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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:

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