| 1 | Kamelot | "RavenLight" | single | From my hotel window I can see a pair of stone lions guarding the road. |
| 2 | Nemesea | "Twilight (New Vocal Version 2018)" | single | Last year, a couple blocks from here, a guy drove a truck into a crowd of shoppers, killing 5 of them including one of my co-workers. |
| 3 | Kobra And The Lotus | "Losing My Humanity" | single | There are more lions on that road now, to make it harder to drive trucks there. |
| 4 | Eldritch | "As the Night Crawls In" | single | Probably it doesn't make a lot of difference, but as reactions go, it's at least comforting in its scale. |
| 5 | Gus G. | "Letting Go" | single | "Minister, what can we do to prevent attacks like this?" |
| 6 | Divided Multitude | "Evolve" | single | "Not very much. Free will is dangerous. Most useful things are also dangerous. Weather is dangerous. We inhabit undefended cities on a giant rock hurtling through space." |
| 7 | Slugdge | "War Squids" | Esoteric Malacology | "But minister, we have to do something, don't we?" |
| 8 | Mikky Ekko | "Not The One" | single | "Oh yes, we certainly will. Order more lions." |
| 9 | Rafael Anton Irisarri | "Falling Curtain" | Midnight Colours | The inchoate urge to DO SOMETHING is usually best placated now and revisited later, |
| 10 | CHVRCHES | "My Enemy" | single | in joy instead of fear. |
| 11 | pronoun | "run" | single | If news shows were scored like movies, |
| 12 | Moose Blood | "Just Outside" | single | our whole relationship to our world would be different: |
| 13 | McCafferty | "Strain" | single | More-obviously mediated, but maybe not actually more mediated. |
| 14 | The Bombpops | "Dear Beer" | single | The compulsion to stay informed is an addiction, like most things, |
| 15 | Hopes on Hold | "No One's More Useless Than Aquaman" | Hopes on Hold | done mostly for its own sake, |
| 16 | FELICITY | "The City Beautiful" | single | but shot through with toxins and emotional contaminants. |
| 17 | Street Sects | "In Contempt" | single | Fear is compulsive, and compulsion is sadly conducive to measurement and thus optimization, |
| 18 | Offret | "We are Waiting" | Alone Among Mirrors 2 | so we can't really be surprised at the misery-drip "news" has become. |
| 19 | VOWWS | "One or the Other" | Under the World | You can always look at a glass and imagine the top 10 ways it will be empty |
| 20 | Markus Junnikkala | "There's More to This World" | Preternatural | once this water is gone. |
| 21 | TeraBrite | "Dangerous Night" | single | But then TeraBrite is singing a 30 Seconds to Mars song, and maybe it was originally about cycles of mutual self-destruction, but now it sounds redemptive. |
| 22 | From Under the Willow | "Hiraeth" | single | And maybe this has become the essential difference for me between art and everything else: art builds towards catharsis instead of anxiety. |
| 23 | Alteras | "Myself on Fire" | single | Of course this is subjective and definitional, but I think not only so. |
| 24 | Vita Versus | "Forever at Last" | single | News anxiety is self-reinforcing, perhaps in its purest form as weather anxiety, because the weather is always dire somewhere, on some time-scale. |
| 25 | Divine Realm | "Autumn" | Nordicity 5 | I'm here in one of the most peaceful countries on earth, and there's a line of mounted police under my hotel window. |
| 26 | Oceans of Slumber | "A Path to Broken Stars" | The Banished Heart | There's always something to fear. |
| 27 | Engel | "The Condemned" | single | I'm looking down on them from an odd angle, and across the street from them there's a store-front with a medical sign above it, and I've been watching people happily entering and exiting, and thinking how refreshing it is to see medical care elevated to the pleasantness of shopping. |
| 28 | Burden Of Grief | "Eye of the Storm" | single | We do commercialization of medical care in the US, too, but somehow always from the supply side, not the demand side. |
| 29 | Dead Shape Figure | "The Last of the Bearing Beats" | single | We do "urgent care", but what we really need more of is "routine care". |
| 30 | Varien | "The Dark Harvest" | single | If much shopping is essentially impromptu lifestyle adjustment, |
| 31 | Paris Blohm | "Body High" | single | and fetishized coffee is borderline medicinal already, |
| 32 | Inukshuk | "Too Far Gone" | single | then this doesn't seem all that implausible, really. |
| 33 | Wolf Alice | "Sadboy - Edit" | single | I'd been looking down on this scene for a while because I got sick and spent about 36 hours in this hotel room, mostly sleeping. |
| 34 | Everything Everything | "The Mariana" | A Deeper Sea 4 | When I finally felt well enough to walk around a little again, I discovered that the medical sign actually applied to the offices above the storefront, which itself was a Danish clothes store. |
