Love all of them, but Somewhere in Time is truly out of this world. One of the best metal albums ever imo. I would otherwise have chosen Killers since it was the first Maiden album that I discovered.

Yep. A very overrated album IMO. Wasted Years is amazing with my favorite guitar solo of all time. Heaven Can Wait and Sea of Madness are good. The rest are mediocre, or in some cases crap.

I'll go with Number of The Beast. Amazing from end to end outside of Gangland, which is just OK. Hallowed alone puts it near the top and add in the other classics and you have my favorite.

I dunno, I wouldn't say there are any outright bad tracks on Somewhere in Time, but it's far from Maiden's best, that's all. I guess 'Deja Vu' lives up to its title (Murray-penned tracks are never the finest, although 'The Prophecy' is pretty damn cool, I must say) and 'Alexander the Great' is basically a pale shadow of 'Rime of the Ancient Marinere' before it.

'Wasted Years' and 'Somewhere in Time' are really the only A-grade Maiden material on the album, I'd say.

Alexander the Great is wicked cool. Perhaps you could make a case for it ending too abruptly, but that has never really bothered me, not to mention that the spoken intro to the song is one of the few of its kind that I think actually works.

Yeah, Alexander the Great is one of my favourite songs on there. That calm intro with the epic leads hypes me up every time.

It's weird, the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is actually my favorite track off that album. Always has been since it came out.

I agree it is a weaker Maiden record but it also seems like one where everyone has a different favorite. Of course, Wasted Years is a consensus as far as solid tracks but everything else seems up in the air.

Is it? The Long Title, Alexander and the title track are consistently cited as highlights by most SiT lovers, it seems, and everybody including most of us SiT haters tend to at least like "Wasted Years".

On NotB, some posts in this thread gave me a new perspective on it. I've always seen it as a Hallowed single with a ton of B-sides, but it's interesting and might be fairer and more accurate to adopt the opposite perspective. Hallowed clearly is the odd song out, such a deep, sad, epic song closing an otherwise vastly lighthearded, tongue-in-cheek, goofy album. It's just as out of place on that album as Can I Play on Seventh Son, and these two songs and albums are polar opposites on the emotional spectrum.

NotB is a pop-metal album with "Children of the Damned" and "Hallowed Be Thy Name" on it. That B-side that was added on the remaster is pretty good though.

Caught Somewhere in Time is by far the best song on that record. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner has a great intro, but when the song kicks in falls apart.

Never thought I'd see the day where 80's Maiden was lumped into the same category as the band who cursed the world with "Pour Some Sugar On Me", but lo and behold...
: /

I don't get it. It's pop metal if the music follows a verse-chorus structure? And if so, that is apparently a bad thing? Is 22 Accacia Avenue not one of the greatest Maiden songs of all time?

Yeah, that scorching riff? Those blazing leads? The howling vocals? Totally pop metal, guys.

As for SiT, I really like it. I dig the futuristic production and the spacey synths. But it's clear there are some songs that are way, way better than others, i.e. "Caught Somewhere in Time," "Wasted Years" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" easily dwarf everything else, but then, every other song is still very solid and consistent. I still think it's one of their greatest works.

Yeah, "pop metal" is pushing it. Then again, so is "scorching riff" in reference to The Prisoner.

Well, in a sense, it is popular metal

when does the poll end, when SSoaSS has the most votes?

I'm very surprised at how much more popular Powerslave is than Piece of Mind. They're like two sides of the same coin, a little like Seventh Son and Somewhere in Time. Powerslave is definitely more consistent, but I find it strange that someone wouldn't think that Piece of Mind has the best songs.

It's probably because of said consistency that Powerslave has pretty much defeated POM, Ilwhyan. I personally support such praise, because even though Piece of Mind has some very important highlights (Revelations, Flight of Icarus and The motherfucking Trooper, for starters), Powerslave not only manages to be more consistent than its predecessor, but it also has better peaks of quality, plus a higher number of them (the crowning jewel being Rime of the Ancient Mariner). In fact, as I stated before, the only song of its tracklist that I find to be underwhelming is Back in the Village.

