| 1 | Principe Valiente | "Strangers in the Night" | Strangers in the Night +2 | When your social institutions have failed you, gothic new wave will be there to comfort you. (As long as you're comforted by having a friend standing across the room from you, looking moodily out the window into inexplicably but dramatically encroaching fog.) |
| 2 | Violet Cold | "No Escape from Dreamland" | Anomie | I am comforted, I think, by knowing that other people understand things the same way I do. More comforted the more it seems like they've arrived at the same conclusions from other inputs. Thus I am literally and specifically cheered by gothic Azerbaijani atmospheric black metal, and more bouyed by it due to the contextual assertion that it comes from somewhere I've never been and yet sounds like definitive voidgaze I would make myself if I had explicit control over what comes out when I try to make music. |
| 3 | Thisquietarmy | "Toujours ce rappel de l’éphémère" | Métamorphose | We always try to find ways to fall from temporary heights without requiring medical care afterwards. Rappelling and memory are both good tactics. |
| 4 | Windswept | "Shrouded in Pale Shining, so Sleeps Infinite Ancient Steppe" | single | When you feel like you're playing as fast as anybody could, you're usually wrong. |
| 5 | Aeternam | "Paropamisadae" | Ruins of Empires | When you feel like you're accelerating thermodynamic collapse, this is also usually mercifully wrong. |
| 6 | Balfor | "Heralds of the Fall" | Black Serpent Rising | There are days when it can seem redundant to imagine monsters. But mythological demons help keep cynical opportunists and small-minded bullies in perspective. |
| 7 | On Fillmore | "Despidida Suspensa" | single | You don't need magic swords. You have math. |
| 8 | Trevor de Brauw | "A New Architecture" | Uptown | You don't need spells. You have oscillators. |
| 9 | Earth Electric | "Meditate.Mediate" | single | You don't need tradition, you have fire and current. |
| 10 | Suits and Skulls | "Closure" | The Dream Never Leaves | To those with the patience to stand still, and the flexibility to choose where, are granted the powers of leverage. |
| 11 | Ashenspire | "The Wretched Mills" | Speak Not of the Laudanum Quandary | Civic evil arises, I think mainly, from failures of imagination. |
| 12 | The Yugos | "Ingenue" | single | Trust nobody who isn't nearly paralyzed by nostalgia. Trust nobody who doesn't seem like they are always falling in love. |
| 13 | Gloson | "Specter" | Grimen | Walking on a line is not a talent. Dancing on a line is a talent. Dancing on a line during a landslide is a superpower. |
| 14 | Montfaucon | "Insanity" | Renaissance | Those who cannot walk lines are doomed to insist, enragedly, that "traditionally" the lines were somewhere else. |
| 15 | Syron Vanes | "Angelchild" | Chaos From A Distance | Those who have lost their lines are doomed to sing immigrants' songs in what they thought was a country they owned. |
| 16 | Holy Hydrogen | "A Neutrino's Journey" | single | Those who build walls create the shadows that make the wilderness seem dark. |
| 17 | Cirith Gorgor | "Proclamation of Destruction" | Bi Den Dode Hant | Fear's only internal instinct is self-preservation. |
| 18 | Last Leaf Down | "Ghost Trails" | single | Nobody will look back with desperate fondness on these days. |
| 19 | Sólstafir | "Ísafold" | single | Future thrift-stores are relentless judges of the present, |
| 20 | Nordjevel | "Krigsmakt" | Krigsmakt +2 | and there will be no vintage market for shitty red baseball caps. |
| 21 | Light of the Morning Star | "Nocta" | Nocta | You will not make American great "again" by making it racist again. |
| 22 | Day Wave | "Untitled" | single | Other people may wear your shitty hats because they want something, but we know you wear them because even a gentle wind dispels the illusion of your hair. |
