| 1 | Cannons | "Written on the Wall" | Written on the Wall 6 | Look, I'm not saying it's easy to come with me on my own fantastic incredible journey. |
| 2 | Laura Pausini | "Simili" | Simili | I've been miniaturized and injected into this universe and I'm trying to find my way home. |
| 3 | Little Mix | "Shout Out to My Ex" | Glory Days (Deluxe) | So are we all. That's how it works. We're always smaller and more lost than we know we should be. |
| 4 | Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness | "Brooklyn, You're Killing Me" | single | But you chose what you do with this. |
| 5 | Royal Teeth | "Is It Just Me" | Amateurs - EP | Do you try to make yourself bigger, or do you try to marvel at the revealed scale of everything else? |
| 6 | KYKO | "Nature" | single | Either effort can take your time. |
| 7 | Pr0files | "Song for Zula" | single | But only one will give it back improved. |
| 8 | Dawn Richard | "LA (feat. Trombone Shorty)" | Redemption | To guard yourself from strangeness is to spend your meager allowance of time on procrastination, |
| 9 | Sleeping At Last | "You Wouldn't Like Me" | single | on receiving brightly-wrapped gifts and rewrapping them, unopened, in pages you didn't even pick from newspapers you don't even read. |
| 10 | Jhameel | "Romantic Soul" | single | I make these lists, which I fully understand are usually too long for anybody, out of much longer lists that I make even longer whenever I figure out a way. |
| 11 | The Chain Gang Of 1974 | "Slow" | single | And clearly much of the process is shield-raising and line-drawing, and finding new blocks to fit into well-worn shape-sorter slots. |
| 12 | Lost Under Heaven | "Lament - Single Edit" | single | I am an obsessive collector of impossibly subtle distinctions, I know this about myself. |
| 13 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "Eternal Youth" | Eternal | It is only, but always, part of me. |
| 14 | Black Anvil | "May Her Wrath Be Just" | single | Most weeks, I immerse myself earnestly in strangeness, and come out of it with a few more hours of bombastic metal, effusive synthpop, roaring guitars, twinkly elfdance baubles and twitchy laptop dissonance. |
| 15 | Klimt 1918 | "Nostalghia" | single | I aspire to be a listening role-model, but I mean a role-model in the most mundane possible sense: not an examplar but just an example. |
| 16 | Khonsu | "The Observatory" | The Xun Protectorate | These songs aren't designed to improve your listening, they're meant to confront and indulge and seduce and betray and improve mine. |
| 17 | Bethlehem | "Die Dunkelheit darbt" | single | They are attempts to exorcise demons, |
| 18 | Kreator | "Gods of Violence" | single | or to circumscribe the negative space where I imagine absent demons might rest, |
| 19 | Freedom Call | "Metal Is For Everyone" | Master Of Light | or to pose victoriously with their corpses in fantastically ill-advised pictures. |
| 20 | Grave Digger | "Healed By Metal" | single | When I say that music is what humans do best, I do not mean that we are better selves in music. |
| 21 | Lancer | "Mastery" | single | All the errors we make in our lives, we repeat and magnify in art. |
| 22 | Gotthard | "Stay with Me" | single | We are sometimes better in our fantasies, and sometimes even worse. |
| 23 | Enbound | "Falling" | The Blackened Heart | Maybe I have to work less hard this week to convince you that there are few more terrifying places than the world other people want this one to be. |
| 24 | Can't Swim | "Stranger" | single | Trust no one. Empathy invites immolation. |
| 25 | Bring Me The Horizon | "Oh No - Radio Edit" | single | Surely the first step in self-preservation has to be moving to safety, away from anything you can't control. |
| 26 | August Burns Red | "What Child Is This? (Greensleeves)" | single | And isn't this everything? |
| 27 | Johnnie Guilbert | "My Mind" | Lost 6 | Thus meditation, and letting go, and purification of every laudable or hideous kind? |
| 28 | Natives | "Passion" | single | It's so hard to make people love you. |
| 29 | A Loss For Words | "Existential Crisis at the Cask 'N Flagon" | single | So much easier to just exclude the ones who don't. |
| 30 | Hot Mulligan | "Something About A Bunch Of Dead Dogs" | single | So much easier, so much more validating, to talk to the people who share your stipulations. |
| 31 | Stray From The Path | "The House Always Wins" | single | Also your ignorances and distrusts and accents. |
| 32 | Wallflower | "Mas Eu Quero Mais" | single | Especially your exceptions and weaknesses. |
| 33 | Sofia Karlberg | "A Bible Of Mermaid Pictures" | single | All of these are ways to encloser smaller, quieter, more manageable spaces, |
| 34 | Jennifer Lopez | "Olvídame y Pega la Vuelta" | single | so is it any wonder that conversations tend to seek them out? |
| 35 | Medina Azahara | "Recordando Esa Noche" | Paraiso Prohibido | Open conversations are fucking hard. |
