Too Soon? Vince’s Best Metal Albums of 2020… So Far

My attention hasn’t been on new music in the first half of 2020 the way it normally is, distracted by pesky, inconsequential tidbits like a global pandemic, mass civil unrest, the birth of my daughter, relocating to upstate NY (for now, maybe longer?) and rehabbing from shoulder surgery.

That said, when I haven’t been tending to my garden, watching the trees change and the flowers bloom, meditating on the nature of friendship or chewing cud over the bias of age, I have been doing my best to keep up with the latest metal, ’cause Dio knows we need it now more than ever.

Here are my favorite metal albums of 2020 so far, in alphabetic order:

Black Crown Initiate – Violent Portraits of Doomed Escape (Century Media)
The Black Dahlia Murder – Verminous (Metal Blade)
Dool – Summerland (Prophecy)
Girish and the Chronicles – Rock the Highway (Lion’s Pride Music)
Insect Ark – The Vanishing (Profound Lore)
Intronaut – Fluid Existential Inversions (Metal Blade)
Night Flight Orchestra – Aeromantic (Nuclear Blast)
Oceans of Slumber – Oceans of Slumber (Century Media)
Ozzy Osbourne – Ordinary Man (Epic)
Poppy – I Disagree (Sumerian)
Sylosis – Cycle of Suffering (Nuclear Blast)