By DJ Monk

The Uber Rock Approved stampOver the course of a year, our Über team listens to literally hundreds of albums, and once again we set them the onerous task of selecting what they feel to have been the best new releases of the past 12 months.

In total, our crack team submitted almost 160 albums for consideration, with their lists then fed into our state-of-the-art musical abacus to calculate our final top ten albums of 2019.

Yesterday, we presented you with our writer’s individual selections. Today, the number crunching has been completed, and we present to you our final list of the ten albums which have most tickled our team’s aural cortexes over the past 12 months… and, in the best tradition of countdowns, we present it in reverse order, starting with…

  1. Conjuring Fate – ‘Curse Of The Fallen’

“…a metal album produced by metal fans for metal fans… and you really can’t say much better than that…” – DJ Monk.

  1. Morgan Rider And The Deep Dark River – ‘The Deep Dark River Quadrilogy Chapter II: Leviathan And The Deep, Dark Blue’

“…an epic album which will appeal to fans of the dankest black metal as much it will to those of folk music, as it ploughs a dark furrow somewhere between the two, possessing as it does the atmospherics of the former and the story-telling ability of the latter. Quite an achievement, and one beautifully realized” – DJ Monk.

  1. Killswitch Engage – ‘Atonement’

“…‘Atonement’ does still deliver a healthy dose of metal over 11 tracks and is definitely worth your attention” – Phil Cooper.

=6. Danny Bryant – ‘Means Of Escape’

“This is 21st Century blues incarnate” – DJ Monk.

=6. Slipknot – ‘We Are Not Your Kind’

  1. Rammstein – ‘Rammstein’

  1. Amon Amarth – ‘Beserker’

“…some of the best work that the band has written to date” – Phil Cooper.

  1. The HU – ‘The Gereg’

  1. The Wildhearts – ‘Renaissance Men’

“My favourite band is back and they have a brilliant new album!” – Juan Pablo Mazzola.

And the winner is….

  1. Sabaton – ‘The Great War’

“… they really do seem to continue to go from strength to strength. Considering the difficult and depressing topic of the tragedy of the First World War, this album manages to capture that sensation without it being overbearing. Sabaton have one again managed to do justice to those who fought, while also managing to convey stories of those who managed to prevail against overwhelming odds” – Jonny Bakes.