| 1 | Blood Stain Child | "INSIGNIA" | NEXUS 3 | Blood Stain Child are why BABYMETAL didn't seem so unprecedented to me. |
| 2 | Bloody Hammers | "Lights Come Alive" | Lovely Sort of Death | Somewhere between Low and HIM and new wave and doom is what may be my new favorite band. |
| 3 | Vega | "Explode" | Who We Are | I was experimenting with a thing at work to do a better of job of finding similar bands, and my opinion of its potential rose when it found this UK melodic hard-rock band for Magnum, and cross-checking revealed that they opened for a bunch of Magnum dates last year. |
| 4 | Cruzh | "Aim for the Head" | single | Remember hair-metal? The hair was cryogenically frozen and shipped to Sweden until the technology to revive it was ready. |
| 5 | Silverlane | "Wanna Be Loved" | Off Course | (Some of it was also smuggled to Holland in a crate of poorly-sealed Knack and Rick Springfield records.) |
| 6 | Street Sects | "And I Grew into Ribbons" | single | We make punk now by tangling wires, |
| 7 | Vacant Windows | "Skirmishes" | single | and sentimental pop by smoothing them out again, |
| 8 | Prinze George | "Move It" | Illiterate Synth Pop | and setting our irregular silhouettes against these geometric backdrops, |
| 9 | Myzica | "We Belong Together" | single | and dancing along the shadow lines. |
| 10 | Luna Aura | "Madhouse" | single | These are our carefully contained fight songs. |
| 11 | Ember Island | "Creep" | single | These are our revisionist memories. |
| 12 | Dustin Tebbutt | "Wild Blood" | First Light | And you can eschew mechanism, but you still exist in a systematized universe, |
| 13 | BETSY | "Lost & Found" | single | and move through it on disco-ball-patrolled streets. |
| 14 | DGM | "Ghosts of Insanity" | single | The new utopianisms are anti-isolationist. What you can't turn back, you might as well turn up. |
| 15 | Eden's Curse | "Sell Your Soul" | single | Let it lift you. |
| 16 | Serious Black | "As Long as I'm Alive" | single | It's like a rainbow in the dark. |
| 17 | Russian Circles | "Vorel" | Guidance | And even when there's no rainbow, the darkness itself is an inexorable propulsive force, |
| 18 | Take Over And Destroy | "By Knife" | single | prone to surges of dissident rage. |
| 19 | Wild Beasts | "Alpha Female" | Boy King | We've seen too much to have purely simple minds again. |
| 20 | Haley Bonar | "Called You Queen" | Impossible Dream | We know you can't just build a wall of sound to keep out your own fears. |
| 21 | Devin Townsend Project | "Failure" | single | And dystopian robot armies are most entertaining as a basement hobby. |
| 22 | Charice | "Epitome of Beauty" | single | Or pumpkin-carriage footmice that don't care how you're supposed to pronounce "epitome". |
| 23 | Tarja | "Demon’s in you (feat. Arch Enemy’s Alissa White-Gluz)" | The Shadow Self | But if you had the magic to turn a pumpkin into a vehicle, wouldn't you give it better powers? |
| 24 | The Legion Of Hetheria | "Awakening" | Awakening | Wouldn't you make your magic shoes out of something stronger than glass? |
| 25 | Dog Party | "'Til You're Mine" | 'Til You're Mine | In the modern version, Cinderella brings her friends and starts a mosh pit at the ball. |
| 26 | Astro Bunny | "天亮之前" | single | And they stay way past midnight, and then take clean, efficient public transportation home. |
| 27 | Celer | "The Burden of Bliss" | Shima | (The ride takes half an hour. Watch streetlights shimmer through rain-blurred windows.) |
| 28 | Ex-Easter Island Head | "Ten Bells" | Twenty-Two Strings | You can make a gamelan out of electric guitars. |
| 29 | Susumu Yokota | "ICONIC AIR" | Laputan | Or, really, anything you have lying around and a meditative tolerance for repetition. |
