As my Christmas present to you all, here is a list of my top-10 metal tunes of 2020, in no particular order. It's a mixed bag of genres and styles, but they're all bangers!

First up, The Terror Begins by Make Them Die Slowly. Horror-movie inspired grind/black/industrial from Mick Kenney and Duncan Wilkins.
https://t.co/0QboX6EBMt
Next, Northern Irish thrashers @gamabomb, with Lords of the Hellfire Club from their excellent new album Sea Savage. https://t.co/fdR16ky3mi
Now for something a bit off the beaten track: brilliant New York black metal experimentalists @imperialnyc's City Swine.
https://t.co/HDKgfe7yDF
Time for something a bit more accessible: this year's best symphonic metal from Sweden's @eleine. Here's the title track from the fantastic 'Dancing in Hell' album.
https://t.co/mvJ650pgcH
From the symphonic to the raw and grungy: Chelsea Wolfe and Jess Gowrie's new band Mrs Piss with Downers Surrounded by Uppers. https://t.co/yvdhtsljWW
Next, the most affecting metal song to come out this year, Tuskegee. @zealandardor's unique combination of black metal, blues and spirituals makes them the most exciting band in metal imo. https://t.co/hq4kTDBd1V
More great black metal, A Hostile Fate from Manchester's @Winterfylleth: https://t.co/A7cnFKq7oK
Time for some Tech-Death: for me, @contrarianband are particularly strong in combining spectacular musicianship with great songwriting, as demonstrated here on In a Blink of an Eye: https://t.co/m46if1xutV
Now turning down the tempo with a haunting track from Hungarian duo The Moon and Nightspirit, Aether. https://t.co/sn7ppwoCCP
And finally, for a more mainstream sound, Fearless by Sweden's @Amaranthemetal, from their excellent album 'Manifest' https://t.co/2UlWchslA6

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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