| 1 | Not Secured, Loose Ends | "Odd eye" | Odd eye +2 | When I first came across this band, they were credited as "Not Secued,Loose Ends", with no "r" and no space after the comma. It is totally plausible for a Japanese band to have named themselves with an English error for reasons of their own, but I was curious what the reasons were, so I tried to look, which is how I discovered that the error is non-canonical, and they are sometimes listed as "Not Secued, Loose Ends", "Not Secured,Loose Ends" and "Not Secured, Loose Ends", and all of this is just their "English" name, because their Japanese name is actually ゆくえしれずつれづれ, which translates as "Everywhere", and which I think should be transliterated as "Yukue Shizeru Tsuredzure", but they seem to have gone with "YukueshizeruTsurezure". Asking questions does not always produce an immediate decrease in local entropy, and anyway when you send an anthem through the vortex you have to be prepared for it to come out scrambled, with bits of death metal and trap and yami kawaii scattered around, and "yami kawaii" means "sick cute" and is sort of Japanese emo-goth, except I initially mistyped it as "yama kawaii" which would be "mountain cute" and is almost certainly also a thing but not this thing. |
| 2 | SILENT SIREN | "NO GIRL NO CRY - SILENT SIREN ver." | single | ゆくえしれずつれづれ appear in pictures as four Japanese women, but I think all four are singers, and there are some men or possibly robots or both playing music in the sick-cute shadows behind them. SILENT SIREN, conversely, seems to be a wholly all-female band, and neither obviously nor performatively unwell. They are participating in a "two-day versus live" with Poppin'Party either soon or recently, and your guess is probably as good as mine what this means, and I suspect we both guess it means both bands play and maybe one wins? And maybe this is a thing that happens a lot in Japan? I feel like it could be a good idea to introduce in the US, too, especially if we can arrange a variant in which the losing band has to stop making records temporarily in order to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. |
| 3 | Poppin'Party | "NO GIRL NO CRY - Poppin'Party Ver." | NO GIRL NO CRY 2 | Poppin'Party, who wrote this song and perform a slightly more organic version of it than SILENT SIREN's, seem to usually appear as cartoons, and come from a fictional animated universe in which I'm pretty sure everything is always cute in the most earnest way possible, but I don't really have time to go find out, and also I'm a little scared. At work I've been spending a lot of time trying to measure artist gender-balance in music, and the more I measure the less confident I am that I know what I'm measuring. Poppin'Party is a female band, in person form as well as cartoon form, but I have no idea how the media universe they inhabit is managed, or where the money goes, or what this signifies in its culture of origin. |
| 4 | GANG PARADE | "ブランニューパレード" | ブランニューパレード +3 | GANG PARADE are the third incarnation of the fourth spinoff (or maybe vice versa) of BiS, not the Scottish Bis but the Japanese BiS, who are related to the other Japanese band BiSH in some way I never feel like I properly grasp, but it doesn't feel like I'm ever going to pass for a Japanese teenage girl despite mostly learning Japanese grammar that way before mostly forgetting it, so I guess that's fine. |
| 5 | kolme | "Brand new days" | single | But then, some guys just carried a lawn-mower into the back door of the comic-book store across the street from me, and that's here in the culture I supposedly know, so I'm not going to fault myself too much for not being totally sure what a "self-produced idol group" is, because it sounds obvious but then kolme's "profile" page mainly seems to talk about when the three members were born, which is a deeper sense of "self-produced" than I was assuming. |
| 6 | Osakasyunkasyuto | "NO-LIMIT" | NO-LIMIT +1 | A girl with waist-length royal-blue hair just went into that same back door. Comic-book stores are probably portals, that would explain a lot of things. Maybe in Japan you can get a new energetic female-vocal pop-punk band out of a vending machine any time you want one. I didn't notice these machines when I was there in 2005, but that's so long ago that half of these people hadn't even produced themselves yet. |
| 7 | WILL-O' | "SPARKING" | single | I tried to look up some more information on WILL-O', but it's hopeless googling that, and when I look at their Spotify about page, I find that the third most common playlist on which people discovered them is this one, which in my timeline I'm still writing, so maybe I'm creating these bands by the force of my own love. |
