| 1 | Анита Цой | "Целься в сердце" | single | Maintain emotional fitness by falling in love with people you will never meet. |
| 2 | The Howling Void | "Lords of Barren Fields" | The Triumph of Ruin | The alternative is groaning metal despair. So you should practice that, too. |
| 3 | Rachael Sage | "Try Try Try" | single | Every quiet, unhurried resignation is a fight-song for or against something. |
| 4 | Midnight Eternal | "'Till the Bitter End" | Midnight Eternal | Epic is a method of listening as much as an alloy of metal. |
| 5 | Radiohead | "Burn the Witch" | single | Even metronomes can hire orchestras and stage melodramas of reincarnation and reconciliation. |
| 6 | WagakkiBand | "Ikusa" | Yasouemaki | The magnificent problem with "folk-metal" is that it allows every music made by people and wires. |
| 7 | Let's Eat Grandma | "Eat Shiitake Mushrooms" | single | This is the magnificent problem with lo-fi indietoytronic hip-hop, too. |
| 8 | ELO | "Stare" | Elogram 6 | We are all conducting orchestras made of electricity and light. Some of them are just more fragile. |
| 9 | Julianna Barwick | "Nebula" | Will | Some are made out of the spaces left when we aren't here. |
| 10 | Fear of Men | "Sane" | single | Or the noises our cleaning machines make when they fall apart while we aren't watching. |
| 11 | White Lung | "Narcoleptic" | Paradise | The border between anger and triumph fountains tourist brochures about each to the other. |
| 12 | Katatonia | "Serein" | single | You are never braver than in the moment before you accept sleep. |
| 13 | So Hideous | "Yesteryear" | Laurestine Orchestral | And never more vulnerable than when you imagine how other people would step in and live your life. |
| 14 | Velnias | "Absolution" | single | The world spins so fast, is it any wonder you find stray Lithuanian gods and pagan metal in tiny Colorado mountain towns? |
| 15 | VÉRITÉ | "Constant Crush" | Living 5 | "Constant Crush" vs "Constant Craving" might explain as much of what has happened in music in the last two decades as anything. |
| 16 | Oyinda | "Flatline" | single | The flaw with all dystopias is that they look into worlds from outside... |
| 17 | Gallant | "Talking to Myself" | Ology | ...and thus infer inhumanity of experience from a dehumanization of observation... |
| 18 | MUNA | "So Special" | The Loudspeaker EP 4 | ...and then are surprised to find that faceless sufferers always turn out to be busier and happier when you visit them in their homes. |
| 19 | Annabel Jones | "Happy" | Libelle 5 | Inside old consoles the space invaders have learned to garden, and made paths through their gardens for dancing... |
| 20 | Kerli | "Feral Hearts (The Forest Sessions)" | single | ...or for standing, quietly, in knee-length socks decorated with magical Estonian plants. |
| 21 | Lacuna Coil | "Ghost in the Mist" | single | If monsters don't sometimes come exploding out of the mist, what the hell is the point of mist? |
| 22 | Tracy Wang | "愛自己" | single | If the monsters turn out to be robots intent on licking the insides of your ears with sugar tongues, try to remember that even robots have a culture. |
| 23 | Veronica Maggio | "Den första är alltid gratis" | Den första är alltid gratis | Jadedness sucks because being afraid of the obvious reduces your opportunities for joy in proportion to your experience. |
| 24 | Maja Gödicke | "Blå" | single | And sometimes the obvious things want to spin you around. |
| 25 | Alaric | "Demon" | End of Mirrors | Even getting pulled into the roiling void usually imparts a detectable precession. |
| 26 | Mitski | "Happy" | single | Inside every apparent purgatory, somebody is making little songs out of whatever has ended up there. |
| 27 | Kumikameli | "Lieron tie" | Verta ja suolia | Take the language out of comedy, and all that's left is poetry. |
| 28 | Holy Esque | "Addicted to Love" | single | Take the objectification out of machismo, and what's left is frantic honesty. |
| 29 | Rebaelliun | "Affronting the Gods" | The Hell's Decrees | And then boil the reserved machismo down and you get an acid that can etch stone. |
| 30 | Blood Red Throne | "Homicidal Ecstacy" | single | And maybe you wonder why we bother etching stone, but how else are we going to get rid of it? |
| 31 | Grave Miasma | "Yama Transforms to Afterlife" | Endless Pilgrimage | Maybe if we finally use up this world, we earn a new one. |
| 32 | Erik Ekholm | "Fields of Light" | Atlas | Or maybe we need to half-believe that to imagine what we'd do differently if we started over. |
| 33 | Sithu Aye | "Set Course for Andromeda!!!" | Set Course for Andromeda | For starters, we wouldn't just sit here. |
