Devin Townsend Essentials

Prepare to be pummelled with metal of many stripes: heavy, progressive, extreme and beyond. This prolific Canadian stomps across genres under his different guises, doing his most punishing work with Strapping Young Lad's metallic wall-of-sound and branching out into Zappa-influenced prog rock, industrial and even ambient music under his own name and with the Devin Townsend Project. He's intense and heavy in any mode—it's no coincidence that song titles on 2009's Devin Townsend Project album Addicted all end in exclamation marks.