| 1 | Hitsujibungaku | "永遠のブルー" | single | I spent years learning tiny amounts of painstaking Japanese, |
| 2 | あたらよ | "憂い桜" | single | ways of falling tentatively in love with a character at a time, |
| 3 | Czecho No Republic | "STORY" | single | with an anime bridge or a kind of tea I didn't know, |
| 4 | Hakubi | "Eye" | single | with mundane and structural things, |
| 5 | MyDearDarlin' | "Your Voice" | single | with voices, syllables. |
| 6 | 都内某所 | "ハバナイスデーイ" | ハバナイスデーイ +1 | Most of it I forget, and even the bits I half-remember, I distrust. |
| 7 | Crispy Camera Club | "待ち合わせは月の下で" | single | I might, rarely, have a guess at half of a line of a Japanese song, just from hearing it, |
| 8 | AFTER SQUALL | "So What!" | RAKUEN | but no confidence that, when I look it up, I'll be right. |
| 9 | Yabai T-Shirts Yasan | "職務質問 〜1日に2回も〜" | Tank-top Flower for Friends | But fluency was never realistically my ambition. |
| 10 | The Otals | "アメリカはまだ夜の中" | Farewell, Our Cabbagefields 6 | I am not trying to absorb our cultural differences, |
| 11 | Aya Hirano | "Sorairo Days - From CrosSing" | Sorairo Days - From CrosSing +1 | I am only trying to reach the point where I can, with reasonable effort, |
| 12 | Finally | "Love me for who I am" | single | just barely understand what they maybe are. |
| 13 | lynch. | "ECLIPSE" | REBORN | I had to look up 永遠, which means "eternal". |
| 14 | NIGAI | "replica" | single | I had to look up "Hitsujibungaku" (羊文学), which means "Sheep Literature". |
| 15 | Ad Infinitum | "From the Ashes" | From the Ashes +3 | I had to look up the lyrics to "永遠のブルー", which means "Eternal Blue", |
| 16 | Memoremains | "In The Dark" | single | and I don't know why they wrote "ブルー" as the borrowed English word "Blue" in phonetic katakana script |
| 17 | Elysion | "Raid The Universe" | Raid The Universe +1 | instead of 青 in kanji, and maybe it's important. |
| 18 | Alwaid | "Illuyanka" | Twelve Daemons | I didn't spot-translate any of "永遠のブルー" from just hearing it, |
| 19 | Liv Kristine | "River Of Diamonds" | single | and that's normal and doesn't usually faze me, |
| 20 | Velkhanos | "Gunpowder" | single | but it's my favorite song ever for now, |
| 21 | Moyra | "Unleashed Spirits" | OMEN | and I keep playing it over and over and then eventually for whatever reason I have to stop, |
| 22 | LYRRE | "Crown" | single | and I want to be able to keep singing it in my head as I walk away, |
| 23 | Hanging Garden | "The Garden" | The Garden +2 | and so I needed to find at least some part of it I could understand without merely memorizing some new noises. |
| 24 | Koburg | "Beauty in the Fight" | single | I recognize 愛, for love, when it's written, and it's "Ai" when you say it, so maybe I should have been able to hear |
| 25 | Djunah | "Hallway" | Femina Furens | 愛をしてるから as "because I am in love". "Ai wo shiteru kara...". |
| 26 | Iress | "Ricochet" | single | I would have been wrong, but not too badly wrong, if I had tried to say this idea myself, |
| 27 | Lesath | "There is a profound sense in which we are isolated" | There is a profound sense in which we are isolated | but I know what the prepositions and infinitives mean if you put them in the right order for me. |
| 28 | An Danzza | "Fólkvangr (Freya's Abode)" | single | So there's my line: "Because I am in love." "Ai wo shiteru kara..." |
| 29 | GALNERYUS | "BRAVEHEARTS" | BETWEEN DREAD AND VALOR | If you walked past me this week and I seemed ethereal and lost, that's why. |
| 30 | Grimgotts | "Until Dawn" | single | I was singing half of a line of this song to myself to hold my heart together until I could play it again, |
| 31 | Powerwolf | "No Prayer At Midnight" | No Prayer At Midnight +2 | still, again, 今も, even now. |
| 32 | Elvenking | "Bride of Night" | Bride of Night +2 | They have names, the three women in Hitsujibungaku, |
| 33 | Narnia | "Hold On" | Hold On +1 | I could probably learn what they are. |
| 34 | Omnium Gatherum | "Slasher" | single | I've been listening to them for almost 5 years, |
| 35 | Enslaved | "Behind The Mirror" | Heimdal | and in that time they've made at least 3 of my favorite songs ever. |
| 36 | Black & Damned | "Hyena's Call" | single | But I need their songs more than they need my love, I think. |
| 37 | Marras | "Musta Heijastin" | single | 80,000 people in Tokyo have listened to them on Spotify in the last month. |
