Here we go again! But where does the time go? It's seems like yesterday that we were ringing in 2012! Like last year, we're doing the same holiday-themed countdown of the finest slabs of metal this past year had to offer, voted by the devout scribes here at BraveWords.com! Hence the name The 12 Days Of Metal. What does "slab" actually mean? We're talking studio albums. No compilations, rerecordings, live albums etc… Just pure metal, all killer no filler!

These are the 12 albums (yeah, we still use that old school term!) that you must have in your collection!

Let's rock!

2012 … The 12 Days Of Metal

3) ACCEPT - Stalingrad (Nuclear Blast)

We haven't seen success stories like this very often, these German metal legends giving us another gift with new singer Mark Tornillo, who replaced original singer Udo Dirkschneider behind the mic for the reunion when the U.D.O. frontman made it brutally clear he wasn’t interested.

“I guess we’re just firing on all cylinders at the moment,” guitarist Wolf Hoffmann told BraveWords' Carl Begai back in May. “We were away for quite some time, so maybe that recharged out batteries enough to give us the energy to keep going like this, but sometimes I ask myself how we’ve managed to do it again. I don’t know. We just go out and do it.”

Months of touring behind classic and new Blood Of The Nations material quite naturally tightened the bonds of this new Accept incarnation, suggesting the band was much more focused going in to do Stalingrad.

“It wasn’t dramatically different,” Hoffmann says of the creative process. “The only difference was that we were, as you said, a little more in tune with what we were going for. When we made Blood Of The Nations we were fishing a little bit; where does Accept belong in 2010? We weren’t sure if we should go the totally old school way or of we should try to incorporate some newer elements in out sound. But, because everything worked out so well with Blood Of The Nations we kind of decided not to change a winning formula. We just tried to come up with new songs that were as good as the one on Blood Of The Nations. The ideas on Stalingrad are fresh along the same lines, and that was our goal.”

Read the entire interview here.

2012 … The 12 Days Of Metal

12) DYING FETUS – Reign Supreme (Relapse Records)

11) SLASH – Apocalyptic Love (Dik Hayd)

10) RUSH – Clockwork Angels (Anthem)

9) THE CULT – Choice Of Weapon (Cooking Vinyl)

8) ANAAL NATHRAKH - Vanitas (Candlelight)

7) KREATOR - Phantom Antichrist (Nuclear Blast)

6) OVERKILL - The Electric Age (eOne)

5) CANNIBAL CORPSE – Torture (Metal Blade)

4) KISS – Monster (Ume)

3) ACCEPT - Stalingrad (Nuclear Blast)

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