible to the original question.

For my personal favorites, I think Arch/Matheos' Sympathetic Resonance, Saxon's Call To Arms, Threshold's For The Journey, Hell's Human Remains Armored Saint's Punching The Sky, Accept's Stalingrad : Brothers In Death, The Obsessed's Sacred, Black Label Society's Grimmest Hits, Cirith Ungol's Forever Black, Overkill's Ironbound and Scorched, Metal Church's Congregation Of Annihilation and Hangman's Chair's This Is Not Supposed To Be Positive and A Loner will all become classics from their respective catalogs. I'm sure pretty much all of Satan's post 2010 output will be considered as such as well.

I think Blazon Stone's entire catalogue will be considered classics for traditional/speed metal.

Haken - The Mountain
Leprous - The Congregation
Orphaned Land - The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR

Another album that I see potential to become a classic in the future both for what it meant to the history of the band and for the quality of the music itself is the last Helloween album, at first I thought it was an ok album with nothing much more but in these two years it has been growing more and more in me and I think it really manages to deploy many of the virtues of the classic Helloween sound and adapt them to new songs that sound incredible: Out for the Glory, Best Time, Robot King and Skyfall are already for me classics of the band on the level of their best songs from their golden years.

As much as I like it, I just also like The Dark Ride and Keeper III so much more really.

I like those albums too, more than the 2021 one, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this one is also very good and has that mystique because of the reunion and the use of three vocalists, that's why I think it will be seen as a classic in the future.

At the very least, Helloween’s 2021 album set a new standard for old guard band reunions to go. So many bands and their fanbases could benefit greatly from getting the Pumpkins United treatment.

It's a very good album that simultaneously I was also thinking would go further in some areas, maybe be heavier or weirder. But yeah it's got a lot of cool songs anyway.

It was certainly a feeling throughout. It works well as a celebration of the band, but I did wish it was a wee bit better. At any rate, it's at least better than the prior two or three, especially My God-Given Right (to be bland).

One of the former mods of this forum stated some time ago that in years to come, Borrowed Time would be revered in the same hushed tones as Cirith Ungol or Omen. Given that it's now ten years since the debut came out, did he have a point?

Riot City - Burn The Night (2019)
Enforcer - Diamonds (2010)
War Dogs - Die By My Sword (2020)
Sacred Outcry - Towers of Gold (2023)
Masters of Disguise - Back With a Vengeance (2013)
Evildead - United $tate$ of Anarchy (2020)
Sodom - Genesis XIX (2020)
Alcatrazz - V (2021)
Darkness - First Class Violence (2018)
First Fragment - Gloire Éternelle (2021)

For now that's all that came to mind off the top of my head. Might add some more later.

Eh, the more time goes on the worse The Dark Ride gets for me. The new s/t smokes it. Don't get me wrong, Dark Ride has some knockouts like Mr. Torture, We Damn The Night and the fucking S tier title track, other songs are starting to irritate me.

Diamonds....this is more of a criticism of Enforcer in general but that albums a little too poppy.

The first album that came to mind was Monarchy by Rivers of Nihil. Their first album was not very good, and the two that followed have failed to reach me, but Monarchy was a fantastic album of technical and progressive death metal prowess. Also:

Ulcerate- Stare Into Death and Be Still, technical/avante-garde death metal
Archspire- Relentless Mutation, technical death metal
Cattle Decapitation- Monolith of Inhumanity/Anthropocene Extinction, technical, progressive death/grind

There have been some fantastic releases in the last decade or more, though the word classic carries a lot of weight.

The Helloween album has some cool songs, but the production is unbearable. Too much saturation.

Charlie Bauerfeind must be banished from sanctuary.

To be clear I consider classics mainly by three criteria:

1. That they are not flavour of the month or even of the year, that they hold up outside of the year that they were created and with any luck may be played for decades. There are good albums released each year, how many of those will you return to the following year, the next decade?

2. They are not wholly derivative, they have to add something to the language of the genre, at the very least not ape just one band or album but expand on the work others have done.

3. They have to be at the very top of their genre in ways of composition and arrangement of riff and melody.

It seems few have heard of my choices enough to debate them.

Major support for this choice from me as well. Despite being in the game for over a decade, Keldian is still something of a hidden gem in the power metal world. Aside from their most recent work which I wasn't big on, they've got a consistent track record. Their 2017 record Darkness and Light could easily make it into a "best of 2010's" power metal as well.

Other choices of mine would be:

Moonsorrow - Jumalten Aika, 2016; (blackened folk)
Analepsy - Atrocities from Beyond, 2017; (slam/brutal death)
Caladan Brood - Echoes of Battle, 2013; (atmo/epic black)
Pathfinder - Fifth Element, 2012; (power)
Keldian - Darkness and Light, 2017; (power)
Seven Kingdoms - Seven Kingdoms, 2010; (power)

That's all that easily comes to mind at the moment.

I don't understand how I could have forgotten to mention another of my favourite albums of the past decade:

Desaster - The Oath Of An Iron Ritual

Simply a pure thrash/black metal album where not a single second is wasted, every song hits like a truck and has enough qualities to be memorable, its final track "At the Eclipse of Blades" is for me one of the best endings for an album in history.

I think A Touch of Medieval Darkness is still busy being a overlooked 90's masterwork.

In technical death metal, an album that I have kept listening to since it came out is Esoteric Malacology by Slugdge. It's weird to me that the band is tagged with Blackened Death/Sludge Metal in their archives page since I don't hear any black metal or sludge in their sound (this is pretty far from Crowbar and Eyehategod to be honest). But besides that, it's an awesome record, and I really recommend it to any fan of death metal. If you like stuff like Nile or Necrophagist, it's a little bit more melodic, but incredibly well done on a musicianship level.

I'm listening right now to Hallucinogen by Blut Aus Nord and I think it has enough merits to be considered not only a classic of the band but one of the best black metal albums of the last decade, the leads and melodies throughout the whole album are fantastic, few times I've heard something that flows so well without losing at any time a single hint of aggression and melodism.

A few that in my personal opinion have the potential to become a classic in their relative sub genre:

Akhlys - Melinoe
Nightbringer - Ego Dominus Tuus
Grab - Zeitlang
Mgla - Exercises in Futility
Spectral Wound - Infernal Decadence
Imperium Dekadenz - Meadows of Nostalgia
Aosoth - V The Inside Scriptures
Forteresse - Themes pour la rebellion
Pyramaze - Disciples of the Sun
Sacred Outcry - Towers of Gold
Vanden Plas - The Seraphic Clockwork
Circus Maximus - Nine
Brainstorm - Firesoul
Tomb Mold - Manor of Infinite Forms
Dead Congregation - Promulgation of the Fall