| 1 | Uada | "The Purging Fire" | Cult of a Dying Sun | Uada are a primordial black metal band from Portland, Oregon. They have a Facebook page, because Satan needs friends too. I hit Follow on it, because Satan needs friends too, and Facebook cheerfully encouraged me to invite these people to join me in occult appreciation: my sister, who loves "black metal" as long as that's your funny way of saying "Irish Boy Band"; the mother of my oldest childhood friend, whose musical taste I'm not entirely sure about but I don't recall her ever bringing up Satan in conversation during sleep-overs at their house in the 70s; a journalist friend who once wrote a book about Napster so I'll assume he is equipped to find out about Cascadian black metal on his own if he wants; and a guy who got fired from the company where I work, but I haven't unfriended him yet because nobody would tell me why he got fired and anyway Satan needs friends, too. |
| 2 | Cosmic Church | "Aloitus" | Täyttymys | I don't think I will "invite" any of these people to join me in haphazardly monitoring the social-media presence of a very random subset of the bands that I discover. Cosmic Church are from Finland. I do actually have Facebook friends who like black metal. These are not them. |
| 3 | Wayfarer | "Animal Crown" | World's Blood | Wayfarer are from Denver, which is where that childhood friend lives now. His mother visits often, and logistically speaking, the grandson goes to bed relatively early, so the grandparents could go to a euphoric-nihilistic black metal show, presumably staged in a haunted forest somewhere just outside of one of the National Parks. |
| 4 | Oubliette | "The Passage" | single | Oubliette is a French name for an American black metal band from the sadly un-Satanic-sounding town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. If Google Maps is to be believed, it is an unholy civic tentacle-nest of shameless gerrymandering. |
| 5 | Iskald | "The Atrocious Horror" | single | Satan, of course, would love gerrymandering. "ALL THIS IS HELL. AND THIS. AND THIS LITTLE BIT OVER HERE. HELL!" |
| 6 | Stortregn | "Through the Dark Gates" | Emptiness Fills the Void | But one's relationship with cartoon Satan is a personal, intimate, nuanced thing. You don't just walk up to people and say "Hey, have you heard about throaty, performative nihilism?" in the same tones you use for "Would you like a free granola bar?" |
| 7 | Thunderwar | "Thunderer" | Wolfpack 5 | Come to think of it, I'd rather the granola-bar people didn't use that tone, either. I don't trust free granola. I don't trust people who think I will eat their granola bars just because they are free. |
| 8 | Skogen | "När solen bleknar bort" | Skuggorna kallar | If the granola bars claimed some unique virtue, it would be different. "Would you like to try a granola bar made from pulverized locust exoskeletons and the ichor of Asakku?" |
| 9 | Failure | "No One Left" | Your Body Will Be 4 | Asakku were Babylonian demons who killed people "especially by means of head fevers", explains Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced online glossary of evil and related concepts. |
| 10 | Primal Fear | "Hounds of Justice" | single | I like the idea of a granola bar with just a touch of carefully denatured head-fever-inducing demonicity. Probably in the end it would just be mildly caffeinated, and would taste like a carrot cake made out of wood pulp, but at least it sounds interesting. |
| 11 | Powerwolf | "Demons Are a Girl‘s Best Friend" | single | A locust-flour-and-head-fever-ichor granola bar aspires to alter the world. |
| 12 | Epica | "Crimson Bow and Arrow" | EPICA VS attack on titan songs | "Free" is gutless. The granola bar is just as free if I don't take it. Everything I don't buy is free to me. |
| 13 | Midnattsol | "Syns sang" | The Aftermath | All this obscure, preposterous metal I track down and meticulously organize for you every week is free to you if you skip it. |
