| 1 | Avantasia | "Misplaced Among The Angels" | single | There's a line in this song, "Misplaced Among the Angels", where Floor Jansen is asked to sing "Trying to scream yet unbearably mute". |
| 2 | Dynazty | "The White" | single | The whole song is gloriously oversolemn, because that's the Avantasia aesthetic and one not often executed more ruthlessly. |
| 3 | Orden Ogan | "Inferno" | Inferno +1 | The melody of the line curves around elegantly into that final word, the "muuuuuuuuu" hanging effortlessly in the air, waiting to dissipate, to escape. |
| 4 | Terra Atlantica | "The Scarlet Banners" | single | You have this decision to make in a song, in an artwork, in a life: |
| 5 | Volver Al Origen | "No Más" | single | to follow the obdurate yearnings of the form in which you find yourself, |
| 6 | Varjola | "Viaton ihminen" | single | or to say what you came to say. |
| 7 | Lacrimas Profundere | "To Disappear in You" | single | The note wants to die. |
| 8 | Mono Inc. | "Princess of the Night" | single | The word wants to end. |
| 9 | Sylosis | "Heavy Is The Crown" | single | Tobias Sammet wrote them both, and so Floor sings them both, |
| 10 | Dress the Dead | "Painless Injection" | single | even though the "t" breaks spell, |
| 11 | Arch Enemy | "The Watcher" | Deceivers | or maybe because of it. |
| 12 | Marlene Mendoza | "Empty Soul" | Insanity 3 | This is the decision you have to make every time you say anything, |
| 13 | Reliqa | "Safety" | single | every time you move: |
| 14 | Delain | "The Quest and the Curse" | single | are you completing a pattern of expectation, |
| 15 | Lunarian | "Endless Sleep" | single | or are you dancing towards a goal? |
| 16 | Nereids | "Pandora" | single | The best songs do not arrive at iterative perfection, |
| 17 | Molllust | "Mars - The game is over - Edit" | single | they remind you, even in lament, to demand joy. |
| 18 | Zio | "Close" | single | They demonstrate, in a memento mori of awkwardness, |
| 19 | Sharm | "Fly with the Dragons" | single | the idea that the will to live comes from a belief in the uncertainty of the future. |
| 20 | HEXED | "Resurrection" | single | Maybe we will be triumphant. |
| 21 | Cold Kingdom | "Apologies" | Apologies +2 | Maybe by feeling triumphant we will let go of some plaintive need to feel like we are winning |
| 22 | Forever May Fall | "Undertow" | Undertow +2 | long enough to see another way to resolve our story logic. |
| 23 | New Years Day | "Hurts Like Hell" | single | This is not a war. |
| 24 | Rinrin | "Guns and Grenades" | single | Even our wars are not really wars any more, |
| 25 | April Art | "Headline" | single | proxy nihilism for ideologies of denial |
| 26 | Enter Shikari | "The Void Stares Back" | single | hoping somebody will believe that they can die for a cause |
| 27 | 塞壬唱片-MSR | "All hail Savior!" | All hail Savior! +1 | without invalidating it. |
| 28 | 花冷え。 | "NEET GAME" | single | Any game is serious to its pieces, |
| 29 | BAND-MAID | "Unleash!!!!!" | single | but only inside the game's conceit is it more serious to the kings and queens than to the pawns. |
| 30 | B.O.L.T | "One Life" | Weather 6 | The poor slow pawns, urged onwards by coronation promises, |
| 31 | Quubi | "Kurogane" | single | begin to confuse survival with dignity if it goes on too long. |
| 32 | Dizzy Sunfist | "Hey! Stay by my side!" | Hey! Stay by my side! +2 | There are no horizons in chess. |
| 33 | POPPiNG EMO | "Ryusei to Underground" | single | The final rank is plainly visible from the beginning. |
| 34 | SHINGEKI | "World breaker" | single | You probably already know people who are as happy as you dream of being, |
