| 1 | Sun-El Musician | "Zube Nami" | African Electronic Dance Music | The first time I got interested in music from somewhere other than where I lived, it was Scottish and I am nominally part-Scottish, so I could obtusely imagine its resonance was hereditary. |
| 2 | Asithandile | "Uyakhonzeka" | single | I'm more Italian than Scottish, though, and yet when I was a kid I don't remember it ever occurring to me to wonder if I would also like Italian music. |
| 3 | Kelly Lee Owens | "Unity – The Official FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™ Theme" | single | But later, of course, I became obsessed with Japanese music, and I'm not remotely Asian. |
| 4 | Ed Sheeran | "Tides" | = | Or, rather, I'm just as remotely everything as I am Scottish, |
| 5 | CHVRCHES | "Screaming" | Screen Violence: Director’s Cut | and so are you. |
| 6 | Kyla La Grange | "Neverland" | single | I can be enfolded by South African gospel as an American atheist |
| 7 | Bronnie | "Rabbit Hole" | single | not because I recognize a god we share, |
| 8 | Maggie Lindemann | "She Knows It" | single | but because I recognize what it feels like to believe something. |
| 9 | Nocean | "The Fall" | Aurora: The Weight of a Shadow | We are all more human than anything else, |
| 10 | Ad Infinitum | "Animals" | Chapter II - Legacy | grandly and inescapably, |
| 11 | Persona | "Animals" | Animal | viscerally and helpless. |
| 12 | Nekonomicon | "Cursed Kurbee" | single | We look up at the sky, or down at our own hands, |
| 13 | Aexylium | "Mountains" | The Fifth Season | or past them to the ground, |
| 14 | Coronatus | "Time Of The Raven" | single | and thus there may be only two stories, |
| 15 | Beast In Black | "Dark New World" | Dark Connection | but they have three different morals: |
| 16 | Aephanemer | "Antigone" | Antigone +1 | everything is possible, |
| 17 | Mister Misery | "Strangeland II - The Return" | single | we are mortal, |
| 18 | Power Quest | "Bound for Glory" | single | or we are here. |
| 19 | Dynazty | "Advent" | single | Or, more likely, all morals are compounded out of these three elements, |
| 20 | Equilibrium | "XX" | single | and most contain them all. |
| 21 | Allegaeon | "Into Embers" | single | Or, teleologically, our morality is whatever these three things produce. |
| 22 | Be'lakor | "Locus" | Coherence | We are precisely and inherently the creatures of these bodies on this surface, |
| 23 | Mastodon | "Gigantium" | Hushed and Grim | and thus ourselves the calibrations of all our conceptions of extents. |
| 24 | Volbeat | "Becoming" | Becoming +3 | I'll have to take this all back if we make it to Venus and the sentient semi-corporeal plasma-slugs have pop-metal bands that sound just like this, |
| 25 | Raizer | "Invisible" | Resurrection | but it's wonderful either way. |
| 26 | SHOW-YA | "TOKYO, I Scream" | single | We are all in this together, no matter how expansive or inclusive the all. |
| 27 | Dizzy Sunfist | "Little More" | DIZZYLAND -To Infinity & Beyond- | When I played "Fields of Fire" and thought my body had prepared me for guitar-lines that build like bagpipe drones, |
| 28 | PassCode | "Freely" | single | I was right, but it has also just as dreamily prepared me for Japanese kawaii cyber-metalcore. |
| 29 | BAND-MAID | "Sense" | Sense +2 | We see ourselves in the shiny surfaces of all of these machines, and find homes in all of these wonderlands, |
| 30 | Malcolm Mask McLaren | "TRY&TRY" | Try&Try 3 | because of course we have only these models of motive and articulation. |
| 31 | INUWASI | "setsuna" | DUTY | We look up to feel our limitations trivialized, |
| 32 | クレナズム | "あまりふたつ" | Touch the figure 6 | or down to feel our powers gathered, |
| 33 | AprilBlue | "マリタイム" | single | and then forward to reform our terrain |
| 34 | Maaya Uchida | "YA-YA-YAN Happy Climax!" | Hikari | or to just walk across it to reach somewhere temporarily and subjectively new. |
| 35 | Scarlxrd | "Lxuder" | DeadRising | But of course migration is only the slowest and surest kind of terraforming. |
| 36 | Smrtdeath | "misfit" | single | It is faster to change ourselves and our surfaces at once, |
| 37 | biteki | "hexed" | single | faster to accept responsibility for a world than to inherit it. |
| 38 | fish narc | "Instant Sobriety" | single | Faster, not easier, |
| 39 | 44phantom | "I WON'T COMPLAIN (feat. Tom The Mail Man)" | single | but sometimes we don't have time for the pace of the easier steps, |
| 40 | Sewerslvt | "whatever" | suffering from melancholia 3 | the patience to build generational churches |
| 41 | ElyOtto | "stalker" | single | as if future children will still worship these same slow idols |