Pop metal my ass!

SiT other flaw IMO is the synths. The drums are good on that album but the guitar synths don't sound very good at all IMO. I think they learned from this one and the result was the amazing Seventh Son, which used such tools much better.

That was a typo. Notice the proximity of the "a" to the "s" on the keyboard.

Good song though it may be, I've always found "The Trooper" to be one of the most overrated songs in the band's discography. Re-listened to Piece of Mind today, and I'd sooner see "Die With Your Boots On", or another of the speedier tracks on the record take The Trooper's slot.

Voted for 'Seventh Son of a Seventh Son'. Probably my third favourite heavy metal album of all time. First and second are 'Master of Reality' and 'Sad Wings of Destiny' respectively.

Powerslave can't even begin to surpass Piece of Mind in those amazing numbers though, and to me it's the highs that count, not the average. Rime is very good, but it's overlong and not as fantastic as the best of PoM. Aces High comes close, but it's definitely shadowed by Where Eagles Dare and Revelations. 2 Minutes is about The Trooper level, if slightly better. Songs on Powerslave from 3 to 6 are all alright, some of them better than others, but I'd count The Duellists together with Back in the Village as an unimpressive number, and while Flash of the Blade is good, it's not Still Life level. While nothing's as low as the lows on Piece of Mind, a better average level doesn't make it a superior album. Piece of Mind has more tracks, and while Powerslave is a longer album, it's mostly because of Rime, which, if written in the traditional Iron Maiden way, could've been five minutes long or so.

Piece of Mind could've done with seven songs (omitting Sun And Steel and Quest For Fire, as those are B-side material). Die With Your Boots On isn't really much good, but it sets the mood for the rest of the album quite nicely after the soaring epic that is Flight of Icarus.

I think "Aces High" might be better than anything on PoM, but PoM has the unbeatable first six songs and "To Tame a Land," and really the only one I think is really filler-ish is "Quest for Fire." "Sun and Steel" rocks pretty nicely.

But then again Powerslave also has the title track, which is also every bit as good as the good stuff on PoM.

I like Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 2 Minutes to Midnight, and maybe even Flash of the Blade more than Aces High. Aces High rules though, especially live.

I voted for The Number of the Beast. That's the first Iron Maiden album I ever listened, almost twenty years ago. I had never been so amazed after listening to a band. "How can ANYONE play THAT good", I thought. Eventually I ended up learning the whole album on bass, and while I've listened to all their albums, none of them has made a mark as deep in my heart as The Number of the Beast.

The Duellists is an underrated track on PS.

Pff almost impossible to answer. My preference for the classics swings every now and then. I'll try to narrow it down by eliminating some first:

First the S/T has to go because for the Di'Anno years Killers is my absolute favourite.

Next one out is Powerslave because of the middle threesome (Flash, Duellists and Village) and because the live version of Rime (on Live after Death) is so enormously crushing that everytime I listen to the studio version I feel liitlebit underwhelmed.

Seventh Son is great but has to go as well. Apparently against popular opinion I don't really like the epic title track that much. I actually prefer Alexander the Great from SiT which I think is great.

Then I'll exclude Number of the Beast because of Invaders, Gangland and 22 Accacia Avenue (intro kicks ass, but then the song drags on and on and on). It's with pain in my heart as Hallowed, Prisoner and Children of the Damned are one of my favourite Maiden songs.

So four out, three left. I think I do like Dickinson material better than Di 'Anno so I'll put down Killers as well. Then for Piece and SiT.........Piece of mind has Revelations, Icarus, Eagles, Trooper and Still Life (underrated song imo), But SiT has the "title"track, Alexander, Wasted Years and Stranger. I think the Smith solo's on Wasted Years and Stranger are gonna put SiT in first place. for now anyways..........

