| 1 | Roxette | "It Just Happens" | single | I guess they didn't technically invent the pop power-ballad, but humans didn't invent the planet, either. |
| 2 | DJ Rashad | "Roll Up That Loud" | Afterlife | If there's a true anti-rockist pole sticking out of the Earth somewhere, it might be here, marking the grave and rallying the survivors for DJ Rashad's twitchy, obsessive version of footwork as the logical extrapolation of every kind of technical and aesthetic miniaturization that has happened in studio-crafted music in the last 30 years. |
| 3 | Tim Hecker | "Obsidian Counterpoint" | Love Streams | And the difference between street music disembowled and art music dis-academied has become basically existential. |
| 4 | Ihsahn | "My Heart Is Of The North" | Arktis. | If you terrify enough people without hurting them, eventually you get to do whatever you want. |
| 5 | Lacuna Coil | "The House of Shame" | single | Like make pounding, growling, death-metal-derived drifting-slab rock music. |
| 6 | Julianna Barwick | "Same" | single | Or collect the shards of stained-glass from flooded churches. |
| 7 | Plaitum | "Jagwa" | single | We are refracted in dark-shimmery electro-shudder-pop. |
| 8 | Era Istrefi | "Bonbon" | single | Or in chirpy post-world post-PC-Music dance-pop from Albania. |
| 9 | Nocaden | "Havran (Semiakusticka Verzia)" | single | Or redemptive, suspended Slovak monument-pop. |
| 10 | Suuns | "Brainwash" | single | What if Game Theory had survived to go experimental noise-surge? |
| 11 | Yumi Zouma | "Keep It Close To Me" | single | Go around the world enough times and you learn that glass can support any weight. |
| 12 | Chelsea Lankes | "Bullet" | Chelsea Lankes - EP 4 | All this architecture just gives us flat surfaces to lean our heads against. |
| 13 | Sizzy Rocket | "Bestie" | THRILLS | All these brands just feed their hopeless powerless vocabulary into the eager grinder of new slang for whatever we already wanted to say. |
| 14 | A.O.S.O.O.N | "City" | single | New-Urbanist EBTG. |
| 15 | Moving Units | "Hyatt Girls" | Damage With Care | If you're late for something, but patient, eventually you outlive the past. |
| 16 | Digitalism | "Go Time" | single | And there's always time for dance-rock. |
| 17 | September Girls | "Catholic Guilt" | Age of Indignation | Twee noise, like the Jesus and Mary Fixed-Gear Bike Chain. |
| 18 | Kidsmoke | "Heartache" | single | Sometimes being alive after punk is more or less all "post-punk" requires. |
| 19 | Kate Jackson | "The End of Reason" | single | Preposterous ambition is just a way to get yourself started. Later you find out what you're really after. |
| 20 | Cult Of Luna | "A Greater Call" | Mariner | A funeral is just a ritual. |
| 21 | Ovum | "The Nexus" | Nostalgia | And post-rock is just a direction to look in from the top of the next hill. |
| 22 | Sweden | "Stockholm" | Oh, Dusty | Power-pop will not be disguised by naming. |
| 23 | Susanna | "In The Need Of A Shepherd" | single | Praying inside is an artistic conceit in itself. |
| 24 | Ted Poley | "Hands of Love" | single | But inside can be as big as you dream. |
| 25 | Seratones | "Don't Need It" | single | Or as close. |
| 26 | Erik Ekholm | "Reflections" | Reflections | In the movie of this, we will be so much taller. |
| 27 | Petri Alanko | "Suite for Time and Machines" | Quantum Break - Original Game Soundtrack | No, it's OK, I'm just listening. |
| 28 | Martina McBride | "That's The Thing About Love" | single | No, really, it's OK, I'm just listening. |
| 29 | Jason Blaine | "Dance With My Daughter" | single | I mean, I think I'm just listening until I notice I'm crying. |
| 30 | Tiny Moving Parts | "Headache" | single | But isn't that how we mostly live? |
| 31 | Two O'clock Courage | "Misericorde" | Missalette | Outside of Antarctica and vessels at sea, isn't it all country music one way or another? |
| 32 | Happoradio | "Valopallo" | single | Your weird languages change nothing. |
| 33 | Irina | "En olekaan valmis" | single | Nobody has yet invented a new direction for the heart to leap. |
| 34 | Only Shadows | "Many A Mountain" | Be Still 2 | The direction is always up. |
| 35 | Draper | "Break Over You" | single | A pixelated sky is still sky. |
| 36 | Summer Was Fun | "Hold On (feat. Q'AILA)" | single | Arguably a pixelated sky is more essentially sky. |
| 37 | Fenrir | "Onwards to Jotunheim" | Loki's Slaughter | As long as you're not arguing with wolves. |
| 38 | Silhouette from the Skylit | "Growing Pains" | Heracles | I just read a Japanese science-fiction novel called (in translation (although not from Japanese)) Werewolf, and I wasn't sure until a little bit after the last page whether there were going to be actual werewolves in it. There kind of weren't, like there kind of isn't any J-pop in this ebullient, whooshy J-rock. |
| 39 | Laakso | "Fall Down" | single | Laakso is a neighborhood in Helsinki, but an indie-rock band from Sweden. Sweden the country, not Sweden the Norwegian band. Presumably there's a Finnish band called Tromsø. |
| 40 | Flotsam & Jetsam | "Iron Maiden" | single | You might not remember Flotsam & Jetsam, but nostalgia can start whenever you arrive. |
| 41 | Max Giesinger | "Barfuß und allein" | Der Junge, der rennt | If you like measured, earnest rock music, you can be comfortable pretty much anywhere you go. |
| 42 | AS IT IS | "Speak Soft" | Never Happy, Ever After (Deluxe Edition) | I've grown dissatisfied with "pop-punk" as a name for this bouncy evolution of it that has long since ceased to be meaningfully punk or at all self-conscious about its popness. I name genres for a living, sometimes, sort of, and I'm naming this one Pixie. And trying to find as much of it as I possibly can. |
| 43 | Kontra K | "An deiner Seite" | single | Macklemore and Berlin Lewis. |
| 44 | Tegan and Sara | "U-turn" | single | Everything gets constantly more awesome. |
| 45 | Jeroen Van Der Boom | "Je Leeft Vandaag" | single | And there are stadiums full of people cheering for sports you don't even understand. |
| 46 | Fantasia | "Ugly" | single | And Patsy Cline and Janis Joplin and Carrie Underwood and Elton John are all just people you've never actually met. |
| 47 | NateWantsToBattle | "Ashes" | Bad Time | Don't confuse Pixie with Otacore. |
| 48 | Lost Tapes | "Girls" | Let's Get Lost | Or Sarahrecordsgaze. |
| 49 | Shiraz Lane | "For Crying out Loud" | single | They tore up the Sunset Strip and sold it to Finland. |
| 50 | The Joy Formidable | "A Second in White" | Hitch | Albums of the week, #1 of 2: the best delirious noise-pop band working. |
| 51 | Frightened Rabbit | "I Wish I Was Sober" | Painting Of A Panic Attack | Albums of the week, #2 of 2: stomp and collapse in awe. |