Rules & Announcements

The following bands have been added to Metal Academy from the 20th to the 26th of April, 2024.

1. Domkraft / Slomatics (FALLEN)

2. Morbid Evils (FALLEN)

3. Throwing Bricks (FALLEN, INFINITE)

4. Valley of the Sun (FALLEN)

5. Noor (GUARDIANS, INFINITE)

6. Catalyst (HORDE)

7. Hadopelagyal (HORDE, NORTH)

8. Molten (HORDE, PIT)

9. Sijjeel (HORDE)

10. Trenchant (HORDE)

11. Asymmetric Universe (INFINITE)

12. Dawnwalker (INFINITE)

13. Karcius (INFINITE)

14. Mountain Caller (INFINITE)

15. Stengah (INFINITE)

16. Aristarchos (NORTH)

17. Blutumhang (NORTH)

18. Cistvaen (NORTH)

19. Dogman (NORTH)

20. Iku-Turso (NORTH)

21. Nimbifer (NORTH)

22. Skare (NORTH)

23. Spiral Staircase (NORTH)

24. Ballista (REVOLUTION)

25. Crush Your Soul (REVOLUTION)

26. Onewaymirror / Gxllium (REVOLUTION)

Very nice.

I still can't get on board with all the Hellripper hype. It's enjoyable enough and nothing more than that.

I agree with you that the Hellripper release isn't anything particularly special but, even though I'd place it slightly ahead of Hellripper, I'd say the same for the Demoniac record so it really wouldn’t appear to have been the strongest of years for The Pit from what I’ve seen.

I don't completely agree about the Demoniac album, it's not as good as So It Goes, but it is still a strong album for me. Unfortunately I think it is just a simple fact that the Pit's best years are behind it and it consistently struggles to produce outstanding material so many years on from it's heyday.

I feel a bit bad now for not staying as plugged in to new releases in 2023 as I usually am, but there was just so much else to get through, with my Horde clan challenge in particular taking up a fair bit of time in the first half of the year.

The votes are in and we have our winners for Best Covers of 2023. Thanks to everyone that voted!

We had enough votes this year to apply a minimum of 5 votes criteria. Where that resulted in a tie for any given clan, the total amount of votes was the second criteria used, followed by the Clan Rating. Even applying these three levels of criteria, we still have a tie for The Revolution. Rather than apply some other random criteria, the aware for The Revolution will be shared this year.

THE FALLEN WINNER

Ocean of Grief - Pale Existence

THE GATEWAY WINNER

Katatonia - Sky Void of Stars

THE GUARDIANS WINNER

Elvenking - Reader of the Runes – Rapture

THE HORDE WINNER

Neuropath - At Damnation's Core

THE INFINITE WINNER

Blut aus Nord - Disharmonium - Nahab

THE NORTH WINNER

Thron - Dust

THE PIT WINNER

Holy Moses - Invisible Queen

THE REVOLUTION WINNERS (TIE)

August Burns Red - Death Below

Impending Doom - Last Days

THE SPHERE WINNER

In This Moment - Godmode

Great updates, Ben! We appreciate it.

A bit of a milestone for the sight today, with The North being the first clan to hit 10,000 releases.

The Horde will probably pass the same mark in the next 6 months or so.

2022 was definitely a weird year overall. I don't think that there were a ton of truly standout releases, especially in some of the Clans that others have referenced, but it produced my longest list yet of albums that deserve a listen or two. So while it wasn't the most exciting year, it was the deepest and most consistent year I've had so far. Let me go through these real quick. 

The Fallen - Although I haven't gone back to it that much, Quiescent is definitely deserving. It's hard for me to truly get into due to my tastes, but it's still an insanely compelling listen when I get the strength to turn it on for another spin. I preferred Messa's Close and Epitaphe's II, but I'm far from upset about this. 

The Gateway - I'm kind of disappointed with this one, as I think Cave In's offering was much stronger, but I don't think Obsidian is a weak album by any means. 

