Derek: Since this is the last Metal Tuesday of the year, once again I’ve asked The Brother to come on and give his top albums of the year. As most of you know, his tastes in metal are both similar and different than me. Enjoy!

2021 Top Albums

Overall, I would say I overall liked this year’s crop of music better than last year’s, but not to the degree of 2019 (which was really just an amazing year). New bands I came across and really liked this year were Nahtram (instrumental folk-black metal) and Stortregn (melodic tech death)

Top Album

In Mourning – The Bleeding Veil

It took me a few spins to really get into this album. The last In Mourning album that took a while for me to “get” was The Weight of Oceans and that has become my favorite In Mourning album – so there is a lot of hope that The Bleeding Veil continues to get better (and I already really like it). This album sees In Mourning play with the more progressive elements of their sound, but still really bring the hammer when its time.

Death

It was a pretty good year for death (and related extreme) metal. I had to cut a lot of good albums to get to this list of five. Like last year, these are in alphabetical order.

No Death

In the realm of “everything else” there was a great crop this year. I really liked a lot of instrumental rock and shred. And post rock. Really, just a lot of great music.

$God is an Astronaut - Ghost Tapes \#10$