Well, like I said earlier on this thread, I have a soft spot for Piece of Mind, it might be my favorite... but Powerslave is just too monumental not to get my vote. That album is almost perfect and you can't go wrong with it.

It will go down as their Magnum Opus. It's got that perfect mixture of being just polished enough while retaining an edge. They're pushing forward a little yet it perfectly captures what Maiden is more than any other album. They had so much momentum back then. I remember being surprised when 2 Minutes to Midnight invaded the airwaves. The extent to which Maiden was played on rock radio in Montreal was impressive, unheard of for a heavy metal band of this type. The tour was also batshit crazy. It was one of those making periods for metal.

I might prefer some songs elsewhere but whenever someone asks me to introduce them to Iron Maiden, that's the album I recommend first. It's also high on my list of albums when I introduce newbies to metal. You can't go wrong. It pictures what the band is about perfectly, it is quite accessible and you don't tire of it.

Piece of Mind is a great Maiden record. But Powerslave is one of the most important metal albums of all time. That's the difference for me.

I dunno. I think track by track its pretty close. Both have some obvious filler, but both have some mighty epics and fast metal tracks. I give the slight edge to....hell I can't decide.

I hope so! For some reason, I can't include a time limit so it will exist forever...just like Maiden's music!

I'm actually kind of surprised that the self titled is in last place now. "Charlotte the Harlot", "Iron Maiden", "Phantom of the Opera", and fuckin' "Prowler" alone make that like my third or fourth favorite album of theirs.

I'm sad about it, TNOTB was last place for a while (but some people are meh like OpsiusCato) but the thing is, the s/t is often the 2nd or 3rd favorite of a lot of people myself included. It's like the Mario Lemieux of Maiden, great and perhaps better, but people will choose Gretzky instead!

Considering I do like all of these albums, there's none I really want in last place, though I guess if I had no choice I'd say Killers, but seeing the self titled there does blow my mind slightly.

OH WELL!
WHEREVER!
WHEREVER YOU ARE!

@Metantoine: That's a good point. Each of us has to choose ONE album, so the result is the average of how many people would save each album from a fire if they could only save one. The exact same pool of voters in front of the same poll but with the ability to pick two albums each might give wildly different results (and don't even get me started on what would happen if we could each save three albums).

Powerslave>Seventh Son>TNOTB>TFF>Fear of the Dark>Killers>AMOLAD>Brave New World>Piece of Mind>SiT>Dance of Death>No Prayer>Virtual xi>X Factor

Less or more.

And where's the debut?

Firstly I made one only for those 7 first, s/t I would place behind TNOB, disappeared in this mess. I'm rather huge fan of last three as this list shows. Fear of the Dark is higher than it should be because of nostalgia, the fillerfull nature of this album doesn't bother me as all songs grown on me after countless listens...

Iron Maiden is probably the most consistent metal band in my book, even the last three would get score somewhere in 70%'s.

If we're talking the first seven, this is how it goes for me:

Powerslave = Killers > Seventh Son > Piece of Mind > Somewhere in Time > Number > Iron Maiden

It's still pretty much impossible for me to pick between my top two. Both Powerslave and Killers are complete, near-perfect classics in my book.

Powerslave. How Seventh Son got a higher rating than any of the first four is beyond me, though.

@Ilwhyan: Nah, I think Powerslave's highlights tend to surpass POM's, if not massively. Add the consistency factor in there, in you pretty much have the reasons why I find Powerslave to be the superior work. We do seem to have a different understanding of what makes a good album though, as for I usually put the average first, and only then come individual peaks of quality.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner is overlong though? How? Every single instance of instrumental noodling, every vocal melody, and even the spoken, atmospheric break towards the middle is well placed and masterfully arranged. I never found a fault with that song. Also, Flash of the Blade is badass and you should feel bad for saying Still Life is better

PS: I like Sun and Steel.....