What a question. Albums are as long as they artists want them to be. Maybe you should ask them if they really consider those "filler" songs to be filler. Nobody's forcing you to listen to the entire thing in one go, but as a musician, you want people to have the album experience, and everything is (hopefully, bar mishaps and mistakes) exactly where it needs to be on that album. As the listener, you can take it or leave it.

Generally I'm a fan of longer albums. More often than not particular tracks drag on too long. A combo of the two would have to be Vektor's Terminal Redux. The last two tracks drag a bit in relation to the overall pace of the album.

Maybe all music is beyond criticism because whatever ended up on the CD must necessarily have been what the artist intended it to be.

Maybe, as was pointed out earlier in the thread, in days of yore, factors like cost of studio time and executive meddling forced bands to be more aggressive both in honing their material and trimming the fat, and the result was shorter albums.

Even though I'm increasingly wary of music criticism/critics, I don't believe all music is beyond criticism, no. However, I think a part of taking on an appreciation for an artist's work is accepting their decisions about how that work should be presented. So yes, on my favourite albums from my favourite bands, i don't really lhink a note (or track) is out of place or doesn't belong there. There are albums I like but which I don't feel so strongly about, but I imagine, hope, that the band feels differently, and I just am not fully on board with them -- and that's fine.

It is true that a single LP length used to be the limit for many bands. It's also true that longstanding "career" bands used to put out albums more quickly. Sometimes two or three a year. Of course none of this discussion really factors in one-guy-and-a-computer projects (some of which can be found on this site) that release every experiment they record to the internet public. But it's hard to write songs; hard to perform them as a band; and even today, it can be a real challenge to record them. I'd hazard a guess that very few artists except the most cynical just put stuff out there to fill space and time with inferior work. Again, if you're not happy with it, there's always that forward button.

The only time I would agree with OP is with stoner metal and drone, the latter being such a shit genre and I've even given sunn O))) a chance live. I would gladly take any recs for good drone.

One album I can always listen to start to finish is Tribulation's "The Formulas of Death" which is 01:15:48 long. Absolutely flows from start to finish and I wish they could play the whole thing live one day.

Yes, I know but i think of metal-bands. And how many of them had the budget to do a double-album in the 80ies? So I always imagine how the band would have to cut their material to getting out one vinyl-disc. Just for fun.

Albums too long? Feck! If I'm forking over $20 and up for a CD, I'd better be getting at least 45 minutes of music.

It depends on the band and the genre. As a big fan of grindcore, I find in the last 10+ years bands are focused more on smaller shorter releases than putting out a solid 30+ minute album. But I would like a black metal album to be around 40+ minutes (depending on the specific style). If something is enjoyable it tends to go by fast. I will gladly listen to a shorter grindcore or death metal album three times over then have to sit through Dopesmoker once.

I would say, quite often, yes they are. Vinyl can hold approximately 50 minutes of music, while CD's about 75 minutes. And bands seem to think they need to fill the entire CD with songs. Quantity not quality in many cases. I'd much rather listen to an 8 to 10 track album with a running time of 35 to 45 minutes than a 14 track album with 70 minutes of music. Because chances are that not all 14 of those tracks are going to be great. Some may be clear fillers. Sure, you can skip the one's you don't like, but if everyone is skipping the same tracks and the band never plays those tracks live, then why put them on the album in the first place if they're that unpopular? If a band has written 15 tracks, pick the best 10 for the album and release the others as B-sides to singles.

I will take an amazing 30 minute album over a boring 60 minute one. Usually, the faster and more intense the music, the shorter the runtime is required to explore its ideas.

First Suicidal Tendencies, first Bathory, SOD's Speak English or Die, GISM's Detestation are under 30 minutes.
Rorschach's Remain Sedate, DRI's Dealing With it, Crumbsucker's Life of Dreams, Excel's Split Image, Whiplash's Power and Pain, Cryptic Sluaghter's Money Talks, Witchfinder General's Death Penalty, Saint Vitus' Hallows Victim and Born Too Late are under 35 minutes. Probably plenty of others I can't think of right now.

Also Black Sabbath's Master of Reality is under 35 minutes.

