| 1 | Black Therapy | "Stabbed" | In the Embrace of Sorrow, I Smile | Epic, shrieky, fast, vigorous Italian black metal. |
| 2 | Moreton | "Johana" | Specimen 5 | Ominous Low-esque suicide lament. From Brisbane. |
| 3 | Rani Chatoorgoon | "Heartbeat" | Samsara | Elegant Canadian symphonic progressive rock. |
| 4 | FM Belfast | "You're So Pretty" | single | Icelandic synth-quirk-pop-group sounding quirkier and icier. |
| 5 | felicita | "a new family" | single | Attack-circuitry blip-punk. |
| 6 | Dream Beats | "Learning to Dance" | single | Swedish lost-80s neo-New-Wave-pop near-disco. |
| 7 | Urfaust | "Meditatum III" | Empty Space Meditation | Ambient metal is very definitely a thing. It's a thing that's probably too metal for most ambient fans, and too ambient for most metal fans, but abandoned interstices are just less crowded. |
| 8 | Enslaved | "Heimvegen" | single | Progressive pagan metal is also a thing, and Enslaved invented it. |
| 9 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Powerslave (Bonus Track)" | The Whole of the Law | If you weren't clear about what "extreme" means in metal, this cover of Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" may help explain it. |
| 10 | Fluisteraars | "Zijsselt" | Gelderland 2 | At its best, I think, black metal can be distilled catharsis. |
| 11 | Moonsorrow | "Non Serviam" | Soulless/Non Serviam 2 | And its best has made a lot of technical progress over the course of the genre's existence, as demonstrated fairly vividly by this sweeping remake of the title track from the second Rotting Christ album. |
| 12 | Netherbird | "Windwards" | The Grander Voyage | At its best it is redemptive grandeur in the elaborate guise of strangled nihilism. |
| 13 | Emptiness | "Meat Heart" | single | And like most things, it's arguably even more interesting when it's too engrossed in its own logic to care about being the best of anything pre-labeled. |
| 14 | Diana | "Over and over again" | single | Named with hopeless undistinguishedness, and maybe recorded in somebody's kitchen. But majestic, stomping, blaring hard-rock all the same. |
| 15 | Alexx Mack | "Whatever I Want" | single | Dance pop with the compressed twitch-ballistics of phone-screen air hockey. |
| 16 | GFOTY | "Mr. E" | Call Him A Doctor | Phone-screen air hockey on a cracked screen. |
| 17 | Theocracy | "Paper Tiger" | Ghost Ship | I'm not saying you have to be Christian to make melodic progressive metal this effusively self-confident. Wait, maybe I am. |
| 18 | Testament | "The Pale King" | Brotherhood of the Snake | No, I'm not, but you need to have a pretty good idea of how reverence works. |
| 19 | Wardrum | "The Unrepentant" | Awakening | You need to at least know how the priests of the Temple of Syrinx dress. |
| 20 | Leaves' Eyes | "King of Kings" | King of Kings | But then, I'm an atheist, and my favorite inanimate thing on the planet is at least nominally a church. |
| 21 | Diabulus in Musica | "Crimson Gale" | single | Believing imaginary creatures are real, I basically don't get. But building churches, I do. |
| 22 | Magistina Saga | "イリジスタブル" | Phalaenopsis 3 | I'm an atheist, but I suspect I believe that we've done more damage to our humanity by building anonymous office "parks" out of rebar and plywood than we have by building churches out of stones and glass. |
| 23 | Madder Mortem | "Blood on the Sand" | Red in Tooth and Claw | Imagine that the Sugarcubes were a Norwegian avant-garde metal band, somewhere between Voivod and Nightwish. |
| 24 | Frida Sundemo | "We Are Dreamers" | single | And then imagine that the floaty, dreamy parts of Björk she left behind coallesced somewhere over western Sweden. |
| 25 | Jóhann Jóhannsson | "Kangaru - From "Arrival" Soundtrack" | single | And the oblique, composerly angles formed their own assemblies and ended up on soundtracks. |
| 26 | Pretty Maids | "Kingmaker" | single | There was a period when metal was the logical extrapolation of hard rock. Some Danes remember. |
| 27 | Words Of Farewell | "Gallows Frame" | single | Also some raspier nearby Germans. |
| 28 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "October" | single | As a border zone, metal can actually be both populist and arcane at once. |
| 29 | Karma Fields | "Sweat" | Sweat +2 | Which is true of all border zones, of course, and thus the fractured fluxwork deconstructions of electronic dance music. |
| 30 | Electro-Light | "Wait For You" | single | And the dance music that is still dance music but sounds like it has been reassembled out of the shiniest bits of everything else. |
| 31 | Upon A Burning Body | "You Don't Own Me" | Straight From The Barrio | And the hyper-precise belligerent crunch of metalcore. |