The Guardians - No surprises here, I'm not the biggest fan of Blind Guardian's more modern material, so this was a massive improvement for them to go back to the kinds of riffs and songwriting that I prefer. It still manages to combine their old and new styles though, making it a really interesting listen for a band that's been going at it for a long time now. There were a lot of other strong releases this year though, especially in the Heavy Metal category. Sonny alluded to Earth Infernal, but Sumerland's Dreamkiller is also a great record, as well as Riot City's Electric Elite. These three albums basically form a trifecta of any classic Heavy Metal style you'd want, ranging from Black Sabbath, to Judas Priest. 

The Horde - I'm pretty torn about this one. I loved Woe when I first listened to it, but as the year went on, I kept finding more and more problems with it. I think my 4.5 still fits, as I still love this style of Metal overall, but to see it take 1st place in The Horde feels a bit disingenuous as I categorize this as an Infinite release way more than a Horde one. While it was an admittedly quiet year for The Horde, I think Inanna, Artificial Brain, or Allegaeon have more of a place than Woe, even though those albums are fairly divisive too. Pretty strange year for The Horde overall as the big albums are hybrids and more progressive overall. 

The Infinite - Not really a surprise, I would have preferred Tómarúm in here, or even Epitaphe, but that's definitely due to personal taste. Even Imperial Triumphant deserve a shoutout, really strong year for this clan overall, Cult of Luna are just way too consistent though. 

The North - This one is VERY surprising as someone who really couldn't get into the atmosphere of this one. I gave it a solid 3.5 score since it accomplishes what it sets out to do very well, but I can't personally get in the right mindset to hear what everyone else seems to be hearing. That being said, the rest of the Black Metal I really enjoyed this year was VERY off the wall, so I wasn't expecting my favorites to be chart-toppers. 

The Pit - There wasn't really another option here. I'd say Autonoesis but I'd consider that more of a North album, I have no issues with Critical Defiance taking it home with some actual straight-up Thrash. 

The Revolution - I'm kind of sad that The Callous Daoboys didn't get more attention here, but Static Dress serve up some serious nostalgia and I'm not surprised this one took it. 

The Sphere - No arguments here, thoroughly enjoyed Krüller all the way through the year. 

Hi Aapokalypt, and welcome to Metal Academy!

If you want any releases added to the site, simply request them in the appropriate clan forum. For example, if you want a Thrash, Speed or Groove Metal album added to the site, you can go to the Requests for The Pit Releases / Bands to be added to Metal Academy thread in The Pit forum. You should find them at the very top of each clan forum.

If you have any other questions, please ask either on the forum or you private message me whenever you like.

Cheers,

Ben.

To get to your profile you simply click on your profile name at the top of the screen. Then if you choose ACCOUNT you'll see that you can change your avatar.

cheers

Here you go, Morpheus. https://metal.academy/releases/40000

You may have noticed a lack of added releases in the past few days. I'm on leave with the family a few hours north of Sydney, and therefore taking a forced break from adding daily content to Metal Academy. I'll be back in time for all the stuff that happens at the beginning of a new month (feature releases, playlists, review drafts etc.).

Trancecore was originally included & then removed after an investigation that found that the majority of releases weren't exactly metal or could fit just as comfortably under Melodic Metalcore.

I quite like this, more from the fact that the position in a fellow member's top 20 is visible on the release page.  My top 20 is pretty fluid outside of the top ten I find as number's one to ten are more or less locked in by now.

That's pretty neat. I like it!

Sonny recently commented that it would be helpful to have updated lists containing all featured releases for each clan. I've now added a new List section called Feature Releases (Month by Month) and added all features up to the current month (April 2022). It's easy enough for me to keep this updated as I add new features each month.

Vinny: I know that you were managing your own public lists with this information but understandably got a bit behind. You can remove those lists now if you want to.

Another milestone for the site today, and it's one I've been working towards since the day the site launched. It has taken over 3 years, but we now have every band added to the site that has at least one metal release with over 100 ratings on RYM (if you ignore a small handful that passed that mark in the last few days).

I guess I have to change my search criteria now. Let's see how many releases come up if I lower it to 95... (the answer is 100s of new bands to add).

Enjoy your vacation, Ben! Please remember my new release requests next week.

Apologies if anyone tried to access Metal Academy in the past hour or so and couldn't. I've been noticing a drop in performance of late, so have upgraded the server it's hosted on. I'm hoping this will speed things up. We now have double the CPUs, RAM and storage space as before, and I higher transfer bandwidth.

