The 25 Best Metal Songs of the Last 25 Years

Here are the 25 best metal songs of the last 25 years.

It has been a wild ride since 2000 dawned a new age for metal with an explosion of subgenres and hybridization that still the driving force behind so much new music today.

It’s really been a catch-all quarter century — classic styles roared back after some troublesome years, navigating the life, death and rebirth cycles that is the story of so many pre-internet bands.

For the new entrants, many styles never waned in popularity — at least not to the degree thrash and hair metal, for example, did in the ’90s. Metalcore, in particular, has been perhaps the most surprising in its keen ability to continuously evolve, even becoming a cottage subgenre thriving in its own sort of bubble.

We had the broad scope of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal ultimately bound by their adoration of heavy rhythms, the tech-death explosion, new sonic depths to chart with deathcore and djent… even power metal caught the attention of the U.S. at one critical moment in cross-culture history.

Subgenres are endless and so is the vast sea of music the last 25 years have produced. Cutting down hundreds of thousands of songs to just 25 to represent that timeframe? Are we out of our minds? That’s for you to judge after seeing which ones received the honor below.