I agree with some others here that when hearing the term "90s metal" all I think of first is FF, Machine Head, Pantera etc.
But phrasing the term slightly different as "metal in the 90s"brings back great memories to many great albums released then.

Though I started listening to metal as a boy in the late 80s, it was in the 90s I was fully into metal. Sure, many albums I
taped and bought back then were the 80s classics (Maiden, Manowar etc) but from the early 90s days on I also spend so
much money on then new released stuff. The whole 2nd wave BM, further albums of well established bands etc. Emperor,
Bal Sagoth, Running Wild (yes ), Manowar (yepp, I do also like their nineties stuff), Ulver and whatnot.

Also I do agree with that the 90s were possibly a bad decade for mainstream/commercial metal but I couldn't care less as
most of my fave stuff from these days never was mainstream (in a MTV commercial sense!).
So, yes - the 90s for "my metal" were a brillant decade. As AuditaTreme stated:



The '00s and this young new decade haven't brought up a single album filling me the same amazement
as those from the 80s and 90s. Sure, there's also plenty of nostalgia and age coming into play but well...

I don't know what to tell ya bud. I love extreme metal and times have never been greater for it than now. There was no Anaal Nathrakh or Deathspell Omega in the 90s (in their current form) and certainly not in the 80s. There are a lot of stinkers these days for sure, but that's just oversaturation.

I didn't like Swansong, but the two albums Carcass put out before that are great. I used to listen to those a lot in the 90s, along with Damn the Machine, an interesting progressive metal band.

I might slightly prefer metal in the 90s to the 80s. A lot of my favorite metal bands like TAD, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Electric Wizard, Slayer (1990-1994), Death, and Meshuggah were all putting out awesome music in this time period. I do agree that the quality of metal in the late 90s suffered, but even then we had great albums like The Sound of Perseverance, Chaosphere, Obscura, Still Life, Times of Grace, etc.The 90s are when metal got more interesting with groups like Meshuggah, Neurosis, Melvins, etc.

While the 80's had amazing thrash, speed, and heavy metal albums, my favorite power, death, and black metal albums came from the 90's. If you just look at the underground scene or atleast the euro scene, metal is at its best, just try to forget about those crappy groove/nu metal bands.

Not true. Nobody considers Thrash Queen's Manslayer to be their favorite album, because it objectively sucks. Don't believe me? listen for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMKiBzcBTjU

Now of course it's not usually so clear cut when determining an album's objective worth, but it's there if you're willing to listen hard enough.

The 90s saw many bands which once were great become worse: Iron Maiden, Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax. The best thing about them was black metal, but I still prefer Bathory’s 80s work. Bathory and Iron Maiden alone would be enough to make the 80s my favourite decade.

I wonder how many people will agree with me, but I’m very happy with the 10s so far. The recent releases of Woods of Desolation, Falls of Rauros and Mortualia are outright awesome.

As a bass player, I really have no problem with funk metal

Both of those are in my top favorite bands, but i am Blind Guardian's, Death's, and Iced Earth's 90's albums are my all time favorite albums, and not only that, the 90's had great bands like enslaved, emperor, opeth, amon amarth, gamma ray, Rhapsody ect.....
But still the 80's is still pretty hard to beat, as the 80's had alot of amazing metal bands, both mainstream and underground. Though I do feel the the post 00's alot of the 80's bands got back on their feet again.

It's an obvious choice if you're into extreme metal. That's when the genre sprouted and flourished. Making that argument for thrash and other kinds of metal is a bit harder. A lot of bands toog groove influences and crumbled to the ground after that. But on the other hand, there were a few bands that took on the rock revivalists and the doomy grunge wave and made something of it. I think Candlemass is a good example. The late 90's Candlemass albums, though not congruent with the first five, nor popular at all, are incredibly unique and some of the best listens in my library. It gave birth to some of the proggy ideas and especially a lot of rock influence you hear in some metal today, like stoner bands and what have you.

Have you heard Twilight Time and Dreamspace? They are not like the flowery Kotipelto albums at all (and to a degree, even Fourth Dimension wasn't like the other Kotipelto albums as it still had some of the older songwriting and didn't have Jens Johansson).

Also I'm always interested in hearing US power metal from the mid to late '90s that is not Virgin Steele, Destiny's End, or Cauldron Born, which I already listen to.

I like alot of the black/thrash and death/thrash that came out in the 90's! Destruction, Sodom, Kreator, Slayer, Possessed, Malevolent Creation, Cruel Force, etc..,

mid 80s to mid 90s for the win, the early eighties with all the nwobhm and speed metal thing, bores me incredibly.

