| 1 | CHVRCHES | "Out Of My Head" | single | Circuitry and helplessness and triumph; |
| 2 | Robyn | "Missing U" | Honey | circuitry and loss and triumph; |
| 3 | The Winking Owl | "Try" | Try +2 | resilience and defiance and triumphant joy: |
| 4 | IKINÄ | "Vaatteet päältä" | single | scream something wordless that means We Survived This Year no matter what it means. |
| 5 | Rave The Reqviem | "Saint Jvdas" | FVNERAL [sic] | Circuitry and fury and redemption, |
| 6 | Muncie Girls | "Jeremy" | Fixed Ideals | methodical refusal and brutal truth, |
| 7 | Kitten | "Strange Embrace" | single | omissions and missions and catharsis: |
| 8 | Straatligkinders | "Herinner" | Verdwyn | sing in voices of incorruptible belief and resonant intervals of relief, |
| 9 | Christine and the Queens | "Doesn't matter (voleur de soleil)" | Chris | and listen harder to get yourself through the night, or the day, whichever is darker. |
| 10 | Per Gessle | "Name You Beautiful" | Name You Beautiful (Official Song - World Table Tennis Championship 2018) 2 | You can come from wherever you can fall in love. |
| 11 | Madder Mortem | "Liberator" | Marrow | Games are not substitutes for reform, but then theme songs for games are not subject to the rules of the games. |
| 12 | Oceans of Slumber | "A Path to Broken Stars" | The Banished Heart | The war's winners get to write the anthems of record, |
| 13 | Kobra And The Lotus | "My Immortal" | Prevail II | but the anthems you can think to write before the wars can win them without fighting. |
| 14 | Myrkur | "Juniper" | single | To win a war without fighting it, you have to be able to see yourself losing it despite your righteousness, |
| 15 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Nebulas" | Great Escape | to see your conscripted forces laying their weapons on the ground, |
| 16 | Hidden Hospitals | "Acid Rain" | Liars | to feel everything that ground has felt before and after now. |
| 17 | Prinze George | "Current" | Airborne EP 6 | The format of the circuitous path between mines |
| 18 | LÉON | "Falling" | single | is dance. |
| 19 | Pale Waves | "Black" | My Mind Makes Noises | The clockwork path between digits is also in its own heart a dance. |
| 20 | Tonight Alive | "Temple" | Underworld | You can come from anywhere whose pain you can feel: |
| 21 | CHVRCHES | "Forever" | Love Is Dead | circuitry and imagination and the moment when your heartbeat doubles. |
| 22 | PassCode | "Seize the day!!" | Locus | We are here with machines and lights and wonder, |
| 23 | BiSH | "Life is beautiful" | Life is beautiful / HiDE the BLUE 2 | with how it felt before you were afraid of any of this, |
| 24 | MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS | "ASAHINAGU" | No New World | with wires pulled taut in lines and hearts spun into circles, |
| 25 | LiSA | "Thrill, Risk, Heartless" | single | with the rules for new games. |
| 26 | Lemaitre | "Rocket Girl (Feat. Betty Who)" | single | This was an earthbound year we survived in springy dreams of transcendance, |
| 27 | Bastille | "Quarter Past Midnight" | single | and the secret nagging knowledge that every day we don't give up is another implication that we might have more choices. |
| 28 | Art In America | "Goodbye My Love - Mind's Eye - Peace of Mind" | Cloudborn | We are people capable of thinking in whole sentences and acting in connected sequences of movement. |
| 29 | Twin Shadow | "18 Years" | Caer | We are blind angels listening to the clocks |
| 30 | Fatherson | "Charm School" | Sum of All Your Parts | until we start to understand their sadness, |
| 31 | Editors | "Darkness at the Door" | Violence | and only thus our own. |
| 32 | Puppet | "Cargo" | single | Circuitry, nobility, awe. |
| 33 | Dark Sarah | "Sky Sailing" | The Golden Moth | We have enough legends for |
| 34 | Amaranthe | "365" | single | each day to hold one of its own, |
| 35 | Alight | "Roses in the Dusk" | Spiral of Silence | and then set it free at sunset, |
| 36 | Manigance | "Your Energy" | single | so that the night teems with disembodied allegory and the muttering of disenfrancised gods. |
| 37 | Crematory | "Stay with Me" | Oblivion | We have enough love to swallow the hatred |
| 38 | Amorphis | "Wrong Direction" | Queen of Time | and dissipate it into our blood as resolve. |
| 39 | Deafheaven | "Honeycomb" | Ordinary Corrupt Human Love | We have enough blood. |
| 40 | Therion | "Night Reborn" | Beloved Antichrist | We have seen this ornate evil in other outfits: |
| 41 | June 1974 | "Arcadia" | Nemesi | brocade and exoskeletons and meticulous displays of violent precision, |
| 42 | Donovan Woods | "Our Friend Bobby" | Both Ways | rooms sucked empty |
| 43 | pronoun | "wrong" | single | and then filled again with regret and reconciliation |
| 44 | V for Volume | "Jueves" | single | and circuitry in the shapes of bodies. |
| 45 | Issa | "Am I Losing You" | Run with the Pack | We make it to the lines of night and years for the feeling that this will end, |
| 46 | Tiffany | "Beautiful" | Pieces of Me | for what it will feel like when it ends, |
| 47 | Billie Eilish | "you should see me in a crown" | single | for who we will be when less of our energy has to be spent fighting this way. |
| 48 | Rapman | "Shiro's Story - Pt. 3" | single | Minutes can be won by temporary force, but all hours become history, and years belong to whoever writes them into stories: |
| 49 | The Animal In Me | "Better Now" | single | of circuitry, of mistakes, of not forgetting; |
| 50 | TeraBrite | "No Tears Left to Cry" | single | of patience, of serene impermanence, of the magnificent instants of imperfection around which we get to try again to construct a better future. |