Metal’s doors were kicked off in 1997, and suddenly everyone was invited to the party. While Metallica towered above everyone else, at least commercially, with the Reload album, and the likes of Emperor and Electric Wizard flew the flag for the underground, elsewhere it was very much a case of ‘anything goes’, from the Foo Fighters’ polished arena-grunge to The Prodigy’s revolutionary rave-rock mash-up to the stentorian, German-language industrial blitzkrieg of Rammstein. There really wasn’t another year like it, as these killer albums prove.
The Top 20 best metal albums of 1997

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