MEGADETH released their fourth album, "Rust in Peace," on September 24th, 1990, through Capitol Records, produced by Dave Mustaine with Mike Clink at Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park. It was the first MEGADETH album to feature guitarist Marty Friedman and drummer Nick Menza, and that lineup — with bassist David Ellefson — is generally considered the finest the band ever assembled. "Holy Wars... The Punishment Due" and "Hangar 18" went out as singles, the latter winning Top Radio Cut at the 1991 Foundations Forum. The album was nominated for a Grammy, appears in "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die," and has been called a genre-defining work by Decibel and a new standard for 1990s metal by Kerrang! IGN rated it the fourth most influential heavy metal album ever made. Mustaine has never written better.

ARCH ENEMY released their seventh album, "Rise of the Tyrant," in Britain on September 24th, 2007, with the American edition following a day later, through Century Media. Fredrik Nordström produced it with Michael Amott at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg, and Daniel Erlandsson took a co-production credit. Forty-eight minutes long, it is the heaviest and least compromising of the Angela Gossow-era albums: less reliant on the melodic hooks of "Doomsday Machine," with Michael and Christopher Amott's harmonised leads pushed toward outright classical phrasing and Gossow's delivery at its most abrasive. "Blood on Your Hands" and "Revolution Begins" became live standards. The record confirmed ARCH ENEMY as the biggest melodic death metal band in the world at a point when the Gothenburg sound had been thoroughly absorbed by American metalcore, and it remains a favourite among long-standing listeners.

RIVERS OF NIHIL released their fourth album, "The Work," on September 24th, 2021, through Metal Blade Records, produced by Carson Slovak and Grant McFarland at Atrium Audio in Lititz, Pennsylvania. It completed the tetralogy the band had built around the four seasons, representing winter. Sixty-four minutes long, it pushed much further from death metal than "Where Owls Know My Name" had: clean vocals, saxophone, piano and long passages of progressive rock, written in the aftermath of a pandemic that arrived just as the band had finally gone full-time and, in Brody Uttley's words, left the material "a little hopeless." Loudwire ranked it the twenty-second best rock or metal album of 2021. It was the last RIVERS OF NIHIL record with vocalist Jake Dieffenbach and guitarist Jon Topore, both of whom left the following year.

EDGUY released their fifth album, "Mandrake," on September 24th, 2001, through AFM Records, self-produced at Rhoen Studios in Fulda. It was their last album for AFM before signing with Nuclear Blast, and it is the record on which Tobias Sammet's writing matured past the straightforward speed of "Theater of Salvation": sixty minutes covering the full range of power metal, from the driving "Golden Dawn" and "Tears of a Mandrake" to the ten-minute closer "The Devil and the Savant." Jens Ludwig and Dirk Sauer's twin guitars carry more weight than on any earlier EDGUY album, and Sammet's own increasingly theatrical delivery pointed directly at the AVANTASIA project he had launched a year before. In 2017 Loudwire ranked "Mandrake" the twentieth best power metal album ever made, and it is still the record long-standing listeners point to when arguing that EDGUY were the best of the German second wave.

DARK FUNERAL released their third album, "Diabolis Interium," on September 24th, 2001, recorded and mixed at Peter Tägtgren's Abyss Studio between January and March of that year and issued through No Fashion in Europe and Necropolis in America. Tägtgren's production gave the Swedish band the cleanest, most punishing sound they had yet achieved, with every tremolo line separated instead of collapsing into a wash. It was the first DARK FUNERAL album with drummer Matte Modin, the only one with guitarist Dominion, and the last on which Emperor Magus Caligula also played bass. It was also their final record for No Fashion. The title is grammatically broken Latin intended to mean "Devil Within" — a detail the band have worn without embarrassment. The 2007 Regain reissue added the "Teach Children to Worship Satan" EP on a second disc.

Michael Shawn Crahan, known everywhere as Clown, was born on September 24th, 1969, in Iowa, and is the last original member still standing in SLIPKNOT. In 1995 he formed a band called The Pale Ones with bassist Paul Gray, playing drums himself; wanting a bigger percussion section, he brought in Joey Jordison to take the kit and moved to percussion, while vocalist Anders Colsefni played a second percussion setup, giving the group the layered, unmistakable drum sound that became their signature. They took the name SLIPKNOT in 1996. Designated number six, Crahan has also driven most of the band's visual identity, directing videos and overseeing their media output, and he ran the side projects To My Surprise and Dirty Little Rabbits. In 2016 he directed the action thriller "Officer Downe."

TYGERS OF PAN TANG released their tenth album, "Ambush," on September 24th, 2012, through Rocksector Records, and it carried a detail that mattered to anyone who followed the New Wave of British Heavy Metal: Chris Tsangarides was back at the desk for the first time in thirty-one years, having last produced the band's first two albums, "Wild Cat" and "Spellbound." Forty-nine minutes of unreconstructed British heavy metal built on Robb Weir's riffing and Jacopo Meille's vocals, it was received warmly by fans and press alike, with PlanetMosh awarding nine out of ten and Metal Kaoz noting how closely it resembled the vintage TYGERS sound. A 300-copy fan pack included a guitar pick, a Rodney Matthews poster signed by the band and a chance at signed vinyl from the "Spellbound" sessions. Mighty Music remastered and reissued it in September 2020.

BATTLELORE released their fifth album, "The Last Alliance," on September 24th, 2008, through Napalm Records, produced by Janne Saksa with the band at Sound Supreme Studios in Hämeenlinna. Every BATTLELORE record draws its lyrics entirely from Tolkien, and this one takes its title from the alliance of elves and men that ended the Second Age. Musically it sits between symphonic, gothic and power metal, with Kaisa Jouhki's clean soprano set against Tomi Mykkänen's growls — a contrast the Finnish band worked long before it became a European convention. It peaked at number 26 in the official Finnish chart. A digipak edition added a DVD of the band's 2007 performance at the Metal Female Voices Fest in Wieze, Belgium — the festival circuit where BATTLELORE found their most reliable audience. Two albums later the band went quiet, making this part of a short late run that fans still rate highly.

WITCHERY released their third album, "Symphony for the Devil," on September 24th, 2001, through Necropolis Records, recorded at Berno Studio in Sweden that February with the band co-producing alongside Berno Paulson. Martin "Axe" Axenrot, later of OPETH and BLOODBATH, took over on drums after Mique's departure, and his arrival tightened everything. The Swedish band's blueprint stays intact — thrash metal riffing and solos driven by Patrik Jensen's writing, with Toxine's vocals rasping over the top — but the black and death metal influence is heavier here than on "Restless & Dead" or "Dead, Hot and Ready." Assembled from members of THE HAUNTED, SEANCE and MERCYFUL FATE, WITCHERY were nominally a side project, yet the records they made in this period earned genuine underground standing on their own terms, and the album drew warm notices across the metal fanzines and webzines of the day.

PRONG released their third album, "Prove You Wrong," on September 24th, 1991, through Epic Records, produced by Mark Dodson. It is the only PRONG album with Troy Gregory on bass, and it continued the move toward groove metal begun on "Beg to Differ," toning down the hardcore punk of the band's 1980s output in favour of something drawing on alternative rock, thrash, funk, progressive music and industrial noise. Tommy Victor said the lyrics took him a year and gathered sixteen years of accumulated experience and anxiety, "looking through a rat's eyes at the whole New York experience." The record includes a cover of THE STRANGLERS' "(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)." Entertainment Weekly praised the minimalist approach that stripped postindustrial noise and metal flourishes down to a brutal essence, and the album's rhythmic vocabulary would echo through the whole decade.