Best Progressive Rock + Metal Album of Each Year Since 1983

There are few music kinds extra divisive than progressive rock and progressive metallic; for essentially the most half, you both love them or hate them (with just about no room to land someplace in-between).

You see, dozens of wholly distinctive artists – from Pink Floyd, Genesis, Jethro Tull and King Crimson to Sure, VDGG and ELP – expanded the variability and recognition of prog rock by the preliminary half of the Nineteen Seventies. With their emphasis on complicated musicianship, literary songwriting, prolonged compositions and genre-splicing experimentation (involving classical, people, jazz, and so forth.), it’s simple to see why.

Though they saved going into the subsequent decade – and past – the rise of punk, new wave and different extra accessible approaches meant that prog rock misplaced plenty of its luster because the Nineteen Seventies concluded.

Enter neo-prog, which arose within the early Eighties because of rock acts similar to Marillion, IQ, Pallas and Twelfth Night time. Across the similar time, heavier bands – particularly, Fates Warning and Queensrÿche – started fusing heavy metallic with these aforementioned different genres and methods. That stated, it was arguably Dream Theater’s 1989 introduction – When Dream and Day Unite – that first totally mixed the aggressiveness of Judas Priest, Metallica and Iron Maiden with the flashy trickiness of these Nineteen Seventies prog rock icons.

From there – and on the threat of creating this intro much more verbose – the next 30+ years have seen numerous different teams construct upon these templates. Irrespective of the place they match alongside the rock and metallic spectrum, heavyweights Spock’s Beard, Porcupine Tree, The Mars Volta, Riverside, Opeth, Ayreon, Haken, Ache of Salvation and BTBAM – to call a number of – have allowed progressive music to stay ingeniously subtle and adventurous.

READ MORE: 10 Finest New Prog Rock + Metallic Bands Since 2010, Chosen By Haken’s Ross Jennings

After all, that inevitable prompts followers to debate which prog artists and albums nonetheless reign supreme.

Properly, that’s precisely what this checklist goals to reply, at the very least to a level. To maintain issues easy and arranged, we’re the biggest prog rock and/or metallic album of every yr since 1983. Be they apparent selections or lesser-known (and certain controversial) picks, each represents the height of prog at the moment.

As at all times, we’d like to understand how you are feeling about our alternatives, in addition to which albums you’d put of their place.