| 1 | MAN WITH A MISSION | "絆ノ奇跡" | single | There's always some reason to feel unhappy, and this isn't it. |
| 2 | mzsrz | "リリー・ホールガール" | リリー・ホールガール +1 | It's a TV-show theme song, but this is the version that gets to the 1:30 point and says |
| 3 | chilldspot | "Girl in the Mirror" | single | the story we're singing has its own sky to fly in, |
| 4 | 堀内まり菜 | "Just a little bit" | single | and we'll see you just over some other horizon. |
| 5 | あたらよ | "届く、未来へ" | single | But on the way there these other songs all drop out of the clouds into our formation, |
| 6 | Luby Sparks | "A Thousand Miles" | single | and the world speeds up below us, |
| 7 | MindaRyn | "SURVIVE" | single | and we never do land to watch whatever this was supposed to ground. |
| 8 | yama | "slash" | single | I'm most helplessly susceptible to music, but it's useless for selling me anything |
| 9 | PassCode | "MYTH" | single | other than more music, because I can't pay attention to motives over joy if there's joy, |
| 10 | Aimi | "MAGICAL DESTROYER" | single | and won't be sold anything by association with grief if there's grief, |
| 11 | BOY MEETS HARU | "unfinished anthem" | single | and by the time the pitch is finished I'm long gone in ecstatic delirium. |
| 12 | Payrin's | "sonzaisyoumei" | sonzaisyoumei / tototo, kamatoto 2 | I can do things while songs are playing, |
| 13 | suga/es | "Seven Stars" | single | run or dance or read or yell at soccer players or assemble jigsaw puzzles |
| 14 | 渕上 舞 | "終焉のDestiny" | single | or disassemble moral ones or try to cajole data into revealing more music |
| 15 | nakishirabe | "YOTAKA" | single | that was hidden from me a second ago, |
| 16 | Muhammad Zaky Zulfiqor | "Goddess" | single | but I can't watch their videos. |
| 17 | Pulse Factory | "I Love You" | single | I'm sorry, you're beautiful and you paid for magical lighting, |
| 18 | Kakashi | "rareru" | yameroyo/rareru 2 | and if you shut up I might watch you walk while I'm falling in love with other songs, |
| 19 | BUCK-TICK | "Ai no Harem" | IZORA | but only if I gather them according to my own unrelated visual kei. |
| 20 | ZERO[Hz] | "AXIZ" | ZERO | This is what the earnest laments over the lost richness of LP packaging nostalgically elide: |
| 21 | Ling tosite sigure | "Super Sonic Aurorally" | last aurorally | I would read Geddy Lee's pedal list, |
| 22 | SHERBETS | "知らない道" | single | and ponder the gatefold texture of Fiona's hair, |
| 23 | Awkmiu | "avalanche" | single | but not for 40 minutes. |
| 24 | nolala | "恋、はじめ、誓約書" | 明日が最後でもいいと思えるように / 恋、はじめ、誓約書 / ピアス 3 | Not even for 4 minutes, although 40 years later I still remember how I imagined both of those smelled. |
| 25 | FINLANDS | "ナイター" | single | I spend hours every week peering at the screens and controls of my music-seeking machines, |
| 26 | 35.7 | "ふたり" | single | but 0:08 loops are a UI dysfunction to be immediately disabled, |
| 27 | Laura day romance | "Kakitai" | Sweet.ep 3 | and don't help me hear any more than being yelled at increases my distance vision. |
| 28 | RAINASH | "Into the Sleep" | Truth 5 | What do RAINASH look like as they stand, obliquely, two meters to the left of the natural center of every song? |
| 29 | Null Positiv | "Töte was du liebst" | single | Beautiful, probably. If I stipulate "beautiful", can I go? There are songs. |
| 30 | Moran Magal | "Take Me Down" | Time Prisoner | I've made it one of my projects to keep aspirationally exhaustive track of solo and/or eponymous projects by female metal singers, |
| 31 | The Dark Side of the Moon | "Legends Never Die" | Legends Never Die 5 | and Moran Magal's example is instructive: the artwork for Time Prisoner has blurry clock-hands |
| 32 | Beyond God | "Coronation" | single | and blurrier human hands, and font-choices that tell me exactly and instantly what they want me to expect from the music. |
| 33 | Attractive Chaos | "The Storm" | The Fire Between Us | Their band photo, conversely, invites me first to ponder which of the two women is the one the band is named after and which is the one who has to explain that she isn't, |
| 34 | ALYXX | "Alive" | single | and second to wonder if I've seen the guy in the back complaining about bike-lanes at a city council hearing before. |
| 35 | Sepsiss | "Bleedlines" | single | I do like meeting and talking to other human beings, |
| 36 | Oryad | "Eve" | single | but it's not the pandemic's fault that I haven't had 32038 conversations with 13045 strangers in the last 8 years. |