| 36 | Usher | "Wait For It" | single | Where do you even start with somebody who thinks it's harrassment for the cast of a play about the ideological formation of this country to speak to an official-elect who has actively opposed institutional tolerance and protection of the vulnerable? |
| 37 | K'NAAN | "Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)" | single | Where do you even start with somebody who thinks this country should be defined not by opposition to bias and closed-mindedness, but by refined and specific biases and particularly closed minds? |
| 38 | Xiu Xiu | "Wondering" | single | How do you discuss anything with somebody who grants inarguable authority to invisible forces? |
| 39 | Slow Meadow | "Palemote" | Palemote +1 | I mean, of course, other people's invisible forces. |
| 40 | John Beltran | "She Dwells with Beauty" | Everything at Once | Your invisible forces are rational understandings of basic universal laws. |
| 41 | Lawrence English | "Object of Projection" | single | Those are easy and helpful. |
| 42 | The Shoes | "Two Pills (Bonus Track)" | Iris (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Bonus Track Version] | It's other people's crazy ideas that make it impossible to reason with them. |
| 43 | Diabulus in Musica | "Marble Embrace" | Dirge For The Archons | As if elves would ever dress that way! Ridiculous. |
| 44 | Dark Sarah | "Island in the Mist" | The Puzzle | And yet. |
| 45 | Beyond The Black | "Lost In Forever" | single | And yet. |
| 46 | Grabbitz | "Follow Me" | single | We either give up, or we find some way to continue. |
| 47 | Mako | "Let Go Of The Wheel" | single | We look for things we've lost in places they can't possibly be, |
| 48 | T-Mass | "Focus" | Dim Mak All-Stars Executive Produced by Steve Aoki | because maybe we'll find something else, |
| 49 | Gordon Lightfoot | "Plans of My Own" | single | or maybe we'll find something that will remind us where we left the thing, |
| 50 | WitchCraft | "Пепел" | single | or maybe our notions of what seems possible are as flawed as everything else we think we know. |
| 51 | Leehom Wang | "緣分一道橋 (電影"長城"片尾曲)" | single | So although it sounds wrong and dangerous to say merely that there are reasons for optimism, there are at least usefulnesses to remembering that most things are less immutable than they seem. |
| 52 | Soulburn | "Where Splendid Corpses Are Towering Towards the Sun" | Earthless Pagan Spirit | You say you don't like metal. |
| 53 | Tycho | "Division" | Division Remix 3 | The Republicans say they're going to undo 8 years of progress in human rights. |
| 54 | Hjerteslag | "Crazy Oktober" | Vannmann86 | These are expressions of belief, and thus testaments to character. |
| 55 | Amish 82 | "303 feat. Kirsti Huke" | I\ 3 5 | But "character" is relative, and revealed more by challenges than by acclaim. |
| 56 | Klamydia | "Koomikon kyyneleet" | single | What do you do when the new crowds are shouting at you? |
| 57 | Words Of Farewell | "Gaia Demise" | A Quiet World | Will a million people fill the Mall to celebrate on days when Trump's acclimation to beaucratic reality makes procedural progress, the way they will show up to defend against oblivious idiocy? |
| 58 | Erik Ekholm | "Arius" | Illumine | We live in a supposedly-free, supposedly-enlightened country where cowards still draw swastikas in darkness. |
| 59 | The Magnetic Fields | "'74: No" | 5 Selections From 50 Song Memoir 5 | But darkness is just one of the many resources they have no plan to conserve. |
| 60 | Jesca Hoop | "The Lost Sky" | single | And in sunlight, and even in cloudlight, we still convert those shapes into flowers and owls. |
| 61 | Vaylon | "Gravity" | Gravity - EP | This is a country that applies meticulous broadcast premeditation to reflexive, un-self-aware posturing, |
| 62 | Vanesa Martín | "Complicidad" | Munay | but sometimes this is what the resolve to bear witness has to entail. |
| 63 | Robe | "Hoy al Mundo Renuncio" | Destrozares, Canciones para el Final de los Tiempos | Every swastika, every hate-lined appeal to "tradition", marks a rupture in our moral society. |
| 64 | High Valley | "She's With Me" | Dear Life | But at least they are marked. |
| 65 | Miranda Lambert | "Runnin' Just in Case" | The Weight of These Wings | Maybe I am sometimes as guilty as anybody of demanding more counterbalancing comforting stories about the planks in the hull that don't have holes from being groped by tiny toxic fingers. |
| 66 | Ion Dissonance | "To Lift the Dead Hand of the Past" | Cast the First Stone | How can we be sinking? Half the ship is now pointing skyward, safely above the water line. |
| 67 | A Sense of Gravity | "Echo Chasers" | Atrament | We would never let the other end of the ship drag us down. |
| 68 | Protest The Hero | "Cataract" | Pacific Myth (Deluxe Edition) | But at the same time, the swastikas and the paperovering and the denials and the howls are all participating in the inventory. |
