| 1 | Eternal Idol | "Another Night Comes" | single | Naming your band after a Tony Martin Sabbath album, that's serious metal geekery. |
| 2 | Riti Occulti | "Beri'ah" | Tetragrammaton | No occult metal is complete without an apostrophe between two vowels. |
| 3 | Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard | "Gallego" | Y Proffwyd Dwyll | If you're a Welsh stoner-metal band, you have to work extra hard to make sure people don't just call you a Welsh metal band. |
| 4 | Sarastus | "Hautakammio" | II-Toinen Tuleminen | Declamatory Finnish blackmetalcore? |
| 5 | Temperance | "At the Edge of Space" | The Earth Embraces Us All | I'd never heard of this Italian gothic symphonic power-metal band before, but this may be my pick so far for the best power-metal album of the year. |
| 6 | Ablaze My Sorrow | "When All Is..." | Black | Sometimes I want gothic black metal, like HIM with extra Infernality. |
| 7 | Honnda | "Fuschia Philharmonic" | Diamonds in the Microwave 5 | Fluxwork + escape room = shatterpop. |
| 8 | NAKED | "Anomie" | ZONE | Industrial shatterpop. |
| 9 | Feral | "Hyphen" | Nexus 5 | Shatterfunk. |
| 10 | Maxwell Sterling | "Hollywood Medieval" | Hollywood Medieval | Chamber shatterpop. |
| 11 | Stoneface & Terminal | "Breaking Through - Original Mix" | Breaking Through 2 | Or, if you're feeling traditional, just some nice progressive uplifting trance. |
| 12 | Voyce | "Lieblingsmensch" | single | German ecstatic pop rap. |
| 13 | Dj Polarsoul | "Ikuisesti" | Forever | Dark Finnish producercore hip hop. |
| 14 | Switchkicker | "Long Run" | single | Australian electrodancerock. |
| 15 | Burning Point | "Master Them All" | single | Finnish power powermetal. |
| 16 | Amaranthe | "Limitless" | MAXIMALISM | Gothic symphonic metal has always at least skirted pop, as one logical consequence of melodic effusion. Amaranthe seem to have treated this as a race to the pop summit that they are determined to win. |
| 17 | Dark Tranquillity | "Forward Momentum" | single | Sonorous dark gothic metal from a band who can rule this form whenever they chose to play it straight. |
| 18 | Tygers Of Pan Tang | "Dust" | Tygers of Pan Tang | Risen-from-the-dead glam metal is the new hard rock. |
| 19 | Wardruna | "Tyr" | Runaljod Ragnarok | Wardruna is the thought experiment where you take out every element you could conventionally identify as metal, and yet you still have music designed to appeal specifically and triumphantly to metal fans. |
| 20 | Forever Still | "Miss Madness" | Tied Down | Paramore + Xandria + Dead Sara. |
| 21 | The Raveonettes | "NVRLND" | single | Wall of noise, wall of sleep. |
| 22 | Mr Little Jeans | "Stitches" | F E V E R S 4 | Glassine metropop. |
| 23 | Wildlife | "2017" | Age Of Everything | "Mr. Brightside" + The Unforgettable Fire. |
| 24 | Allie X | "Misbelieving" | single | Ellie Goulding + Tori Amos. |
| 25 | Cakes da Killa | "Keep It Goin' (feat. Calore)" | Hedonism | Flux hop. |
| 26 | BASECAMP | "Lo" | In Stone | Shattersoul. |
| 27 | Anagnorisis | "Disgust & Remorse, Pt I" | Peripeteia | Black vortex metal. |
| 28 | Witchery | "Nosferatu" | single | Black neo-thrash metal. |
| 29 | Twilight | "Dandini - Original Mix" | single | A data glitch keeps conflating this Eastern-EDM Twilight with the Nachtmystium-related supergroup, but I turn out to like this one better. |
| 30 | Murmur | "Labirynth (Chapter 1)" | Murmur 3 | Study music for contemplating the void. |
| 31 | Grant-Lee Phillips | "Find My Way (Acoustic Demo) [Bonus Track]" | The Narrows (Deluxe Edition) | I admit that I wish Grant-Lee Phillips would only make demos. |
| 32 | Imogen Heap | "Tiny Human" | Tiny Human +1 | As close as anybody has come, I think, to recreating the combined senses of possibility and fable Kate Bush channeled on The Hounds of Love. |
| 33 | Dragonette | "Body 2 Body" | single | Bounding synthpoptimism. |
| 34 | FaltyDL | "Infinite Sustain (feat. Hannah Cohen)" | Heaven Is for Quitters | Progressive uplifting trance as slow-motion slow-burn anticipation. |
| 35 | Alpines | "Stay" | single | Massive Attack soundtrack restraint as indietronic astral soul. |
| 36 | Shana Falana | "Cool Kids" | Here Comes the Wave | New resonant awash indie shoegaze. |
| 37 | Hideous Towns | "Value" | single | An Echoey post-punk version of the Cannanes. |
| 38 | Aeternitas | "House of Usher" | House of Usher | I have an enduring weakness for grandiose gothic symphonic metal that sounds like they recorded it by cramming a host of angels into somebody's spare garage. |
| 39 | Goes Cube | "The Stand" | Shadows Swallowed The Flood | Chaotic, bludgeoning cybermetal. |
| 40 | Hieroglyphic Being | "This Is 4 The Rave Bangers" | single | Electrotribalism. |
| 41 | Shed | "Keep Time" | The Traveller | Boomtrip. |
| 42 | Youssou N'Dour | "Ban La" | single | Ageless afropop bounce. |
