| 1 | kent | "Egoist" | single | It's like a U2 who realized that The Joshua Tree was going to take them over an event horizon, and figured out how to spin the yearning grandeur into an emotional flywheel so they could play it back out under control. |
| 2 | Mithridatic | "The supply..." | Miserable Miracle | Budgeoning raw French black thrash metal. Like a nightmare in which an abandoned disco turns out to be a zombie logistics center, and the disco ball is a tiny, frenetic Death Star intent on beating you to a pulp. |
| 3 | protoU | "Static Memories" | Lost Here | The coronas around slow-motion contoured rain noises. |
| 4 | Brightr | "We" | Year One | Ebullient-depressive acoustic pop-emo, like a stream of perfect old Wonder Stuff b-sides. |
| 5 | Charm Designer | "Everlasting" | Everlasting | Bellowing Colombian gothic progressive doom metal. |
| 6 | The Alliance | "Enso - Original Mix" | single | Selflessly archetypal whooshy progressive uplifting arpeggiator-trance. |
| 7 | Templars | "Under the City Lights" | single | Jangly lo-fi power-pop somewhere between Winter Hours and Guided by Voices. |
| 8 | Safe, so Simple | "Ghost in My Backseat (feat. Joe Candelaria)" | Too Close to Closure 5 | Terse, shouty pop-punk emo-core. |
| 9 | Distrito Rojo | "Eterna Contradicción" | Distrito Rojo | Affectionately dissheveled Spanish punk/rock. |
| 10 | DJ Marfox | "2685" | single | Snake-charming music for robot snakes. |
| 11 | Amon Amarth | "At Dawn's First Light" | single | How to ram a stack of amps with a longboat. |
| 12 | Mob Rules | "Dykemaster's Tale" | Tales From Beyond | If you name your band Mob Rules, you better sound like you started off playing Sabbath covers in somebody's rec-room but had so much fun that you accidentally got good for real. |
| 13 | Circus Maximus | "The Weight" | Havoc | Equally well-named maximalist melodic progressive metal. |
| 14 | Frightened Rabbit | "Lump Street" | single | Starts off like an ABC song that had the drum-machine spine chewed out of it, but eventually lurches into a flight that's half flee and half soar. |
| 15 | Grant-Lee Phillips | "Tennessee Rain" | The Narrows | I'm only just noticing how Grant-Lee Phillips has become the ghost-union of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash. |
| 16 | Ten Fé | "Elodie" | single | Bouncy-airy-sighing London indie pop. |
| 17 | White Sea | "Arcadia" | single | Sultry ethereal menace from one of Kate Bush's more apt pupils. |
| 18 | Stepdad | "Harm's Way" | Masterbeast Theatre 4 | Imagine pixelated dragons. |
| 19 | Irreversible | "Irreversible - Original" | Irreversible | Dystopian space-colony church-organ music. |
| 20 | Wyrd | "Death Of The Sun" | Death Of The Sun | Hoarse, epic pagan black metal. |
| 21 | Ihsahn | "Pressure" | single | Like an avant-garde-black-metal "Baker Street". |
| 22 | Astro Bunny | "美人淚" | single | Taiwanese visual-kei/trap/Enya pop. |
| 23 | Simone | "Sapere che ci sei" | Felice | Chiming Italian pop-rock band you needn't bother trying to Google. |
| 24 | Nemesea | "Twilight" | single | The return of my favorite pop-gothic pop-symphonic pop-metal band! |
| 25 | September Mourning | "Eye Of The Storm" | single | Rococo techno-progressive steampunk-gothic metal. |
| 26 | Huecco | "Qué daría yo" | single | Street-band arena-pop-rock. |
| 27 | Deftones | "Doomed User" | single | What's left of desert blues after a sandstorm. |
| 28 | Ital Tek | "A Delicate Balance" | Hollowed | Dance music for orphaned office chairs. |
| 29 | Memotone | "Across the Divide" | Chime Hours | An unassuming piano, accidentally bitten by an electroultramagnetic spider, turns into a self-propelled short-circuit. |
| 30 | Celer | "Part I" | Symbols 2 | Aeolian harp for glaciers. |
| 31 | Hammock | "Clarity" | single | Atmospheric-heroic post-post-rock. |
| 32 | Stam1na | "Ikoneklasmia" | Elokuutio | Finnish metal-hybridizers go electronicore. |
| 33 | Scamp | "Last Blaze" | Ten Ni Mukatte Tuba Wo Hake | You know the short wooden rods they play koto drums with? Ever tried really hard to dismantle a garbage truck with one? |
| 34 | Haken | "Initiate" | single | Progressive metal as a kind of oblique, architectural soul music. They should tour with Agent Fresco. |
| 35 | Save Us from the Archon | "la notte I: across the glass" | L'Eclisse | Hyperactive, lyrical (but instrumental) technical djent-prog. |
