| 1 | Manigance | "Your Energy" | single | It is so tempting to believe that everyone would be improved if they just liked the things I like, starting with this majestic power-metal anthem by the French band Manigance. Not only does it instill an inexorable love of existence by its melodic nature, but it gives you a chance to think about whether they're actually singing "I want to feel your breasts" or it's an accent thing, and whether that affects what you think about it or whether you still feel like encouraging other people to listen to it and how those two things relate to each other. |
| 2 | Sirenia | "Into the Night" | single | But of course the very first elementary lesson in social empathy is realizing that euphoria is universal, but catalysts are individual. |
| 3 | Amaranthe | "Inferno" | single | This is good. Imagine a world where songs and things and humans had objective lovability, and the resulting competitive moral and logistical carnage. |
| 4 | Divine Ascension | "Evermore" | single | If this run of new metal songs, which for me unravel despair and recenter me in a place of frankly unreasonable faith in humanity, leave you still nasueated by political hypocrisy and climate threat, this is normal. |
| 5 | Xiphea | "Ice Blood Cave" | Everland | Regrettable, because listen how hard these people have clearly worked to learn to play like this. |
| 6 | Dark Moor | "Birth of the Sun" | single | Centuries of erratic aesthetic evolution have gone into the development of the artistic calculus of metal, |
| 7 | Dragony | "Angels on Neon Wings" | Masters of the Multiverse | establishing these particular parameters of maximalism as extensions of classical proportion and mythological resonance and what it looks like when things explode at a safe distance. |
| 8 | Seventh Wonder | "Dream Machines" | Tiara | Decades of technology originally designed for the space program (I assume) have been repurposed to produce guitar tones that induce the same exhilirating vertigo as rocket launches, |
| 9 | Guardians Of Time | "As I Burn" | single | but with apparently infinite passenger capacity, |
| 10 | Nordic Union | "Because of Us" | single | and precisely because it's easier to imagine (if only partly true) that infinite listeners only elevate a song in the way that they would crush a restaurant or a pet goat, |
| 11 | Agrypnie | "Neon" | Pavor Nocturnus | of course I want everyone to hear and love these songs. |
| 12 | Agrypnie | "Grenzgænger" | Grenzgaenger | Because, also, they turn darker. |
| 13 | Nachtmystium | "Silver Lanterns" | single | Mythologies counterbalance the ethereal and the infernal, and if you soar with me, you will crash with me, and then I won't crash alone |
| 14 | Mesarthim | "Ω" | The Density Parameter | into the chaotic dimensions. |
| 15 | Evoken | "Ceremony of Bleeding" | single | Shared mechanisms for triangulating joy are appealing, |
| 16 | Set and Setting | "Revisions Through..." | Tabula Rasa | but shared mechanisms for confronting threats are crucial, |
| 17 | Cantique Lépreux | "Paysages polaires III" | single | and voluntary immersion in the superficially antithetical is how we rehearse our responses. |
| 18 | Vanhelgd | "Så förgås världens härlighet" | Deimos Sanktuarium | The ability to imagine a world in which everyone loves the frightening things you love is the dual application of curiosity and conscience to your own natural instincts. |
| 19 | Akitsa | "Siècle Pastoral" | Credo | If we all loved the same things, we imagine that our responsibilities to each other would be more self-evident. |
| 20 | Kjeld | "Banier fan Frisia" | Banier fan Frisia +2 | If we all feared the same things... |
| 21 | Maggie Rogers | "Light On" | single | But then, we do. |
| 22 | Valerie Broussard | "Hold on to Me" | single | We do, ultimately, fear the same things. |
| 23 | Holygram | "A Faction" | single | Joys abound and specialize, fears pervade and unify. |