| 30 | Skúli Sverrisson | "Opna" | Saumur | I politely decline to consider this jazz. It's like the infrared traces of jazz in the walls of a place where people might once have improvised, but now we have filled it with sensors and scopes and retrospective discipline. |
| 31 | Maja Gödicke | "Rokoko" | single | And when the forensics people are gone again, we have time enough for a love song before they have to set up for whatever happens here later. |
| 32 | Ana Diaz | "Nästan där" | single | But if they kick us out, we have endless arenas in VR. |
| 33 | Trivecta | "Labyrinth (feat. Miyoki)" | single | Electronic music is inherently folk music. |
| 34 | Siddhartha | "Tarde" | single | Sadness plus math converges on reverie. |
| 35 | Katie Gately | "Tuck" | single | Reverie plus more math circumscribes obsession. |
| 36 | Pixelord | "Robo" | single | It's pretty much always possible to add more math |
| 37 | Erik Ekholm | "Parallax of Reality" | Breaking Reality 5 | until the complexity of artificial processes becomes indistinguishable, both practically and conceptually, from that of natural ones. |
| 38 | Peter Hollens | "Homeward Bound" | single | The whole point of knowledge is that the same equations describe reverence and interpolation. |
| 39 | Shahead Mostafafar | "Blood Moon - Original" | single | Your breathing can be scored. |
| 40 | Austin Wintory | "Chaos, the Mother" | Abzu | You are adrift and free to explore, even while you are being timed and measured. |
| 41 | 65daysofstatic | "NMS_exteriorAtmos1/False Suns" | No Man's Sky: Music For An Infinite Universe | Patience is an implication of infinity. |
| 42 | Highasakite | "Samurai Swords" | single | But so is impatience. |
| 43 | Justin Moore | "Pick-Up Lines" | single | And of course it's idiotic to write yet another truck song, but no more so than any other thing somebody already did, and the thing about patience is that the millionth one may be the one where you get it right. |
| 44 | Eluvium | "Regenerative Being" | single | Rules are a superstructure. |
| 45 | Lymbyc Systym | "New Varieties" | New Varieties +3 | And you can make a more fanciful assembly with engineering than with thatchwork. |
| 46 | We Deserve This | "Subliminal" | single | Arguably "fanciful" describes the divergence from found form, and thus engineering is fancy by definition. |
| 47 | VOLA | "Gutter Moon" | single | We make aesthetic machines for glitteringvoidgaze. |
| 48 | StarSystems | "Entropy" | StarSystems III | We look at the stars in silence, but then go inside and write planetarium anthems |
| 49 | Raaka-Aine | "Pelastaja" | single | for darkensses in which we are all secret agents |
| 50 | Asenblut | "Helden des ewigen Sturms" | single | and secret gods. |
| 51 | The Sunshine Underground | "Something's Gonna Happen" | single | And if half the time, when you go to say your melancholy farewell, half the people only then realize you were here, make your exit count. |
| 52 | WANIMA | "Tomoni" | Juice Up!! 4 | And next time, assume you are free to repeat yourself as much as you want. |
| 53 | Moose Blood | "Pastel" | Blush | This, in a universe without imaginary autocrats, is probably what we are left to mean by prayer. |
| 54 | YG | "FDT - Pt. 2" | single | And this is a universe without imaginary autocrats, despite the ambitions of would-be real ones. |
| 55 | Faux | "Nerves" | Inhale EP 5 | Anybody who tries to tell you that wonder is not inside you, just under the skin and ready to sublimate, is trying to get you to pay for the knife before they use it on you. |
| 56 | Giggs | "501 (Hollow & Heston)" | Landlord | Aspiration is not a zero-sum impulse. |
| 57 | Storm The Sky | "Second Best" | Sin Will Find You | Catharsis does not have to be a surrender. |
| 58 | Ozan Doğulu | "Yağmur" | single | We were not better off when we knew less. |
