Reports from the Underground: 2021 Albums of the Year

Tier 5: Honorable mentions

Hello readers, Sebastian here, if you have been a fan of the blog for a while, you may have noticed a trend: we have peaks and valleys of how often certain genres get covered by the blog. Understandably, what gets covered is determined by what genres our reviewers are interested in. And with a long history of people coming and going, eras arise out of who contributes to keeping this subway running. There was an early era of a lot of traditional prog metal stuff being covered along with a focus in power metal thanks to Sam, Dylan, and Matt. Then there was a rise in eclectic prog rock, metalcore, and wacky stuff from Stephen, Josh, and Tyler. Later is when I joined with Evan, Callum, and Mike which turned out to be a kind of progressive death metal boon. Now with the fresh batch of wide-eyed writers, it seems we have a collective focus on avant garde metal and prog/tech death stuff. You’ll see a lot of this reflected in our album of the year picks.

Before we delve into our top picks of 2021, I wish to present you all with a list of all the honorable mentions that we’ve reviewed during the past year. These are all albums that we scored at least an 8/10 but for whatever reason, did not end up in our final writeups. Each of these is a clickable link to the original review. They’re all presented in the following format:

dd-mm-yyyy   Band   Album   Genres  Country

I apologize if they don’t look super illustrative with this presentation, however, this can serve to be a good resource to navigate what we reviewed over the year.