Each and every year we do our best to bring you the latest and greatest in Hard Rock and Metal. While we can’t bring you every new album and every new artist there is, we do bring you the best ones there are whether they are old school favorites or brand new artists you may not have heard of before.

2012 gave us many great new Hard Rock & Metal songs and even brought in some great new artists as well. That’s why we are here to present to you, our Top 20 songs of 2012 as well as a few honorable mentions here in our annual awards show.

The winners are as follows in their ‘Best of’ categories for 2012:

Most Obscene Song: Dethklok – I Ejaculate Fire

If you haven’t heard this song from Dethklok, do yourself a favor and look up the video on youtube. Don’t watch it in front of your mom though, because any normal red blooded individual might find it offensive. Us Rockers/Metal heads aren’t exactly normal though, so you’ll be glued and intrigued. Perhaps a little grossed out too if your stomach is uneasy.

Best Hard Rock Semi-Ballad: In This Moment – Scarlet

Why not have an actual Ballad of the year? It’s simple. We like Hard Rock & Metal. We like guitars, drums, the whole nine yards. That doesn’t mean though that you can’t mix in something that’s a bit of a ballad as well. In This moment gives us probably one of the best rounded songs of 2012 with ‘Scarlet’ and is definitely one of the better songs off their album ‘Blood.’

 Best Album Lead Off: Shadows Fall – The Unknown

An album at times can be made or broken by the very first sounds you hear. It’s why many artists will put some sort of ambiance as their intro to the album instead of an actual song. That idea that if the first one is bad, the rest might be downhill as well. Shadows Fall wasn’t afraid at all of their lead off track ‘The Unknown’ and it set us up for one of the best albums of 2012 ‘Fire From The Sky.’

Feel Good Song of The Year: Shinedown – Bully

As we reflect back on all the events in 2012, sometimes it takes a song to send the right message to everyone out there. Sure sometimes messages can get skewed and used for an agenda, but other times they are there to say “Hey, Wake up!” – Shinedown did a great job with this in their song ‘Bully’ trying to send a message to young teens and adults a like that at the end of the day we’re all in this together and we can all take on those who may not be so nice, just so long as we stick together though it all.

- TOP 20 - 

These songs were the best of the best. A year that brought us some new style as well as some great music to bang our heads to. A year that we thought was going to be lacking ended up being pretty awesome in the world of Hard Rock & Metal! Here are the Top 20 Hard Rock & Metal songs of 2012!:

20 - Three Days Grace – Operate
19 - Miss May I – Hey Mister
18 - Prong – Eternal Heat
17 - Papa Roach – Where Did The Angels Go
16 - 10 Years – Knives
15 - Tremonti – Wish You Well
14 - Slash – Shots Fired
13 - Edge of Attack – Rise Above
12 - Stone Sour – Absolute Zero
11 - Marion Crane – Illegitimate
10 - Shinedown – Enemies
9 - Adrenaline Mob – Undaunted
8 - In This Moment – Blood
7 - Shadows Fall – Lost Within
6 - Deftones – Tempest
5 - Lacuna Coil – I Don’t Believe in Tomorrow
4 - Lyriel – Parting
3 - Stone Sour – Tired
2 - Marion Crane – The Cycle

and the #1 Hard Rock & Metal Song of 2012 is:

Edge of Attack – Set The World Aflame (feat. PelleK)

Every once in awhile you stumble across something special. Sometimes it’s just a single song and sometimes it’s an entire album. Other times it’s the artists themselves. In this case it’s all 3. Our #1 song of 2012 came to us by complete accident in our efforts to search out up and coming indie Hard Rock & metal bands. The rest of the world is looking at artists like Halestorm and Stone Sour right now. While those artists are the here and now, they are no where near what the future of what Hard Rock & metal should be. We call ourselves THE Hard Rock & Metal station and we look for the artists that punctuate the mixed genre that we have put together. That is why it is with great pleasure, that we are pleased to award for Song of the Year to go to none other than Edge of Attack with their song ‘Set the World Aflame.’

We had the pleasure of featuring Edge of Attack this past May and we knew from the onset that they were something special. We had no idea the treat we were in for when we received a copy of their unreleased album Edge of Attack and the moment it hit our desk last spring, we knew right then and there these guys had a big future in the music industry. Mark our words folks, Edge of Attack is going to be one of the biggest acts this generation and we feel privileged to be one of the first stations to get to play their music for a wide audience across the globe. While the original release of their album never hit the stores, their full album release due to signing with ‘Spread the Metal Records,’ will be out next month and they once again will be featured in February. Congratulations to Edge of Attack on a job well done.

and our final and biggest award of 2012:

The Hard Rock & Metal Album of The Year:

Marion Crane – The New Religion

When choosing an album of the year it’s much more than trying to figure out which album had the best songs. It’s about finding the album that not only had some of the best songs, but was also consistent with their music throughout. Any artist can throw together two or three good songs and feel good about what they have released. For Marion Crane you can tell they put their heart and soul into ‘The New Religion’ and it is hands down the most complete Hard Rock & Metal album of 2012. We reviewed ‘The New Religion’ earlier this year and to quote:

‘The New Religion’ starts off with the title track of the same name by wasting no time giving you a rough almost grunge style guitar, and then hits you loud and hard almost immediately letting you know that Marion Crane is here to Rock as they paint a picture of a modern society full of human drones that might as well be ready for the world to end in an apocalyptic manner. After it’s over we realize that we’re just getting started with one of the best actual Hard Rock albums we’ve heard in a long time.

The Entire album from Marion Crane is one that you don’t want to stop listening to start to finish. It’s almost like a drug that you don’t want to put down because you want to hear what comes next. There are so many instances where you think you know a song in this album and then Chris Stanton hits you with some of the most enjoyable guitar solos we’ve heard in a long while that make you think in your head (or even say out loud), “Fuck Yes!” Add on top of those this rolling bass lines of Kyle Munford, the hard hitting drumming of Adam Tillis, and the vocals of S. Thomas Crane; who reminds us of the late 90′s and early 2000′s when Hard Rock singers were masculine and could dominate the music that was behind them, and you’ve got the perfect musical package.

This is the first time in Nuclear Fallout Radio’s history that we have awarded our top honor to a brand new/up and coming artist. Marion Crane is on the Hard Rock scene and they are surely here to stay. If there’s one artist you want to tell your friends about, it’s these guys and look for many great things coming from them in the years to come. They are well deserving of album of the year as no other artist was able to put together a more complete, a more LOUD, 2012 album than they were able to. Congrats to them on their accomplishments and we wish them the very, very best in the years to come!

2012 brought us some great music and we can only hope that 2013 continues to do the same as well.