The Best Metal Album of Each Year of the 1990s

What’s the best metal album of each year of the 1990s? Let’s find out!

Toward the end of the previous decade, metal was reaching its commercial peak while also blazing new trails in the underground. While many of metal’s ’80s heroes flailed during the 1990s, a small handful endured, contributing timeless classics of their own amid a new breed of metal’s future elite.

From various shades of death metal, resplendent black metal, mathcore, goth metal, groove, etc., the ’90s found metal diversifying its palette with a knack for hybridization. Fundamentally, many of the bands below pooled from similar influences, but it’s their more unique personal tastes (jazz, prog, classical) that spurred several evolutionary offshoots.

On the commercial end, hair metal fizzled while thrash, overall, experienced an identity crisis. Grunge pulled things over back toward the rock world while Pantera‘s innovative style vaulted them to the top of the charts in 1994, bringing newfound heaviness to the masses.

While history largely points to this era as one of metal’s low points, the rest of us know that it’s simply a false notion. Sure, the ’80s style of heavy metal — twin guitar leads, high-pitch singing, frenetic drumming — was out of style and the ones playing it all experienced their own lows, but metal was thriving in different wars.

Below, see the single best metal album from each year of the 1990s!