[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Somewhere In Time by Iron Maiden (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1986.
Country:
Overall rank: 1,242
Average rating: 78/100 (from 354 votes).

Tracks:
1. Caught Somewhere In Time
2. Wasted Years
3. Sea Of Madness
4. Heaven Can Wait
5. Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner
6. Stranger In A Strange Land
7. Deja-Vu
8. Alexander The Great (356-323 B.C.)

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[MadhattanJack]

This is generally considered to be Iron Maiden's most intricate and densely symbol-filled album cover ever, and indeed, one of the most densely cryptic album covers of all time. Entire articles have been written about it (this one for example) and the section about it in the album's Wikipedia article is twice as long as the rest of the text. And even those articles don't mention the symbols in the windows behind Cyborg Eddie's right leg — the "K" with the horizontal upper diacritic doesn't appear in the Unicode extended character set (the closest is the Cyrillic-Bashkir "KA" symbol Ҡ, but that's hardly conclusive). Nor is it listed anywhere as an occult symbol, or at least it's not among the common ones used by modern-day QAnon weirdos and such. The downward-pointing male sign is sometimes used as a symbol for gender equality, but this was 1986, so I'm not so sure about that either.

I've never actually heard the album, by the way. (I'd probably be too distracted by all the cover symbology to properly appreciate it.)

[Fischman]

This was an easy album for metal purists to dismiss with Maiden adding synths to their instrumentation.

But if you set aside such restrictive genre label constraints, you find an excellent album moving forward but without losing the band's core self. Some very catchy and still heavy tunes, and like Dio's Holy Diver (and infinitely better than Judas Priest's Turbo debacle), proving metal could update without selling its soul.