| 1 | Doe | "Last Ditch" | single | In my mind, this is what all my favorite Rainer Maria songs sound like. |
| 2 | Wyatt Blair | "Dancing on a Dream" | Point of No Return | Yeah, I miss the clothes I had in the 80s, too. |
| 3 | E C H E L Ä N | "Perspective (feat. Logan Swirsky)" | single | Elegant synthrospection. Please don't do this with your band name. |
| 4 | Celestial Ruin | "Firestorm" | Pandora | Vancouver melodic epic gothic metal. |
| 5 | An Abstract Illusion | "Drop This Planet of Dust" | Illuminate the Path | Swedish melodic epic progressive death metal. |
| 6 | Sheidim | "Deviant Kingdom" | Shrines of the Void | Morbid Spanish epic black metal. |
| 7 | Thrawsunblat | "Dead of Winter" | Metachthonia | Woods of Ypres guitarist Joel Violette's astonishing pagan-atmospheric epic black metal. Maybe my metal album of the year so far. |
| 8 | Hollow Sunshine | "Bad Company" | Bible Sea 6 | Drone soul. |
| 9 | Unlike Pluto | "Found You (feat. Michelle Buzz)" | single | Carefulstep. |
| 10 | Milk & Bone | "Natalie" | single | Breathy Montreal chvrches. |
| 11 | Linney | "Closer" | single | "A Thousand Miles" inverted. |
| 12 | Krystalmath | "Needle to My Thread" | single | Glassy poptimism. |
| 13 | Pusher | "Shake Down" | single | Toronto beats, Greek South African flow. Good luck making a better international grime record. |
| 14 | Dan Talevski | "Rocket" | single | About as close to a new Michael Jackson song as you're going to get. |
| 15 | Black Coast | "Sleep Alone" | single | Indietronic arena pop. |
| 16 | Dawn Richard | "Cali Sun" | single | OK, trip trap can now be a thing. |
| 17 | of Verona | "Signs" | The White Apple: B-Sides | If you missed any of these the first time, this is the most important synthpop album of the week. |
| 18 | Mothica | "Out of It" | single | Whooshy, mechanistic electronica with airy, angelic vocals is one of the (countless) things against which I appear to have failed to evolve a defense. |
| 19 | Lyon | "Bodytalk" | single | They swarm, knowing this. |
| 20 | George Cosby | "Juliet" | single | Also: reverberant, obsessive piano pop with dramatic near-operatic singing. |
| 21 | Helms Alee | "Galloping Mind Fuk" | single | So, there's the wing of post-rock that has become "study" music. This is the other wing. The one that will crash your drone into the sun to find out if the sun breaks. |
| 22 | Sivyj Yar | "The Wind Whispers in Solitude" | The Unmourned Past 2 | Epic meditative black metal. Voidgaze. |
| 23 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Depravity Favours the Bold" | single | Anaal Nathrakh seem to have finally noticed that extreme black metal had caught up to them. |
| 24 | Doom:VS | "The Light That Would Fade" | Aeternum Vale | Purist funeral doom. It says "doom" right in the band-name. |
| 25 | Still Corners | "Down with Heaven and Hell" | single | Twittery, becalmed anti-dance indietronica. |
| 26 | Phantogram | "Cruel World" | single | Deconstructed, half-reassembled, half-abandoned, half-found-and-canonized. |
| 27 | LVL UP | "Hidden Driver" | single | In these end-times, not even milk hotels can be neutral. |
| 28 | Sabaton | "Sparta" | The Last Stand | War is a bad idea but a magnificent idiom. |
| 29 | DGM | "Fallen" | single | The kind of progressive metal that makes me want to be progressive about everything. |
| 30 | Narnia | "Messengers" | single | Of course there had to be a progressive metal band called "Narnia". Of course they had to disband so they could be resurrected. |
| 31 | Skeletonwitch | "The Apothic Gloom" | The Apothic Gloom +3 | Black/thrash metal. |
| 32 | Devin Townsend Project | "Secret Sciences" | single | I've long suspected that Devin Townsend is Weird Al Yankovic's secret serious identity. |
| 33 | The Last Royals | "If You Wanna Say I Love You" | single | If we ever split the coextensive urban and rural American nations, Brooklyn will be the new urban capital. |
| 34 | NeonNoah | "Dreaming With the Lights On" | single | Texas will mostly go with the new Confederacy, but Dallas will come with us. |
