| 1 | LIZ | "Cloudbusting" | Planet Y2K | The original version of this song is the heart of one of my favorite musical artworks of all time, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, an album that changed my relationship to music profoundly and lastingly when I was 18. I suspect that most of the versions of me from ages 18 to 40 would have regarded this cover of it as horrific from the first measure, reaching the point of irredeemability five words in when LIZ replaces Organon with Tokyo. |
| 2 | First to Eleven | "Never Really Over" | Covers, Vol. 4 | It's superficially the reverse of this First to Eleven cover of Katy Perry, which recasts a pop song for which I felt nothing into a surging pop-punk anthem for which I am transfixedly target-marketed. |
| 3 | The Animal In Me | "Graveyard" | single | A pop-punk cover of "Cloudbusting" is an obviously-great idea, too, and one of these bands should do it. |
| 4 | AmaLee | "MAYDAY (From "Fire Force")" | single | Somewhere along the way I seem to have stop treating even the most indelible and irreplaceable of my favorite songs as sacred. |
| 5 | Ninja Sex Party | "Closer to the Heart" | Under the Covers, Vol. III | You can't cover Rush, that's some unholy combination of pointless and insane. And yet, this is half decent and, to me, wholly endearing in its halfness. |
| 6 | Jorn | "Lonely Nights" | single | My atheism was formed before my musical tastes, and music is precisely my version of spirituality, |
| 7 | Cyhra | "No Halos In Hell" | No Halos in Hell | and from 18 to maybe 50 I suspect I would have told you that atheism doesn't preclude spirituality, but it renders the idea of spiritual growth moot, at least. |
| 8 | Trash | "Never Die" | Never Die +3 | Absence does not conceal depths. |
| 9 | Ex Libris | "Chapter 3 - Anne Frank: The Annex" | Ann | Spirituality, however, is not a measurement of the gods or the lack of them, |
| 10 | Scarleth | "No Return" | Vortex | but of your own relationship to whatever is or isn't, |
| 11 | Spoil Engine | "Medicine" | Renaissance Noire | and there is always more awaiting depth to your relationships. |
| 12 | In Mute | "Just(ice)" | Chaos Breeder | I claim no meaningful progress yet in coming to terms with death, |
| 13 | Seven Spires | "Succumb" | single | but I feel like I'm making nearly constant microprogressions in coming to terms with life. |
| 14 | Sin7sins | "As Rain Falls Down" | single | Both journeys are definitional, of course. |
| 15 | Delain | "One Second" | single | The cynic says that progress is a matter of pointing decisively in the direction you happen to be moving. |
| 16 | The Murder of My Sweet | "Head of the Snake" | single | The optimist says "Yes, exactly!" |
| 17 | Candye Syrup | "WHITE RUSSIAN" | single | The direction I am pointing is towards openness over judgment; |
| 18 | Not Secured, Loose Ends | "Paradise Lost (2019)" | BrightDark | expansiveness over reductivism; |
| 19 | Machico | "Zeal" | マチビトサガシ | discovery as an iterative process of escape |
| 20 | uijin | "Sayonara Teddy" | Sayonara Teddey / Horoniga Teatime 2 | rather than a collection of notional hoards; |
| 21 | THE BANANA MONKEYS | "kyun" | kyun +3 | towards the belief that new versions of "Cloudbusting" not only do not diminish the original, |
| 22 | CYNHN | "2時のパレード" | single | but cannot; |
| 23 | BBHF | "Namida no Kaidan" | Family | towards subatomic proof that perfection is monotonically increasing, |
| 24 | Take mind's place | "ESCAPE IV X" | single | and every new song recalibrates what we are capable of; |
| 25 | PANORAMAPANAMATOWN | "Medachitakunai Mind" | GINGAKEI | towards breathing the processes of reinvention and recombination as cultural syllogisms, |
| 26 | Arukara | "瞬間 瞬間 瞬間" | single | and tracing every remaining moment as a particle of hope and collective self-belief. |
| 27 | Dragon Ash | "ROCKET DIVE" | single | I say "You have not yet heard your favorite song" a lot, |
| 28 | Aiolin | "Clear Gray" | Clear Gray +2 | and the point of this formulation is that it expresses an infinity-esque finity in finite-universe terms. |
| 29 | Thorr | "Unicorn Deathsquad" | Unicorn Deathsquad | You can usually get a person who belives the universe is huge to believe that it's huger. |
| 30 | Liturgy | "HAJJ" | H.A.Q.Q. | You can try to get the love you want by identifying it, and there are even worksheets, |
| 31 | Seth | "Hymne au vampire acte I" | Les Blessures De L'âme: XX Ans De Blasphème | but the main thing you accomplish by naming your goal is reducing your receptivity to the unanticipated. |
| 32 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Connect the Goddamn Dots" | single | There are innumerable paths to joy, |
| 33 | envy | "A step in the morning glow" | single | until and unless you stipulate that you will not step on any of them but one, |
| 34 | Avatarium | "Voices" | single | and these are not that one. |
| 35 | Billie Eilish | "everything i wanted" | single | Abundance does not reveal insubstantiality. |
| 36 | Hannah Diamond | "Love Goes On" | single | It beckons. |
| 37 | Tizzy Bac | "鐵之貝克2.0" | single | You don't have to know which step leads most efficiently towards the nearest utopia, |
| 38 | Ravenna Golden | "Cry" | single | you just have to take one, |
| 39 | Nicole Sabouné | "For Us" | Come My Love 4 | and let it go again, |
| 40 | Aubrie Sellers | "Far From Home" | single | and then look around and see where that has taken you. |
| 41 | Jenna Paulette | "Small Talk" | single | The cynic says that you see things as you are, not as they are, |
| 42 | Madison Kozak | "OMG ILY" | single | and the optimist says "My heart is racing, and I bet I can beat you to that corner", |
| 43 | Rosecraft | "Givin' Up" | single | and by the time you get there you have reached escape velocity |
| 44 | Thyla | "Lenox Hill" | single | and you have a new choice of roads. |
| 45 | Irina | "Aattoaamu - Anna laulu lahjaksi" | single | Each song is a gift of possible futures, |
| 46 | Lasten Hautausmaa | "Sähköisku" | single | if you see yourself as possible. |
| 47 | Astropålido | "El Huracán" | single | Your destiny is a collection of stories you have not yet told, |
| 48 | Majesty Of Revival | "S7" | Timeless | sinuous bridges into the void |
| 49 | Trad.Attack! | "Pass-pass" | single | made out of material you thought held up the world, |
| 50 | NateWantsToBattle | "Comet" | Happily Ever After | but the world doesn't have to be held to stay up. |
| 51 | New Arcades | "In The Movies" | Returning Home | Love is not a measurement of the ground or the loss of it, |
| 52 | The People The Poet | "Come to Meet Me in the Rain" | single | or the even or uneven flow of seas, |
| 53 | Obongjayar | "Still Sun" | single | it is a diurnal incantation against fear from a point just far enough outside of our orbit that it is never occluded. |
| 54 | Texture | "Charlie Don't Surf - Live" | Dust | The cynic says those are death rays and we are watching our own prison burn. |
| 55 | Shakira | "Si Te Vas - El Dorado World Tour Live" | Shakira In Concert: El Dorado World Tour | The optimist says "We are free to go anywhere now, and in this blazing light we can see forever." |