| 23 | Eclipse | "Killing Me" | single | Heroism requires movement, |
| 24 | Minniva | "You'll Be In My Heart" | single | and movement scrapes you against the air. |
| 25 | Breathless | "Tribe" | single | The people who know what you really look like, they are your tribe. |
| 26 | Daisyhead | "Don't Feel Bad" | single | Disguises fool nobody, but implicate you in deception. |
| 27 | Have Mercy | "Coexist" | single | Nobody looks at your shapeless suits and imagines that you're saving us from the unmanageable lust your true contours would excite. |
| 28 | Lorde | "Green Light" | single | Does it frighten you to see anybody kissing on a light-up dance floor? |
| 29 | Blanck Mass | "The Rat" | World Eater | Only joy can compete with joy. There are dark joys, but a dark joy is not the negation of bright joys any more than you make fluxwork by negating anthemic pop. |
| 30 | Evan Caminiti | "Joaquin - feat. Jefre Cantu Ledesma" | Toxic City Music | Rebellion, too, requires movement. |
| 31 | Bare Infinity | "Reaching for the Sun" | The Butterfly Raiser | If your character looks worse in a wind-machine, the story is not about you. |
| 32 | Last Days of Eden | "Hermanos D'Armes" | Traxel Mör | The power of tradition is in retelling stories to see all of us in them, not in retelling them to cherish the original absence of other people. |
| 33 | Donovan Woods | "It'll Work Itself Out" | They Are Going Away 4 | You can find peace in perspective, if you understand that perspective and peace are what you're seeking. |
| 34 | The Wild Reeds | "Capable" | single | But if you don't understand this, nothing else is going to make much sense. |
| 35 | Erik Ekholm | "Bleeding Edge" | Black Heart | If your character looks confused in a wind-machine, you're not reading the story in a competent translation. |
| 36 | NateWantsToBattle | "Perfect by Design" | Sandcastle Kingdoms | But if you have kids, they have the ability to explain it. Did you give them the courage? |
| 37 | RichaadEB | "Corridors of Time" | single | Did you give them any towers they were allowed to knock down? |
| 38 | Nathan Fake | "HoursDaysMonthsSeasons" | single | Or did you always prefer to not climb stairs? |
| 39 | Wolfheart | "Tyhjyys" | Tyhjyys | I suspect we all have self-destructive preferences. |
| 40 | Turmion Kätilöt | "Dance Panique" | single | There are parts of me that love the internal logic of stories more than human realities, not as a way to understand. |
| 41 | Kite | "Demons & Shame" | single | I spend hours of some days standing in a room surrounded by excellent people, but wearing headphones and watching numbers flutter around a screen. |
| 42 | Frande | "我只是你的愛人" | single | I hear things I don't understand, and I believe beyond any rational confidence-level that they must be people singing about hope and wonder. |
| 43 | Night Ranger | "Comfort Me" | single | I seem incapable of falling out of love with any foolish thing, |
| 44 | House Of Lords | "Hit the Wall" | single | and incapable of not falling in love, |
| 45 | Bonfire | "Praying 4 A Miracle" | single | and I'm not at all sure that this is easier than just hating anything that doesn't have your name printed on it. |
| 46 | Crazy Lixx | "XIII" | single | I mean, you make that look effortless, and you seem pretty bad at anything that isn't easy, so I assume that's really easy. |
| 47 | Dulce María | "Rompecorazones" | single | Certainly it's easier than learning a new language, like Spanish or high-school-level English or compassion or critical thinking, |
| 48 | HY | "Butterfly" | Chance | or dancing to other people's songs, |
| 49 | Tengger Cavalry | "Fight" | single | or realizing that other people's songs are your songs, too. |
| 50 | DM | "Red Star - Original" | Red Star EP 2 | A flag is a brand of dream, |
