Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest followed by Liberate Te Ex Inferis. Those are their first two with most of their classic lineup. They had a different vocalist for the first two albums before those which are also good, but different. Funeral of God is probably their most popular aside from the first two. I would say it has the best production as well. If I'm being honest I've only listened to their later stuff a few times, but it was all fairly good. They don't really have a bad album other than self-titled, and that's only because they used a weird electronic drum v-kit. Still some bangers on there though.
What's cool is that their vocalist Dan Weyandt cites Carcass as a big influence for his vocals and you can definitely hear it on those first two albums before he came into his own style. And then later on, Jimmy Ryan from Haste the Day cites Dan as his main vocal influence. It's pretty cool to hear from one artist to the next.
I wouldn't start with that one but my favorite Zao album is The Well-Intentioned Virus, which gets quite sludgy at times.
My favorite album of 2015. Holy cow that was a decade ago????? This band turned me on to the epic heavy metal genre in earnest. Would kill to see them live some day
Running the Zao discography in one of my Discords and we are currently on The Funeral of God. Pretty solid so far but I can objectively say Where Blood and Fire is their best. That album had zero skips while some of their others suffer from some odd choices.
This album is exactly what I wanted from them with their next album. Still very much TROB, but a tighter run time and no filler. Possible metal AOTY for me already tbh, but it's still january.
There was a point in my life I wanna say in 2006 where I had time to download either an unearth album or all that remains. Thank god I went with unearth.
This Darkened Heart and The Fall of Ideals were gateway albums as a teen for getting me into the dumb shit I post here nowadays. The follow-up to The Fall of Ideals was decent, but everything after that combined with Phil's political transformation and the fact I passed by that sound made it has been pretty shitty.
Yeah I'll still ride for those two records but beyond those it gets pretty dismal especially after Oli's passing. Also Ken Susi going from AILD to ATR is very funny. Getting what he deserves I guess.