| 14 | Millennial Reign | "Break the Tide" | The Great Divide | But here's the thing: it's made out of pulverized locust exoskeletons and the ichor of demons you don't even know if I invented a minute ago. It aspires to alter worlds, and they could be your worlds if you want them. |
| 15 | CHVRCHES | "Forever" | Love Is Dead | Locusts are mostly pulverized wheat in the first place. We have only this one planet, so nothing is really that exotic. CHVRCHES are an occult black metal band from Scotland, except the singing is clear and bell-like instead of hoarse and gnawing, and they play computers instead of the forges of fire giants, but the songs are still about the fear of eternity and the yearning for it, like all good metal songs. |
| 16 | HAERTS | "New Compassion" | single | Eating a granola bar made out of bugs is a gesture of hope, |
| 17 | Rubblebucket | "Fruity" | single | made with small bones in your head, |
| 18 | Goldfrapp | "Ocean (feat. Dave Gahan)" | single | and so is listening to a song about anything and making it be a song about love. |
| 19 | Echo Ladies | "Almost Happy" | single | So is smiling, |
| 20 | Ovlov | "Spright" | single | so is talking without spitting, |
| 21 | State Champs | "Mine Is Gold" | single | so is finding a pair of headphones you can wear with hats. |
| 22 | Rain Check | "Drown" | single | Rain Check are a shouty emo band from Abilene. Facebook thinks my wife would like them. This is encouraging, in that it suggests Facebook is not secretly monitoring our text messages, which feature a running sub-theme of idiotic things people do in Texas, I guess in the fond hope that she can eventually convince me to not have grown up there. |
| 23 | Dream on Dreamer | "Voices" | single | She doesn't really like shouty emo bands, in the first place, but if I were standing on a street corner trying to get her to try one, I'd just tell her they were from Australia. |
| 24 | Dance Gavin Dance | "Care" | single | It's like Texas, but with less football and fewer megachurches and guns. I guess not that much like it, really. |
| 25 | Mattia Cupelli | "Once There Was Only Dark" | single | And yet at night, in a large enough open space, Texas and Australia and the moon are all the same. |
| 26 | Dan Bull | "Dark Souls" | Dark Souls +1 | The mythologies we know we made up are the same as the ones we think were given to us. |
| 27 | Roo Panes | "My Narrow Road" | single | They are all tactics for marking or making paths. |
| 28 | Andromida | "New Worlds" | single | Andromida is a one-person progressive-djent project from, I dunno, space? Or possibly Pittsburgh. I guess it doesn't really matter, but then, why did I look it up? |
| 29 | Subsignal | "The Passage" | La Muerta | There's nothing interesting about eating bugs. There's something interesting about knowingly eating bugs. |
| 30 | Arena | "The Mirror Lies" | Double Vision | Subsignal are Germans with a Spanish album-name. Arena are British with a Foreigner album-name. |
| 31 | Sarah Longfield | "Ember" | Collapse // Expand | Sarah Longfield is on a metal label. |
| 32 | Leah Daniels | "The Story" | The Story | Leah Daniels makes the songs Taylor Swift would be making if she'd gone pop without stopping being Taylor Swift. She's from Australia, too, but the part called Canada. |
| 33 | Säkert! | "Arktiska oceanen" | Arktiska oceanen - EP 3 | You can try to flee north, but the rising oceans are rising everywhere. |
| 34 | Straightener | "After Season" | Future Soundtrack | My wife and I went to Japan once, and spent an hour in record store listening to things we'd never heard of. She bought a Straightener album. |
| 35 | LiSA | "Nippon" | single | That trip was not a very good way to discover music. Streaming is way better. |
| 36 | alcott | "予報外れのラブソング" | single | But it doesn't work for ramen. Yet. |
| 37 | Corvus Corax | "Hugin & Munin - Single Edit" | single | Hugin and Munin are the wise-cracking anchors of a puppet news-hour for babies. Or region-locked Pokémon. |