The main issue seems to be the front page, which can take over 10 seconds to load. If this doesn't improve, I will work with my developer to try to optimise it. There's quite a bit going on when the page is loading, and some of it is probably a bit superfluous.

Cheers,

Ben.

Another 1000 releases added in just over a month. This lockdown working from home thing isn't all that bad. 

Pleasing to see the high praise for Ulcerate and Oranssi Pazuzu in the album section.  I do need to pick up on that Cirith Ungol album actually as never got around to it.  Like Ben, I have very little time for online presence currently (although some of this is a conscious effort to be spending less time in front of a screen outside of work hours) so my contribution levels are dropping here sadly.

I'm extending the award cut off to Friday this week (so they will be announced on Friday). Get your release and cover ratings in for 2020!

I won’t rate an album without giving it at least three listens too, often a lot more.

As for that last comment, I can only assume you’re excluding all of the better albums that came before it, such as Powerslave, Paranoid and Ride the Lightning. If you exclude all the clearly better albums, then I totally 100% agree with your opinion.

More subgenres =  more lists. This can only be a good thing in my opinion as lists sit amongst the world's crowning achievements as far as I'm concerned. Besides, there's an absolute requirement to have a subgenre like melodic death metal differentiated from slam death metal as there's a very clear separation in their audiences. If we're serious about the site being the best place on the internet to discover metal music that's in line with each individuals unique personal tastes (which we undeniably are) then it really is a must-have feature,  particularly as we've had a number of people suggest that they felt this was a gap for us compared to the competition & drift away from the site.

The additional subgenrification also helps me to keep the monthly Spotify playlists fairly varied & opens up some of the more passionate & interesting discussion on the forums so I can't see that the new feature is anything but positive.

That is an incredible amount of work Ben and your dedication is amazing. Thanks 25,000 times for all your stellar efforts to provide your members with a satisfying experience.

In these crazy times we are all living in, it is fantastic to have a place where you can just "hang out" and shoot the shit with like- (or sometimes unlike-) minded individuals about music, nothing more and nothing less. No pandemic, no mentally unhinged politicians, just talking with (and hopefully listening to) others about something we all love. Many, many thanks to both you, Ben and Daniel for all the hours you both must spend to provide this all for us.

Best wishes to both of you and your families for Xmas and the New Year and also to all the Academy members.

Seconded.

Thirded!

Ah, that may be the issue. Thanks Daniel.

I've implemented both of Sonny's suggestions, adding a descriptor for the member selector while making it searchable.

So it's now really easy to see what any particular site member rated the albums on any given list.

Works great Ben and I'm certain it will be very useful going forward. Although selecting to only show releases you've rated whilst at the same time excluding any releases you have already rated unsurprisingly yields zero returns!

If anyone has any further feedback (either good or bad) on the Gallery functions shown in this thread, please let me know ASAP. I want to make sure everything is all good before closing off with my developer.

If anyone has any further feedback (either good or bad) on the Charts functions shown in this thread, please let me know ASAP. I want to make sure everything is all good before closing off with my developer.

To future proof the Hall, I've added the ability to view Active or Finished judgements. I've also added the ability for me to "complete" a judgement early, which means I can close off some of the judgements where it's now a foregone conclusion (any judgement that already has 8 yes or no votes). I'll close some off later in the week.

I'm with the consensus on this one. Being a cover artwork junkie I too am enjoying finding covers I may never have come across whilst checking back with the gallery every few days. Great feature to be able to filter covers you haven't rated yet - saves delving through them all again.

Late to the party (as usual) but I like this idea.  Sometimes you just want delve into a micro-niche, because nothing else really works (at the time). For example, I like Candlemass, but I’m a much bigger fan of St. Vitus/Pagan Alter/Paul Chain Violet Theater and am more interested in hearing bands that sound like those. So yeah, I’m all for sub genres even within something like Trad Doom. Perhaps Candlemass would be Epic Trad Doom while the others would be Classic Trad Doom? Whatever, just as long as the distinction is made. A few suggestions for the Sphere: There is Neue Deutsche Harte of course,  but there are also specific strains based on Godflesh/Earache on one end and Ministry/WaxTrax on the other (I’m pretty sure this has been pointed out already). These two strains have specific sounds, but I’m not sure what the titles would be offhand. To round things out for that clan, I guess you could just say “modern” for stuff like Author and Punisher.

