| 1 | Robyn | "Missing U" | single | As a kid I would flip over LPs in the store, looking to see if the credits mentioned synthesizers. |
| 2 | CHVRCHES | "Out Of My Head" | single | You can, of course, play honky-tonk on a DX7. |
| 3 | Puppet | "Cargo" | single | You can make cities without metal or glass, |
| 4 | Amaranthe | "Army of the Night" | The Sacrament of Sin (Deluxe Version) | or see a coastline as fractalless imprecision. |
| 5 | Beyond The Black | "Million Lightyears" | single | You can cover patterns with love, |
| 6 | Manticora | "Through The Eyes Of The Killer - Towering Over You" | To Kill To Live To Kill | or love with patterns, |
| 7 | Primal Fear | "The Ritual" | single | or everything with mud and fear and computational uncertainty. |
| 8 | Behemoth | "God = Dog" | single | You can think of poetry as a separate enterprise from numbers, |
| 9 | Dragonlord | "Northlanders" | single | like you can contemplate an ethereal afterlife, |
| 10 | Hadal Maw | "Vilified" | Charlatan | if you can contemplate an afterlife as something other than metaphor. |
| 11 | Helrunar | "In Eis und Nacht" | single | Unless you can't, like I cannot. |
| 12 | Beyond Creation | "The Inversion" | single | I am an involuntary disciple of awe and math, |
| 13 | A R I Z O N A | "What She Wants" | What She Wants +2 | of quantification as a tactic for holism instead of reduction, |
| 14 | of Verona | "Kids in America" | single | of life as the stubborn inexplicable superimposition of will, or its convincing illusion, over physics or our approximations of it. |
| 15 | The Blue Hour | "Lament" | Lament +3 | All music, by moving the air in harmonic patterns, participates physically in this implausible mythology, |
| 16 | Anggun | "Siapa Bilang Gak Bisa" | single | in the same sense that the medium is always partly the message, |
| 17 | YONAKA | "Waves" | single | but if you say enough different things in the same format, |
| 18 | Deaf Havana | "Ritual" | single | eventually the format cancels itself out. |
| 19 | Trophy Eyes | "Friday Forever" | single | I've listened to all these songs this week. |
| 20 | AS IT IS | "The Fire, The Dark" | single | I've listened to the whole list maybe more times than usual, even, |
| 21 | Foxing | "Gameshark" | single | but only impatiently, as a journey back to the beginning, |
| 22 | The Love Language | "Frames" | Baby Grand | as if I must earn the right, every few hours, |
| 23 | Tides Of Man | "New Futures" | Every Nothing | to drop back into a desperate, ecstatic alternation between Robyn and CHVRCHES again, |
| 24 | Muncie Girls | "Locked Up" | single | and again, and again. |
| 25 | NIGHTS | "Over and Over" | single | I don't, by any measure, only like music in which heartbreaking human frailty flows over relentless arithmetic substrates like scarred but glowing android skin, |
| 26 | Ava Luna | "Centerline" | single | but oh my god. |
| 27 | Miracle Of Sound | "Ode to Fury" | single | Robyn made "Call Your Girlfriend" and "Dancing on My Own" and "Get Myself Together", which is as good a trio of pop songs as anybody's ever, I think, |
| 28 | Erik Ekholm | "Invader" | Thunder | and it's too soon to say for sure whether "Missing U" really makes it four, in my head or heart, |
| 29 | Ruelle | "Come Fly With Me" | Emerge | but it's as illustrative an example as we're going to find for a thing music can do to me, |
| 30 | Mrs. GREEN APPLE | "青と夏" | single | framing love as goal and the universe as method, |
| 31 | kankakupiero | "メリーさん" | はじめてのはじまり | so that pi and clockwork and octaves are both obviations of the need for theology |
| 32 | HYDE | "AFTER LIGHT" | single | and at the same time a kind of rueful meta-theology of their own. |
| 33 | Masaki Suda | "ロングホープ・フィリア" | ロングホープ・フィリア +3 | Each lone, meticulous, mechanical pulse is a self-contained allegory of every idealized heartbeat, |
| 34 | Fatherson | "Charm School" | single | and the stars sparkle overhead in Fibonacci reveries, |
| 35 | dEMOTIONAL | "Dreamers Light" | single | and constellations of argpeggio and metronomicons. |
| 36 | NEFER NEFER | "Älä Mee" | single | And her voice is small and vast, and haunted and a tautology of transcendence, |
| 37 | Deep Ng | "那怕最終一個人" | single | and these things combine, intractable against ineffable, |
| 38 | A-do | "門後" | single | to sound like what it feels like to me to be knowingly alive. |
| 39 | Aborted | "TerrorVision" | single | And then the pulse stops, and the fluttery stars pause in the middle of a subjective transit because they don't change but we do, |
| 40 | Attan | "Feed the Primates" | single | and CHVRCHES slam into their post-Japan-tour collaboration with J-pop trio Wednesday Campanella. |
| 41 | Exploded View | "Sleepers" | single | It's an oversimplification to say that CHVRCHES are my favorite band, |
| 42 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "Darkhorse - Edit" | single | and another one to say that falling in love with J-pop fundamentally altered my emotional relationship to the unknown, |
| 43 | Tiffany | "Worlds Away" | single | but only in the way that we necessarily oversimplify by talking, or by making an obscenely semi-self-contained thought out of any amount of infinite possibility. |
| 44 | Ex Libris | "The Courtship" | Ann - Chapter 1: Anne Boleyn 3 | I don't know if "perfect song" is a useful or meaningful concept, |
| 45 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Nebulas" | single | and I imagine that if it is there would be criteria and checklists, |
| 46 | Lord Of The Lost | "Abracadabra (feat. Dero Goi / OOMPH!)" | Thornstar (Deluxe Edition) | and what I'm saying here is not that there are no great things that aren't in this CHVRCHES song, |
| 47 | Helalyn Flowers | "Run Away (with My Demons)" | Nyctophilia | it's that this is another 3:18 during which I don't care, |
| 48 | Phil Wickham | "Breath Away" | Living Hope | and another demonstration that the duration of my now can be minutes; |
| 49 | Elevation Worship | "Won't Stop Now" | single | that KOM_I's angel-bell voice skittering through the verses in the inherent syallabic pixelation of Japanese micro-nudges Lauren into a transformational tiny yell, |
| 50 | Alter Bridge | "Words Darker Than Their Wings (feat. The Parallax Orchestra) - Live" | single | and to me this single moment is an immortally recurrent legend of inevitability and defiance; |
| 51 | Nedeljko Bajic Baja | "Ogledalo srece" | single | that I believe we are connected to each other by more than separates us; |
| 52 | Severina | "Magija" | single | that I believe that all machines are most definingly levers for amplifying humanity; |
| 53 | Ministarke | "Ne Vraćam Se Na Staro" | single | that we become better selves by escaping whatever we've been so far, |
| 54 | Korpiklaani | "Henkselipoika" | single | but lovingly, lingeringly, pushing away and holding on at once with a kiss and breath; |
| 55 | Danheim | "Feikinstafir" | single | that we go around the world to find ourselves, or somebody or anybody, |
| 56 | Triddana | "Pages in the Past" | Rising from Within | and we don't want to go home yet. |