| 35 | Utsu-P | "ウラボス (feat. 初音ミク)" | single | or who, at least, are free of the things you think keep you from happiness, |
| 36 | Zakuro Fujiwara(CV:Momoka Ishii) | "Watashi o Yobu Koe" | single | scars from different mistakes they never made |
| 37 | Sayuri | "DAWN DANCE" | 酸欠少女 | or obligations they were offered and did not accept. |
| 38 | Finally | "kimiyell" | single | You cannot become perfect |
| 39 | Yoru no Honki Dance | "STARLET" | single | because you cannot unknow the path you took, |
| 40 | Regal Lily | "地球でつかまえて" | 恋と戦争 4 | and thus cannot forget that you were once and always unsure. |
| 41 | POOLS | "mokuzu" | single | The pawns that reaches the last square |
| 42 | Homecomings | "Shadow Boxer" | single | can choose to become anything at all, |
| 43 | The Otals | "Sister and Tapir" | and The Rules of Summer 2 | supposedly, |
| 44 | Pale Waves | "Unwanted" | Unwanted | but somehow they never choose to become eagles or goldfish or bicycles. |
| 45 | Eat Your Heart Out | "Twenty Something" | Twenty Something +2 | Our fears constrain our ideas of the possible |
| 46 | Yumi And The Weather | "Can You Tell - Single Edit" | single | in the name of considerate caution. |
| 47 | Alvvays | "Easy On Your Own?" | Easy On Your Own? +1 | We reach the edge and, instead of stepping off the board, |
| 48 | First Aid Kit | "Out of My Head" | Out of My Head +1 | become the successors ourselves of everything we just almost escaped. |
| 49 | Dessa | "Blush" | single | We turn back. |
| 50 | PRIZM | "All the Way" | All the Way +1 | We make the shape of the board by our inwardly retraced steps, |
| 51 | All The Damn Vampires | "Saturday" | Synth City | make the rules by how we have learned to think we have to move. |
| 52 | CALI JEWLS | "Has the World Gone Mad" | single | The days can't name themselves, |
| 53 | Honestly | "Let This Be Love" | Let This Be Love / Night Life 2 | the cities, |
| 54 | daine | "boythots" | single | the feelings. |
| 55 | Ada Rook | "DONT WAKE" | single | The note doesn't want to die, |
| 56 | Rachel La Scalla | "Dodged A Bullet" | single | it only needs to be reminded of our love |
| 57 | blackwinterwells | "halo3" | halations 2 | every second, every beat. |
| 58 | Sorry X | "Festers and Feeds" | single | Even the magnetic travel-pawns are held only barely against the surface of the board, |
| 59 | Graveyardguy | "KMS" | single | things they have felt pressed against any one of two colors. |
| 60 | death's dynamic shroud | "Fall For Me" | single | This is the decision you make every time you contemplate a move: |
| 61 | Rey Pila | "Amygdalae" | Amygdalae / IQ Test 2 | is this a story about inconsequential choices between isomorphic oppositions, |
| 62 | DLD | "Está Bien" | single | or is it time to play something else? |
| 63 | Reyli Barba | "La Manzana Permitida" | single | Some note that doesn't fit in this grid, |
| 64 | Cecilia Toussaint | "Crimen" | single | some path that bends or even loops, |
| 65 | Celest | "Cosas Invisibles" | Cosas Invisibles 6 | some tangent inexpressible in the received notations. |
| 66 | Fusee | "The light that illuminates you" | SKELETON 5 | You do not have to wait to be granted special or unusual withheld powers |
| 67 | FEST VAINQUEUR | "Earendel" | single | that you always had. |
| 68 | Boris | "Cramper" | Heavy Rocks (2022) | Every piece can always move in any direction. |
| 69 | GUHTS | "Burn My Body" | single | Try it. |
| 70 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Bonefire" | single | We line the streets for the passage of royalty, |
