Thread as titled.

My favourite Autopsy album, and death metal album is Acts of the Unspeakable. Despite it's good score on the archives, it's one that seems to get passed over in their discography in favour of the first two, and they never play from it at their live shows. It just has such a filthy atmosphere that's unmatched to me.

Was interested what other people thought as to some of their favourites that are less loved by the community at large.

There's so many of them...

But one of the most prominent is Kreator's Endorama. I just love that record, probably due to sentimental reasons. The whole production is warm, radio-friendly and appealing, and this is certainly my summer album of choice.

Savatage - Power of the Night
Manowar - The Lord of Steel

Not their best, but I still enjoy them. Both have their flaws, yeah, but still have nice amount of catchy songs.

I rate Never Say Die about in the middle of Ozzy-Sabbath.

90s Maiden and particularly The X Factor which is in their top 3 albums.

Load

Youthanasia

The live albums from Ripper era Priest (the best official live Priest there is along with the 82 tour video)

The Glorious Burden (despite Schaffer's actions since)

Cathedral - VIIth Coming (overlooked in general)

Poetry For the Poisoned by Kamelot immediately pops into mind. It could just be pure nostalgia but I find myself listening to this album more often than some of their more "obviously" good albums like The Black Halo. I guess one of the common complaints about the album is Khan's vocal delivery which lacks dynamic range when compared to earlier albums. However, since this was the first Kamelot album I heard I just assumed that this was how his voice was supposed to sound like so so I grew more attached to this vocal style instead. I don't know, it has a certain confident calm aura surrounding it where he feels like a morally gray narrator-type character who's always in control of whatever situation he's in. Good stuff.

Picking an album you really like that is usually considered not the apex for the artist is really easy because you basically have a gargantuan range of things that could hypothetically qualify. I'm proposing Hard Mode: Your Favorite Album that the Fanbase Otherwise Actively Dislikes.

When I add Hard Mode, I have zero answers. Most of the ones that spring to mind for me upon reading the thread are albums that aren't the usual #1 pick but are still generally liked anyway (Life Is Killing Me, Gateways to Annihilation), were seen as disappointments at the time but hindsight has reevaluated them to simply be the least good of their good era after they got much worse later (Majestic, Are You Dead Yet), are generally well liked and only overlooked because of bigger albums in the discography (The Gray Race, Atavism), or are actually big fan favorites and are only largely ignored by the band itself (Somewhere Far Beyond). And even with all of those caveats, only Gateways and Beyond are my #1 favorites in those respective discographies anyway.

Hard Mode is truly Hard. Embrace Sisyphus.

For most of my top bands / artists, I'd say my favourite album is also among those that the fan base likes / is one of the most popular.

Any that come to mind are for those bands that I'm more of a casual fan of. And even then, I'm not sure how the album is generally viewed by the fan base / metal community - for all I know, it might be quite well liked. The closest I could think of might be Satyricon - Volcano, although my perception is that people tend to think it's a mid tier album.

This is the one I always bring up when a thread like this come up. I love Endorama! What a great record. Wish they would play some of this stuff live.

There aren't many. The main one that springs to mind is Sentenced - The Funeral Album, an excellent album that ties with The Cold White Light as their very best, for me. Generally speaking, I've always thought their albums pretty much got better as their career progressed, an opinion shared by the only two Sentenced fans I know (probably the only two in the UK!). It wasn't until years later I realised how polarising The Funeral Album is among Sentenced's fanbase. My guess the Amok-loving 'metal died in the mid-90s' crowd refused to accept that they didn't dial back the clock ten years and try to end their career with some sort of Amok Part II, which could not possibly have happened given how much the band had moved on musically and personally.

Seen a couple st anger reviews on here like this, but I personally come up short too. Definitely like a lot of hated albums but they're not usually my favorites. Closest thing I can think of is that hail to the king used to be my favorite a7x and the black album was my favorite Metallica, (maybe cheating with that second one) but those aren't my current opinions.

For normal mode, immediately I think of Schizo Deluxe by Annihilator and Xecutioners return by obituary (love is a bit overboard but still).

Black Sabbath - Never Say Die
Iron Maiden - X Factor
Exciter - Exciter & Unveiling the Wicked The Jaques Belanger albums, Blood of Tyrants and The Dark Command as well.
Coroner - Grin

I got a few.