Anyway this doesn't seem to be a popular opinion but I'm not much a fan of long albums at all. Maiden's Powerslave is honestly pushing it for me at 50 minutes. Really depends on the genre though. The average hardcore record is way shorter than a doom metal record and that's because they're going for different things. The only time I really tolerate a really long record (really long for me is basically anything around an hour or over) is if it's old school prog or experimental rock.

Disgorge - Cranial Impalement
Gutalax - Shit Beast
Haemophagia - From Sickness to Cult
Municipal Waste - Hazardous Mutation

To name a few incredible albums under half an hour. I prefer shorter albums. I listened to Master of Puppets since years today in the car and it's way too long. Too many skippable songs and a dozen couplets per song. Just too much.

if it won't fit on a single vinyl it probably needs trimming. So much crap would have been trimmed, or put off until the next album when it could get more work to fix it. 40 minutes is perfect. There are exceptions of course.

Recently listened to two albums whose running times differ by only about one minute, where one album feels way too long while the other doesn't.

Insomnium's In the Halls of Awaiting is 10 songs, 55 minutes, and I wouldn't call it too long since all but 2 songs are a reasonable 4 - 5 minutes and no song feels like obvious filler.

On the other hand I tried getting into SepticFlesh with Sumerian Daemons which is 13 tracks and 56 minutes. The album starts out great, with an intro that sets the stage, a good first proper song, and songs #3 and #4 are excellent. But no matter how many chances I gave it, none of the songs from #5 through #13 measured up to those first few. (I guess Magic Loves Infinity came closest.)

I think those are the factors most likely to produce an album that feels too long: a dozen or more tracks, a running time near an hour, and the best songs mostly near the beginning.

80 minutes is a monstrosity. Only a fabulous band can pull off a solid 40 minutes. I love Nile but they're out of their minds if they think I want to sit there and listen to that sound for an hour and a half.

Also bonus tracks are an abomination against all sensibility. This is like stapling some rough sketches to the bottom of a painting.

Since when did EPs count as albums? Especially the Shitlickers one which is like 8 songs at about 7 minutes total (4 songs first EP at about 4 minutes...
4 songs second EP at about 6 minutes or so)

Moderat Likvidation EP is 6 songs at 16 minutes (thats a fucking lot for a 7", especially since Discharge "Why" is a 12" and SHORTER, like 14-15 minutes only )

Not when the bonus tracks somehow manages to be ever more fucking awesome than some of the actual album songs.

Running Wilds "Pile Of Skull" comes to mind.

This song rules:


And "Win Or Be Drowned" is also a good song!

And I'm amazed that they did never include this asskicker of a song:

Generally I think the answer is yes, they are. But I think for me a big part of the reason is that I listen almost exclusively to full albums rather than cherry picking songs, and have found more often than not that the 50-70 minute albums are padded with filler. Albums in the 30-45 minute range are generally preferable to me as they tend to be tighter and more focused.

That said, there are longer albums which I love and for which time passes by very quickly due to the quality of the music, that's just much harder to pull off.

Creatively it is not part of the album.

Extreme metal shouldn't pass the 40 minutes mark. There's no fucking way to stuff like The Great Execution, Dechristianize and Obscura to maintain a consistent quality for an entire hour.

I personally don't care to listen to the same band for much longer than 45 mins, unless it's maybe a live or greatest hits album from one of my favorite groups.

I’ve seen a good number of albums over the last few years from smaller and far lesser known bands across several genres (not just brutal death and slam and grind) release full-lengths under 30 minutes and sometimes well under that runtime while still having very noticeable filler. The pendulum can and does swing in both directions.

So apparently the new Necros Christos album is going to be a lengthy fucker. Subtract the Gate and Temple tracks and you'll still end up with roughly 1.5 hours of music. Don't get me wrong, I love everything these guys have done so far and I get that they want to do something special as this will be their last album, but I feel like this might be a little too much.

I've heard it said that your attention span is not more than double your age. With that said, I guess my attention span is about 15 years younger than I am!

Depends. Some bonus tracks can legitimately flesh out an album. But the trend of throwing some random (often poorly recorded) live tracks at the end of an album, a bunch of B-sides from another EP, etc., tends to drag things down for me. It feels like a relic from the CD era where they are trying to add value to the purchase. I pretty much always skip over those tracks.

