You can still vote in one more round of 2002 ranking!
THIS IS A POWER RANKING GAME. The albums are arranged in the poll from best to worst, with the top seeded album being the top ranked album. I seeded the albums based on two facts: how many lists it appeared on, and my general understanding of this board's tastes after being here for 15 years. This way we don't have to spend multiple rounds moving an album like Brave New World to the top, it's already there unless voters decide to knock it off the top spot.
Essential Questions:
How do you knock albums off the top spot? If you feel like an album is ranked too low, vote for that album. Any album that receives a significant plurality of votes (this number will be fluid and based on participation) will move up a slot. If you like the list as is, vote for the top album.
How often does this update? I will look at the numbers roughly every 24 hours and move albums accordingly. You can vote for as many albums as you want and you can vote whenever the poll resets. After a week, I will close the poll and we will move on to the next year. This will take us to mid December with the finals wrapping up right at the new year.
How were albums selected? I would say 95% of the albums that will appear in this game were sourced from Maidenfans lists. Every album that was submitted will appear in the game. For years that have a lot of duplicates (2000 being one), I filled in the list with other acclaimed albums. Many years surprisingly had close to all unique albums, with 2014, 2020, and 2023 having only one duplicate each. No year featured an entirely unique list of albums. No Maidenfans nominated albums were seeded lower than an album I pulled from an outside source.
Do I need to listen to every album here? Not necessarily, but I would highly encourage it! You have a week to vote and the voting will update every day (so you can vote every day or you can vote once a week or whatever you want). Everybody has unlimited votes. I think you will get more out of this game if you listen to the albums you're not familiar with and see if you can find any new favorites.
My favorite album isn't here! You had 7 months to send me a list!!!
I want to thank everybody who participated. I received 17 lists and 250+ albums! Most years had quite a variety of material and it made me appreciate the diversity of taste around here. I'm really excited to dig into each list I got and I am going to do my best to listen to every album. With that being said, let's get started with...
YEAR MMIII (2003)
2003 feels like the first year where modern technology (i.e. downloading) feels like a major player. You have the release of St. Anger, the rollout of which is pretty severely tainted by Lars' crusade against Napster. But then on the other hand you have our top seeded album, Dance of Death, which Maiden promoted by encouraging audiences to make bootleg recordings of their live performances of the new song to share with other fans. Down ballot we also have artists like Devin Townsend and Queensryche who, to varying degrees of success, tried to embrace the new technology in their own ways. While not directly correlated, I also find a bit of a changing of the guard here with artists who established a pretty solid internet presence early on and have continued to thrive in an increasingly digital world, such as Avenged Sevenfold and Gojira.
The other element I notice in this year is you start to get the sense that Metal now lives in a post-9/11 world. With the USA dragging the rest of the world into a conflict in Afghanistan and a massive blunder in Iraq soon to follow, it's actually kinda astounding how quickly the vibe changes on these Metal records. A lot of the fantasy-dominated Power Metal that has been a mainstay in the last few years is mostly gone from this current year. Iron Maiden is writing songs like Face in the Sand and Age of Innocence, as well as dusting off their war song chops with Paschendale. Dream Theater writes In the Name of God which, despite largely being about cults, seems clearly interested in the holy wars of the middle east. Even if the bands aren't responding directly to the fledgling Bush era, it seems like a lot of fantasy themes have been traded for topics grounded in reality and socio-political theming. Avenged Sevenfold and Evanescence are probably the closest we get to nu Metal in this list (I would argue neither exactly are nu Metal), but I always felt like the popularity of these bands in America was in some ways a 60s style sort of counterculture to the Bush years.
Not to be too predict-y, but I get the sense that this could be the first year the top seed doesn't win, which would be remarkable if the first album to get toppled is a Maiden album. I think Train of Thought has a very strong chance here, and I am also just curious how far the forum's Maiden bias will go when it comes to an album that is frequently ranked toward the bottom of the discography. If anything is going for Maiden, however, this actually feels like the first somewhat weak year we've had. Other than Train of Thought, I'm not sure I see a clear competitor that could actually gain a consensus like the other top seeds have had.