Sodom - Tapping the Vein
Pestilence - Malleus Maleficarum
Atheist - Elements
Cannibal Corpse - Vile

Metallica - Load
Anthrax - Sound of White Noise, Stomp 442
Conception - Flow

Cannibal Corpse - Eaten Back To Life: their most fun and catchy album
Psycroptic - Ob(Servant): a tour de force. Mindblowing. People bitch about "drum triggers," I think they mean the samples used. They're perfect for the album. The drumming is superb. Then there's those who will forever whine about the singer or how they love their first singer. Who cares. A shame Psycroptic didn't stay in that vein and went in some other direction.

Kreator - Outcast and Endorama
Sodom - 'Til Death Do Us Unite
Exodus - Impact is Imminent
Cradle of Filth - Thornography and Nymphetamine
Slayer - Diabolus in Musica

This is making me feel like an old-head

This is close to my line of thinking (and hey, I'm UK based too!)

I love The Funeral Album - I'd put it on par with (or maybe just ahead of) Down, and behind The Cold White Light in my rankings. I listened to it religiously when it came out. I didn't realise it was a divisive release within the fanbase.

Say it with me now...

Orchid. By. Opeth.

I fucking LOVE that album like no one's ever loved it. I've listened to it obsessively for the entirety of last year, and man, it's like nothing I've ever heard in my entire life. I hate Opeth's discography so much it's hilariously ironic how much I love their debut and how many light years ahead it is of everything else they've made.

Other than that, there's a couple more:

Kreator - Terrible Certainty (not hated but literally forgotten by both the fans and band; it's my favorite thrash album)
Black Sabbath - all Tony Martin albums (even Forbidden; Tyr is top 10 Sabbath)
Dissection - Rainkaos (I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me a lot over time. Jon's songwriting is as good as ever, even with the abrupt style shift)
Carcass - Swansong (my favorite Carcass album)
Pestilence - Spheres (I love prog death, what can I say)

Seconding this one! While I do like the more recent albums of theirs, honestly, I find myself returning to their early stuff more.

I love Virtual XI by Maiden. Probably because it was the first of their albums I listened to. Started getting into them around that period in time (late 90's), with the compilation Best of the Beast being a good introduction. I was 17 years old and just getting into metal.

So what if it's more or less universally panned? It has some really good songs - "Futureal", "The Clansman", "Como estais amigos", and Blaze does what he can with the material on offer.

Nocturnus - the other two albums

And for every hard mode there is a cheat, just pick that one ambient instrumental album by a big band - you might just enjoy it, and there will surely be a big stink around it.

Plenty of them. There's a lot of really great bands that fans turn on the second they change sounds from whatever they were doing as teenagers, and it's kind of a bummer. There's also albums that are great but not really what fans are looking for. I like that Hologram album (Holocaust-adjacent, very disliked followup from some of them to The Nightcomers) quite a bit, I REALLY like both of the mid-80s Angel Witch albums, I love almost all Black Sabbath albums to death, I'm into all Motorhead, I like post-NFH Sentenced a lot more than most people with my taste, I like modern Maiden more than most people with my taste, I love Ungol's Paradise Lost all the way through (though I REALLY get why people don't like most of it other than Join the Legion and the trilogy at the end), I like Mortuary Drape's Buried in Time quite a bit....

Many of mine already mentioned (Anthrax's 'Stomp 442' is one that most fans of the band seem to dislike a lot), but a couple of things I didn't notice:

- Helloween's 'Chameleon'! It's so varying and not so power metal-ish. Plenty of great, great songs.
- Exodus: 'Force of Habit' is one heavy and groovy album. The covers could have been left out.

Killing the Dragon is my favorite Dio album, all the fun of the eighties albums without the commercial pressure and featuring an incredibly spirited performance from Doug Aldrich

I don’t know if Angel Rat is necessarily the best Voivod album but it’s the one I play most often.

Entombed - Same Difference
Opeth - Heritage
Mastodon - The Hunter

Slayer “Diabolus In Musica” and “God Hates Us All”...sure, not your typical Slayer sound but for what they are, I think both are awesome and way better than anything that follows.

Someone mentioned “Impact Is Imminent” by Exodus, and I concur! My 2d fave after the debut.

Saxon “Power And Glory” and “Crusader”. Both are in a steady rotations since 80s. Call me crazy but I prefer them over classic ( first 3) Saxon

I've mentioned it in another thread somewhere but, "The Ritual" is my favourite album by Testament. Fans hate it cause it's not thrash, and that's probably why I do like it. Thrash just doesn't work for me anymore outside of a few songs here and there.

