2005 was a wild time to get into heavy music — especially from a technological standpoint.
20 years ago, a lot of us were still only just starting to rip metal CDs to load onto our colorless, imageless iPods (you know, the ones with that new-fangled clickwheel). While MTV were still airing a mix of nu-metal favorites and rising rock talent, a little company called YouTube began streaming that year, too – eventually changing the way we’d watch music videos forevermore.
This was also the year where Guitar Hero taught us that you didn’t need a real six-string to shred, just a Gibson-shaped piece of plastic and a few colorful buttons. Indeed, some of the biggest metal makers of the era (including some on this list) would end up bringing the gaming and music communities together through that iconic video game series.
Whether we pumped them through our stereos, our personal devices or our PlayStations, these were 13 of the greatest heavy-music albums 2005 had to offer.
Avenged Sevenfold – City of Evil
Following a pair of underground albums that put them on the metalcore map, Avenged Sevenfold signed to major label Warner Bros., set course for “Bat Country” and revolutionized the Aughts metal landscape after firmly setting up roots in their adventurous City of Evil.
A7X were certainly no strangers to melody ahead of City of Evil, but it’s fair to say that it’s a record that finds vocalist M. Shadows more fully focused on his tuneful, if raspy, cleans more so than screams, while bright-eyed bangers like “Beast and the Harlot” reveled in outright giddy power-metal influences that seemed way more European in nature than the OC hardcore scene that birthed the band.
Then again, the “Bat Country” video was a slick-yet-sinister (or should we say Synyster) salute to Sin City-style debauchery, and it transformed A7X into renegade MTV favorites for years to come.
The Black Dahlia Murder – Miasma
Vampire youth, keep raising your cups to the ne’er waning moon.
Even back in 2005, it was clear that the Black Dahlia Murder’s Miasma was ripened to putrid perfection. Take a whiff of it these days and it’s still grotesquely potent and on-point.
For their second longplayer, the Michigan-made melodeath crew near-perfected their speed-forward songcraft, peppering it all with blinding shred, blasts galore and sorrow-melodied riffage that sounded more Scandinavian than mid-Western. God-tier shrieker Trevor Strnad was a feral force to be reckoned with on enduring all-timers like the blazing “Statutory Ape,” “A Vulgar Picture” and sin-celebrating title track.
A ruthless and riotously raging statement from a then still-rising force.
Black Label Society – Mafia
Zakk Wylde and the rest of the Society were plenty fired up when they hit the studio to make their sixth and quite possibly most-beloved full-length, Mafia. It’s a toweringly groove-heavy achievement filled with apocalyptic roadhouse rockers and Southern-sludge greatness (“Fire It Up,” “Suicide Messiah,” “You Must Be Blind” ), while Wylde’s performances across the LP hit the bullseye with hard-squealing vibrato, wah-crushed blues-metal scalework and a rasp-heavy drawl.
The record likewise finds Wylde at his most tender, via the tributary piano ballad “In This River,” written before his friend and fellow shredder Dimebag Darrell’s tragic onstage shooting death in 2004, but dedicated to him forevermore.
If you hadn’t already been brought into the family by this point, Mafia was likely the record that had you pledging allegiance to BLS forevermore.
Bullet for My Valentine – The Poison
While it was given a most-fitting Valentine’s Day release in the U.S. back in 2006, Bullet for My Valentine’s melo-core debut album was technically out in the U.K. in the fall of 2005. Pick your poison when it comes to the official release date, but nevertheless, the Welsh band’s mix of pinch-squealing severity, jud-judding breakdowns and ultra-melodic hook-making went down super smooth for a lot of metal fans back in the mid Aughts.
The Poison is a heady concoction of fast-and-furious metalcore shredding, Maiden-leaning guitar galloping and sugary, emo-esque choruses (check the jet-black-banged, sad boi sensitivity frontman Matthew Tuck tumbles out on “Tears Don’t Fall”). Having gone gold in the U.S. and selling more than a million copies worldwide, Bullet for My Valentine’s first shot left a mark.
Fittingly, they’re playing the album on a hefty 20th anniversary tour with Trivium this year.
Dream Theater – Octavarium
Dream Theater don’t write songs, they write goddamn suites, and the progressive metal titans’ eighth album, Octavarium, is packed with some of their best.
Clocking in at nearly 76 minutes, it’s an ambitious concept record themed around the musical octave, with each song delegated to a different key — a fittingly nerdy conceit for a band formed at the Berklee College of Music.
It all culminates in the title track and what might be Dream Theater’s single greatest song: a towering five-part, half-hour spectacle that’s operatic, psychedelic, heavy, shreddy and dizzyingly complex.
Gojira – From Mars to Sirius
An out-of-this-world breakthrough for the then-rising French progressive metal force, From Mars to Sirius was a major revelation when it dropped in 2005. The band’s third album remains a unendingly heavy and proudly eco-conscious statement, with vocalist-guitarist Joe Duplantier’s climate-focused lyrics around a dying planet and the ensuing environmental fallout resonating more and more each year.
Throughout, the music contorts from brutal to bleakly beautiful, while Joe’s brother, drummer Mario Duplantier, puts on a bombastically percussive clinic of punishing grooves and extreme blasts.
From the music to the content, it was clear that the backbone of Gojira’s sound was indeed “The Heaviest Matter of the Universe.”