| 69 | Walking Across Jupiter | "Walking Across Jupiter - Blossom" | single | We learned more about this country from Sanders' loss and Trump's win than we were ever going to from another Bush decorously debating another Clinton. |
| 70 | Fuzzbox | "Let's Go Supernova!" | single | We are learning painful and terrifying things about how well we are occupying the surface of this planet. |
| 71 | ONE OK ROCK | "Bedroom Warfare" | single | We can split atoms, but we can still be crushed by nothing fancier than water. |
| 72 | exist†trace | "Yoake No Hikari" | Royal Straight Magic | We bend the Earth smugly to our will, and then it just casually snaps. |
| 73 | RADWIMPS | "Dream Lantern" | Your Name. | And yet, and yet, these few days between our awakening and our self-destruction have such moments of beauty that no plate tectonics were ever going to produce. |
| 74 | Krampus | "The Trial" | Counter Current | These fragile creatures that would mob-vote against their own internal nobility are capable of infinite love. |
| 75 | EASYFUN | "Monopoly" | single | No, it's worse than that: are ultimately incapable of anything but love, but even love can coil up so tightly inside your guilty darkness that it hurts to do anything that makes it move. |
| 76 | Sinkane | "U'Huh" | single | Hold still, hold still. Maybe this feeling will go away. Maybe these strangely sparkly people will dance past and not stop here in our shadows. |
| 77 | Holy Holy | "Elevator" | single | Dance like that? Of course we could. |
| 78 | Jai Wolf | "Gravity (feat. JMR)" | Kindred Spirits 6 | Enlightenment? Fuck you for implying we don't already know what it looks like here. |
| 79 | Jupe | "Seventeen" | single | This is where we're from. The magnanimity you wave at us drips judgment and condescension, and you wonder why we won't kiss your hand. |
| 80 | Nicole Millar | "Pixelated" | single | Do you have questions for us? |
| 81 | Sixx:A.M. | "Wolf At Your Door" | Prayers for the Blessed | Are you actually curious what it's like here? |
| 82 | MoStack | "Block Popping" | single | Because we can actually tell you. |
| 83 | Sharky Major | "Big 45" | Big 45 +2 | We've been telling you. |
| 84 | Smiler | "No Better Time" | Clarity | Those insane, pathetic, hateful, misguided stories? Every adjective you say after you say "insane" is meaningless. |
| 85 | U-KISS | "PaNiC!" | PaNiC! +1 | If you don't understand a story, stop there. |
| 86 | Demet Akalın | "Nazar" | Rakipsiz | Swallow your corrective reflex. |
| 87 | Burcu Güneş | "Ağır Yaralı" | single | Few wrong things are subject to simple righting. |
| 88 | Billy Talent | "A Passage To Bangkok" | single | The good boards in the hull are not material from which you can cut plugs for the bad ones. |
| 89 | Miss Montreal | "Christmas Hearts" | single | You have to care. |
| 90 | Santa Cruz | "Drag Me Down" | single | When you stop caring, you die. |
| 91 | Power Trip | "Firing Squad" | single | When you stop caring, your opinion stops mattering. |
| 92 | Wellhello | "#Sohavégetnemérős" | #Sohavégetnemérős | That is how society is the opposite of solipsism. |
| 93 | Sabled Sun | "God Is Binary" | 2148 | That is the only way we have a country. |
| 94 | Nikki Lane | "Highway Queen" | single | The question a ballot asks you is not "what do you want?", it is "what do you think will work for all of us?" |
| 95 | Cara Dillon | "Upon a Winter's Night" | Upon a Winter's Night | This is a much harder question, and one you may not feel qualified to answer. |
| 96 | Shallow Side | "Renegade" | single | But there's nobody else. That's the terrible premise of democracy. |
| 97 | June 1974 | "Protection" | single | It works, like most things, as long as enough people take it seriously. |
| 98 | Crywolf | "Windswept" | single | It is inexplicable, and sustained by belief. |
| 99 | The Algorithm | "overclock" | single | So those of you who wish this were a country ruled by faith, you don't understand how profoundly you already have your way. |
| 100 | Saint Of Sin | "Kayama" | Kayama +2 | But the faith is this: |
| 101 | Radiohead | "Supercollider" | Supercollider / The Butcher 2 | You will listen to other people's songs. |
| 102 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "Curse All Maps" | Fake End | That is all. |
| 103 | Jim-E Stack | "Deadstream (Rostam Version) [feat. Charli XCX]" | single | Everything else is fancy ways of saying "let it go". |
| 104 | Heimlich | "Sharks - Radio Edit" | Sharks 5 | Your pain is real, your songs are amazing. |
| 105 | Invader Girl | "Danger Zone" | Danger Zone +1 | Have you heard mine? |
| 106 | Theatre Of Delays | "Dust" | single | Have you heard ours? |
| 107 | Mankku [mancko] | "Öppet hus" | Det var allt för stunden | What about these? I have more. There are so many more. |
| 108 | Eternal Deformity | "Esoteric Manifesto" | No Way Out | We don't have time for fighting, there are too many songs. |
| 109 | Devilment | "Life Is What You Keep from the Reaper" | II - The Mephisto Waltzes | Play that one you played me again. Yesyesyes. And have you heard this one? |