| 1 | Dessa | "Fire Drills" | single | We will take turns writing the essay about how algorithms have no soul, |
| 2 | Johnny Marr | "The Priest" | single | and about how you and your best friend played "Sister Christian" or "HUMBLE." in a car, |
| 3 | Charli XCX | "Backseat (feat. Carly Rae Jepsen)" | Pop 2 | on a road, |
| 4 | Rynn | "With You" | single | in a moment of crisis or redemption, |
| 5 | Pale Waves | "My Obsession" | single | and this is what we mean by discovery, |
| 6 | Cash Cash | "Belong" | single | songs as encapsulations of personal connections, |
| 7 | Vallis Alps | "New Slang (triple j Like A Version)" | single | songs that reach you as the culmination of crescendoing waves of context. |
| 8 | Joanna Gruesome | "Pretty Fucking Sick (Of It All)" | Pretty Fucking Sick (Of It All) +1 | And of course, yes, when this happens, it is invested with transcendent and enduring power. |
| 9 | Parralox | "Stop/Start" | Holiday '17 | But that power is not the power of music, it is the power of human connection itself. |
| 10 | Mercury Girls | "All That Heaven Allows" | Ariana 2 | The song is a transmitter, a sigil. |
| 11 | Ó | "Broken Necks" | Live at Third Man Records 2 | Songs work for this, but they are not the only thing. |
| 12 | Marsheaux | "Full Attack" | single | Eating pupusas by a bus stop outside a foreign hospital on the way to your honeymoon; |
| 13 | The Naked And Famous | "Punching in a Dream - Stripped" | single | misheard lines from movies you saw together when you were 10; |
| 14 | Tonight Alive | "Crack My Heart" | single | a lamp you bought your father; |
| 15 | Leaves' Eyes | "Across the Sea" | single | things you grew up or gave up or rose up together with: |
| 16 | Leah | "Elixir of Life" | single | this is not discovery, it is the assignment of personal significance to unclaimed objects. |
| 17 | Anna Fiori | "El Ritual" | In Ohtli Tonalli | These moments are momentous, and should be treasured, |
| 18 | Ethernity | "The Code" | single | but they are exceptional by their nature. |
| 19 | Arkona | "Shtorm" | single | You cannot fill all your days with honeymoons or first lamps, |
| 20 | Grimner | "En Fallen Jätte" | single | and if this is the only way you think it counts to discover new food, you will eat insularly. |
| 21 | Watain | "Sacred Damnation" | single | If you want to discover music because you love music, you have to actually seek out music. |
| 22 | The Atlas Moth | "Coma Noir" | single | If you care about reaching people you don't already know, you have to listen to some of them sing. |
| 23 | Lascar | "Uneven Alignment" | Saudade | Algorithms are not a goal, |
| 24 | Eoront | "Passing the Gates" | Neverending Journey | no more a substitute for people |
| 25 | The 3rd Attempt | "Into the Light" | Egocidal Path | than a screwdriver is a soulless substitute for inviting your friends over to turn a screw with all of their loving and meaningful fingernails. |
| 26 | Rolo Tomassi | "Balancing the Dark" | single | To discover, you must explore, |
| 27 | Mist of Misery | "Tortured by Solitude" | Fields of Isolation | must bring back something that your friends don't already know. |
| 28 | Sisters of Suffocation | "Shapeshifter" | single | Maps are exploration technology. |
| 29 | Oceans of Slumber | "The Decay of Disregard" | single | Some of our maps are drawn by individual hands, |
| 30 | Wonders of Nature | "To the Tops of the Hills" | Solitariness | as they all used to be, |
| 31 | Sins of Sincerity | "Transform Her" | Signal Fires | but we now also have ways to elicit maps from collective patterns in the footsteps of travelers. |
| 32 | Miracle Of Sound | "Force of Nature" | Level 8 | This is all "algorithms" means: |
| 33 | Erik Ekholm | "Centuria" | Battlestation | you are curious what other people know, |
| 34 | Epic North | "Sky Map" | Skygate | and you realize that interviewing them individually |
| 35 | Dirge | "Pure" | Alma Baltica | won't tell you what they think everybody already knows. |
| 36 | Hakobune | "Undulate" | single | It means, like tool-use always means, that you're trying to accomplish something. |
| 37 | Dima Lancaster | "Параллели" | single | I have, since about when I first gained control of a radio knob, been trying to explore music. |
| 38 | Caleb Hyles | "Closer" | single | Friends are a wonderful and largely ineffective way to do this, |
| 39 | Marmozets | "Major System Error" | single | unless you have a lot more friends than I do, |
| 40 | The People The Poet | "Where the Dandelions Roar" | single | or your friends have tools. |
| 41 | Anenon | "Tongue" | single | Making friends is slow. |
| 42 | Poppy Ackroyd | "Paper" | single | Making and discarding a hundred fractionally different friends in search of a better one is not how friends work. |
| 43 | Mitis | "Moments" | single | The soullessness of algorithms is their defining mercy. |
| 44 | Koven | "With You" | single | Your friends cannot be optimized, you have to love them how they are. |
