| 1 | Vrylnia | "Invocation" | The Other World | I got a new pair of earbuds for running, |
| 2 | The Erinyes | "On My Way to Love" | The Erinyes | and also a new pair of supposedly slightly fancier shoes. |
| 3 | Epica | "The Final Lullaby (feat. Shining)" | single | The thing about running gear is that running is hard, |
| 4 | Edenbridge | "At First Light" | Shangri-La | and bad gear can make it even harder, |
| 5 | ELYSATIUM | "Destiny" | single | but good gear doesn't really make it easier. |
| 6 | Ghosther | "Resistance" | Immersion | Nor would you want it to. |
| 7 | Ксюша на Марсе | "Колыбельная" | Колыбельная +1 | Running is not a transportation mode. |
| 8 | RedHook | "SAY" | single | If I wanted to reach a destination with less effort, |
| 9 | Evol Walks | "Back Where You Belong" | single | I would use pretty much any other method. |
| 10 | The Erinyes | "Where Do We Go" | The Erinyes | I run to force my body to expend energy it would otherwise unimaginatively conserve, |
| 11 | Praise the Sun | "The Curtain of Life" | The Proffer of Light | and to confront my brain with a provocation of effort |
| 12 | LOST NEBULA | "Doomsday" | single | that offers emotional potential for essentially no risk. |
| 13 | Reliqa | "Second Nature" | I Don't Know What I Am 6 | If I stop in the middle of a loop, the sudden reduction in centripetal force does not fling me from the route to my grisly demise. |
| 14 | E-An-Na | "Cenuşiu" | single | The new shoes do not make this unlikely outcome differently unlikely. |
| 15 | RAVDINA | "Капли" | single | I'm trying them, instead of the supposedly slightly unfancier model I've been running in for a couple years, |
| 16 | Molllust | "Saturn - Human Clockwork" | Saturn 2 | because the company that makes both models describes the fancier one as the running shoe they would make if they only made one running shoe, |
| 17 | Unleash The Archers | "Falsewave" | single | and I know a veiled warning when I hear one. |
| 18 | Debler Eternia | "Eternia" | single | As with all choices, I want to know if I'd be sad to have only this one |
| 19 | The Erinyes | "Take Me" | The Erinyes | while I still have others. |
| 20 | OCTAVIAGRACE | "追想列車" | single | Are they better? Maybe. |
| 21 | 猫の眼に宇宙 | "再生のアンセム" | 再生のアンセム / I:Do:l 2 | Are they $25 better? Maybe. |
| 22 | Finally | "WILD BRAVE" | single | If I replace running shoes after 500 miles, a $25 more-expensive pair only has to be $.05 better per mile, |
| 23 | BRATS | "Spiderweb" | single | and the current tradeoff between my financial situation and my bodily self-awareness is such that I absolutely cannot pretend to be able to detect anything that subtle. |
| 24 | EMPATHY | "RULE" | single | I take about 1500 running steps in a mile, according to a device on (dubiously) my wrist, |
| 25 | LiSA | "NEW ME" | single | so that's a third of a hundredth of a cent per step, |
| 26 | POPPiNG EMO | "ROLLING DAYS" | single | which sounds like an absurdly exploitative wage for running-shoe laborers, |
| 27 | Morfonica | "寄る辺のSunny, Sunny" | 寄る辺のSunny, Sunny +1 | and would be, if we paid for running shoes by counting our steps |
| 28 | Quubi | "Three" | Gene | and stopping after just one of them. |
| 29 | sui sui | "maze of desire" | MONSTER BITE 4 | If you only go one step, that is not a run. |
| 30 | chilldspot | "Like?" | Titles 5 | That is a hop. |
| 31 | airattic | "Film Reel of Our Youth" | Film Reel of Our Youth +1 | If you hop just once, young or old or gazing at your hopping shoes or not, you are not a hopper, you a person who hopped once, |
| 32 | funeral | "exit life" | single | and I don't want to hear about how much energy-return you feel like you got from your hopping shoes after hopping in them once. |
| 33 | aldrch | "prone2leave" | single | The company that makes my shoes (and also other running clothes) gets a lot more than a third of a hundredth of a cent of my money over the course of a year, |
| 34 | fish narc | "Timebomb 2" | single | even though I give them nothing at all most whole days, never mind miles. |
| 35 | Drippin So Pretty | "No More" | single | Carrying a stack of nickels in order to pay for each mile of running as I run it would be annoying, |
| 36 | hoshie star | "i'm back" | single | and not just for me. |
| 37 | Lil Xtra | "Karma" | single | Instead, I pay all the nickels ahead of time, |
| 38 | TOWNS | "Speak For Myself" | single | and this buys me the freedom to run as many miles as I want in these shoes, |