It's always odd when people say they like an album but it's 'too long'.

I mean, if it's that good wouldn't you want it to not end?

This band goes way too overboard with their fucking interludes. Even a 2CD release with like 40 minutes each would be more listenable than this.

+1. And demo tracks.

Usually...

I wonder if bonus tracks should be counted... they can easily bump a 45 minute album up to an hour. Symphony X's Iconoclast got bumped up to a double album if you include the special edition bonus tracks and that album was pretty long.

^ Those aren’t really bonus tracks in the traditional sense, though. That version is what the band always intended the album to be and allowed a truncated version to appease the label, which hardly made a difference because why only have this much music when you could have THIS much (and a more complete listening experience) for a slightly higher price? That’s my favorite SX album however, so take my opinion with a grain or two of salt.

I’m reminded of Jerry Cantrell’s “Degradation Trip” and how it was released as both a single and eventual double album as intended (and was a triple album in the very early, embryonic writing stages,) with the “extra” songs strung throughout in sequence instead of all of them tacked on at the end or in a bonus disc. A work of art as far as I’m concerned.

I generally prefer a 50+ minute album because I like to sit through my albums for quite a while, but then again I don't really judge albums on length, more on the quality of the instrumentation.

I don't think albums are too long, not for my personal taste anyway. I was recently listening to Blood Oath by Suffocation in the gym, and by the time the album was over that time had just flown by anyway, and that's a medium sized album. I'd say no. Unless you are talking about stuff like Sun O)))) where they play a chord and just let it ring for a whole five minutes, that is overkill.

In general my limit for blasty shit is about a half hour, so I rarely go past that with DM albums. Litany by Vader is prefect in that regard. But even that is hard to work though entirely because...production is a huge key! If its harsh and loud with no dynamics my limit is more like 3-4 songs usually then I'm reaching for the button to put something else on. Records that breathe pass the time much better than a distorted loud mess.

The first Bathory is 27min (incl. intro/outro). And no one ever protested.

This is the only answer.

I think in many cases where people say that they feel as if the album has 40 minutes (just picking numbers for the example) worth of great material and another 10-15 of okay material. All in all it is still a great album, but could use a bit of trimming.

I think so. Back when I was young I remember being annoyed that Deicide's Legion was so damn short. But that was when Death Metal was starting, when I had just gotten a CD player, not to mention that the album is brilliant. Now I download a bunch of albums every year. I look at the list on my media player, so many albums kids are cranking out these days have 12, 13 songs and usually halfway through I'm switching to something else. I figure back when record labels and producers had a say some stuff just didn't make it, now it seems there's no filter and everything ends up being released. Just give me 8 great songs, 40 minutes total and I'm good.

To expand upon this, some bands take the opportunity afforded by bonus tracks to come out with some unexpectedly good experiments.

My favourite examples of this are "The Absolute" and "Time Out of Place" from Dark Tranquillity's Atoma. Some might balk at me for this—I say that you've been complaining about the band being on auto-pilot for years anyway, so fuck it—but I realised upon hearing them that I would be very okay with Dark Tranquillity becoming a gothic/synth/dark wave act. It's about time Stanne gave us more of his beautiful cleans and that kind of music would certainly suite them (or vice-versa).

To also expand on the subject of the OP and my previous answer to it, I would point out that some forms of (metal) music are naturally suited to longer albums. Doom and post-metal are the obvious citations. It's not impossible to shorten them but I think they're most often in their element when they're hitting the fifty- to sixty-minute mark.

Bathorys debut album obviously

Yeah I think that an album is too long if you have trouble listening it in one sitting.
And the CD format did kinda ruin albums. Bands should just realize it's quality over quantitity.

If the music is great, I don't care about the length. The current Fjoergyn album is over an hour long, but filled with enough greatness to please me for the rest of my live. Or let's take a look at Midnight Odyssey. "Shards of a Silver Fade" has a total length of 2h20. 8 songs, 2 discs. Sure that's not the right music for driving or stuff, but the Ambient Black Metal of this giy is really intense and fits very well to a day of meditation or just fade into some sort of limbo.

On the other hand, I never liked Slayer despite their short albums, so it's (as always) a preference thingy.