| 45 | Puppet | "Chin up (feat. Azuria Sky)" | Life Overseas EP 4 | Your algorithms, on the other hand, you can change. |
| 46 | Gesu no Kiwami Otome | "戦ってしまうよ" | single | Your tools can be sharpened. |
| 47 | NoisyCell | "Letter" | Letter 6 | My best exploration tool is a pile of obsessively tinkered-with math that takes |
| 48 | negoto | "Dancer in the Hanabira" | Soak | years of my encoded listening behavior, |
| 49 | Ev0lution | "South Side Suicide" | single | and millions of other people's listening patterns |
| 50 | Toothless | "Leave Take Lend" | single | and the list of 10,000+ new releases that come out every week, |
| 51 | Pablo López | "El Patio" | Camino, Fuego Y Libertad | and finds 400-600 new songs that people who know some of the same things I know know. |
| 52 | Sabina Ddumba | "Två mörka ögon" | single | These are not exactly recommendations, but they are a statistical approximation of what I might know if I had relative omniscience. |
| 53 | Songs of Boda | "Iago" | single | They are like revisiting every place I have ever traveled, every week. |
| 54 | sleepmakeswaves | "Children (triple j Like A Version)" | single | They are, in a sense, not discovery, exactly, but an exploratory inertia, |
| 55 | 小男孩樂團 | "我的驕傲" | single | or the diligent part of exploration that comes after initial discovery. |
| 56 | Jadudah | "Messed Up" | single | I go through them. |
| 57 | Megaherz | "Vorhang auf" | single | I do this every week, because every week there are more songs. |
| 58 | Schock | "Nicht verlieren" | Halt Still | Most of them, I do not like, no matter how much evidence there is suggesting that I might, |
| 59 | Benji & Fede | "Buona fortuna" | single | but this was always true of the things my friends liked, |
| 60 | rovere | "caccia militare" | single | or the reviews I read in Q or Decibel, |
| 61 | Mariahlynn | "TAB" | single | or the songs George Gimarc or WFNX played. |
| 62 | Escape the Fate | "I Am Human" | single | Most of your steps take you nowhere new yet. |
| 63 | Danger Silent | "Save My Life Tonight" | single | I know I once thought of this as a reductive process, |
| 64 | The New Age | "Temper" | single | of scouring the world for candidates to be winnowed and discarded and juxtaposed in the quest for top 10s and poll votes and desert-island nightmares, |
| 65 | Rival | "BISC044: CCL Part One" | single | but I have gradually realized or acknowledged or come to believe that exploration is not an advanced level of scavenger hunt, |
| 66 | Voodoo Circle | "Running Away from Love" | single | it is an emotional integration of perpetual movement and curiosity. |
| 67 | RSO | "Together On The Outside" | Making History 5 | I don't sift 500 songs a week down to 80 on the way to picking 10 a year, |
| 68 | Abduktio | "Eurooppa Vajoaa" | Jotain Palaa 4 | I do it because 80 is about the number I have time to fall in love with in a week before the next week happens, |
| 69 | Dinero | "Duelo de titanes (con El Drogas)" | single | without wearing headphones while I'm walking my daughter to school, |
| 70 | The Jezabels | "If You Go (triple j Like A Version)" | single | or in place of sleep. |
| 71 | SLUMBERJACK | "Paperplanes (triple j Like A Version)" | single | The destructive urge to summarize has metamorphosed into an expansive compulsion to hear more. |
| 72 | Cr7z | "INAGA" | ULT7MA | You don't have to want to live or listen this way, |
| 73 | Midnight Boy | "Bombay Haze" | single | but it didn't used to be possible to live this way. |
| 74 | Kamikazee | "Agimat" | single | You don't have to fly around the world. You don't have to eat things you can't pronounce, to see if the flavor changes your mouth so you can. |
| 75 | Daniel Padilla | "Maging Superhero - From "The Gandarrappido: The Revenger Squad"" | single | But I want to. Maybe you want to. It's becoming possible to try. |
| 76 | We Invented Paris | "Bubbletreez" | single | So I try. I try to make tools that make it possible, and then I try them to see how well they work. |
| 77 | Eleni Foureira | "Sto Theo Me Paei" | Vasilissa | They work badly, but surprisingly well. They work rather dramatically better than whatever else you're doing. |
| 78 | Daniele Magro | "Cuorearmato" | single | If you reject these things, these astonishing unprecedented levers made of math, you are only stating that you never cared about the results in the first place. |
| 79 | Miligram | "Pogrešna Noć" | Novi Miligram Grmi! 2 | But if you cared enough to ask the friend who actually knows some new songs, you care enough to let math help, too. |
| 80 | Young Guv | "Traumatic" | Traumatic +1 | If you wake up and want today to be anything other than a meticulous replica of yesterday, you care enough. |
| 81 | We Deserve This | "60 Seconds" | Seconds 4 | And if you care, these equations and queries and algorithms and songs are on your side. |
| 82 | New Arcades | "There's Only Two of Us Now" | single | If you care, there are a million songs waiting to reach to you, waiting to be shared with your friends, waiting to just play. |