| 36 | Astropol | "Always You and Me" | single | Humming, Yaz-grade recessional hymn for a quiet 2am flash mob in an empty office park. |
| 37 | Cheops' Cave | "Numerous Times" | single | Like the Killers recast in the Swedish notion of Vegas glam-rock. |
| 38 | Welle: Erdball | "1000 Engel" | 1000 Engel | A German synth-goth version of Pat Benatar's Seven the Hard Way via "99 Luftballoons" via ABBA. The rest of the album is goofy chiptunes, but it could be accordion-cleaning noises for all I care. |
| 39 | Sound Remedy | "Lost" | single | Hard to believe it's taken this long for it to occur to somebody to do a whole trance/dubstep ballad in half-time. |
| 40 | Really Slow Motion | "Dominus" | Battle Angel | I assume these epicore composers have a way of generating the things through automation, because the volume of material is otherwise unexplainable. And it sort of all sounds the same, I guess. But in the way that a master donut-hole chef's donut-holes all taste the same. |
| 41 | Clint Mansell | "Critical Mass" | High-Rise (Original Soundtrack Recording) | The score for the JG Ballard adaptation is half epicore, half Megalith Theater. |
| 42 | Echos | "Tomorrow" | single | Patient, staticky indietronic elegy. |
| 43 | Circadian Eyes | "Homecoming" | single | Like a 5-second synth-hook time-stretched to 5 minutes. |
| 44 | Billions and Billions | "Slum Mgmt" | Lonelier Than Ever and Alone Together | Synth-bell-step. |
| 45 | Windsor Airlift | "Starlit Souvenirs" | The Moon's House | Consort post-rock. |
| 46 | exist†trace | "This Is Now" | This Is Now | The "visual" part of visual-kei is that it's like listening to an ocular migraine. |
| 47 | Tiny Little Houses | "Milo Tin" | single | Twee, understated Melbourne indie rock. |
| 48 | Dalshabet | "SOMEONE LIKE U" | Naturalness | Four sweetly treacly solo-songs, but also this audacious attempt at a K-pop "Uptown Funk" paper-machéed out of Michael Jackson and Prince posters instead of James Brown. |
| 49 | Johan Baeckström | "Like Before" | Like Before EP 5 | The closest anybody has maybe come to reviving The Assembly without Vince Clarke's actual presence. |
| 50 | Mimikry | "Det spelar ingen roll" | single | Blearly, swaggering/staggering Swedish punk. |
| 51 | The Comet Is Coming | "Star Furnace" | single | The Daleks have a synth-pop band. |
| 52 | ESDLCP | "High Bridge" | single | Chilean experimental pop-electronica. |
| 53 | K-X-P | "Sub Goblin" | III, Pt. 2 | Finnish underwater Depeche Mode. |
| 54 | Eliza Shaddad | "Always" | Run EP 4 | Pensive, methodical, art-synth-pop. |
| 55 | Takahiro Kido | "Hidamari Song" | Inside-Out Tokyo 5 | Exquisitely tasteful pop-modern-composition mood-music, like post-classical as an inversion of post-rock. |
| 56 | La Femme | "Sphynx" | single | Impish elfish art-punk. |
| 57 | The Body | "Wanderings" | No One Deserves Happiness | Groaning, distended, antagonistic rock noise. If rock is usually guitar music, this is amp music. |
| 58 | Helalyn Flowers | "Synthetic Paranoia" | Sonic Foundation (Deluxe Edition) | The goth Roxette. |
| 59 | Paola | "Kria Agkalia - Radio Edit" | single | Greek anthemic arena-pop... |
| 60 | Evridiki | "Pagos" | single | ...or arena-pop-rock, just to make sure the Italians don't own either whole aesthetic. |
| 61 | Lumen | "Голоса мира" | single | Russian arena-rock peace-anthem sing-along. |
| 62 | Gai Barone | "2 Sides of Nowhere - Original Mix" | Towards | Dreamy neo-Jean-Michel-Jarre trance-EDM. |
| 63 | George Dorn Screams | "Spacja Kosmiczna" | Spacja Kosmiczna | Gauzy, shoegaze-ish Polish alternative semi-post rock. |
| 64 | Michael Angelo Batio | "Soul in Sight" | Soul in Sight | In which a man whose Wikipedia page has a section-heading for "Picks", and whose top Google image-result shows him playing a four necked guitar, finds his vocal-shredding soulmate in The Voice Italy alumna Gianna Chilla, and they set out to rid the world of subtlety and use up its remaining supply of notes. |
| 65 | Maya Berovic | "Pauza" | single | I love Turbo Folk most when it sounds like laptop Rotting Christ without growling. |
| 66 | Jenny Woo | "Here We Stand" | Proud of Every Scar | Alberta acoustic-oi heroine in grand, slashing electric oi-pop-punk mode. |
| 67 | Sunstorm | "The Sound of Goodbye" | single | And did you know that there's a melodic hard rock underground full of denim-and-leathery people who have either been in or opened for Rainbow? |
| 68 | Ted Poley | "Higher" | single | Well, there is. |