I don’t recall having seen this pop up in this community. Give a rundown of your favorite albums. Top slot, top 3, top 5, 10… whatever’s easiest to you since I know it can be tough to narrow things down to a specific degree.
It’ll be interesting to see where everyone is coming from in this regard. Could create for a good opportunity to discuss albums, find people with similar tastes, argue that a different album from someone’s catalog is better, etc.
I’ll throw mine down in a separate comment once I get it figured out.
I find a lot of times I’m more skirting around the edges of symphonic metal without landing dead center. I like female vocals a lot, so I get into stuff like Tristania and The Gathering pretty hard. And I like some stuff that’s more in the neoclassical darkwave spectrum like Autumn Tears, Rain Fell Within, Dargaard, etc. Elis is probably the most on the nose symphonic group that I enjoy a lot.