| 38 | Liturgy | "Before I Knew the Truth" | single | They are witnessed. They will not be forgotten. |
| 39 | Spirit Possession | "Orthodox Weapons" | single | Their songs are heard by people who understand them completely. |
| 40 | Majesties | "Verdant Paths to Radiance" | Vast Reaches Unclaimed | I could walk among them as a politely tolerated intrusion, |
| 41 | CHTHONIC | "護國山" | single | albeit one that is sometimes capable of comprehending public-transit announcement, |
| 42 | Cradle Of Filth | "She is a Fire" | single | but love is only rarely a symmetric exchange. |
| 43 | The 69 Eyes | "Death of Darkness" | single | Mostly it is a substance we uncontrollably exude. |
| 44 | Deathstars | "Midnight Party" | Midnight Party +1 | It mixes with nitrogen in a layer around the surface of the world |
| 45 | Symphony Of Sweden | "Down And Counting" | Get Out Of My Mind 4 | to coax it past habitable to ecstatic. |
| 46 | Demons Down | "Where Will Our Tears Fall" | single | It holds us poised on the brinks of despair. |
| 47 | Stormwarning | "Satellite Falling" | single | It triangulates our emotional position to within a single hope. |
| 48 | A.C.T | "Digging a Hole" | Falling | It dissipates self-refillingly as we wrap it around ourselves. |
| 49 | Ihsahn | "Dom Andra" | Dom Andra +1 | You could begin half your sentences with "Because I am in love", |
| 50 | Haken | "Sempiternal Beings" | Fauna | and maybe in doing so identify the other half that would be better unsaid. |
| 51 | Tnne | "Dreaming Awake" | Life 3.0 | And so, eventually, with the feeling of pulling something foreign out of my chest so wrenchingly |
| 52 | RPWL | "A Cold Spring Day in '22" | single | that I don't know how all the blood stays circling inside, |
| 53 | Seelenkraft | "Wir Alle - Single Edit" | single | I stop hitting the back-arrow and let the rest of these songs play, too. |
| 54 | ENGST | "Was Wäre Wenn" | Was Wäre Wenn +3 | They are also about love, even the ones that are about sorrow or darkness or other ways of saying "forever". |
| 55 | Marathonmann | "1985" | 1985 +2 | I'm in love with a Polish melodeath band who seem to be more popular in Finland than Poland. |
| 56 | Kirkkovene | "Se on kuin yö" | single | I'm in love with a French melodic metal band I thought were Belgian, |
| 57 | kanon | "Angels" | single | but I've seen lovable Eiffel Towers in both of those countries. |
| 58 | Brevin Kim | "Ghost" | single | I'm in love, demonstrably, with hundreds of bands who don't have the self-awareness |
| 59 | toast | "take it slow" | single | to avoid sounding like pompous idiots in their own third-person autobiographies, |
| 60 | Thanks! I Hate It | "Opossum! My Possum!" | Lovers Lane | and hundreds more too paralyzed by that self-awareness to admit what they dream about. |
| 61 | Can't Swim | ""can you help me?"" | Thanks but No Thanks | I'm in love with unhurriable progressive rock discursions and tense emo pleas, |
| 62 | Daughter | "Swim Back" | single | and apparently every phenotype of gothic. |
| 63 | Tanukichan | "Escape" | GIZMO | Some of these songs are even in English, |
| 64 | Monteperdido | "MARCA 52" | Daño Físico | but I can't say it often matters as much as it might. |
| 65 | Annacrusa | "Ver la belleza caer" | La Espina | It may be gloomily tempting to imagine that your love is never instrumental. |
| 66 | Marta Movidas | "Por el humo se sabe dónde está el fuego" | Yunque 4 | Don't all of these bands have fans other than me? |
| 67 | Pan | "Luminiscencia" | single | Music, we might be far from the first to argue, |
| 68 | Cora Yako | "Souvenirs" | Souvenirs +2 | exists most properly between friends in a room, |
| 69 | Lanterns on the Lake | "The Likes Of Us" | single | or at least between unvirtual bodies who could potentially be friends before the music finishes. |
| 70 | Momma | "Bang Bang" | single | Doesn't streaming dehumanize this, isolating each of us to be preyed upon by cynical algorithms and adamantine hyenas? |
| 71 | girlhouse | "worth it" | single | Doesn't sunlight exist, we might as well ask, to tempt us with the cursed skin of strangers? |
| 72 | boygenius | "Not Strong Enough" | the record 4 | The penurious definitional restriction of joy |
| 73 | CHROMA | "Don't Mind Me" | single | produces an abundant economy of fear. |
| 74 | Sinta | "Tabi" | single | We do not create communities through ruthless elimination of otherness, |