| 34 | Chelsea Grin | "Clickbait" | single | We might still look at our phones, but we'd make sure there were better things inside of them. |
| 35 | Keith Urban | "Gone Tomorrow (Here Today)" | Ripcord | We'd make sure you could drive out past the city lights, but still get decent wifi. |
| 36 | Kristy Lee Cook | "Everything" | All Kinds of Crazy 4 | We would understand that people have their own reasons for driving to somewhere you just left. |
| 37 | Real Friends | "Mess" | single | We would remember that somewhere people are just discovering every thing you already know. |
| 38 | Against The Current | "Young & Relentless" | single | We will try to remember what it felt like to have everything change. |
| 39 | Muzzy | "Junction Seven" | F Minor Factory - EP 4 | If shared joy is multiplied, then manufacturing can aspire to systematic optimism. |
| 40 | Mr FijiWiji | "Hostage (feat. Anna Yvette)" | single | And urban planning can be structural preparation for collective reverie. |
| 41 | Aurix | "Flux" | single | And we can dance in any space they left us. |
| 42 | Scythia | "Eternal Oath" | Lineage | We can be Nordic mountain kings in Pacific-rim rain forests. |
| 43 | Die/May | "Fragments (feat. 丐 Killaneth)" | single | We can be goth-anime destroyers in careful social democracies. |
| 44 | Skepta | "Konnichiwa" | Konnichiwa | We can say hello however we want. |
| 45 | Maniac | "Nightmare" | Fast and Deadly | We can teeter majestically in ridiculous boots. |
| 46 | Blacks | "Night and Rain" | Wake Up 3 | We can twitch until we forget what we were afraid of. |
| 47 | IDIOTAPE | "You Want It Real" | Re 4 | Arguably the key innovation of the electric guitar was the addition of knobs. |
| 48 | Sundara Karma | "Loveblood" | single | Sometimes the "post" in post-punk mostly just means you aren't afraid of reverb. |
| 49 | Adult Jazz | "Earrings Off!" | single | Björk + Scott Walker. It's not jazz. Maybe it's adult. |
| 50 | Crystalyne | "Air I Breathe" | single | Theme song for an uplifting heroine cartoon that makes you cry even though it's obviously selling you something. |
| 51 | One Morning Left | "OML_KVLT" | Metalcore Superstars | Theme song for a fight-league where you find yourself caring who wins. |
| 52 | Lost Under Heaven | "Unites" | Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing | Vortex soul. |
| 53 | ANOHNI | "Execution" | HOPELESSNESS | Even shimmery diffidence usually imparts an unmistakable precession. |
| 54 | Kristin Kontrol | "(Don't) Wannabe" | single | All this literalist beeping can be recycled into soaring anthems. |
| 55 | New Pharaohs | "Nothing Without You" | single | Giving up can be an oblique resolution. |
| 56 | Ted Poley | "Let's Start Something" | single | This could be our night. |
| 57 | Sunstorm | "Don't Walk Away from a Goodbye" | single | No, really, this could be our night. |
| 58 | Sleeping At Last | "Atlas: Sight" | single | The day gives you time to accomplish tasks, but the night gives you cover for transformation. |
| 59 | Away Days | "Messiah" | Away Days 4 | If nothing else, staying up is a defiance in itself. |
| 60 | Astrid S | "Hurts So Good" | single | Without darkness, how does anything have a chance to glitter? |
| 61 | Danny L Harle | "Ashes of Love" | single | Glitter is important. |
| 62 | Red Velvet | "Yossism (Music from Telemonster)" | single | Without nighttime, when would we wear our excellent impractical clothes? |
| 63 | Kindbergs | "Här och Nu" | Här och nu - En samling | Without these clothes, how will we dress up as the heroes we dream of people dreaming of? |
| 64 | The Hypothesis | "Shades to Escape" | Origin | Headphones are more portable than stages, but they are tools for the same purpose of delineating a space that is subject only to dream logic. |
| 65 | Glorior Belli | "Lies, Strangled Skies" | The Flock That Welcomes Sundown | And dream logics, no matter how grim, are exercise regimes for strengths of purpose. |
| 66 | Dead of Night | "Touched by the Hand of God" | The Dead Shall Rise Again | In this sense, even theocracy is a thought experiment in what you would do if an uncontestable power were to demand it. |
| 67 | Candlemass | "Death Thy Lover" | single | The point of contemplating death, maybe, is to imagine yourself granted the infinite power of a final parting wish. |
| 68 | Kvelertak | "Nattesferd" | single | All the people who have ever ignored you are lashed to chairs in rows and made to shut up and listen long enough to internalize one piece of profound human wisdom you have won the inarguable right to declare. |
| 69 | Vektor | "Charging the Void" | Terminal Redux | And you take a breath, and you look each one of them briefly in the eye, and then you say "Progressive metal doesn't have to sound like Yes + Cylons", and you hit the fucking Play button. |