| 39 | Slowly Slowly | "Longshot" | single | at least until they degrade to the point that they no longer function as shoes, |
| 40 | Loveless | "IS IT ME" | End of an era | which in my experience they don't actually do in 500 miles. |
| 41 | Autumn Fires | "Lifelines" | single | $.05/mile is thus, in fact, a measurement of me more than the shoes. |
| 42 | Fridge | "Walkaway" | single | I am a 55-year-old who has spent much of adulthood out of shape, |
| 43 | Rice Lucido | "Chill" | single | and almost all of it employed at software companies, |
| 44 | Dotty's World | "Hanggang Dito" | single | and am thus willing to spend $.05/mile to feel hopeful that nicer shoes, replaced more often, |
| 45 | SunKissed Lola | "HKP" | single | increase the chances that I will be able to keep running for a few years now that I've semi-mastered it. |
| 46 | Identikit | "Dust Collector" | single | The guy who buys shitty $40 running shoes and only ever runs 20 miles in them has generated $2/mile, |
| 47 | Dasha | "Vegas" | single | which I think we can all agree is a much fairer rate to pay shoe-laborers than a third of a hundredth of a cent, |
| 48 | Sizzy Rocket | "Live Laugh Love" | Live Laugh Love +2 | were it not for the small detail that none of those rates are wages, |
| 49 | Maggie Lindemann | "cages" | SUCKERPUNCH | or even how shoemaking wages are paid. |
| 50 | Dylan | "Nothing Lasts Forever" | Nothing Lasts Forever +1 | It might occur to you to try to apply this reasoning analogically |
| 51 | Daya | "See You In My Dreams" | In Between Dreams 4 | to some other payment domains, and if it does, I will not try to prevent you, |
| 52 | emlyn | "my best friend's ex" | single | or at least not until it looks like you're about to suggest giving me running shoes for free but requiring me to stop every mile to watch advertisements on their soles. |
| 53 | Lauren Weintraub | "Boston" | single | Don't forget to account for the history of the shoe industry, in New England and elsewhere, |
| 54 | Juli | "Fette Wilde Jahre" | single | and which of these two hypothetical customers the shoe companies would like to have, |
| 55 | Chapel Hart | "American Pride" | single | and whether the answer is different for different shoe companies. |
| 56 | Rina Sawayama | "Forgiveness" | Hold The Girl | Analogies are not much use for running, but good for thinking. |
| 57 | Carly Rae Jepsen | "Talking to Yourself" | single | Shoes, at least, are tangibly if gradually consumed by the physical act of running. |
| 58 | FLETCHER | "Guess We Lied..." | Girl Of My Dreams | This is not true of analogies. Nor, for that matter, of earbuds. |
| 59 | Concrete Castles | "Ghost of You" | Wish I Missed U (Deluxe B-Sides) 3 | The ones I was using before still work. |
| 60 | The Beths | "Your Side" | Expert In A Dying Field | I presume they hold a charge for less time than they did when they were new, |
| 61 | The Joy Formidable | "Adored or Bored" | Into the Blue | due to what I hope will come to seem like the woeful state of circa-2020 battery-charging technology, |
| 62 | The Darling Fire | "Heart Will Stop" | Distortions | but they run for a lot longer at a time than I do, so I'm not going to be the one to critique that. |
| 63 | Jesus Jones | "Wired and Windburned" | single | They do not appear to degrade from the act of playing anthemic symphonic metal |
| 64 | The Wedding Present | "We All Came from the Sea" | We All Came from the Sea +2 | or melancholy Japanese indie-pop |
| 65 | Too Much Joy | "Normal Never Was" | Normal Never Was +1 | or unglossy Pinoy pop-punk |
| 66 | MandelKokainSchnaps | "Mama" | single | or Big-Country-evoking Welsh alt-rock |
| 67 | Tonbandgerät | "So wie mit 19" | single | or stately German indie-adult-pop. |
| 68 | Lucky Duckes | "La Tormenta" | La teoría del todo 4 | They played me music without flying out of my ears, for two and a half years, |
| 69 | Carolina Durante | "Casa Kira" | single | in a frankly admirable combination of acoustics and non-ballistics, |
| 70 | Maldita Nerea | "La increíble historia entre tú y yo" | single | and I feel more than a little bad about the disloyalty inherent in even questioning them. |
| 71 | Fast Animals and Slow Kids | "Il tempo è una bugia (feat. Ligabue)" | single | But the company that made those earbuds actually did stop making them, |
| 72 | Hombre Tigre | "Autovía" | Ha Empezado el Baile 6 | and once you realize you can't necessarily live with an earbud model for the rest of your life, |
