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Editor's Choice: Honorable Mentions

Editor's Choice Logo

I know I’ve lapsed on this column in the past few months, but let me make it up to you with even more musical recommendations.

I’ve never had a harder time coming up with an honorable mentions section for my top albums list. Records kept entering and exiting at rapid speed. In the end, the amount of albums I cut from my list dwarfed the list itself. This feels significant. Metal, like wine, has vintages. 1986, a good year. 1991, the same. both a quarter of a century ago. Coincidence? Probably. Still, I challenge you to compose a worthy top albums list for either of those years and limit it to ten ranked options and ten also-rans.

Lists are good because they focus attention and engender discussion, but their limited scope can undermine simple facts like: 2016 was an amazing year for metal. I don’t want to distract from that fact. So here’s every album that nearly made it into my list, but didn’t.

Honorable Mentions:

Alcest – Kodama

Anagnorisis – Peripeteia

Asphalt Graves – The New Primitive

Cavalcade – Lake Side Effect

Crippled Black Phoenix – Bronze

Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas – Mariner

Deathspell Omega – The Synarchy of Molten Bones

Emma Ruth Rundle – Marked for Death

Eteral Deformity – No Way Out

Furia – Księżyc milczy luty

Gojira – Magma

Heaven Shall Burn – Wanderer

Ihsahn – Arktis

In Mourning – Afterglow

Gorguts – Pleiades’ Dust

Katatonia – The Fall Of Hearts

Khemmis – Hunted

Mantar – Ode To Flame

Metal Church – XI

Metallica – Hardwired… To Self Destruct

Mithras – On Strange Loops

Moonsorrow – Jumalten Aika

Nuke – Nuke

Palace of Worms – The Ladder

Pogavranjen – Jedva Čekam Da Nikad Ne Umrem

Trap Them – Crown Feral

Trees of Eternity – Hour of the Nightingale

Virus – Memento Collider

Vektor – Terminal Redux

Zhrine – Unortheta

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