| 42 | Gurldoll | "Bones" | single | because their joints incline at similar angles. |
| 43 | Namasenda | "Shots Fired" | Unlimited Ammo | We never claim the tedious birthrights of our actual ancestors: |
| 44 | Jessica Winter | "Like A Knife" | More Sad Music 6 | war and fear, |
| 45 | MASKED | "Bled Out!" | UNHOLY | suffering we only know to attribute to insufficient reasons, |
| 46 | Scarlxrd | "Dr. Dxxm" | DeadRising | short lives that ended before any of this was possible. |
| 47 | Archspire | "Abandon the Linear" | Bleed the Future | We brandish heraldry of sides taken against time, |
| 48 | Doedsvangr | "Flagelist" | Serpents Ov Old | not because we have discovered an immunity to it, |
| 49 | Sol Sistere | "The Narrow Path" | Sol Sistere | but because we have become so reliant on a temporary misconception of history as short |
| 50 | Häxkapell | "Eldskapt" | Eldhymner | that we think we can return to the beginning of it with a short fall |
| 51 | Grafnár | "Ómennsk" | single | and a soft landing, |
| 52 | Cronómetrobudú | "Guerra Serena" | Verne | with a serene war |
| 53 | Scarlxrd | "Hate Sxng 2" | DeadRising | from which we come up screaming. |
| 54 | Carolina Durante | "La planta que muere en la esquina" | single | The trees and lions and dragons on those shields die in a corner, |
| 55 | Aiko el grupo | "Romantinski" | single | and are then swaddled in burlap |
| 56 | Sierra Leona | "Me Prometo las Llamas" | single | and carried in ceremonial vessels |
| 57 | Nat Simons | "Déjalo Ser" | Felina | into the attic, |
| 58 | Lunáticos | "Netflis" | single | saved for when we will hope our children will reenact these fights as pageants. |
| 59 | Gemeliers | "Un Millón" | single | Are all our hopes like this? |
| 60 | Ed Sheeran | "Be Right Now" | = | Ways of wishing for joy without understanding that operational optimism is a willingness to change? |
| 61 | Midnight Oil | "Rising Seas" | single | All of these songs are equal, the grimly defiant and the shimmeringly harmonic. |
| 62 | Broken Chanter | "Allow Yourself" | Catastrophe Hits | You have to allow yourself to survive, |
| 63 | Novelbright | "seeker" | single | first, before any of the other quests can begin. |
| 64 | cinema staff | "Kaitei" | single | Movie revolutions leave this part out |
| 65 | Letzte Instanz | "Unsere Fahnen" | Ehrenwort | by labeling the heroes instead of explaining how they came to know this about themselves, |
| 66 | ASP | "Spät" | single | and thus too often end up remaking Triumph of the Will without Nazis |
| 67 | Betontod | "Der nackte Kaiser" | Pace per sempre | as if this is the same kind of enterprise as reshooting a kidnapping movie without a sex offender. |
| 68 | Legacy Pilots | "Better Days" | The Penrose Triangle | There's nothing inherently wrong with telling a story in icons and allegory, |
| 69 | 小男孩樂團 | "認同感" | single | reduced thus to essentials and origins, |
| 70 | KEiiNO | "VENUS" | single | but only if it doesn't end with autocrats insisting that every distant planet is a breakaway piece of this one, |
| 71 | Felicia Takman | "Allt som inte blir som jag vill att de ska vara" | Alla gör slut | and the universe quivers uneasily until it is brought down out of the sky into a specific valley. |
| 72 | Veronica Maggio | "Var är du?" | Och som vanligt händer det något hemskt 6 | The lost ask where you are as an accusation, |
| 73 | Leaves' Eyes | "Galeids of the Væringjar" | Viking Spirit | holding your curiosity responsible for their fear. |
| 74 | Herknungr | "Ámáttugr" | Dauðadagr | But of course it is the other way around. |
| 75 | SKÁLD | "Þat Mælti Mín Móðir" | Winter Songs 5 | That is what our ancestors were trying to tell us. |
| 76 | REMINA | "Dying Sun" | single | We will not unoverheat the Earth |
| 77 | Clarice Jensen | "Back To Mexico" | Identifying Features 4 | by inviting Venus to Eurovision. |
| 78 | Tori Amos | "Addition of Light Divided" | Ocean to Ocean | We will not unite ourselves by settling under a single god, |
| 79 | Scarlxrd | "Still.Here" | DeadRising | but by climbing out from under the mouldering layer of them. |
| 80 | Beast In Black | "My Dystopia" | Dark Connection | You can't rewind time a few convenient minutes and then leave it motionless, |
| 81 | Ad Infinitum | "Inferno" | Chapter II - Legacy | any more than you can light a final fire and walk away. |
| 82 | Nocean | "The Farewell" | Aurora: The Weight of a Shadow | This doesn't mean that you are trapped, that you can't walk away, that there is no away. |
| 83 | CHVRCHES | "Bitter End" | Screen Violence: Director’s Cut | But it does mean that all the aways are the same, and we walk from one to the other not to be welcomed as complacently corpulent kings, but to keep taking steps. |