| 37 | Smoulder | "Dragonslayer's Doom" | Violent Creed of Vengeance | Art is not a proxy for human relationships, |
| 38 | Rage Of Light | "Upriser" | single | which is why making it more immersive is not inherently a goal. |
| 39 | Hail Sagan | "Hyperphantastic" | Disclosure 6 | I spent 6 hours of my life watching 2 Avatar movies in I guess a total of 6D, |
| 40 | Evermore | "Queen of Woe" | single | and Cameron spent $700 million making them, |
| 41 | MagiTech | "The Last Battle" | The Last Battle +1 | and in terms of contributions to humanity, I rate that whole project a distant second to the act of naming a metal band "Hail Sagan" |
| 42 | Tete Novoa | "Seremos Tú y Yo" | single | if somehow only those two things have been properly nominated. |
| 43 | Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall | "You Can't Hurt Me Anymore" | Hunt the Flame | Both movies have elaborate battle scenes that tell you less about adrenaline and moral conflict |
| 44 | Kvelertak | "Krøterveg Te Helvete - Single Version" | single | than the dry, clattering kick-drum gallops in "The Last Battle", |
| 45 | Atreyu | "God/Devil" | The Hope Of A Spark 4 | and although I learned something about myself from sitting through the second film, |
| 46 | Yakuza | "Psychic Malaise" | single | it wasn't anything good. If Cameron had exceeded my specific expectations for The Way of Water as minor-triumphantly as Atreyu did my general expectations of metalcore, |
| 47 | Overkill | "Scorched" | Scorched | it would probably have been the greatest movie of all time. |
| 48 | Axeheart | "Sword of the Gods" | Sword Of The Gods | The thing about the sword of the gods is that there are no gods, |
| 49 | Metopia | "Zu den Sternen" | single | and if there were gods, they wouldn't need swords, |
| 50 | Vintersea | "Unveiling Light" | single | so rendering the sword in uncanny simulation is a point-displacing literalism, |
| 51 | Forest of Ember Skies | "Compass" | single | whereas saying "sword of the gods" invokes centuries of theocratic authoritarianism |
| 52 | Wounds of Recollection | "Nearest Place to Hide" | single | and all its attendant human resistance. |
| 53 | Óreiða | "The River" | single | The Way of Water is like the Muzak version of Moana, |
| 54 | Heretoir | "Wastelands" | Wastelands +1 | or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover as reenacted by corporate catering, |
| 55 | Raat | "Nocturne" | Nocturne +2 | or ChatGPT writing you a letter from a completely living relative as if they are already dead. |
| 56 | Usnea | "To the Deathless" | To the Deathless +2 | I'll trade you all of those for the ebulliently grim joke of naming a bleak post-metal band Raat while there are Ratt fans still alive. |
| 57 | Mesmur | "Refraction" | Chthonic | The Avatar movies are too long, and yet both exhausting and unsatisfyingly shallow, |
| 58 | Lustre | "Reverence" | single | while this Lustre song is too long but lovely and you can hit ⏩️ when it has been lovely enough. |
| 59 | Arkona | "Kob'" | single | The gods understood that our lives are short, |
| 60 | Danheim | "Langskib" | single | and thus their divine interventions must be punctual and efficient. |
| 61 | An Danzza | "Seiðr (The Prophecy)" | single | This is why the swords in the prophecies are either brightly polished or dripping blood, |
| 62 | Phindile Buthelezi | "usathane othandweni" | Mamezala's day 3 | but either way, beating them into better tools also yields scraps and alloys and resonances |
| 63 | Son of Africa | "Ntandokazi Madaka (Ndiceli camagu)" | single | we can use for our own purposes. |
| 64 | Natasha K | "Uzube Nami" | single | There are a hundred new reasons to feel happy every week, whatever the gods neglect. |
| 65 | Skhalo | "Re gola ka mohlako" | single | Put on something bright and long, and surround yourself with friends |
| 66 | Ezrah | "Lerato laka" | Lerato laka +1 | or deer. |
| 67 | Shenseea | "Curious" | single | We're getting married, or we're already married, |
| 68 | Spice | "Queen of the Dancehall" | single | or we just got married and somebody gave us matching pairs of diamond socks. |
| 69 | KraiGGi BaDArT | "Championship" | single | With the money Cameron spent on Avatars, |
| 70 | Kuve | "Cari Cari" | Cari Cari +2 | he could have paid to finish La Sagrada Familia; |
| 71 | Miss Caffeina | "Y De Repente" | Shanghái Baby 5 | but the girl in the mirror reminds us that we spent a lot more money watching them than anybody did making them. |