| 35 | Mimikry | "Alla vill till himmelen men ingen vill dö" | single | They do some things right here in Sweden, but they still have colds, and they haven't made health-care as fun as shopping, |
| 36 | Mustasch | "Winners" | single | and the police are not ceremonial. |
| 37 | Den svenska björnstammen | "Bara skog" | Bara skog +1 | They don't seem particularly good at getting snow off of sidewalks, |
| 38 | Lecherous Nocturne | "Quantum Mysticism" | single | and with enough searching you can find the occasional pastry that's a little too dry. |
| 39 | Do As Infinity | "GET OVER IT" | ALIVE | But traveling is not a competition in which the world is participating and you are judging. |
| 40 | Maverick | "Myrmidon" | single | At the drugstores here, which are just drugstores and don't try to also be terrible grocery stores and liquidators of shitty colorful electronics accessories, they do actually try to help you. |
| 41 | Sondre Justad | "Gjør det igjen" | single | You can tell somebody is earnestly trying to help you even if you don't speak their language. |
| 42 | Lucy Dacus | "Addictions" | Historian | You rarely see hotel reviews that tell you how comfortable the beds are to be laid up in. |
| 43 | Skating Polly | "Queen For A Day (feat. Exene Cervenka)" | single | This was a pretty comfortable bed. |
| 44 | No Thank You | "Cubic Zirconia" | single | I'd rather not be sick, |
| 45 | Marsheaux | "Suffer the Children" | single | and if sick, would rather it not be while traveling, |
| 46 | Digitalism | "Red Lights" | single | but you experience things a little differently in that still-recovering daze. |
| 47 | Mors Subita | "Into the Pitch Black" | single | Take a city you have indexed for museums and coffee, and see what it feels like to find ibuprofen and some yogurt. |
| 48 | Ministri | "Tra le vite degli altri" | single | Take songs you would dance or soar to, and play them on quiet laptop speakers while your head hurts. |
| 49 | Cycle | "100 Vidas" | Electrik | Fail and recover. |
| 50 | Nunatak | "Disonancia perfecta" | Nunatak y el tiempo de los valientes | Practice swapping "oath" for "oat" whenever you see either cited in public. |
| 51 | Perro | "Celebrado Primo" | single | I made it out to do a Pokémon raid, and a Swedish girl about my daughter's age asked, through her mother as English translator, if I could help her catch the Rayquaza. |
| 52 | Siloé | "Cerezos" | La Luz | She was missing, and I at least hit the thing, but neither of us caught it. |
| 53 | Urthboy | "Have & Hold" | single | Fail and recover. |
| 54 | Angie McMahon | "Missing Me" | single | When I get home and tell my daughter this story, she will probably point out how in Sweden kids her age have phones already. |
| 55 | Revolverheld | "Immer noch fühlen" | single | Also free education, universal healthcare and public pensions. |
| 56 | KAFVKA | "Fick dein Volk" | single | But none of this makes their Rayquaza catch-rates any higher. |
| 57 | Bely Basarte | "No Te Quiero Ver Llorar" | Desde Mi Otro Cuarto | Real-world advantages don't always translate to games. |
| 58 | Rolo Tomassi | "Alma Mater" | Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It | The vegetarian I went to the vegetarian restaurant with proclaimed it too vegetable-ish, |
| 59 | Buffalo Tom | "Freckles" | Quiet and Peace | but enjoyed the pie. |
| 60 | Horse Attack Sqwad | "Pojat puhuu heskaa" | Suuren Yli-Hevosen armosta | The things you decline don't determine what you will love. |
| 61 | PassCode | "AXIS" | Locus | You may think you hate metal for the growly voices, but you might hate it with fembot voices, too, |
| 62 | SUPERNOVA 1006 | "Killer Whale" | Blackout (Deluxe Edition) | or at half-speed. |
| 63 | Now, Now | "AZ" | single | Just don't give up, that's all we're really asking, |
| 64 | Hidden Hospitals | "Liars" | single | all we're singing, |
| 65 | Zeal | "ปลุก(Rizing)" | single | in whatever voices |
| 66 | Kayah | "Czarna Polana" | single | and quantities. |
| 67 | Trio Da Kali | "God Shall Wipe All Tears Away" | Ladilikan | Order more lions when you must, |
| 68 | The Dollyrots | "Get Radical" | Get Radical +1 | and then fill the streets again. |
| 69 | Familjen | "Alla färger du ska se" | Kom | Streets are the shape of human presence imposed upon space, |
| 70 | The Eiffels | "Body Like That" | single | as indelible empty as filled with foam, |
| 71 | Fresno | "Natureza Caos" | single | or flowers or snow, |
| 72 | Tusky | "Going Out" | Rated Gnar | or delirious riots, |
| 73 | Ancestral Voices | "Eumycota" | Mycelia | or rubble and centuries of earth. |