I can't think of any generally hated albums I outright love, bit there are quite a few I don't mind at all. First I thought of was Morgoth - Feel Sorry For the Fanatics. I really like it for what it is - groovy, industrial-tinged take on Killing Joke. There are a couple of fillers on there, but overall I enjoy it.

Carcass - Swansong and Gorefest's Soul Survivor and Chapter 13 also get thumbs up from me, probably the best examples of death'n'roll.

I'll go to my grave insisting Breeding the Spawn doesn't get the respect it's due from Suffocation fans or casual death metal listeners. I think this is changing slowly, but even now, I think it's very much overlooked in favor of its predecessor and successor. I also think, despite the veneration for Annihilation of the Wicked and Ithyphallic, Nile reached its pinnacle with Catacombs-- those other albums are solid, but man, they were channeling something really unique on that record, something that managed to conjure up the primal darkness of ancient Egypt (as it exists in the popular imagination) far better than the overdramatic interludes of later material.

In entirely the opposite direction, both in style and in fame, inasmuch as A Pregnant Light is "popular" I feel like it's on the strength of My Name Doesn't Have a Game, I've always found earlier stuff like St. Emaciation, Stars Will Fall, and even Most High Place to be a little more unique and compelling. I don't even know if they qualify as metal at this point, but hey, they're on the archive, so I'm counting 'em.

There may be a few albums that would meet BastardHead's 'hard mode' metric lurking in the recesses of my brain but I can't think of them at the moment. Hard mode is hard.

I was thinking about posting Chameleon. Doesn't matter that it's not even remotely power metal, it's still got some good songs, e.g. "First Time," I Don't Wanna Cry No More" and, dare I say it? Yeah, I even like "Windmill."

I really like Megadeth The System Has Failed- which most people seem to blow off as middling at best

I actually like and listen to both Clayman and Colony more than Whoracle by a longshot...

Not that it's a bad album, per say. I just think it's inferior to the aforementioned ones.

Gosh, there are so many....and many of those have been listed already by others.

But the main ones for me:

My Dying Bride - 34.7888% Complete
Metallica - Death Magnetic / Hardwired
Anathema - the last four studio albums
Trouble - Manic Frustration
Possessed - Beyond the Gates
Anthrax - White Noise
Dio - Master of the Moon

Without BastardHead rule:

Abigor - Fractal Possession
Darkspace - Dark Space III I
Darkthrone - The Underground Resistance
Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden
Nagelfar - Srontgorrth
Necromantia - Crossing The Fiery Path
Pantera - Power Metal
Summoning - Old Mornings Dawn

With BastardHead rule:

Meshuggah - Contradictions Collapse
Nokturnal Mortum - Нехристь(NeChrist)

Limbo (I have no clue whose works are the worst considered by the fans):

Furia - W śnialni
Lunar Aurora - Of Stargates And Bloodstained Celestial Spheres
Monstrosity - Spiritual Apocalypse

Onslaught - In Search of Sanity deserves a mention.

Alienigma is the Agent Steel album I go back to the most... love those big, chunky riffs and Bruce Hall's crazy vocals.

I've legitimately got some dumb tastes. Check this out:

Black Sabbath - Headless Cross
Judas Priest - Turbo
King Diamond - Abigail 2; Voodoo
Kiss - Hot In The Shade
Rush - Power Windows
Saxon - Destiny
Venom - Calm Before The Storm
WASP - Inside The Electric Circus

It's almost as if I deliberately go against the grain, but I swear I don't. These albums just capture me and so from my position, the hate for them is hard to understand.

I acknowledge the inexplicability of this list

Opeth's first two albums are the best in my opinion followed by My Arms, Your Hearse. THIS is when Opeth were completely original and mysterious. No other band in the world was making metal like this, completely original.

I got into them at Morningrise and remains my favourite by them and one of the best albums ever. No songs, just a hour of endless riffs and melodies, absolutely awesome. I actually went off them with Blackwater Park, that was the album that most fans jumped on but there was nothing like early Opeth. It was like a secret club.

Black Sabbath - Never Say Die
Bolt Thrower - Mercenary

How can Somewhere Far Beyond be said to be largely ignored by the band? Every time I’ve seen Guardian live they’ve played material off of it, and they’ve even done a bunch of anniversary shows over the last couple years where they play the whole album front-to-back.