| 1 | Spector | "Born In The EU" | single | Independence and unity are, of course, both laudable cultural values. It seems to me that economic unions of cultural nations are a pretty good combination of the two. UK indie band Spector's Remain anthem came out before the referendum, but works just as well as a reminder and love-song as it does a campaign poster. |
| 2 | Orpheum | "Darkness and Decay" | Darkness and Decay | The urge to believe in something bigger than what you see around you is, apparently, not universal. Which seems intuitively wrong to me, but then so does the fact that not everybody loves bombastic gothic symphonic metal. |
| 3 | Derya Uluğ | "Okyanus" | single | So, for that matter, does the idea that bombing anything is ever remotely sane. |
| 4 | 羅小白 | "UUU" | single | What's the point of getting up and going out into the world if not to see what crazy things other people do? |
| 5 | Bad Suns | "Disappear Here" | single | How else do you have any idea what your own normal means? |
| 6 | Equilibrium | "Prey" | single | The answer, I guess, is that not everybody asks what their own normal means. It just is. Which is a compact justification for fantasy, I think. Folk metal is definitively exaggerated, but exaggeration is a form of self-awareness. |
| 7 | Fates Warning | "Seven Stars" | Theories Of Flight | Progressive-metal bombast is just as inherently life-affirming as it is ridiculous. Ridiculousness is life-affirming. Anything that rejects entropy, anything that formulates theories, anything that stacks notes on top of each other. |
| 8 | Majesty Of Revival | "Deadlock" | Dualism | I kind of never run out of patience for progressive metal. |
| 9 | Teodasia | "Rise" | Reloaded | Old progressive metal re-recorded with a new singer? Sure! |
| 10 | Deadlock | "Backstory Wound" | single | Shouty/elegiac gothic djent-metal? OK. |
| 11 | Periphery | "Flatline" | single | Shouty thrash djent without the elegiac or gothic bits? Also often fine. |
| 12 | Chelsea Grin | "Four Horsemen" | Self Inflicted | Apocalyptic choketech metal? Apocalypse fantasies are still a way to celebrate not being apocalyzed yet. |
| 13 | Circle of Contempt | "Filth" | Structures for Creation | Cyber-apocalyptic tech-death metal? |
| 14 | VOLA | "Starburn" | single | No Clean Singing was a revolution about independence. The return of clean singing to extreme metal is a revolution of re-unity. |
| 15 | While She Sleeps | "New World Torture" | Brainwashed | It doesn't mean we stop being angry. |
| 16 | Myka Relocate | "Hide The Truth" | The Young Souls | It doesn't mean metal can't cheerfully morph into power-pop. |
| 17 | Sink | "Hunger" | Ark of Contempt and Anger | It doesn't mean metal can't sublimate into pure ritual. |
| 18 | Agnes Obel | "Familiar" | single | And grind away the layers of metal until there's nothing left but a few shreds of cello and diffident drumbeats, and the haunted intensity isn't necessarily any different at all. |
| 19 | Angel Olsen | "Shut Up Kiss Me" | single | There are a thousand ways to cope. |
| 20 | Fyfe | "Stronger" | Stronger +3 | Some of them are more ruminative than others. |
| 21 | Mapei | "Come On Baby" | Hey Hey | Some of them build on ways in which people have formulated joy before. |
| 22 | Stooshe | "Let It Go" | single | This one is half Bastille and half Rihanna and should be a huge hit. Huge. |
| 23 | Young Summer | "Alright" | single | I kind of never run out of patience for airy, wistful, inertial synthpop. |
| 24 | Little Jinder | "Jag måste sluta leva som jag lever för evigt" | single | Which comes in all sorts of languages, but definitely Swedish. |
| 25 | Joanna Gruesome | "Pretty Fucking Sick (Of It All)" | Pretty Fucking Sick (Of It All) +1 | And you can swap the synthsizers for guitars and the airiness for snarls without losing the wistfulness. |
| 26 | 何潔 | "愛情是冒險險險險險" | 敢愛 | I have no idea what this about, so I guess I shouldn't be confident it isn't wistful in its own way. |
| 27 | Meat Loaf | "Going All The Way - Radio Edit" | single | I've spent a lot of this week digging through data about how different groups of people listen. Genders, ages, countries, kinds of music. Meat Loaf sounds old here. Really old. |
