I have never done a 0% review, I think it would be really unusual for a band to put something out that I would find absolutely irredeemable. Even St Anger and other legendary bad albums aren't truly zero-worthy in my book. I think a 0% album should not only be very bad, but have a little extra oomph to truly deserve a 0. It should also lack the "so bad that it's good" factor imo

What, for you personally, does an artist need to do (or not do) for a release to deserve a 0%?

Agree about the combination of factors, I think it's not only a matter of "objective" (as much as it may mean) lack of quality, but it also should come with that something that pushes you to downright hate said album and never want to hear it once for the rest of your life. It might be the vocals (as it did for my case), the themes (like for NS bands, or just bands with fuckin' stupid lyrics or toxic attitude...), or whatever. "So bad it's good" albums surely do not qualify, because that would imply you enjoyed them to some extent, after all.

That's why it's also extremely subjective, I feel some of us get irked quickly and give out a lot of 0%s, while others could be more lenient and tend to look at the positives.

Let's start from the premise that reviews are a literary exercise, and as such, all criticism, reviews, analysis, etc. are solely and exclusively subjective opinions of the author, therefore it is not possible to apply a mathematical formula to determine a specific score for a musical work. In other websites or media dedicated to music, films or literature reviews, they use much simpler scoring systems such as the star rating or a simple "no or yes recommended". The fact that MA gives you such a wide range of scores means that the score itself is also a reflection of the subjective opinion of the author, since the value he gives to those numbers is absolutely personal, that's why you can find people who never put 100%, or 0% or who only score in blocks of 5 in 5 (5, 10, 15, 20, 25 etc).

So a 0% score can mean a lot of things, it can be used as something hyperbolic, it can be that you don't like anything you've heard, it can be used to express how the work represents the opposite of your ideology or philosophy (there are several Noktorn reviews of 0% that talk about how he understands the work he's reviewing to go against his idea of what metal is) or it can even be used as a means of punishment for the band's actions like some of the reviews Wintersun receives or the case of an album I can't remember the name of right now where the author gave them a 0% because the band had stolen fragments from other bands and passed them off as their own.

For me, to date I have only three works which I consider to be worthy of an absolute 0% if I reviewed them. One would be the demo of the French LLN band "Torture", a demo whose "music" I can only interpret as an unfunny gimmick whose meaning and value were solely products of its time and geography and therefore is completely obsolete today, but I can't even attribute it a value for its historical importance because it didn't provide anything.

Another 0% I would give to "Daughter of Darkness" by the Natural Snow Buildings project, although this will never be seen because it is not a metal band. Basically I would give it that rating because it is to this day the only musical work that has made me feel physically and mentally sick, six hours of the same unpleasant noise of which I only endured four and a half until it completely broke my psyche.

And the last example would be Mayhem's "Grand Declaration of War", and that's basically because I'm unable to find a single moment that doesn't bother me deeply, it's the fact of trying to be avant-garde without understanding what makes it avant-garde, I hate the way it's structured, I hate the mix, I hate the songwriting, it's purely visceral.

And those would be my examples and my interpretation of the question.

On this topic, the """"new"""" Pestilence seems to have hit the right spot for everyone, so far. What you reap is what you sow, truly.