| 71 | Sigh | "Satsui - Geshi No Ato" | single | but afterwards their carriages remain where the route leads |
| 72 | Shining | "Ugly and Cold" | single | and we go home, |
| 73 | Cosmophobe | "Fractional Velocity" | Moons of Jupiter 3 | or out for ice cream and then |
| 74 | Vananidr | "Awake" | single | to Target for cat litter and AAA batteries. |
| 75 | Lustre | "Thirst" | single | There is no war to win. |
| 76 | Thessa | "The Devil's Lair" | Losing Sleep | We take turns in armor to remember what it feels like to guard each other, |
| 77 | The Dark Atom | "Dystopia" | single | to give unarmoredness as a gift. |
| 78 | Aethyrien | "Naglfar, Ship of the Dead" | single | The underworld will be running shuttle-busses between North Station and Vígríðr on weekends for the next 7 weeks due to required maintenance. |
| 79 | Vévaki | "Gestaþáttr - Single Edit" | single | Nobody thinks through the operational implications of making a transportation system out of teeth |
| 80 | Anahata | "Midsummer Cairn" | single | or corporations. |
| 81 | A-Z | "The Far Side of the Horizon" | A-Z | We do not step on boards, |
| 82 | The Goo Goo Dolls | "Day After Day" | Chaos In Bloom | and thus have no excuse for moving in short, unimaginative lines. |
| 83 | Editors | "Kiss - Edit" | Kiss 4 | "I will be the one who becomes a queen" is not a strategy |
| 84 | Eve 6 | "mr. darkside" | single | unless you know what the queen would sing, |
| 85 | Del Amitri | "Lips of London" | Fatal Mistakes: Outtakes & B-Sides | and if you do, you can sing it where you stand. |
| 86 | Skelm | "Ek Lief Jou Ek Haat Jou" | Bang Vir Die See 2 | Her song wants to be sung in a new language, anyway. |
| 87 | Die Heuwels Fantasties | "BELLVILLE" | single | Its notes don't want to die. Nobody wants to die |
| 88 | Echo Deep | "Moments" | single | before whatever happens next, |
| 89 | Sparks Bantwana | "Ngingo Wakho" | single | before we find out whether we are willing to finish the uncooperative words we have started to sing. |
| 90 | Son of Africa | "Princess Zee (Nam Ndoyiboninkosi)" | single | Maybe we will feel lost where they take us, at least at first, |
| 91 | Tzusan | "Wasps In Syrup" | single | pawns unsure of the protocols for releasing capturing bishops, showing them everything we've discovered since they put on those hats. |
| 92 | BLESSED MANE | "In the Future" | single | Every piece is allowed to move into the future, by holding still or doubting. |
| 93 | Tom Vek | "Survive New" | Newer Symbols | Theology explains how you can't; science describes how you did. |
| 94 | Iisa | "Saari" | single | In between, you get to feel divine or desperate or deductive or magnificent |
| 95 | Ásgeir | "Limitless" | Limitless +1 | or like all of us are all of these things and everything, |
| 96 | Ronski Speed | "Two Of Us" | single | in every combination more inexorable than loneliness. |
| 97 | HALIENE | "Reach Across the Sky" | single | The angels line the edges of the board, writing speculative rules of how they could be allowed to land on a square and feel gravity again. |
| 98 | Our Last Night | "A Thousand Miles" | OLN Goes 2000's 2 | We can't walk home without passing them, lined along our triumphant route. |
| 99 | Wave Break | "Running Up That Hill" | single | These songs, once recovered, don't want to disappear again. The world doesn't want to end. |
| 100 | Del Amitri | "Happiness is It" | Fatal Mistakes: Outtakes & B-Sides | We do not have to dream of being queens. Or we were always queens, but we don't have to be queens ennobled by attrition. Or we can demand joy. Or we have it, already. |