| 1 | VUUR | "The Martyr and the Saint - Beirut" | In This Moment We Are Free - Cities | The first time I heard a dense metal band with a soaring female singer, it was 1997, and the band was called The Gathering, and the singer was Anneke Van Giersbergen, and the thing didn't have a name. VUUR is Anneke's new band, and sometimes a thing escapes and eclipses its inventors, but sometimes it spins a world around them. |
| 2 | Tyranny of Hours | "The Silver Wheel" | single | I could listen to music all the time without listening to anything but gothic symphonic metal. Maybe I mean that temperamentally, I'm not actually sure. But there's enough of it, that's my point. |
| 3 | Dante Fox | "Firing My Heart" | Six String Revolver | And clearly in retrospect my reaction to The Gathering was largely a function of my own inherently-limited listening experience and gender-role preconceptions. |
| 4 | Steffi | "Low Battery" | single | Along the way from age 30 and age 50 one would hope I've become at least marginally less limited and preconceived. |
| 5 | Eat Your Heart Out | "Better Late Than Never" | single | If nothing else, I've listened to a lot of new songs. |
| 6 | Portal | "Phreqs" | single | It's hard to simply clench your cortex and become better. |
| 7 | Taake | "Sverdets Vei" | Kong Vinter | It's not trivial to listen to a lot new songs, either. |
| 8 | Red Moon Architect | "Rising Tide" | single | But where you can spend a day trying earnestly to become better and not know if you're making the situation worse, |
| 9 | Hooded Menace | "In Eerie Deliverance" | single | you can spend a day listening to new songs. |
| 10 | Squealer | "Behind Closed Doors" | single | Probably you will survive. The struggle is real, but metaphorical. |
| 11 | Criminal | "Unidad Oi Oi" | Tener Que Afrontar 5 | And probably you will not survive completely unchanged. |
| 12 | ionnalee | "GONE" | single | Music evokes and encodes worldviews. It does this automatically, of course, because otherwise it would still be waiting for us to figure it out. |
| 13 | The New Division | "No Pride in Paradise" | No Pride in Paradise +2 | So when you listen to a new song, you are letting at least a tiny bit of something go. |
| 14 | ASC | "Sentinel" | Sentinel +3 | Even when you listen to your own people play your worldview back to you, you are starting to accept the possibility that a worldview can survive in the aesthetic space between humans, |
| 15 | Antonymes | "Sleep" | At This Time of Year 4 | and that therefore potentially humans can exist in the moral space between worldviews, |
| 16 | Nordheim | "Troll Riding a Raptor" | Rapthor | and thus that trolls can be taught the fundamentals of airborne dressage, |
| 17 | Cardiant | "Soul" | Mirrors | and that beliefs can change. |
| 18 | Valonkantajat | "Loppusuora" | Vastavirtaan | If you had to plan for one of these, you'd buy a helmet. |
| 19 | Death Of Lovers | "Ursula In B Major" | The Acrobat | But did you ever try to buy a troll-proof helmet? |
| 20 | Makeup And Vanity Set | "Stimulation" | Syncro | I mean recently? |
| 21 | NateWantsToBattle | "Haruka Mirai (From "Black Clover")" | single | Somewhere along the way through history we've mostly stopped preparing for trolls. |
| 22 | Dima Lancaster | "Two Planets (Russian Version)" | single | This isn't entirely because they no longer attack much, but that's got to be part of it. |
| 23 | Jeremiah Pena | "Inaudible Shimmer and the Associated Construction" | From Mountains and Sky | And the reason they stopped attacking is that we stopped fearing that they would. |
| 24 | Eddie van der Meer | "Gorgeous" | Cover Songs #8 | We feared a backlash from having a president that was both black and competent. |
| 25 | Blue Stahli | "Rebel Yell - Cinematic Version" | Rebel Yell 2 | We fear our capacity for self-sabotage. |
| 26 | Au5 | "Lush" | single | We fear a drowning world. |
| 27 | Boys of Fall | "No Good for Me" | single | These fears don't sell helmets, they sell pathos and incapacitating incredulity. |
| 28 | Up from Here | "Another Weakness" | single | They sell us muted catharsis |
| 29 | Romancer | "Nausicaa" | Honeybee 6 | and complicated defiant elegance. |
| 30 | Thisistoodifficult | "Not The Same" | On Your Time 2 | They sell us sadness |