| 38 | Frosttide | "Carved Into Ice" | Decedents 5 | Odin used them to know things about the world. Studies have shown that kids who spend too much time listening to ravens grow up to have only one eye. |
| 39 | Suotana | "Sorrowl" | Land of the Ending Time | They should be outside, instead, playing in the empty miserable void of misery. |
| 40 | November-7 | "Divine" | Overload 1.0 5 | Just make sure they're wearing voidscreen. |
| 41 | Kissin' Dynamite | "Ecstasy" | single | I mean, we grew up with un-self-aware bombast and aerosol cheese and it didn't do us any harm, |
| 42 | Paty Cantú | "Vete" | #333 | other than compacting our emotional range and making us afraid of popular music and women and Mexicans and dancing. |
| 43 | Alex Ubago | "Solo si lo hacemos juntos" | single | I'm sure we were right at the time, but somehow just recently all of these things have become awesome, and apparently they now even have Mexicans in Europe, |
| 44 | Hatchie | "Sure" | single | which includes Australia. |
| 45 | We Are the Catalyst | "Someone Like You" | single | Sometimes you can really taste the bugs. |
| 46 | Downtown Boys | "Fotos Y Recuerdos" | single | You can make the world a little better without it totally noticing, but the big changes come not from mitigating loss, |
| 47 | Tancred | "Something Else" | single | but from making people redefine themselves in vocabulary of aspirations. |
| 48 | Destination Anywhere | "Dancefloor" | Bomben | You can hold them still for a moment, but they can carry themselves towards a horizon, |
| 49 | Ben Zucker | "Der Sonne entgegen" | single | across borders like they aren't even there, |
| 50 | D.O.D | "Glow" | single | like there is no enduring distinction between awakening in motion |
| 51 | Candlemass | "Flowers of Deception" | House of Doom 4 | and dying as statuary. |
| 52 | PassCode | "UNTILL THE DAWN" | Ray 4 | When I follow PassCode on Facebook, it doesn't berate me to invite my relatives, it wonders if I'd like to follow BiSH and BAND-MAID. |
| 53 | OYASUMI HOLOGRAM | "freak" | 4 | This seems like bait-and-switch to me, but like baiting with a pyramid scheme and then switching to an actual pyramid, with solar panels and dual-flush toilets. |
| 54 | Mary's Blood | "World's End" | Revenant | I don't need any help knowing which bands I should tell my mother about. |
| 55 | SoundWitch | "Fifth" | SPEAK 3 | I need help not having to fly to Japan to get half-decent ramen. |
| 56 | Gold Steps | "Vacancies" | Incandescent | I need help reading the news without hating people. |
| 57 | Sadness | "Vivify" | single | I need help relating landscapes to civilizations. |
| 58 | Craig Cardiff | "Desolation Row" | Upstream Fishing All the Words, He Is: Birthday Cards for Bob Dylan | I need help thinking of history as something that isn't new or ours, but we're participating in it right now anyway. |
| 59 | Terra | "Levande" | single | I need methodologies for glory, |
| 60 | Mosaic MSC | "Miracle" | single | or maybe just a lot of glories from which to improvisationally retrofit methods. |
| 61 | Nikiforos | "San Alitis" | single | I just need to spin |
| 62 | ASG | "Execution Thirst" | single | or stomp for a few minutes. |
| 63 | Yui Onodera | "Substrate 3" | Substrate / The Garden | I need to know what it feels like in Tokyo at night when I'm not there, how they miss me but persevere. |
| 64 | Mansesteri | "Midas" | single | I know too much about the problems I can see, not enough about what they put up with in Finland instead; |
| 65 | Tony Anderson | "Finding Your Heart" | Finding Your Heart +2 | too much about ancient heartlessness, |
| 66 | amiinA | "Jubilee" | Jubilee | never enough about new colors that don't even have names yet; |
| 67 | Sara | "Avaa se ovi" | single | too many things I swallowed for free, |
| 68 | Halcyon Days | "Keeper" | single | not enough shouting until we are empty again. |