| 8 | RAINASH | "Close My Sight" | single | You flirt with solipsism enough, it starts to flirt back. |
| 9 | SALTY DOG | "DANCE & SHOUT !" | single | This playlist is currently the only playlist on which people have heard SALTY DOG. It's tempting to delete this track and see if the universe inverts, but the only way to do solipsism wrong is to second-guess it. |
| 10 | Eir Aoi | "流星" | FRAGMENT (Special Edition) | If you're the only sentient being in the universe, then your survival is axiomatic. So it's a dignified loneliness, at least. |
| 11 | Cold Kingdom | "A New Disaster" | single | But also maybe part of why I feel a reflexive sense of relief when a female voice emerges in a metal song, or really any song. Not entirely dudes. But then you look at the band photo and it's four bearded dudes and a female singer, and are three of them twins? Not-all-dudes is not enough. |
| 12 | Visionatica | "The Pharaoh" | single | Electing Elizabeth Warren president would be a great act of symbolism, as well as a reasonable political measure, but it's going to take more than a couple of demographic electoral breakthroughs to turn this into something other than one thin end of a cultural bell-curve whose pudgy center put Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell and Brett Kavanaugh into positions of literally-obscene power. |
| 13 | Hollow Haze | "Oblivion" | single | Ivanka Trump had every advantage her father had, and can't possibly be dumber by process of elimination, and yet he's president and she had some symbolic company nobody missed when it was gone. |
| 14 | Månegarm | "Ett sista farväl" | single | Farewell, sister, the frost giants aren't going to rehire you to "advise" them. |
| 15 | Sister Shotgun | "She Lives" | Fragments | The future isn't female, it's just that anything even close to an equitable future is going to seem vastly female by contrast with these centuries of bludgeoning patriarchy. |
| 16 | Zephyra | "Dreams Denied" | Fall. Rise. Conquer. | Men took a turn. We did about as well as you'd guess. We made it to airplanes that only sometimes crash, and smart phones, and death metal, slightly faster than we rendered the planet uninhabitable. So it could've been worse. |
| 17 | The Last Martyr | "Creatrix" | single | Kind of a long turn, though, for how badly it was obviously going at most points. |
| 18 | HEALTH | "JUDGEMENT NIGHT" | single | We should definitely preserve some entitlement rage in a museum. |
| 19 | First to Eleven | "E.T." | single | It'll be interesting to look back at, eventually. |
| 20 | Stand Atlantic | "MakeDamnSure" | single | If there's an eventually. |
| 21 | Magica | "In Puterea Ta" | single | I mean, one in which we have the luxury of nostalgia, |
| 22 | LOST NEBULA | "A Tragic Dilemma" | single | not days spent hunting rats and fighting over the "good" dust masks. |
| 23 | Drudkh | "Golden Horse" | A Few Lines in Archaic Ukrainian | All dudes in this one. Hoarse shrieking, masturbatory blastbeats. It's really great. Men's music can be quite intriguing in some ways, if you take it on its own terms. |
| 24 | From The Bogs Of Aughiska | "The Great Sea Stack at the Cliffs of Moher" | From the Bogs of Aughiska | But I know this about myself: if, halfway through that abyssal Drudkh thrash or this textural voidscape, some idol singers suddenly blasted their way in with rainbow lasers and started singing, I would love it even more. |
| 25 | Allegaeon | "Interphase // Meiosis" | Apoptosis | Not every individual thing has to be balanced, |
| 26 | Amon Amarth | "Crack the Sky" | single | only the whole Earth itself, in order to not roll off of the turtle's back. |
| 27 | Starkill | "Detonate" | single | I love death-metal's rasp. I admit I love it, and believe it doesn't have to be part of anything beyond itself, but I also admit I love it even more as contrast, and even more as part of deliberate and self-aware contrast. |
| 28 | Sunn 0))) | "Troubled Air" | single | In order to love something flawed, meaning anything, don't you have to believe it doesn't have to recapitulate phylogeny? Doom is a compelling aesthetic, |
| 29 | Pinkish Black | "Until" | single | but an unwelcome compulsory in scenario futurism. |
| 30 | Re:ply | "itsuka" | single | You can learn to think a different way, |
| 31 | Atlas Pain | "Hagakure's Way" | Tales of a Pathfinder | but not via inertia alone. |
| 32 | Varg | "Das alte Feuer" | single | Not while fleeing the wolves and idolizing them at once. |
| 33 | Stormlord | "Leviathan" | single | Not without teaching your warriors to recognize subtlety. |