| 31 | DVSR | "Endless" | Therapy | and rage |
| 32 | Joe Satriani | "Cherry Blossoms" | single | and immersive cults of denial, |
| 33 | kankakupiero | "0になって" | #HAL 3 | and we rarely notice that every year the shipping costs and times both drop. |
| 34 | The Micro Head 4N's | "SILVER BULLET" | Jougen No Tsuki No Orchestra -Stella Note Magic- 4 | We may have any world we can confront ecstatically. |
| 35 | Ha*Ash | "30 de Febrero" | single | An opportunist's weapons can always be turned. |
| 36 | Miss Li | "Pressure" | A Woman's Guide to Survival | Listen to a new song, and see what it arms you with. |
| 37 | Vita Bergen | "Light the Lights" | Light the Lights - EP 4 | Doesn't this one remind you of something you wanted to one day believe? |
| 38 | Vånna Inget | "Jag ska fly tills jag hittar hem" | Vi tar alla minnen härifrån - en liveskiva | Doesn't this one remind you of how it felt to first understand something simple? |
| 39 | Darin | "Rädda mig" | Tvillingen | Does this world still spin? |
| 40 | Poppy Ackroyd | "Aliquot" | Escapement | We are meticulous but incautious, |
| 41 | Federico Albanese | "By the Deep Sea" | single | this is our quiet curse. |
| 42 | Seas of Years | "Mesopelagic Transmissions" | Three Horizons Away 5 | We imitate triumphant anticipated statues of ourselves, |
| 43 | Fly by Midnight | "Malibu" | single | prematurely, or maybe postmaturely or just without ever bothering to mature, |
| 44 | Bright Light Bright Light | "Put a Little Love in Your Heart" | Cinematography 3: Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal 6 | and bad things keep happening while we are busy dancing and crying and falling in love, |
| 45 | Sushi x Kobe | "Inntrykk" | single | but you can fight all the time. |
| 46 | Giorgieness | "Che cosa resta" | single | I mean, temperamentally. You can orient yourself by injustices and desperate enmity. |
| 47 | Diodato | "Cretino che sei" | single | But those helmets will crush your neck themselves even if no blow lands. |
| 48 | Luca Napolitano | "Anche stavolta" | single | The clash of blades is poetic, but it's one poem. Short, and now you've heard it. |
| 49 | The Staves | "Take Me Home" | The Way Is Read | Listen to a new song. |
| 50 | Maxsta | "Keeping It Moving" | single | Listen to a new song you don't readily understand, and realize that for somebody it is recording truths everybody they know already acknowledges. |
| 51 | Dappy | "Trill" | single | Listen to a new song not to adopt somebody else's conditions, |
| 52 | A Broken Silence | "In the Beginning" | single | but to shift in the grip of your own. |
| 53 | Sjowgren | "Stubborn Forces" | single | Doesn't this one remind you of something lost? |
| 54 | Maan | "Back To Us" | PM 4 | Doesn't this one sound like all the songs you hate except somehow maybe this one is yours? |
| 55 | Ayben | "Başkan" | Başkan | It is wise to dissolve most teams. |
| 56 | Xavier Naidoo | "Zuhause" | Für Dich. | Send the corrupt and diligent alike home. |
| 57 | Mavi Phoenix | "Aventura" | Young Prophet 6 | Say you're sorry. |
| 58 | Ebe Dancel | "Ang Panday - From "Ang Panday"" | single | Listen to a new song. |
| 59 | Eleni Foureira | "Vasilissa" | single | Another one. |
| 60 | Lula | "LA VERDAD" | Vida salvaje | Another one. |
| 61 | The White Raven | "Heavy Chains" | single | Legislation can wait. One more, one more. |
| 62 | Mosaic MSC | "Latido" | Tiembla - EP 5 | Doesn't this one sound like spotlights and swirling fog somewhere you've not yet been? |
| 63 | Herrat | "Kuka pelkää pimeää?" | single | What if those people came here and asked you what they should see? |
| 64 | Xavier Boscher | "Timelessness Kingdom" | Embryogenesis | You have a thousand answers. |
| 65 | Heuning | "Nuwe Maan" | single | Whereever they're from, there are songs they have not yet heard. |
| 66 | Prayers | "Black Leather (feat. Kat Von D)" | Baptism Of Thieves | You have these songs. That's why they have come here. |
| 67 | Bunnydeth♥ | "Fucked up Rainbow Brite" | single | I mean, they'll say other reasons, but that's really why. |
| 68 | Blanche | "Rewind" | Hotelbellevue 5 | They've come for new songs or helmets, and where would you buy a proper helmet these days if you even wanted to? |