| 1 | EMA | "Aryan Nation" | single | The annual MoPop Conference in Seattle is an experiment in being bombarded for about 72 hours by variant ways to think about music. |
| 2 | Sólstafir | "Silfur-Refur" | single | The vectors range from music critics talking about the chart anomalies of Hall & Oates' imperial phase |
| 3 | Farsot | "Vitriolic" | Faillure | to assistant professors of cultural theory classifying the gender politics of country/hip-hop crossover singles |
| 4 | Secret Sphere | "The Calling" | single | to ethnomusicologists contrasting the idioms of dissent and community in breakup songs set against different continents' civil wars |
| 5 | Labyrinth | "Still Alive" | Architecture of a God | to forced marches of erratic personal discovery undertaken to strange and magnificent soundtracks. |
| 6 | Ayreon | "Star Of Sirrah" | single | (And me, using math to try to understand people. Or to try to not be as dismayed by not understanding them.) |
| 7 | Red Moon Architect | "Tormented" | single | David Byrne, asked on stage what he's been listening to lately, calmly took out his phone and flipped through his playlists for at least a full minute in order to give an answer that the question deserved. |
| 8 | Dua Lipa | "Lost In Your Light (feat. Miguel)" | single | It is a gathering of a tribe of people for whom this seems perfectly reasonable. |
| 9 | Peter Hollens | "Carry on Wayward Son" | single | For some, it is a convocation about writing about music, and papers are delivered aloud, verbatim, in the spirit of a slow poetry reading. |
| 10 | Skarlett Riot | "Feel" | single | For some it is a conference about listening to music, |
| 11 | SNOVONNE | "The Child and the Bitch" | The Child and the Bitch | for some it is the universe of liner-notes crossing into the three-dimensional. |
| 12 | Have Mercy | "Smoke And Lace" | Make The Best Of It | For 20 minutes, some place I rarely think about is vividly revealed as the center of the world. And then again. |
| 13 | Gnarwolves | "Straitjacket" | single | Memphis: Stax + Crunk + FedEx = the distribution center of the universe. Or New York without subways. |
| 14 | Paramore | "Hard Times" | single | A bright presenter half my age struggling for a moment to think of a current band as powerfully revolutionary as the Raincoats were in 1978. |
| 15 | Sinners Are Winners | "Queen of the Damned" | The Invocation | Greil Marcus rhapsodizing about the Mekons, with Jon Langford sitting beside him with a guitar as a human sound-clip generator. |
| 16 | Belmont | "Water Weight" | single | The competing demonization and weaponizations of nostalgia. |
| 17 | The Winter Passing | "She Was a Rose" | Double Exposure 6 | Moral cowbells. |
| 18 | Christopher Willits | "Comet" | single | Insistence over resistance. |
| 19 | Ásgeir | "Afterglow" | single | Curiosity over tolerance. |
| 20 | Valgeir Sigurðsson | "No Nights Dark Enough III. Fear and Grief and Pain" | DISSONANCE | Robert Christgau rising to the "Music and Politics" theme-prompt with a WTF rant and a T-shirt reading "TRUMP KILLED LEONARD COHEN". |
| 21 | Lowercase Noises | "A Course of Strengthening Medicines" | single | Brexit prefigured in Brit-ambivalence about constantly losing Eurovision. |
| 22 | GAS | "Narkopop 1" | Narkopop | Girls Rock Camp graduates growing into adult assumptions and expectations about their politics. |
| 23 | Heiress | "Restless Aim" | Restless Aim | Activisms both partisan and non-. |
| 24 | Muzzy | "Lost Forever" | Spectrum - EP 4 | Ways in which stages can be safer than studios. |
| 25 | Grabbitz | "Play This Game" | single | Performative gender. Maybe the idea that all gender is performative, or that "gender" is performative by definition. |
| 26 | Mitis | "For Miles & Miles" | single | The constant repeating revelation of new layers of meta above and between the ones I thought I knew. |
| 27 | DROELOE | "See Through Me" | single | Power as a personal force. |
| 28 | LoneMoon | "Lullaby" | Solstice EP 3 | Violence as a quality of self-esteem. |
| 29 | Second Woman | "/" | S/W | The conspiracy of ZIP codes, and what Ed Sheeran smells like. |
| 30 | Murlo | "Tired Of You" | single | Class, religion, charity and insincerity. |
| 31 | Svreca | "Circa" | Between the Lines 4 | Tower blocks, dictatorships as discos, bad ideas we had as kids and how to keep having them as grownups. |
| 32 | Slackk | "Zip Me Up" | single | The narrative-class privilege of having somebody else take care of your kids. |
| 33 | Leonce | "Alesis Drums" | Insurgency | Audiences who nod at your musical citations, vs fellow fans who get out of their seats when you hit the volume. |
| 34 | Oceano | "Human Harvest" | single | Trap's simultaneous quests for respect and independence. |