| 34 | Gaahls WYRD | "Carving the Voices" | single | Not without acknowledging the casualties of your history. |
| 35 | Avast | "Birth of Man" | single | Not without starting over, |
| 36 | Varaha | "Climax & Exile" | single | or at least understanding how profoundly the end of your battle patterns |
| 37 | Minniva | "Never Enough" | single | is not a victory. |
| 38 | The Anix | "Chrome" | Chrome +1 | But apocalypse is a transition, |
| 39 | Andromida | "Soulseeker" | single | and every transition is an opportunity. |
| 40 | Arch Echo | "Stella" | single | When you automate a social process, you get a chance to think about what its rules have been, |
| 41 | Fuimadane | "Freyja" | Kominn Vel á Sik | and how they formed that way, |
| 42 | Heather Woods Broderick | "A Stilling Wind" | Invitation | and what they aspire to express. |
| 43 | Grand Magus | "Dawn Of Fire" | Wolf God | We are composed of the same elements as always, |
| 44 | Erland Cooper | "Spoot Ebb" | single | but assembled with qualitatively different techniques. |
| 45 | Maenad Veyl | "They Belonged With The Others" | Body Count | Our modern anvils are reticulated and self-calibrating. |
| 46 | Rafael Anton Irisarri | "Coastal Trapped Disturbance" | single | We can manufacture our own tranquilities, |
| 47 | Lucy Mason | "Amazing Grace" | single | not because we don't remember how they used to be, |
| 48 | Sólveig Matthildur | "Dystopian Boy" | Constantly in Love | but because we need them to fit into new spaces. |
| 49 | Second Still | "Double Negative" | single | Geography defeats us, but geometry we've mastered. |
| 50 | Drab Majesty | "Ellipsis" | single | Efforts to turn one into the other are misguided but not inscrutable. |
| 51 | Cold Showers | "Shine" | single | We are practicing to solve the puzzle-room we live on, |
| 52 | AELONIA | "Forever Alive" | We Are One | or just to escape it. |
| 53 | Metatron Omega | "Evangelikon" | Evangelikon | What if the tranquility were shaped like regret, only louder? |
| 54 | Chastity | "Lash Out" | Death Lust Cuts 4 | What if we admitted the ways in which we are broken? |
| 55 | Ten Eighty Trees | "Casual Habits" | single | How do you feel, as a man making men's music in the world where people don't mind hearing you, of course, but you know they're always thinking "If a woman starting singing right now, in this song, that would be even better"? |
| 56 | Submotile | "Alba" | Ghosts Fade on Skylines | Even if you can barely hear her. |
| 57 | JAMBINAI | "ONDA" | Small Consolation / ONDA 2 | There are men in this band, I think, and anyway I first heard about them from a male friend. |
| 58 | Nek | "La storia del mondo" | single | The story of the world is full of men, after all. |
| 59 | Shade | "Senza farlo apposta (feat. Cristina D'Avena)" | single | You can feel their voices humming in your bones, |
| 60 | Klara & Jag | "Måste jag dö?" | single | although dancing helps. |
| 61 | Karina | "Mi Vida Eres Tu" | Tequila y Rosas | Love helps, and survival, |
| 62 | Lauran Hibberd | "Hoochie" | single | and visiting small islands and leaving them. |
| 63 | Abigail | "Despertar" | Despertar | Don't name your men's-music band "Abigail", that will also help. |
| 64 | Stellar Master Elite | "Ad Infinitum" | single | Hear the men when they speak. Their experiences are important to them, |
| 65 | Delta Rae | "Heart Won’t Break" | single | however trivial they probably seem to you, compared to your own. |
| 66 | Young Oceans | "Until These Tears Are Gone (Among the Ruins)" | single | None of these streets had names until somebody died to be safely remembered. |
| 67 | Phil Wickham | "You Cannot Be Stopped" | single | None of these fears had brand names, |
| 68 | Lonely Robot | "Authorship of Our Lives" | single | or ways to make our lives seem emptier by implication. |
| 69 | Kardinal Synd | "Enhetsfront" | single | All short songs are about dissatisfaction, |
| 70 | Vånna Inget | "Skuggor" | Skuggor/Allt ska bli bra 2 | but only for a second until the next one starts. |
| 71 | Lydia Ainsworth | "Diamonds Cutting Diamonds" | single | Disdain is a surge, |
| 72 | Shreya Ghoshal | "Ghar More Pardesiya" | Kalank | joy is a delirious equilibrium. |
| 73 | Eman | "Fiume" | Eman | The abyss calls you from every silent instant. |
| 74 | Maria Carrasco | "Vienes" | single | Maria Carrasco is 23 and has been recording for 12 years. The moments hesitate but the years do not. |
| 75 | Tiffany | "I Think We're Alone Now - 2019 Version" | single | If your future paused, or broke entirely in two, and you had a chance to redo all your mistakes or triumphs, do you know where you would even start? |