The 11 Best '80s Prog Metal Albums (Ranked)

Here are the 11 best ‘80s prog metal albums (ranked)!

We've already ranked the 11 best prog rock albums of the 1970s (when the style began, more or less). So, we figured it was time to do the same for the records that kickstarted progressive metal during the second half of the 1980s.

As we discussed in our feature on the history of prog metal in 21 albums, it was artists such as Fates Warning, Queensrÿche and Voivod who played the biggest roles in getting the subgenre going. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they made the greatest LPs of their generation, though, nor does it mean that everything they did in the 1980s was golden (or even suitable for this list).

On the contrary, those bands — and a few others — didn’t really get tricky and fantastical until after their debuts. Even so, they still favored heavy metal, thrash metal, power metal and/or other templates since the true birth of progressive metal as we know it today didn’t come until Dream Theater’s 1992 classic Images and Words gained widespread attention for mixing the heaviness of Metallica with the complexity of Yes.

Still, there are plenty of collections from the 1980s that deserve their flowers (which is why we’ve limited ourselves to no more than two picks from each band). You can probably guess a few of the ones we chose, but where they land in our list of 11 might be surprising.

So, tally up your own choices and then see how they compare to our ranking of the 11 best ‘80s prog metal albums!

Would you swap any placements for these albums? Let us know!