| 73 | Marmi | "La Broma De Mis Sueños" | single | you start worrying that the rest of your life might start at any moment. |
| 74 | LEATHERS | "Ultraviolet" | single | The new ones are better. |
| 75 | Katri Ylander | "Autio talo" | single | We're in an era of insanely rapid improvement in tiny machines that consume or emit waves: |
| 76 | Cordelia | "Anker" | single | cameras in phones, |
| 77 | Leah | "Ek Like Jou" | single | sensors in almost everything (I assume the next model of these running shoes will be Bluetooth-enabled, and the asshole adsole idea is probably inevitable), |
| 78 | The Roads Below | "Breakup/Breakdown" | single | speakers nestled inside our ears. |
| 79 | Mitchell Tenpenny | "Good Place" | This Is the Heavy | These mid-tier wireless "sport" earbuds only claim to have good audio quality, |
| 80 | Koe Wetzel | "Money Spent" | Hell Paso | and they're still a dramatically better music-listening experience |
| 81 | Hamish Hawk | "Think Of Us Kissing" | single | than any of my practically countless and now essentially obsolete previous generations of stereos and headphones. |
| 82 | Dan Mangan | "Just Know It" | Just Know It +2 | Dramatically, but not transformationally. |
| 83 | Sahg | "House of Worship" | House of Worship +3 | There have been only four transformational advances in music playback in my lifetime, I think, unless I'm forgetting one, which would be embarrassing: |
| 84 | Wolfheart | "Knell" | King of the North | - the shift from LPs to CDs making essentially-full-fidelity playback possible in portable devices; |
| 85 | In Flames | "Foregone Pt. 1" | Foregone Pt. 1 +2 | - the shift from CDs to iPods making collections as portable as individual albums; |
| 86 | Stratovarius | "Frozen in Time" | Frozen in Time +3 | - the shift from downloads to streaming making collecting no longer a prerequisite of listening; |
| 87 | Ginevra | "Masquerade" | We Belong to the Stars | - and the shift from wires to wireless closing, at least provisionally, the unencumbered distance between the music-control interface and our heads. |
| 88 | Perfect Plan | "Can't Let You Win" | single | I assume the next one will involve implants and/or angels. |
| 89 | House Of Lords | "Take It All" | Saints and Sinners | This new running set belongs to the same era as the previous ones, |
| 90 | Hartmann | "Remedy" | Get Over It | so they only sound better and weigh less and fit better and make track- and volume-changes more easily, |
| 91 | Mentalist | "Tears Within A Paradise" | Empires Falling | and I would have been surprised if I didn't like them better than their predecessors. |
| 92 | Somehow Jo | "Rush" | Scales and Details | The surprise, though only mild, is that I also like them notably better than the fancier pair of less ear-adhering and more "professional" (in predictably both good and bad senses) earbuds I was previously using for non-exercise purposes. |
| 93 | Virtual Symmetry | "The Paradise of Lies" | Virtual Symmetry | Progress elides tradeoffs. |
| 94 | MCC [Magna Carta Cartel] | "This Is My Life" | Savantgarde 2 | The tiny camera in my phone is better than all my previous cameras at everything but extreme zoom, |
| 95 | For Absent Friends | "Little Things" | The Big Room | and one of the many interesting things I learned from my questionable choice of majoring in photography at college was that walking closer is almost always better than zooming closer, anyway, |
| 96 | Destrage | "A Commercial Break that Lasts Forever" | SO MUCH. too much. | especially (and I learned this in college too, albeit with different magnitudes) if you don't have to carry a giant camera with you. |
| 97 | Marras | "Viiva" | single | The noise-reduction in these mid-tier 2022 "sport" earbuds is more or less as good as the noise-reduction in my much-clunkier 2020 specialty noise-cancelling earbuds, |
| 98 | The Antichrist Imperium | "Misotheist" | single | and the reproduction of misotheism is cheerfully superior. |
| 99 | Ifernach | "A Winter Tree Clad in Black Frost" | single | It's a little weird to say that my earbuds are the most important piece of technology in my life |
| 100 | Ellende | "Freier Fall" | single | when they need a phone or computer to do anything and those gadgets can do many other interesting things, |
| 101 | Second To Sun | "The Divine Voice" | Voices of Obscurantism | but I already routinely say that I think putting all the world's music online together is the greatest cultural achievement of my lifetime |