| 43 | WSTR | "Footprints" | single | Power pop-punk. |
| 44 | Sleep On It | "Counting Miles" | Lost Along the Way 5 | Emo pop-punk. |
| 45 | The Gospel Youth | "The Darkest Shades of Black and Grey" | single | Melancholic-ecstatic pop-punk. |
| 46 | Fossil Youth | "Late Night Swim" | single | Punk pop-punk. |
| 47 | SACRED PAWS | "Everyday" | Everyday +1 | Post-world indie rock. |
| 48 | Inon Zur | "Secrets of the Louvre" | Eagle Flight (Original Game Soundtrack) | Valkyrie epicore. |
| 49 | Shahead Mostafafar | "Into The Next Dimension - Beginning To Remember" | Miniqua | Indie compositional epicore. |
| 50 | Stephen Walking | "Hey" | single | Neuroflash dance-pop. |
| 51 | Caspian | "Castles High, Marble Bright" | Castles High, Marble Bright +1 | Cathartic post-rock. |
| 52 | amiinA | "Atlas" | Atlas 6 | Coruscating alt-J-rock, not to be confused with Icelandic laboratorio where the other A is capitalized. |
| 53 | We Deserve This | "Dark Matter" | Signs and Symbols 5 | Cinemascopic post-step. |
| 54 | Matenrou Opera | "PHOENIX" | PHOENIX RISING 6 | Amphetaminic occular-migraine visual kei. |
| 55 | NateWantsToBattle | "Viridian City" | The Greatest Master | The first great pop-punk otacore Pokémon album. |
| 56 | Palisades | "Aggression" | single | Shouty pop-punk-core. |
| 57 | Animals As Leaders | "Arithmophobia" | single | Hyperintense djentmath. |
| 58 | Destrage | "Not Everything Is Said" | A Means to No End | Shrieky Italian power-death metal. |
| 59 | Radere | "I Can't Sleep" | I Can't Sleep, I Can't Wake Up | Unrelaxable between-state ambient-noise. |
| 60 | William Ryan Fritch | "Recoiled" | Ill Tides | Slow-morph flux-ambient texturescapism. |
| 61 | Casino Versus Japan | "Swimming, Thawing" | Frozen Geometry | Sentimental isolation-tank echolocation. |
| 62 | protoU | "Voices of the Water" | Khmaoch | Having had the momentary thought, I am now morbidly afraid that if you speed this up 250x it turns out to be 2 seconds of a Kajagoogoo song being flushed down an after-hours design-museum commode. |
| 63 | Gemelli Diversi | "Uppercut" | Uppercut | Easily one of my 10 or 14 favorite recent Italian pop-rap anthems about boxing. |
| 64 | Benji & Fede | "A casa mia" | 0+ | Italian electro-idol-pop boy-band glory. They can still be a boy band with only two of them, right? |
| 65 | William Hut | "The Racetrack" | Hafnir Games | Haunted-dream Norwegian bedroom-solipsynthm. |
| 66 | Mithras | "The Statue On The Island" | On Strange Loops | Epic monsters epically eating your head. |
| 67 | Young Kato | "I Wanna Shake You Out Of It" | One. Two. Three. Four. EP 4 | Turboelastic funksynthpop. |
| 68 | Sundara Karma | "Olympia" | single | Soaringchiming pop-guitar-rock. |
| 69 | Johnny Foreigner | "Flooding" | single | Slashing glittering-shard noise-pop. |
| 70 | Coquin Migale | "Soft" | single | Stop-start alt-rock somewheregaze. |
| 71 | Jimmy Eat World | "Through" | Integrity Blues | Maybe the modern and current grand-masters of the mid-tempo open-hearted crashing-drum crescendoing restrained-fury rock anthem. |
| 72 | DON BROCO | "You Wanna Know" | single | Math-punk-pop. |
| 73 | SayWeCanFly | "I Didn't Know" | single | Fragile pixie acoustica. |
| 74 | A Story Told | "Closer" | single | Chainsmoking for non-smokers turns out to be surprisingly Goo Goo Dolls-esque, which might explain a lot. |
| 75 | Betontod | "Freunde" | single | Galloping, exhortational German power-punk. |
| 76 | Goodbye Fairground | "Rational Dreams" | I Don't Belong Here Anymore | Neo-trad Social-Distortion-ish German punk rock. |
| 77 | Estiva | "Flares - Extended Mix" | Flares 2 | Sometimes the short version is like an unopened box. |
| 78 | Thegiornalisti | "Fatto di te" | Completamente Sold Out | Airy Italian pop rock. |
| 79 | Philipp Poisel | "Bis ans Ende der Hölle" | single | You have to give the reverb something to savor. |
| 80 | Michael Kiessou | "Alemok - rmx" | single | Dance-battle afrobeats. |
| 81 | Sôber | "Héroes" | Vulcano | Surging Spanish hard-rock/alt-metal. |
| 82 | Besserbitch | "The Eternal Procrastinator" | Pretenders & Liars | Swedish anthemic fight-punk. |
| 83 | Adna | "Overthinking" | single | Becalmed in echo. |
| 84 | Gaika | "In Between 2" | SPAGHETTO | Grimeflux. |
| 85 | Szabyest | "Szerelem kell" | single | Swoony Hungarian electro-clatter pop-rock. |
| 86 | Megosh | "I Stole from the Dead" | single | Math-pop-dream-core. |
| 87 | Concepts | "Change the Scheme" | Misguided 6 | Crushdjent. |
| 88 | Lea Porcelain | "Warsaw Street" | single | Towering gothic post-punk. |
| 89 | Aethernaeum | "Blut und Tränen" | Zwischen zwei Welten 2 | Roiling melodic black noise metal. |
| 90 | Tanya Tagaq | "Nacreous" | Retribution | This is what sound sounds like in its home universe, as it prepares itself for the death-ritual of crossing over into ours. |