ARGUIN’ TIME! METAL HAMMER’S “BEST DEBUT ALBUM OF THE PAST 25 YEARS” LIST

What was the best debut metal album of the past 25 years?? Metal Hammer wanted to know, so they asked their readers… and over 16,000 responded.

Now, if there’s anything my otherwise worthless Communications Studies college degree taught me, it’s how to parse survey results. Any survey conducted in the manner of Metal Hammer’s is obviously going to have skewed results; a poll held online is probably going to skew younger, the magazine’s readers probably skew younger to begin with, the magazine’s coverage choices might be biased thereby attracting readers with certain tastes, newer albums are likely to be remembered more freshly than older ones, UK metalheads might have different tastes than those elsewhere, the questions were probably not posed in a scientific manner, and on and on and on. But that doesn’t mean this survey isn’t worth something: while it might not show how the general world populace views all metal debuts released in the past 25 years, it does show what a large group of Metal Hammer readers think. And that is certainly interesting!

My point is this: don’t get too butthurt when you see that Korn’s debut was named #2, above GN’R’s Appetite for Destruction no less. Or that Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory appears far above Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled. But man… that does kinda sting.

View the rest of the list here — including the shocking-but-not-really #1 choice — then come back to MS for some good old-fashioned name-calling and flame-warring.

-VN

Thanks: Mat Bourbon