| 32 | Memphis May Fire | "Out Of It" | This Light I Hold | Metal arose from guitars sounding a bit like engines, so we shouldn't be too surprised when they cross over and become wholly unsentimental machinery that sounds a little bit like guitars used to sound. |
| 33 | Alesana | "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" | The Annabel Trilogy Part III: Confessions | Nor that metalcore could mutate into progressive pop-punk. |
| 34 | Guyz | "Walk On" | Walk On +3 | The Japanese, of course, have a sleeker version of everything. |
| 35 | Skull | "Buzzer Beater" | single | Korean reggae-step? |
| 36 | Sin Fang | "Clangour In Space" | Space Echoes 4 | R-and-beep? Blip-toy soul? |
| 37 | La Oreja de Van Gogh | "Diciembre" | single | And obviously I of all people believe that there are still such things as genres, but so should you. |
| 38 | Sløtface | "Empire Records" | single | Not every work intends to be trivialized into asking only formal questions. |
| 39 | Amish 82 | "My Name feat. Kirsti Huke ((Single Edit))" | My Name feat. Kirsti Huke 3 | Sometimes the snare hits right when the heart expects it. |
| 40 | Epic Score | "Imminent Threat" | Epic Underscore: Fight the Darkness | This is no more (or less) pandering to our instincts than donuts or sunsets. |
| 41 | Peter Hollens | "Little Drummer Boy" | A Hollens Family Christmas | It is possible to do a mundane thing with wonder. |
| 42 | Mattia Cupelli | "Sunset Between Two Headlands" | Ars Gratia Artis, Vol.1 5 | Possible to fill three minutes with a single shard of thought. |
| 43 | Miranda Lambert | "Keeper of the Flame" | single | Possible, after all, to get somewhere on roads whose destinations are entirely known. |
| 44 | Russell Dickerson | "MGNO" | Yours - EP 5 | Possible to come alive wherever you happen to be standing. |
| 45 | Thomas Rhett | "Anthem" | Tangled Up | Possible to epitomize things you probably think you reject. |
| 46 | Ulcerate | "Yield to Naught" | Shrines of Paralysis | But only for so long, before your deepest resonances resurface. |
| 47 | Arkona | "Vozrozhdenie" | single | Self-awareness doesn't have to undermine the power of legends. |
| 48 | Myrkgrav | "Vonde auer" | Takk og farvel; tida er blitt ei annen | Atheism isn't the denial of legend, it's the elevation of all myth to a common level. |
| 49 | Courage My Love | "Stereo" | single | This works with everything. It works with food, with cities, with whatever pop music sounds like now. |
| 50 | Dominique | "If I Could Go Back" | single | Which is always however amazing you allow it to be. |
| 51 | DON BROCO | "Money Power Fame" | single | Your job, as you listen, is to realize that you control whether you listen sincerely or not, and that this is actually not necessary but more than sufficient. |
| 52 | VUKOVI | "Boy George" | single | The symbols of your disdain can be freely reassigned. |
| 53 | MaRLo | "Leave My Hand" | single | But put them down now, for a minute, and step into these spinning blacklight whirls. |
| 54 | Sleeping At Last | "Atlas: Anger" | single | Belief is a form of dance. |
| 55 | Aphonnic | "Fruta Fresca" | Indomables | As is rage. And rage with self-awareness is a whole ballet, in whatever language. |
| 56 | Parlour Tricks | "Leave Your Light On" | Bodies 6 | Yearning, defiance, triumph: these are all minor variations on the theme of experiencing something by naming it, by choreographing how you want to remember that it made you feel. |
| 57 | Joshua Hyslop | "Wells" | single | All named feelings have more in common with each other than with their absence. |
| 58 | Asta Kask | "Världen tillhör er" | Upphittat! 2003-2016 | Street punk is a kind of urban planning. |
| 59 | Stiffy Jones | "Once This Car Starts Moving..." | Narrow Road of Memories | A last chance power drive, in a one-headlight borrowed car, is exactly what all of this is zoned for. |
| 60 | Shrine | "The Burden of Knowledge" | Ordeal 26.04.86 | None of which means, of course, that it doesn't have a way it sounds when we're not filling it with traffic. |
| 61 | Mocsok 1 Kölykök | "Szakad A Kép" | Társalog Minden Csillag | Like most things, it can sound familiar and unintelligible at once. |
| 62 | Aaron Lee Tasjan | "Dime" | Silver Tears | The things you understand perfectly may not speak to you half as well. |
| 63 | June 1974 | "Remembrance" | single | It's so much easier to tell somebody knows you when they speak in your codes. |
| 64 | Sad13 | "Hype" | single | Does everybody believe precision is more exciting than accuracy? I suspect not, but I'm only guessing, wildly. |
| 65 | Eternal Idol | "Evil Tears" | single | Everybody loves differently, but I'm not trying to hear that, see? Not right now. |
| 66 | amiinA | "Legacy" | Avalon | I spend these hours making lists of Nordic blast-metal and Japanese indie alt-rock because I know that's what people want and need. |
| 67 | Music For Cats | "Meoween!" | single | I know this the same way we know anything. |