One thing that bothered me about the Anniversaries page was that releases with multiple clans were only being displayed with one clan icon (the first one alphabetically). That's been fixed now, so multiple clan icons will appear when multiple clans are present.

The cover images are no longer cut off at the bottom on the Featured page. Looks much better.

There will be a number of new features and improvements this week. I will create a thread for each one, as I'd like to get feedback without having everything clogging up a single thread.

The 5th new feature is the ability to "Like" a post in the Forums. When you hop into a thread now, you'll notice the little heart symbol down to the bottom right of every post. Simply click it to show your approval.

Thanks Ben, now we can get rid of all those lonely-looking zero-rated releases!

There will be a number of new features and improvements this week. I will create a thread for each one, as I'd like to get feedback without having everything clogging up a single thread.

The third new feature (well, change) is that I've sorted the Members list on the Clan pages by Ratings (descending) rather than creation date as it was before. Not a big change, but it should give newcomers a way to discover who the major contributing members are in their clans.

Note that these lists are not intended to be leader boards.

Y’know, now that I think about it, this is starting to get ridiculous. At this point, I don’t know what’s going on in that guy’s head. I mean, really? Using two accounts to cheat the rating system and coming up with an insane lying excuse? Yeah, I’m starting to think that guy has to go. Ben, in case MadManx2084 ends up pulling another strange stunt like that, please ban him. I didn’t wanna have to make that request, but it’s for the best...

Just letting everyone know that I'm heading away with the family for a few days. We're staying in a very remote house in the country and I doubt there will be any internet connectivity. In other words, it's unlikely that any releases will be added until about next Tuesday. Please don't allow Daniel to fill the site with reptilian related releases in my absence.

Cheers!

I've now completed the first 100 metal releases from Century Media Records. I believe this to be the only list of its kind, and I had to spend days tracking down releases to fill in missing label code gaps.

For anyone wondering, Century Media used two different coding systems for European (77xxx) and US releases (7xxx), but they clearly attempted not to double up on numbers. So in the image below, you can see that Morgoth's Feel Sorry for the Fanatic was released as 77119 in EU and 7819 in the US, so I've given it the joint code of 819 in my list. Power of Expression's X-Territorial was only released in EU on 77120, but they purposely didn't use the number 7820 on a US release. They applied this system to around 95% of releases, with only the occasional number being duplicated (example: 77150 is Gurd's D-Fect album in EU, whereas 7850 is The Spudmonsters' Moment of Truth in the US).

Anyway, I enjoyed making it, cause I'm a metal nerd.

There's a Speed Metal challenge up in the Lists section. The guide for using it is contained within the challenge itself.

Nuclear Blast was my latest label to attack and we've now got the first 100 metal releases added to the site. There are a lot of classics in there, particularly early death metal bands like Dismember, Benediction, Suffocation, Monstrosity, Sinister, Hypocrisy, Gorefest, Amorphis, Brutality, Incantation and Kataklysm. Despite that, I've only reviewed 17 on the list. Anyone reviewed/rated more?

The Napalm Records Label list has been increased from 100 releases to 200. 

Check out the latest Label List, which is the first 100 releases on Metal Blade Records. It's a very impressive list! The thing I find most amazing about it is that, despite the metal genre still being quite new, there wasn't a single release on Metal Blade in the first 6 years that isn't still considered to be metal today.

Thanks guys.  This has been a real pleasure to complete.  And I am not done yet as since I have discovered so many great releases on my reviews thus far, I will be actively going through more or less all lists to add further reviews and pick up some cool new shit.  Thanks Daniel and Ben for this site, all your hard work and dedication is much appreciated and thanks to all members for contributing overall, this is not just about me, we all make this site what it is.

p.s. Ben, loving those stats.

There are two Stoner Metal challenges up in the Lists section. The guide for using them is contained within each challenge.

Man, there are a lot of bongs and breasts adorning stoner metal album covers.