While other subgenres weather peaks and valleys of relevance, progressive metal is always there, testing the boundaries of what heavy musicians think they can do. It’s no surprise, then, that the genre had yet another stellar year in 2023, with so many of its albums wowing both critics and fans.
The past 12 months’ great prog metal albums came from all directions. While such experimentalists as Enslaved and Tesseract stayed the course and stuck with the genre, we saw arena-metal heavyweights like Avenged Sevenfold barge in. Newcomers such as Unprocessed also announced their worth more loudly than ever before. All these bands and more are celebrated below, as Metal Hammer names the 10 best prog metal albums of 2023:
