2011 wasn’t exactly a banner year for metal. I see a world of metal caught in transition. The aughts are behind us, and what the new decade will hold is anyone’s guess, really. Of course, none of this is to say that there aren’t nuggets of face-melting joy. Here are fifteen records that stand out from the pack among this year’s crop of metal records, conveniently ranked from least most awesome to most most awesome.

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Hailing from the United Kingdom, Evile are sure standouts in the field of thrash, leaning more toward a gritty, Bay Area sound and aesthetic than cartoonish crossover revival. Their most recent Earache release, Five Serpent’s Teeth, continues along these lines, proving that the thrash revival may just be more than a passing trend. The album is especially impressive, given that the band suffered a tragic blow prior to its creation: Original bassist Mike Alexander succumbed to a blood clot in the lungs in October of 2009. Fittingly, Five Serpent’s Teeth includes a tribute to Alexander in the form of a riff he used when warming up before a show.

We recently spoke to lead guitarist Ol Drake about Alexander’s passing, Rock Band, touring with his idols, and the future of the Evile, as well as thrash at large. Read our full chat after the jump!

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If anyone needs any proof that the “New Wave of Thrash Metal” party is over, they should listen to Worlds Torn Asunder. It’s not that the record is offensively bad. Not by a damn sight. It’s just that there’s nothing here we haven’t heard before, at least twenty times, since Reign in Blood dropped in 1986.

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Confession: I far prefer Brutal Truth’s more recent work to the stuff I cut my teeth on back in the 90s. While some bands shoot their wad completely in the first three records (I’m looking at you, Metallica), other bands mature with age. Brutal Truth belongs squarely in the latter camp, with End Time standing as a perfect example of how the band has grown as songwriters.

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Despite some rock-solid contributions to the genre, instrumental metal is an oft-overlooked idiom. Odyssey’s new record An Abstract Existence stands as a triumph in the genre, blending a love of thrash, death metal, fusion jazz and prog rock. Forget neoclassical metal and mathcore. Odyssey are what happens when a tech death band ingests too much classic Yes and fires their vocalist. In case you’re wondering that’s a very, very good thing.

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Full disclosure: I yearn for the Golden Age of Thrash, when young men in denim battle vests covered in Sodom and Exodus patches roamed o’er the land. While the 1980s are dead and gone, thrash lives. No one is more keyed into the thriving thrash scene than Diamond Plate. Their new album, Generation Why?, complete with audio samples questioning patriotism and authority, shows that Earache still know a winner when they see one.

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