| 28 | White Zoo | "Score - Original Mix" | Jackpot EP 2 | A part of the mechanized fantasy of EDM, I think, is a very literal kind of transcendance. Mathematical ratios never sound unsteady. |
| 29 | Arkasia | "Discovery" | Discovery EP 2 | Calculated music can be an expression of our imagination, not filtered through our limitations. Arguably this makes it more human, not less. |
| 30 | Maria Villalon | "Mágico y Absurdo" | single | But if you don't think synthesizers and machines and tools are expressions of humanity, I don't think we're using the word "humanity" the same way. |
| 31 | División Minúscula | "Frenesí" | single | If you think wires changed their qualitative nature when we shrunk them down enough to make circuitry, we're hearing different species in these songs. |
| 32 | Label | "Это всё ты" | single | You get music by imposing math on noises. That's what rock and roll is. |
| 33 | Eluvium | "Fugue State" | single | That's what calms us. |
| 34 | Prins Póló | "Læda Slæda" | single | That's what connects Iceland to Argentina. Well, that and football. |
| 35 | Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith | "Closed Circuit" | single | But there is no ambient experimental football. |
| 36 | Erik Ekholm | "Source of Creation" | Vanguards 4 | There is no epic atmospheric football. |
| 37 | Imagine Music | "Cosmic Vibration" | Infinity | Yet. |
| 38 | Cloud District | "You Are the Answer to My Security Question" | Summer Slam - EP 6 | Except, wait. If math is about rules, and football is the imposition of rules onto dance the way that music is the imposition of math onto noise, then all of this is about love. |
| 39 | Set It Off | "Something New" | single | All of it is about contemplating the void and then turning away and starting over. |
| 40 | Frances | "Say It Again" | single | Music and football and days are all about perseverance. |
| 41 | Nadia Gattas | "Gravity" | Gravity 5 | Against entropy and all its feckless henchman laws. |
| 42 | Mas Ysa | "Seraph" | Seraph | You will not contain us. |
| 43 | John Hancock III | "Negative Space" | single | We can build escape ships out of discarded shipping containers and reclaimed mica and suspended fourths. |
| 44 | Ghetts | "Peng Tings" | Peng Tings +1 | We can suspend life-support capsules in sinkholes |
| 45 | Evelina Olsén | "Kärleken är vi" | single | as readily as we can build terraria in clean rooms. |
| 46 | Afromikko | "Postikortein" | single | We forgive each other for oblivious appropriation every time we open our mouths. |
| 47 | La Habitación Roja | "Nuestro Momento" | single | Nothing unites our disparate humanities any more profoundly than their indelible perpetual glorious reluctance. |
| 48 | Cosmic Gate | "Edge of Life" | single | Nothing centers us any more firmly than our constant defining conviction that the center is anywhere but right where we are. |
| 49 | Rafael Frost | "Call This Love - Original Mix" | Call This Love 2 | And of course this is true, because there is nobody to doubt our authority. We are whatever we say we are. |
| 50 | Thomas Godoj | "Mensch sein - Single Edit" | Mensch sein 2 | We are serious because we take ourselves so. |
| 51 | Lindsey Stirling | "The Arena" | single | As long as we believe. |
| 52 | Sadikbeatz | "Final Patient" | single | We have our methods. |
| 53 | Amber Perú | "Sin Tu Voz" | Amber + 5 | We have our heroes. |
| 54 | Ceca | "Autogram" | Autogram | Put methods and heroes together the wrong way and you have fascism or terrorism. But there's 100 right ways for every wrong ways, and the right ways all lead to joy. |
| 55 | NateWantsToBattle | "Fire" | single | And the right ways are easier. |
| 56 | Joker | "Saat 0726" | Yaşamak Ödürür | And the ways cannot be shot or bombed. |
| 57 | Olatunji | "Ola" | Awakening | Dark ages are short. |
| 58 | DRÆMINGS | "Area 51" | single | Amplified fear is paranoia, and paranoia is imaginative, and imagination leads you back to love. |
| 59 | Kostume | "Auringonlaskuhumala" | single | And "auringonlaskahumuala" and every other long word is somethingish for omg, wait, put that down, did you see that? Have you heard this? |