| 24 | Grim Sickers | "Save Me" | single | If you can internalize that other people may not love the things you love, |
| 25 | Sia | "I'm Still Here" | single | maybe you can believe that when the people you hate are consumed by the fears you despise, |
| 26 | Yizzy | "Hype Ting" | single | they are coping in their own inept way |
| 27 | Basement | "Nothing Left" | Beside Myself | with the same frailties you feel. |
| 28 | Worriers | "Best Fear / Worst Fantasy" | Survival Pop | Imagine how lonely Trump must be, |
| 29 | Rival Town | "A New Normal" | single | inside those tensed layers of bilious squinty petulant smug mistrust. |
| 30 | YONAKA | "Own Worst Enemy" | single | You'd distrust everybody else if you were that deceitful yourself, too. |
| 31 | The Twilight Sad | "Videograms" | single | Lots of us grow up without things we later discover. |
| 32 | The K's | "Glass Towns" | single | The quality of parenting isn't measured as much by what you give your child, |
| 33 | 32 tens | "Fool" | single | as by how well they are prepared to face the inevitable unknown, |
| 34 | 04 Limited Sazabys | "Utopia" | Soil | which is why poverty doesn't preclude it, |
| 35 | LADYBABY | "DAMEDAME TONO" | single | nor wealth ensure it. |
| 36 | Akasick | "エリザベスロマン" | single | To be clear, raising Donald without any vestige of morality was bad. |
| 37 | Hysteric Panic | "絶対×絶命" | single | But raising him to not even recognize morality as a factor in other people's behavior was far worse. |
| 38 | The Birthday | "青空" | 青空 +2 | This is what makes him not only not heroic, but not even anti-heroic. |
| 39 | odol | "光の中へ" | single | The anti-heroic is constructed by refracting the heroic through some medium of distortion. |
| 40 | OCTAVIAGRACE | "oddeye" | new eclosion | Pence is anti-heroic, arguably, as he at least makes a show of applying a systematic personal conviction to his actions, |
| 41 | PAN | "もうすでにここにあるのだ" | single | but it's a conviction based on a deepy inhumane belief in the superiority of certain people over other ones. |
| 42 | DEVIL NO ID | "BEAUTIFUL BEAST" | BEAUTIFUL BEAST +3 | Trump doesn't even have that. |
| 43 | Omedetai Atama de Naniyori | "Hi Izuru Basho" | Hi Izuru Basho +2 | He has no group. |
| 44 | VOLA | "Ghosts" | Applause Of A Distant Crowd | We call him a racist, because he says racist things, |
| 45 | Beyond Creation | "Surface's Echoes" | Algorythm | but in truth he would have to work to rise to the level of racism, |
| 46 | Port Noir | "Old Fashioned" | single | because that implies at least empathizing with a set of people he believes is superior, |
| 47 | Stam1na | "Gaian lapsi (feat. Anna Eriksson)" | Taival | and he has no such set. |
| 48 | Skálmöld | "Ljósið" | Sorgir | Lacking all character, |
| 49 | Alkonost | "Paporotnik" | Paporotnik +1 | he assumes other people all also lack it completely, |
| 50 | Danheim | "Runatal" | single | and thus loyalty is rendered absurd by definition. |
| 51 | Metal Church | "Damned If You Do" | single | A principled racist believes in their own rightness, |
| 52 | Creye | "Holding On" | Creye | but lacks a universal imperative which which to explain how it could have been earned through living, |
| 53 | Echos | "Saints" | Saints +1 | and thus is forced to assume it was bestowed as a gift. |
| 54 | 信 | "不負時代 (電視劇《創業時代》片頭主題曲)" | single | Assuming the gift was bestowed according to "racial" boundaries, |
| 55 | Gåte | "Tonen" | single | or even that there are such boundaries, |
| 56 | Hekla Stålstrenga | "Fuck MS" | single | is inane, |
| 57 | VNV Nation | "A Million" | Noire | but once you don't understand something, |
| 58 | The Bangles | "Jet Fighter" | single | your explanations are bound to be bad. |
| 59 | Matthew Dear | "Can You Rush Them" | Bunny | Trump doesn't get any better, but he also doesn't get any worse. |
| 60 | HEALTH | "BODY/PRISON" | single | It's the rest of us getting worse for tolerating him, |
| 61 | Playa Limbo | "Universo Amor" | Universo Amor 2/4 5 | and the horror is how we even get worse for tolerating him involuntarily. |
