In 1995, Norwegian corpsepaint legends Immortal were on top of the world: With Mayhem’s Hellhammer sitting in on drums, vocalist/bassist Abbath and guitarist/lyricist Demonaz were high on the icy grimness of their own Battles in the North and opening for Morbid Angel on the European leg of the Domination tour.

With a few coughs at the beginning of “Sweet Leaf,” Tony Iommi officially hailed cannabis as the drug of choice for the kind of people who dug Black Sabbath.

While a pretty good case could be made for inducting either Rock for Light or I Against I into our esteemed Hall, the debut full-length by DC-cum-New York’s Bad Brains deserves the coveted nod; not just for its blazing punk/hardcore, but the circumstances surrounding its creation.

Cave In have had many musical identities since their inception in Methuen, MA, in 1995, but the one that first established them as underground heroes was the dizzying, face-ripping metal blowout now known the world over as Until Your Heart Stops.

Quicksand are as easy to classify as any band in our ever-expanding Hall of Fame: The New York quartet was post-hardcore in every sense of the term.

Death metal had never sounded so guttural and primal before Obituary’s 1989 debut, Slowly We Rot, infected record stores.

The word “metalcore” is so ingrained in modern extreme music, it seems unimaginable that there was a time when metal and hardcore were completely separate worlds.

When Darkthrone’s monumental epic, A Blaze in the Northern Sky, hit the shelves in 1991, it was an album of hesitant firsts: the first Norwegian black metal album (Mayhem’s Live in Leipzig came out earlier but with faulty distribution); the first major second-wave black metal album, globally (Czech group Master’s Hammer had released Ritual a year prior, but with less impact); the first truly blackened death metal album; and the first to chime DM’s death knell in popularity.

Of all the classic albums thus far inducted into Decibel’s Hall of Fame, none has had a greater influence on the death metal and black metal that succeeded it than Celtic Frost’s Morbid Tales.

They were the best band you never heard of. Unless you lived in the greater Boston area between 1989 and 1995, worked at Century Media, or happened to catch them on your local college radio station (or on their 1993 European tour with the Cro-Mags), Only Living Witness were virtual unknowns.