| 51 | Junius | "The Queen's Constellation" | Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light | not an armband for hate-troops. |
| 52 | David Maxim Micic | "Someone Else's Hat" | Who Bit the Moon | Flags exist to be flown together, not ranked in order. |
| 53 | Viva Suecia | "El Nudo y la Esperanza" | Otros Principios Fundamentales | If you hate your own body, which may be perfectly reasonable if you've fed it with hateful things, wrapping a flag around it won't make it dance better. |
| 54 | Niños Mutantes | "Glaciares y Volcanes" | single | The planet isn't subject to your jurisdictions. |
| 55 | Los Punsetes | "¡Viva!" | single | You don't have the numbers. |
| 56 | GIRLI | "Not That Girl" | single | You don't have the girls, |
| 57 | Lil Debbie | "Today" | XXIII EP 5 | or the kids, |
| 58 | EMMA6 | "10 Jahre" | Wir waren nie hier | or the cats or the Germans. |
| 59 | Staatspunkrott | "Eis//Meer" | Choral vom Ende | You don't even have the government. |
| 60 | Skitarg | "Salta Lotta" | Los Pulkerz | You have the people who haven't seen through you yet, |
| 61 | Lastkaj 14 | "Kom så matar vi monstret" | single | and the wind paws through your wispy hair with tiny probing fingers any time you take your shitty cap off for even a second. |
| 62 | Khuli Chana | "One Source" | One Source | The saddest irony, maybe, is that you hooked people who think they want their problems fixed, and the best way to find solutions to problems is to see what other people have done, not obsess on what you used to do before you realized you had these problems. |
| 63 | Waje | "Mountain" | single | More data helps. |
| 64 | Blaudzun | "When We Wrote This" | Jupiter (Part II) | Data is how you understand that the sun isn't aimed at your and only your towers. |
| 65 | Soziedad Alkoholika | "Alienado" | Sistema Antisocial | Listening to other people is how you understand that the sun doesn't aim at anything. |
| 66 | Loreen | "Statements" | single | You are no more, but even more importantly no less, designated and spotlit than a Moroccan couple's kid growing up to win Eurovision for Sweden. |
| 67 | Le Luci Della Centrale Elettrica | "Nel profondo Veneto" | Terra | Earth is covered with moving parts, and only a few of them are us, |
| 68 | Matmatah | "Margipop" | Plates coutures | and all of us are literally marginalized. |
| 69 | Peter Bjärgö | "You Let the Light Shine Through" | Animus Retinentia | To the planet, all of these noises are "ambient". |
| 70 | Dunderbeist | "Tvilja" | single | All of this. |
| 71 | Depresszió | "A kés hegye" | single | In this sense, of course, only cosmic ignorance makes any of our human ephemera seem significant, |
| 72 | 3D Stas | "Nothing but Deceit" | Anger / Nothing but Deceit 2 | but we exist entirely, and relatively, inside of this absolute ignorance. |
| 73 | Villain of the Story | "Never Coming Back" | Wrapped in Vines, Covered in Thorns | Like the thin atmosphere, it is a foundational conceit. |
| 74 | Getsunova | "นักเดินทาง" | single | Like the thin atmosphere, our relationship with it is indifferent in exactly one direction. |
| 75 | Renaud Garcia-Fons | "Je prendrai le métro" | La vie devant soi | I don't want to listen to jazz, either. |
| 76 | Vitja | "Find What You Love and Kill It" | Digital Love | Maybe you don't want to listen to this. |
| 77 | Wiktoria | "As I Lay Me Down" | single | I'm an atheist, and most of my favorite buildings are stone churches. |
| 78 | The Mechanist | "Minds & Machines" | Minds & Machines 5 | Maybe you can be a billionaire shithead who makes things better for somebody other than other billionaire shitheads. |
| 79 | Music For Cats | "Meow-Tang Clan" | single | Nobody but you is stopping you. Well, and all the rest of us. |
| 80 | amiinA | "Avalon" | Avalon (Instrumental) | But if you aren't dead yet, maybe you can still dance. |