| 59 | False Friends | "All My Friends" | single | The trick is channeling nostalgia into progress, not regressivism, although really all this takes is the smallest amount of self-awareness not crusted over with spray-tan. |
| 60 | MaRLo | "You And Me" | You And Me +1 | All you have to do, to not fear the day, is keep yourself from falling for the cynical tactical lie that yesterday's sunrise had qualities somebody has now stolen from you. |
| 61 | Luke Bond | "Alone" | Alone +1 | The definitive evil has nothing to give you, and so it tries to sell you the right to distrust everything you see. But you can dance yourself clean of this. |
| 62 | Schmutzki | "Hey Haters" | Spackos Forever | You can shake it off in any style. |
| 63 | Betontod | "Küss Mich" | single | You can take away the love and the anger, or you can cheerfully mash it together. |
| 64 | Serum 114 | "Mein Leben, meine Wahl" | Die Nacht mein Freund | All it takes is the tiniest piece of hope to hold us together, |
| 65 | Olexesh | "Weyauu" | single | to give us the will to resist fear and resignation, |
| 66 | Dame | "Low Life" | Low Life +2 | to recognize the next moment as an opportunity, |
| 67 | Bosshafte Beats | "Danke Jeannie" | single | to fire up the machine that can drill us out of this trap. |
| 68 | Field Mouse | "Half-Life" | Episodic | Quiet insidious revolutions will always outlast opportunistic declamation. |
| 69 | Dotan | "Shadow Wind" | single | Appeals to essential continuity trump aggrandizations of loss. |
| 70 | Chef'Special | "Amígo" | single | And ultimately, reactionary fascism will always founder on the unavoidable truth that fear is not a dance music. |
| 71 | Olamide | "Who U Epp (ft. Da Emperor)" | single | And building walls to protect your tender fears from other people's invasive fears is both less effective and less fun than treating all the fears like a trading-card game. |
| 72 | Banky W. | "Gidi love" | single | Intolerance is the procrastination of joy, |
| 73 | Kiss Daniel | "Mama" | single | and thus combines the worst elements of small-mindedness and indolence, |
| 74 | Solidstar | "Wait (feat. Tiwa Savage & Patoranking)" | single | and petulant not-dancing in the presence of delirious rhythm. |
| 75 | Ionosphere | "The Stellar Winds, Pt. 1" | The Stellar Winds | Which is doubly idiotic because we also have excellent music for not dancing, |
| 76 | Sianvar | "Stay Lost" | Stay Lost | and music for converting skepticism into hypotheses, |
| 77 | Dessa | "Quinine" | single | and songs for every kind of quiet rediscovery of purpose. |
| 78 | Saint Of Sin | "Angel of the Thought" | Skychild | Whatever you are terrified you've lost, we have songs for rediscovering it inside of you. |
| 79 | Sinsaenum | "Splendor and Agony" | Echoes Of The Tortured | You are not being asked to conform to other people's rituals, you are being invited to find your own soul. |
| 80 | DRÆMINGS | "Sinking Ship" | The Eternal Lonesome | You are being invited to be less lonely. |
| 81 | Julien-K | "Spectromeda" | California Noir - Chapter Two: Nightlife in Neon | You are being invited to press buttons that activate magic, |
| 82 | Unknown Artist | "Just A Little More D&B" | Just A Little More 2 | and by implication to recognize magic in whatever happens when buttons are pressed. |
| 83 | Electro-Light | "Aurora" | Aurora +1 | Every single song is a chance to begin again, |
| 84 | Idina Menzel | "I See You" | single | without hopelessness, |
| 85 | Carla dal Forno | "What You Gonna Do Now?" | single | but maybe this time with a method. |
| 86 | MirrorMaze | "Worn and Torn" | Break the Horizon | This time the potential magnitude of fear will be proof of our capacity. |
| 87 | Kindling | "Weightlessly" | single | This time the density of our focus will give it load-bearing properties. |
| 88 | Sky H1 | "Air" | Motion 6 | This time we will realize that the raw material for progress is everything around us. |