| 102 | Behemoth | "Once Upon A Pale Horse" | Opvs Contra Natvram | even though we had to invent the internet to make it among a billion other things possible. |
| 103 | Cloud Rat | "Corset" | single | We're still just beginning to understand the constraints and possibilities of music streaming, I think, |
| 104 | ChuggaBoom | "No Rules, No Limits" | No Rules, No Limits +2 | and simultaneously the implications of so much of music moving from shared air directly into our bodies. |
| 105 | Callejon | "Sternenstaub" | Sternenstaub +2 | Music is joy, and this was no less true when I was 12 and it was coming out of a tinny 1979 clock-radio speaker |
| 106 | Décembre Noir | "Small.Town.Depression" | single | turned to its literal lowest volume against the side of my head because it had no headphone jack, never mind Bluetooth, |
| 107 | Violet Cold | "Shazam the Void" | single | and the Great American Radio Show aired in Dallas after my bedtime. |
| 108 | Lybica | "Ascend" | Lybica | Our spirits have always flown with our available wings. |
| 109 | Lullabies for Falling Empires | "Sinking" | single | New earbuds don't make joy more joyous, much like they don't make running less hard, |
| 110 | Kuggur | "الاِحتِفَالِ بِإۤلِة الشَّمْسِ فِي سَهْلِ الْبِقَاعِ - Single Version" | single | but we don't run to escape running, and neither does joy exist to be optimized |
| 111 | ef | "Moments of Momentum" | single | or measured, or discretized. |
| 112 | Bakahira | "My Mother Told Me" | single | Earbuds are a technology of immersion, not isolation; |
| 113 | Vévaki | "Heimdalagaldr - Single Edit" | single | of music as present and overlayed world, not a sited ritual. |
| 114 | Astralseid | "Wild Weird Web" | A Leaf in the Stream of Creation | Of course this is the theme of all virtuality and everything that isn't entirely virtual but virtually so, |
| 115 | Eldrvak | "...And The Sky Turned Black" | single | including our catastrophes, |
| 116 | Through Mists | "Until My Lungs Explode" | Until My Lungs Explode 5 | their proffered doom |
| 117 | Irist | "Gloria" | Gloria 5 | and all our stubborn combinations of denial and hope. |
| 118 | A.A. Williams | "The Echo" | single | If we can reach each other with a whisper, |
| 119 | REZN | "Possession" | single | what other seemingly intractable distances exist to limn diversity |
| 120 | No Devotion | "No Oblivion" | No Oblivion | instead of inviting the void? |
| 121 | I:Scintilla | "HEAD" | single | These songs accompany me. |
| 122 | Ketil Bjørnstad | "Til deg, du hei og bleike myr" | Det stig av hav eit alveland 3 | We arrive as legion. |
| 123 | Björk | "Ovule" | single | Our headphones may yet save our lives, |
| 124 | uMjabulisi | "CONTROL" | Ningaphiki Nami | no matter how long we survived without them. |
| 125 | Mtekhala uMaqatha No Dogzin | "Dlozi Lami" | Bayede | The past is not an alternative to the future, |
| 126 | Mthandazo Gatya | "Khumbul'ekhaya" | Journey To Infinity | it is the hearth we cross when we are ready to go |
| 127 | Ntokzin | "Induku Enhle" | single | somewhere new |
| 128 | 071 NELLY THE MASTER BEAT | "Ramasedi" | single | and today everywhere is new again. |
| 129 | Aleksi Perälä | "FI3AC2274010" | UNITY III | All these machines are levers we use to lift ourselves up, |
| 130 | Kontrollverlust | "Angels" | Angels +2 | to pry ourselves forward towards transformations that described themselves as our fate |
| 131 | Lauren Babic | "My Curse" | single | until they realized they were not entitled to our silence. |
| 132 | DIAMANTE | "Like a Prayer" | single | Let the choir sing. Let the noise-cancellation lift their voices out of the HVAC hum, traffic, |
| 133 | Death From Above 1979 | "Don't Stop Believin'" | single | streetlights, people. |
| 134 | CANYON | "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" | single | There is thunder in our hearts; |
| 135 | No Resolve | "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" | single | possibly we put too much bass-boost in our new earbuds' custom EQ settings. |
| 136 | Ana Black Orchid | "Running Up That Hill - Metal Version" | single | Look into someone's eyes until you can tell the song they're hearing. |
| 137 | Patty Gurdy | "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" | single | If you move one step apart, once you know, that is not running. Not running away. |