| 35 | Matt Mays | "Faint of Heart" | Songs from Once Upon a Hell of a Time - EP 4 | Cultural currencies of consensual disdain. |
| 36 | Matthew Good | "Bad Guys Win" | single | The Album as Western ego. |
| 37 | Pr0files | "Money" | single | The single as Western impatience. |
| 38 | Vanesa Martín | "Hablarán de ti y de mí" | single | Guitars as magnified tone of voice. |
| 39 | Aleks Syntek | "El Ataque de las Chicas Cocodrilo" | single | Elusive frontiers, glamorized. |
| 40 | María José | "El Amor Coloca" | El Amor Coloca +1 | Dancing, not about architecture but against it. |
| 41 | tricot | "Melon Soda" | single | Authenticity as a rearguard retreat. |
| 42 | Uneven Structure | "Alkaline Throat" | La Partition | Identity as spectacle. |
| 43 | Outrun The Sunlight | "Synergy" | Red Bird | Spectatorship as the act of imposing spectacality. |
| 44 | From Sorrow To Serenity | "Golden Age" | single | Hotel-breakfast omelet stations and indignant karaoke. |
| 45 | Cayetana | "Bus Ticket" | single | Segway tours passing under monorails. |
| 46 | Charly Bliss | "Westermarck" | Guppy | Rhyhorn nests. |
| 47 | Skating Polly | "Louder In Outer Space (feat. Louise Post & Nina Gordon)" | single | Allusion over elaboration, and maybe also under it. |
| 48 | Frida Sundemo | "It's OK" | It's OK +1 | And maybe, afterwards, the single most-unifying idea that the opposite of politics |
| 49 | Hate | "Numinosum" | single | is intimacy. |
| 50 | FM2000 | "Saona" | single | Conference proposals were due on US election day. |
| 51 | Sol Pereyra | "Brillar" | Prendete | I was impressed by how many people seemed able to deliver the same talk they had conceived before the Chaos Monkey reign and rain. |
| 52 | Miss Caffeina | "Oh! Sana (feat. Ivan Ferreiro)" | single | I'm always impressed by how Seattle seems to turn sunny and beautiful for the few hours a year I'm there. |
| 53 | The New Raemon | "Tan Valent - Unreleased Track" | single | Our government and society are fracturing and destabilizing, and yet we still have good days. |
| 54 | Grises | "Laberinto" | single | We still turn around in a line for coffee and find a distant friend we barely know standing there. |
| 55 | Amy Shark | "Weekends" | Night Thinker - EP 6 | We gather our courage to ask famous people questions that will expose us as much as them. |
| 56 | Adrenaline Rush | "Adrenaline" | Soul Survivor | We gather our courage to become tiny parts tentatively famous ourselves, for a few minutes at a time. |
| 57 | İrem Derici | "Tektaş" | single | We learn that the challenge is sometimes to explain things so they become less clear. |
| 58 | Algodón Egipcio | "El Ciclo del Agua" | single | Privilege is dangerous, and dangerously abstract, and even more dangerously and thrillingly relative. |
| 59 | Trad.Attack! | "Imepuu" | single | Something that comes easily to you is desperately coveted by somebody you don't even realize is watching. |
| 60 | Mala Reputación | "Caliza" | El Arte de la Guerra | Today's mistake is tomorrow's lesson |
| 61 | The Magnettes | "Young and Wild" | single | and next week's moral |
| 62 | Kitaro | "Soul from Ocean" | Sacred Journey of Ku-Kai, Volume 5 | and someday memoir. |
| 63 | Seka Aleksic | "Koma" | Koma | In the middle of the conference, or almost more accurately with this neurosis of temporary music-geek safe-space in the middle of it, the Seattle instance of the March for Science suddenly appeared and then suddenly paraded past for an inspiringly long time. |
| 64 | DRÆMINGS | "Holy Land" | DRÆMINGS 6 | I snuck out of a conference room to join this movement for two blocks, walking literally underneath the monorail. |
| 65 | Ghost Bath | "Seraphic" | Starmourner | No science, no monorails. |
| 66 | Xavier Boscher | "Quinacridone" | single | No science, no synthesizers, no microphones. |
| 67 | Robert Robert | "Misunderstood" | single | No rationality, no society; but so too, without irrationality a much longer methodical walk to joy. |
| 68 | When Icarus Falls | "Into the Storm" | Resilience | As urban infrastructure, the Seattle Center Monorail is fading spectacle. |
| 69 | Ankor | "Numb" | single | It covers barely 1 mile, and just to make sure you can't board it while still mistaking it for the future, tickets can only be purchased with cash. |
| 70 | Mortiis | "The Great Leap (Godflesh Extended Version)" | The Great Corrupter | Imagined futures are a distraction, and you should question their motives. |
| 71 | Perfume Genius | "Go Ahead" | single | But this one happens to run from right where the light rail from the airport stops |
| 72 | Klimt 1918 | "Comandante" | Comandante EP 3 | to one of the many scattered places where my heart starts. |