| 75 | Yves Tumor | "Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood" | single | or the recursive iteration of barricades within barricades, |
| 76 | JACKIE EXTREME | "THE MINES" | ONYX | any more than we build cities by drilling industriously away from the air. |
| 77 | Skofee | "Mad At You" | Joyland 6 | Home is not a place to never leave, |
| 78 | Demi Lovato | "Still Alive - From the Original Motion Picture Scream VI" | single | it is a way you react to whatever you find |
| 79 | Mimi Webb | "Freezing" | Amelia | when you go everywhere else. |
| 80 | Safree | "White Lotus (Arte II)" | single | We learn everything a tiny shard of dubious comprehension at a time: |
| 81 | Edurne | "Fresas & Champán" | single | languages, paths, excuses, |
| 82 | Efecto Mariposa | "Laberinto de Cristal" | single | the thinnest membranes between history and gossip, |
| 83 | Juli | "Gehen oder bleiben" | Gehen oder bleiben +2 | between exuberant freedom and glib disregard. |
| 84 | Wild Fire | "Just Friends" | single | We deny love with love, as if we have only one force, |
| 85 | Jennifer Zamudio | "Kom Terug" | single | but a thousand garish outfits |
| 86 | Priscilla Block | "Couple Spring Breaks Back" | single | and a plan for an empire in which everybody dresses like this. |
| 87 | Travis Denning | "Strawberry Wine And A Cheap Six Pack" | single | Love is perfect, but not precious. |
| 88 | Alana Springsteen | "shoulder to cry on" | shoulder to cry on +1 | Home is a name for the spaces in which you have forgotten how to lose yourself, |
| 89 | Loreen | "Tattoo" | single | as if you could breathe all the air until there is nothing. |
| 90 | Henna Uoti | "Parantajat" | single | I'm in love with sour Finnish candy B brought back from the North Pole |
| 91 | Linney | "With You (with Morgin Madison)" | Desert Dream 6 | and sugary LA pop EDM I got from nobody |
| 92 | Monika | "I'm Nothing Without You" | single | and Greek drama that ought to be their Eurovision entry. |
| 93 | Medusa | "Anlarsın" | single | You can't look Medusa in the "ı"s |
| 94 | Aishe | "Bıraktım Geride" | single | but it's never too late to walk away: |
| 95 | Moyann | "Feelings" | Feelings +1 | somewhere warm |
| 96 | Derivakat | "Nightmare" | single | or sharp-edged, |
| 97 | D Double E | "Mobb Mentality" | single | close streets |
| 98 | Steg G | "Demons" | single | or big countries, |
| 99 | Nwaiiza | "I Want The Night" | single | dark or alight. |
| 100 | Makhadzi | "Tsini Tsini" | single | You spend years learning tiny amounts of everything, even if you try not to, |
| 101 | Emanuele Esposito | "Amazwe" | single | until every song you've never heard reminds you of something you knew in high school: |
| 102 | Ithole leNdidane | "Ubaba ka Uyah" | single | Zoolook or Scatterlings |
| 103 | Bruce Cockburn | "Us All" | single | or Stealing Fire. |
| 104 | Robin Lane | "Dirt Road to Heaven" | Dirt Road to Heaven | Everything sounds a little like welcome home |
| 105 | Trench Dogs | "Skulldug and Headsick" | Stockholmiana | for a reason. |
| 106 | Skids | "Destination Düsseldorf" | single | The bands your dead heroes used to be in make new albums. |
| 107 | Savage Cut | "They Didnae Tell Me That" | single | Somebody builds a bridge where there used to be faeries. |
| 108 | The Alarm | "Forwards" | single | The guy that took the place of your dead hero goes back to his own band. |
| 109 | Hoshiko Yamane | "A Daily Unreality" | Reflections | Hyperborea |
| 110 | Simon McCorry | "Storm" | single | or why you quit the cello once you got a record-player |
| 111 | Violet Cold | "Neold" | single | and headphones. |
| 112 | Puppet | "Ignorant Fool" | single | Music isn't a sacred grove where we gather in coarse robes on a single night a year. |
| 113 | FalKKonE | "Sorairo Days (From "Gurren Lagann")" | Sorairo Days (From "Gurren Lagann") +2 | We create communities by effusive citizenship in the moving states of constant renewal. |
| 114 | Our Last Night | "golden hour" | single | We buy concert tickets for our children, and drive them to the lights, |
| 115 | UMC | "Flowers" | Flowers +1 | and then drive home blasting covers we know would infuriate them. |
| 116 | Rain Paris | "Dark Horse" | single | You should know what you're falling for. Are you ready for, ready for, |
| 117 | Nicoletta Rosellini | "Over the Hills and Far Away" | single | because you are in love, everything? |