90's death metal > other death metal

Dudes, almost all of your posts were reasonable and fine reads in and of themselves, but reading them only reinforced my impression that it all boils down to this:



Of course the guy who started a sentence with "I would say 1997-2000/01-ish were the worst years for metal" (GravityLapse, was it?) WAS going to reveal shortly thereafter that he's not on speaking terms with EuroPM (which was at its peak at the time), and it's also a given that he's not at all into the type of black/death/whocaresanymore "extreme" metal awesomeness this exact era swarmed us with (what with calling that era "Hollywood" for BM).

It's also not in the least surprising that the dudes for whom the 90s were an obviously greater era for metal than the 80s are much more into either black, death and generally "extreme" metal or EuroPM, prog and otherwise soft metal than they are interested in the middleground genres on the aggressiveness scale (the heavy metal, the power metal, the doom metal, speed and thrash, mostly). Conversely, dudes with the opposite preferences will obviously shrug at the very mention of 90s metal being superior to 80s metal, because that makes sense.

There was no middlegroung to speak of in the 90s, whereas the 80s almost entirely took place there, looking in all directions, often simultaneously. The 90s saw two main trends escalating apart from one another: soft metal and extreme metal. That's what made sense then, much more than proper subgenres. You'd buy the latest Metallian or another decent metal mag (yeah back then they were still immensely useful and mostly okay), and the sampler CD of new/upcoming releases would be roughly half/half soft and extreme. You wouldn't really need to give much thought to whether the new Labyrinth was prog with EuroPM tendencies or proggy EuroPM: it was soft, so it'd go to the soft pile. Likewise, the exact dosage of black vs death the new The Crown contained didn't matter much: it was extreme, so on to the extreme pile. However, in those days, finding a new release that met the following three criteria was damn near impossible: A) metal, B) roughly on par with the kind of soft/extreme balance your typical 80s album had and C) good. Much of the place formerly occupied by that type of metal was taken by the overwhelming wave of MTV-friendly, dime-a-dozen, barely even metal (if that) crap that the mainstream audience and less knowledgeable metal/rock enthusiasts alike vaguely remember as "90s metal".

So yeah, if your top 100 favorite albums of all times are mostly along the lines of, say, 'Heaven and Hell', 'Holy Diver', 'Piece of Mind', 'Crimson Glory', 'Heavy Metal Maniac', 'Show no Mercy', 'Orgasmatron', 'Master of Disguise' or 'Among the Living'... The 90s were very likely a tedious, desperate walk across the desert for you, with precious few oasis to just barely keep you alive.

If you're leaning more towards one extreme or the other in terms of overall aggression versus sweetness, then the 90s were THE DAYS, and looking back on the 80s, you might struggle to find much of interest to you.

For the most part, I'm in the former camp and the 80s are unquestionably the golden age of metal in my book. But an insane amount of greatness also came from the 90s, both extreme and soft, and I'd place it securely second in the Top Decades ranking system if there were such a thing, with the 70s close behind (as Riffs said, insane quality but so little to go buy, here's the desert metaphor again). The 2000-2010 decade has yet to redeem itself in my eyes, as it was right around the corner of that decade that I got my "fuck! metal is dead!" epiphany (I came around since, but still), and stuff from the past few years, although vastly clinical in its "reinvention" of the past and/or shameless exploitation of the nostalgia factor, actually gives hope that we're in what will end up being a really good decade for metal. We'll see.


Dude, are you for real? Do you realize who you're telling this to?! That man right there is not your typical RW fan, he is THE Running Wild fan. He's not merely celebrating the Rolf, he's making this in his honor. Check your facts, bro.

Well, a lot of genres crapped their pants in the 90s, at least for what I enjoy. Arise and Sacrifice's Soldiers of Misfortune were the last gasp of oldtime thrash I liked. Death metal was already on its way to pretensing it up with later Death, Gorguts and Atheist; Carcass' Heartwork and Hypocrisy's Abducted being among the last records about which I gave a shit. At least until Severe Torture came around.

But on the good side, folk metal popped up! And in all genres we finally got to hear great bands from Eastern Europe once communism died - Korrozia Metalla, Arakain, Vader, Hurd. There was also Primal Fear and Iron Savior to rescue power metal from the washed-up Helloween and Stratovarius. And sure it's been mentioned before, but mid90s black metal of Norway, Russia and France will never be replaced.

So I agree the 90s are written off unfairly, but they're too inconsistent to best the 80s. For everything that petered out back then (NWOBHM), something new and fresh replaced it (doom, thrash).