(written by Islander)

We aren’t quite finished with our 2025 LISTMANIA series, but we’re getting very close. As we’ve neared the end in many previous years, we’ve included a “List of Lists” assembled by Dutch writer Peter van der Ploeg for his To the Teeth metal blog, which began life in May of 2016, originally on Facebook and eventually expanding to SubStack, and this year we’re sharing his List of Lists again.

As in the past, Peter explains that he began the exercise by assembling a population of year-end lists from an international group of music sites. For the 2025 endeavor, he identified the following sources:

This year I’ve counted the relevant lists from Album of the Year, Angry Metal Guy (AN Grier, Steel Druhm), Bandcamp, Brooklyn Vegan, Consequence of Sound, Decibel, Invisible Oranges (Colin Dempsey, Josh Rioux), Meat Mead Metal, Metal Hammer, Metal Injection, Metal Storm, MetalSucks, No Clean Singing (Gonzo, Will Cifer), No Echo, Popmatters, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, The Needle Drop, The Quietus, To The Teeth, Toilet ov Hell, Treble and Zes Losse Tanden. Some magazines or blogs publish a lot of personal lists: I included a maximum of two, to prevent publication bias.

Altogether, these lists included a total of almost 300 albums. Peter then assigned point values to the selections based on the rankings they received at their original locations. He explains: Continue reading »

To the Teeth is the name of a Facebook-based metal blog that began life in May of 2016, and has expanded into a newsletter format. The proprietor, Dutch writer Peter van der Ploeg, regularly posts about new extreme metal songs and full releases, and as the year goes along he adds selected music to a growing Spotify playlist. He also has had a Reddit thread in which he often goes into greater depth about what appears more briefly at To the Teeth on FB.

Peter has posted his own personal 2021 Top 25 list, which you can see HERE, but he again compiled a “List of Lists”, as he has done in past years. To do that he began by assembling a population of 97 year-end lists from 26 international critics, magazines, blogs, and other publications. Those included a lot of “big platform” mainstream publications as well as lists from metal-only outlets such as our own; those 97 also included separate staff lists from some sites (such as our own). These places were the sources of the lists that Peter included in the aggregation process:

Angry Metal Guy, Bandcamp, Banger TV, Consequence of Sound, Cursed, Cvlt Nation, Decibel, Forbes, Heavy Music HQ, Invisible Oranges, Kerrang, Last Rites, Loudwire, Metal Hammer UK, Metal Hammer DE, Metal Insider, Metal Injection, Metal Sucks, Nine Circles, No Clean Singing, PopMatters, Revolver, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, The Quietus, To The Teeth, Toilet Ov Hell, Treble and We Are the Pit

All together, these lists included a total of 656 records. Continue reading »

To the Teeth is the name of a Facebook-based metal blog that began life in May of 2016. The proprietor, Dutch writer Peter van der Ploeg, regularly posts about new extreme metal songs and full releases, and as the year goes along he adds selected music to a growing Spotify playlist. He also has a Reddit thread in which he often goes into greater depth about what appears more briefly at To the Teeth on FB.

Peter has posted his own personal 2019 Top 50 list, which you can see HERE, but he again compiled a “List of Lists”, as he has done in past years. To do that he began by assembling a population of 117 year-end lists from 32 international critics, magazines, blogs, and other publications Those included a lot of “big platform” mainstream publications as well as lists from metal-only outlets such as our own; those 117 also included separate staff lists from some sites (such as our own). This year, these were the lists he included in the aggregation process: Continue reading »