| 72 | Ultraligera | "Amor Amor" | single | Love what you love. |
| 73 | Sinaia | "Muros" | single | The monumental and the minuscule are both |
| 74 | Elefantes | "Luciérnagas y mariposas" | single | qualities of light. |
| 75 | Einar Solberg | "Over the Top" | Over the Top +2 | There's always some reason to fear the inevitable self-corruption of complexity, and Einar Solberg's itinerant falsetto is not one of them. |
| 76 | Karmanjakah | "Flying" | single | Sometimes you follow a song from a judicious distance, to find out where it's going to go, |
| 77 | Shaft of Steel | "Back to Me" | single | and sometimes you already know that it's going to your high-school reunion in a shiny stupid car. |
| 78 | LeBrock | "Gone" | Gone 5 | It's a TV-show life, but you moved away, |
| 79 | Idyl | "Acımam" | single | and all the things you loved 40 years ago are either long gone, |
| 80 | Hazel | "LOTUS" | single | or full of old people you don't recognize. |
| 81 | PUTOCHINOMARICÓN | "síndrómé dél ímpóstór / nó mérécé lá péná / párá nó dár péná" | Auphmoy 3 | But you walk in, and the room rotates into a dimension that wasn't even here before, |
| 82 | aldn | "pressure (with chloe moriondo)" | single | and you get to decide what those years have been worth. |
| 83 | familypet | "know how it felt" | coward 6 | We travel in time, slowly, but we get there eventually. |
| 84 | Ekoh | "Fucked Up" | single | We didn't used to be able to summon these worlds by tiny gestures, |
| 85 | KID BRUNSWICK | "Heaven Without You" | Heaven Without You +1 | but we fought over what we had. |
| 86 | Father Koi | "Just to see you" | everything is a dream, but it is your dream | The disregarded gods banged their swords, and then polished them. |
| 87 | Brevin Kim | "I'll Be Damned" | High School Football | Neither of these worked. |
| 88 | Ben Folds | "Exhausting Lover" | Exhausting Lover +1 | Sometimes you show up with the money to finish the church |
| 89 | Origami Angel | "Thank You, New Jersey" | single | and they say that's nice for you, but you're the 2,407th richest person |
| 90 | Spanish Love Songs | "Portions for Foxes" | Portions for Foxes +2 | and this is the largest unfinished church in the world. |
| 91 | Samia | "Maps" | Maps / Country 2 | There's always some problem that your money can't solve |
| 92 | Pinkshift | "to me" | single | because you tried to confuse it with love |
| 93 | Speedy Ortiz | "Scabs" | single | or measured it with the wrong currency. |
| 94 | The Linda Lindas | "Too Many Things" | single | We have the beat, |
| 95 | Iress | "Blush" | single | and all the embarrassing things we've done when we thought we had the beat. |
| 96 | Sarah Kinsley | "Oh No Darling!" | single | The rooms were already rotating when you walked into them. |
| 97 | Emm Gryner | "Don't Give In" | Business & Pleasure | The people you saw play in somebody's living room travel through time at the same speed, |
| 98 | Amanda Fagan | "Down By The Ocean" | single | but through space along different tangled paths. |
| 99 | Miss Fortune | "Too Cool To Be Cordial" | single | All the songs are wrong for something, |
| 100 | Petite Noir | "777" | MotherFather | leaving you all the ways to pick elsewise. |
| 101 | Texture | "Non Zero" | single | The world ends in fire, |
| 102 | Harry Shotta | "Anything" | Anything +1 | or doesn't in any other way. |
| 103 | Kai Whiston | "Trailer" | Quiet As Kept, F.O.G. | I want silent movies and unaccompanied songs |
| 104 | The Dark Tenor | "No Sleep (Nessun Dorma)" | single | and a crumbling world constantly and ineptly rebuilt |
| 105 | Anoice | "civil war" | unerasable fire 5 | but never finished. |
| 106 | Chantal Michelle | "Breathing Water" | Broken to Echoes | It doesn't seem to stop us when we don't have the beat, either. |
| 107 | Maddrigal | "Restless" | restless 4 | Nothing does. |
| 108 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "Exostat I" | Aieganzes Aigonzis : Angels of God | Our artifices will not replace us, they will replace our gods, |
| 109 | Mimir's Well | "Return To Spiritual Order + 852Hz" | single | and like every other cosmology, this one will end with a battle |
| 110 | Ghost | "Jesus He Knows Me" | single | in which we have no side. |
| 111 | PRIZM | "Everywhere" | single | Come watch with me, we can see it all from here. |
| 112 | Wind Walkers | "Eyes Closed" | single | If we want. |