THIS IS A POWER RANKING GAME. The albums are arranged in the poll from best to worst, with the top seeded album being the top ranked album. I seeded the albums based on two facts: how many lists it appeared on, and my general understanding of this board's tastes after being here for 15 years. This way we don't have to spend multiple rounds moving an album like Brave New World to the top, it's already there unless voters decide to knock it off the top spot.
Essential Questions:
How do you knock albums off the top spot? If you feel like an album is ranked too low, vote for that album. Any album that receives a significant plurality of votes (this number will be fluid and based on participation) will move up a slot. If you like the list as is, vote for the top album.
How often does this update? I will look at the numbers roughly every 24 hours and move albums accordingly. You can vote for as many albums as you want and you can vote whenever the poll resets. After a week, I will close the poll and we will move on to the next year. This will take us to mid December with the finals wrapping up right at the new year.
How were albums selected? I would say 95% of the albums that will appear in this game were sourced from Maidenfans lists. Every album that was submitted will appear in the game. For years that have a lot of duplicates (2000 being one), I filled in the list with other acclaimed albums. Many years surprisingly had close to all unique albums, with 2014, 2020, and 2023 having only one duplicate each. No year featured an entirely unique list of albums. No Maidenfans nominated albums were seeded lower than an album I pulled from an outside source.
Do I need to listen to every album here? Not necessarily, but I would highly encourage it! You have a week to vote and the voting will update every day (so you can vote every day or you can vote once a week or whatever you want). Everybody has unlimited votes. I think you will get more out of this game if you listen to the albums you're not familiar with and see if you can find any new favorites.
My favorite album isn't here! You had 7 months to send me a list!!!
I want to thank everybody who participated. I received 17 lists and 250+ albums! Most years had quite a variety of material and it made me appreciate the diversity of taste around here. I'm really excited to dig into each list I got and I am going to do my best to listen to every album. With that being said, let's get started with...
YEAR MMIII (2003)
2003 feels like the first year where modern technology (i.e. downloading) feels like a major player. You have the release of St. Anger, the rollout of which is pretty severely tainted by Lars' crusade against Napster. But then on the other hand you have our top seeded album, Dance of Death, which Maiden promoted by encouraging audiences to make bootleg recordings of their live performances of the new song to share with other fans. Down ballot we also have artists like Devin Townsend and Queensryche who, to varying degrees of success, tried to embrace the new technology in their own ways. While not directly correlated, I also find a bit of a changing of the guard here with artists who established a pretty solid internet presence early on and have continued to thrive in an increasingly digital world, such as Avenged Sevenfold and Gojira.
The other element I notice in this year is you start to get the sense that Metal now lives in a post-9/11 world. With the USA dragging the rest of the world into a conflict in Afghanistan and a massive blunder in Iraq soon to follow, it's actually kinda astounding how quickly the vibe changes on these Metal records. A lot of the fantasy-dominated Power Metal that has been a mainstay in the last few years is mostly gone from this current year. Iron Maiden is writing songs like Face in the Sand and Age of Innocence, as well as dusting off their war song chops with Paschendale. Dream Theater writes In the Name of God which, despite largely being about cults, seems clearly interested in the holy wars of the middle east. Even if the bands aren't responding directly to the fledgling Bush era, it seems like a lot of fantasy themes have been traded for topics grounded in reality and socio-political theming. Avenged Sevenfold and Evanescence are probably the closest we get to nu Metal in this list (I would argue neither exactly are nu Metal), but I always felt like the popularity of these bands in America was in some ways a 60s style sort of counterculture to the Bush years.
Not to be too predict-y, but I get the sense that this could be the first year the top seed doesn't win, which would be remarkable if the first album to get toppled is a Maiden album. I think Train of Thought has a very strong chance here, and I am also just curious how far the forum's Maiden bias will go when it comes to an album that is frequently ranked toward the bottom of the discography. If anything is going for Maiden, however, this actually feels like the first somewhat weak year we've had. Other than Train of Thought, I'm not sure I see a clear competitor that could actually gain a consensus like the other top seeds have had.