| 35 | Ellie Goulding | "Still Falling For You - From "Bridget Jones's Baby"" | single | Movies with soundtrack songs like this were only ever meant for the city theaters, anyway. |
| 36 | Signals Midwest | "Alchemy Hour" | single | Both sides will have songs about vehicles, of course, but if it mentions turn signals, it's a city song. The city songs about cars are about traffic as a social machine, the country ones are about moral immunity. |
| 37 | Oathbreaker | "Second Son of R." | 10:56 / Second Son of R. 2 | One nation will be founded on vows and faith and certainty. The other will be noisier, and unafraid of the unknown. |
| 38 | Trap Them | "Luster Pendulums" | single | Entropy is gravity rotated into the temporal. |
| 39 | Wrekmeister Harmonies | "Some Were Saved Some Drowned" | single | In this way even decay is an energy. |
| 40 | Leiva | "Dejándose Caer" | single | We have glorious heartland guitar-rock in cities, too. Even Spanish ones. |
| 41 | Funambulista | "Quiero Que Vuelvas" | single | Especially Spanish ones. |
| 42 | Los Daniels | "Desperté" | Inmortal | And the Spanish ones that aren't even in Spain. |
| 43 | Eluvium | "Rorschach Pavan" | single | We know that quiet can be a mental state as much as an acoustic one. |
| 44 | Titan Slayer | "Fury of Fire" | Titanium: Chapter 04 5 | And that paranoia is the acute form of awareness. |
| 45 | Blood On The Dance Floor | "Sorry Not Sorry" | single | But fear and dancing can coexist. |
| 46 | William Hut | "Memorial" | single | We can make country stomp-anthems in snow-bound Northern cities. |
| 47 | Feuerschwanz | "Ketzerei" | Sex is Muss | On Friday nights we can cheer for relentless football robots. |
| 48 | Asenblut | "Titanenerbe" | Berserker | At the end of the season, we will let them destroy each other. |
| 49 | Wardruna | "Odal" | single | And the funeral will be more cathartic than the championship. |
| 50 | coldrain | "Wrong" | VENA II | Well, maybe not more. |
| 51 | Zynic | "Dreams in Black and White" | Dreams in Black and White | But, after all, sports are a metaphor; the way the stadium pours exhilaration back into the city afterwards is real life. |
| 52 | Modiga Agenter | "Lyckliga slut" | single | Synth-pop and architecture are definitively humane. |
| 53 | Wretch 32 | "I.O.U." | single | This is the critical difference between mere dirt and majestic grime. |
| 54 | Twin Atlantic | "The Chaser" | single | This is why plugging in a guitar connects it to our nervous systems. |
| 55 | Sponge Cola | "Ang Saya" | Sinag Tala | And connects all of our nervous systems together. |
| 56 | Isabell Schmidt | "Nimmst du mich mit" | single | This is how grace flows so effortlessly into the simplest forms. |
| 57 | Bosshafte Beats | "Koffer voller Cash" | single | Which is as good an excuse as any for stockpiling simple forms. |
| 58 | Mira Luoti | "Sitä tipahtaa pimeyteen" | single | And banking them in Nordic vaults. |
| 59 | Dan Bull | "In No Man's Sky" | In No Man's Sky +2 | But if seed vaults are love's response to fear, so too do we need the moments when we just stop worrying for a while. |
| 60 | Cruzh | "Set Me Free" | single | When we let ourselves revel in our capacity for oblivious giddy foolishness. |
| 61 | Meshiaak | "It Burns At Both Ends" | Alliance Of Thieves | Which is, after all, prodigious. |
| 62 | Idina Menzel | "Queen of Swords" | single | And jubilantly various in its forms. |
| 63 | Bedårande Barn | "Ung och stolt" | Ung och stolt +2 | And ageless. |
| 64 | Against Me! | "Haunting, Haunted, Haunts" | single | We transform without exactly changing. |
| 65 | Danny L Harle | "Super Natural" | single | And put on costumes never knowing when they'll turn out to be our perfect clothes. |
| 66 | Osamuraisan | "Running through" | Meanings of Dreams | You can find yourself in surprising places, if you are curious enough to look. |
| 67 | WagakkiBand | "Kishikaisei" | Kishikaisei +1 | And brave. |
| 68 | Affiance | "Africa" | single | Or, if bravery is what it is when you persist despite the possibility of failure, whatever you call the thing when you persist despite the full cognizance of what previous failures have indisputably supposedly proven. |