This French-Canadian band’s second album threw down the gauntlet so hard in 1996, it cracked the floorboards. Impossibly fast, dizzyingly complex, and propelled by the manic drumming of Flo Mounier, death metal’s own Neil Peart (like Rush’s drummer, he never seemed to play the same beat twice), it combined the guttural energy of grindcore with the labyrinthine song structures of the most progressive death metal of the time. It’s a record bands (including Cryptopsy themselves, honestly) are still trying to measure up to, decades later.

– Phil Freeman