| 62 | Lightfoils | "Summer Nights (Radio Edit)" | single | If you stand for nothing, what will you run from? |
| 63 | Shana Falana | "Stripped" | single | Trump doesn't run. |
| 64 | Cilver | "Turns Me On" | single | Trump is what a human looks like after spending 72 years never thinking anything was worth running for, |
| 65 | Imogen Heap | "Platform 9 3/4" | single | and getting implausibly lucky about not ending up near any predators at their meal times. |
| 66 | Francesca Battistelli | "This Could Change Everything" | single | It's not because he's white, or whatever that shade is. |
| 67 | Hell Boulevard | "Dead Valentine" | In Black We Trust | It's not anything he did. |
| 68 | tyDi | "Let Go" | single | Even his cheating is ultimately undistinguished. |
| 69 | Richard Durand | "The Air I Breathe" | The Air I Breathe +1 | We created him by pouring too much crap into our moral atmosphere |
| 70 | Street Sects | "The Drifter" | single | the same way we have poured too much crap into our actual atmosphere, |
| 71 | Coph Nia | "Untitled I" | The Tree of Life and Death | and in both cases the questions are now essentially the same: |
| 72 | Thisquietarmy | "Cometh" | The Body and the Earth | - can we agree that this is bad? |
| 73 | Rubio | "Seres Invisibles" | B 4 | - can we stop making it worse with such vigor? |
| 74 | Scuba | "Entrospect" | single | - are we going to lose random freedoms again every 4 or 8 years? |
| 75 | TINI | "Por Que Te Vas" | Quiero Volver | - are a few nominally modern bits of civilization like Puerto Rico or Florida just going to be flattened each year from now on? |
| 76 | Shining | "Fight Song" | single | - are we going to keep saying #RESIST as if institutionalized inhumanity is so thoroughly to be expected that it takes only a "#" to label ourselves as participants in the standing war? |
| 77 | 22 | "Call Me Trimtab" | single | Or are we going to insist on something more complex? |
| 78 | Ímar | "Deep Blue" | Avalanche | I went to the other side of the world, once, and when we got to the most distant point, we ran into some people from our hometown experimenting with regrowing coral reefs by applying trickles of electric current. |
| 79 | MAGIC OF LiFE | "魔法にかかる" | FOR YOU | Maybe we can make new ice shelves, and send all our diseased mosquitoes there. |
| 80 | Tokyo Karankoron | "ユートピア" | わすれものグルービィ 6 | Maybe we can figure out how to use hurricanes to power our electric grids instead of smashing them. |
| 81 | Age Factory | "See you in my dream" | GOLD | Maybe we can convince the people hiding their fear |
| 82 | The Floor | "革命を鳴らせ" | single | behind the heraldric shields and crossed swords of "heritage" |
| 83 | Carina Dahl | "When Sorrow Comes Alive" | single | that the possibilities for weaponry explode as soon as you allow it to be ceremonial. |
| 84 | Soap&Skin | "Surrounded" | single | Of course you don't need to love any specific thing I love, |
| 85 | Anni Lahe | "Illalla taas" | single | but do you have something that works for you like all of this works for me? |
| 86 | ASSI | "Peppi ja Pan" | single | Can you put on headphones and contemplate misery without becoming miserable? |
| 87 | Brian Eno | "Only Once Away My Son" | The Weight Of History / Only Once Away My Son 2 | Can you escape without leaving? |
| 88 | Lethargy | "When You Are Alone" | single | Can you feel lonely without blaming it on other people? |
| 89 | Ancst | "Clandestine Path" | Celestial | Does anything we can share sound to you like what it sounds like inside of your head? |
| 90 | Lapingra | "Porco Mondo" | single | Would you recognize your resolutions in foreign languages? |
| 91 | The Cerny Brothers | "I Wanna Love You" | single | Would you run after something? |
| 92 | Arc Iris | "$GNMS" | Icon of Ego | Of course you can pick your own loves in which to fall. It is not my job to direct your heart, and I know that. Of course I know that. (But wait, what about this?) |