Job for a Cowboy – Doom
It’s not even a full-length album, but Job for a Cowboy’s seminal 2005 EP, Doom, is arguably the most influential deathcore release of all time.
Arriving about a year-and-a-half before the genre really took off, this seven-song project was an instant yet polarizing smash hit that set the bree-bree-and-breakdowns template for innumerable bands in the years that followed. JFAC would evolve into more of a technical death-metal sound and ditch the pig squeals, but Doom remains the band’s most iconic moment.
The viral SpongeBob video certainly didn’t hurt in turning it into a pop-cultural moment.
Judas Priest – Angel of Retribution
A lot of hype and expectation surrounded Priest’s Angel of Retribution. That’s only natural – the band’s 15th album was their first with legendary frontman Rob Halford back on the mic since 1990’s eternal Painkiller. Fortunately, the British titans’ first release of their post-Ripper Owens era delivered big — a true triumph from these gods, to paraphrase the record’s opening “Judas Rising.”
Angel of Retribution is a brawny bruiser filled with back-to-basics Priest-ing (“Judas Rising”), twin-solo mastery (“Deal With the Devil”) and a helluva lot of self-referential lore-building (“Demonizer”).
While it’s not necessarily as innovative a release as the title to ground-pounding lead single “Revolution” would suggest, hearing Halford’s hearty eagle-screech working in tandem with one of rock’s most signature guitar sounds stood among 2005’s biggest joys.
Korn – See You on the Other Side
Collaborating with a pop production team is often a big red flag for rock bands, but working with producers The Matrix (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Shakira) injected new life into Korn on their seventh album, the aptly titled See You on the Other Side.
That new life was much needed considering the record was their first as a quartet after the departure of long-time guitarist Brian “Head” Welch and would prove to be their last with original drummer David Silveria.
Amid all these shakeups, Korn crafted legitimately bangin’ singles worthy of their canon with “Coming Undone” and “Twisted Transistor,” combining heaviness and poppiness at their best.
Mudvayne – Lost and Found
While 2002’s The End of All Things to Come has its moments, Mudvayne themselves believed that the L.D. 50 follow-up was a little too slick for their liking. The nu-metal quartet apparently got their footing again while making Lost and Found, specifically while hammering out a bunch of raw and raging arrangements at a remote Northern California ranch property. Their perseverance clearly paid off, with the record going gold shortly after its release in 2005 (its since been certified platinum).
Exploring Lost and Found today, you’ll discover some of Mudvayne’s most thrashed-and-grooved statements (Grammy-nominated first single “Determined”), as well as bruising hard-rock moodiness (“Forget to Remember”) and nu-metal hookcraft akin to scene peers like Linkin Park (the band’s biggest hit “Happy?”).
Nine Inch Nails – With Teeth
Following the expansive, wild-eyed ambition of 1999 double-LP The Fragile, Trent Reznor crossed over into the new millennium with substance issues and a bad case of writer’s block. Nine Inch Nails’ follow-up, With Teeth, arose as the industrial-rock impresario navigated a newfound sobriety, and the resultant release found him invigorated with a lean and wholly vital set of songs.
From its moments of spacious, yearning gloom-house (“All the Love in This World”) to its hook-forward nihilism (“Every Day Is Exactly the Same”) to its motherboard-exploding synth-rock (“The Hand That Feeds”) and one of NIN’s most sleekly sensual club grooves (“Only”), it’s fair to say that With Teeth still has a lot of bite all these years later.
Queens of the Stone Age – Lullabies to Paralyze
Queens of the Stone Age were in a bit of a weird spot following the breakout success of 2002’s Songs for the Deaf. Following periods of reportedly unhinged and even violent behavior, wildcard bassist-vocalist Nick Oliveri was bounced from the band, while co-vocalist and Screaming Trees’ frontman Mark Lanegan only made minor contributions to the LP.
Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl was off the drums, though Joey Castillo made for a strong, hammer-down substitution. Wildly, Lullabies to Paralyze also features guest spots from ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Garbage vocalist Shirley Manson and comedian Jack Black, so it seemed like Josh Homme was still in good collaborative company in the mid Aughts, despite some lineup turmoil.
While steered by adreno-punked first single “Little Sister” — still one of Queens’ most enduring anthems — the desert rockers also brought a profoundly dark and gloomy veneer to antisocial creepers like “The Blood Is Love.” It may be their record with the highest highs and the lowest lows, but all of it stopped us in dead in our tracks.
Fully paralyzed us, if you will.
System of a Down – Mesmerize/Hypnotize
System of a Down doubled their fun in 2005 by delivering their two-chaptered opus, Mesmerize and Hypnotize.
Released just six months apart, there is a natural cohesiveness coursing through the band’s fourth and fifth full-length releases. Nevertheless, that also means a zany headiness was injected into 23 tunes that were inspired by black metal and Motown, but likewise advanced SOAD’s uniquely folk-spiked nu-metal.
The push and pull mean its most populist pit-pleasers could be defiantly political (“B.Y.O.B.”) while other highlights were isolation anthems that brought metal crowds together (“Lonely Day”).
While feverishly ambitious, the two-fer also marked a serious burn-out period for SOAD, who would head on an extended hiatus the following year, and have still only released two more songs together in the ensuing 20 years since.