Metal Stars Choose their Desert Island Discs

Heavy Metal Stars Pick their Essential Metal Albums

Feb 8, 2009

Metal stars including Children Of Bodom's Alexi Laiho Amon Amarth's Johann Hegg and My Dying Bride's Aaron Stainthorpe pick their metal island discs...

In this series of short interviews, Suite 101 asked a bunch of current metal stars to choose their own essential metal album.

Ozzy Osbourne's Bark At The Moon

“I could easily reel off ten or twenty albums but it’s so ****ing hard to choose just one. I’ll go with Bark At The Moon by Ozzy Osbourne just because I love every single song on that album and there’s some great ****ing guitar playing in there. I think Jake Lee is so underrated but he’s kicking some ass on this one definitely.”

“Highway To Hell – is that metal enough? I’d say AC/DC simply for the fact that so many people think they’re English. Here in the States they do anyway. I had someone say to me the other day that the best band to come out of Australia was like, Silverchair or some shit. I went: ‘What about AC/DC?’ Jesus! Whether you want to call them a metal band or a straight up rock band, AC/DC just ****ing rule.”

Johann Hegg of Viking Metallers Amon Amarth

RIDE THE LIGHTNING“Oh, that's difficult. There's so many I could say but I'll go with Ride The Lightning by Metallica. It's one of the essential albums, in my opinion anyways. There are a lot of other great albums I could pick but that stands out off the top of my head and it meant a lot to me as a kid. It's still probably my favourite Metallica album.”

Oli Sykes of Bring Me The Horizon picks: Killswitch Engage by Killswitch Engage

“For me it was one of the first albums that got me into metal and metalcore. Killswitch just do it perfectly really. If you like that kind of thing, they’re the epitomy of metalcore.”

“Master Of Puppets absolutely, Iron Maiden’s Killers – for some reason I really like the sound of that record, Vulgar Display Of Power, I would say for me the entire output of Accept. If I had to pick just one I would say Metal Heart because that record was one of those rare ones where every single song was just rock solid. I just love how those guys constructed songs. There were fast songs, there were slower songs – it was varied but it was the same high quality from top to bottom.”

My Dying Bride Singer's Essential Metal Album

“It’s going back a bit but this album was just utterly, utterly epic. That was also the major influence on me – maybe not on My Dying Bride as an entity but certainly on me personally. It got rave reviews everywhere so I went out and bought it and it was even better than they’d tried to make out. It’s just a phenomenal record.”

Click here for more essential metal albums according to Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Deicide's Steve Asheim, High On Fire's Matt Pike and more.

The copyright of the article Metal Stars Choose their Desert Island Discs in Metal Music is owned by Paul Travers. Permission to republish Metal Stars Choose their Desert Island Discs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.