| 1 | Thy Catafalque | "Alföld" | Alföld | We are emotionally infinite, but logistically constrained. |
| 2 | Blut Aus Nord | "The Endless Multitude" | single | This is true both individually and collectively, |
| 3 | Nocte Obducta | "Balder" | single | and although this is only one of the reasons why infinite personalized AI music is pointless, |
| 4 | Boris | "The Look is a Flame" | Bright New Disease | it's enough. |
| 5 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "I See You…but Never Clearly" | single | We already have more music than we have time, as listeners, |
| 6 | Rise to the Sky | "I Knew That Joy Would Die" | Two Years of Grief | and more musicians than our current reward-systems can meaningfully reward. |
| 7 | So Hideous | "Bright Black Beach" | single | I believe in the distribution of power, and distributing global music-listening minutes equally across all available global music seems like the logical ideal of that principle, |
| 8 | Soulless | "The Supreme Resurgence" | The Supreme Resurgence | but that's neither the only imperative nor the only form of power. |
| 9 | Arkona | "Razryvaya plot' ot bezyskhodnosti bytiya" | Kob' | Dissipation is not the same as distribution; |
| 10 | Aprilmist | "Homesick" | single | there are no entropic utopias. |
| 11 | Ethicist | "Monochrome" | Ethicist 4 | I'm reminded of this by something almost every day, |
| 12 | AVKRVST | "Isolation" | The Approbation | but today by the laborious cross-checking of the outputs of different similar-song systems at work. |
| 13 | Rivers of Nihil | "The Sub-Orbital Blues" | single | The new Thy Catafalque album just came out this week, |
| 14 | Black Void Cult | "Even the Stars Have to Die" | single | and as Hungarian experimental post-black metal bands go, Thy Catafalque are fairly well-known, |
| 15 | Horrendous | "Cult of Shaad'oah" | Cult of Shaad'oah +1 | so some people have already listened to it. |
| 16 | Thy Catafalque | "A felkelo hold országa" | Alföld | "Néma vermek", the last track on the album but the first advance track, released back in March, has been played 60k+ times. |
| 17 | Nocte Obducta | "Karwoche" | single | "A csend hegyei" and "Testen túl", the second and third singles, have each been played 40k+ times. |
| 18 | Boris | "Narcotic Shadow" | Bright New Disease | I heard those when they came out, so I've been playing "Alföld", contributing a few plays to its 10k+. |
| 19 | Spirit Adrift | "Barn Burner" | single | We are a small but enthusiastic audience, us attentive Thy Catafalque fans, |
| 20 | OneFromTheNorth | "Church Burner" | Regime, Salvation & the Pyre | having learned over time that the project rewards patience and its songs reward immersion. |
| 21 | Sarayasign | "Everdying Night" | single | There's no other band exactly like this one. |
| 22 | Degreed | "This Is Love" | single | There are, however, a lot of bands that are not entirely unlike Thy Catafalque. |
| 23 | Midnite City | "Hardest Heart To Break" | single | In the streaming era, one unfancy but effective method for finding them is to just see what else people who play Thy Catafalque play. |
| 24 | Kent Hilli | "Nothing Left To Lose" | single | In fact, we can even aggregate the tastes of the people who have listened to "Alföld", specifically, |
| 25 | Vega | "Love To Hate You" | single | to find out what else they – we – collectively know. Here's a playlist of that. |
| 26 | Tommi Läntinen | "Tie on vapaa" | single | It's pretty good. My listening is part of it, so I'm not an unbiased evaluator, |
| 27 | The Trews | "Peace Jam" | single | but the "bias" we're talking about here is taste, is love. |
| 28 | Sammary | "Trance" | single | That's what we're trying to amplify with sharing, or advocacy, or math. |
| 29 | Zorya | "Rise" | Mystic Lament | The current data-math I'm using for song-level Fans Also Like has significance thresholds, |
| 30 | Conquer Divide | "the INVISIBLE" | the INVISIBLE +3 | and as a result only finds 34 other songs to go with "Alföld", at least when constrained to just one per artist. |
| 31 | Project Renegade | "Token" | single | "Only" here means 3.5 hours of creepy nerd-wraith music, which is plenty for me since I also have many hours of Greek electro-metal |
| 32 | PRO FORMA | "Tanikala" | single | and Filipino post-hardcore to obsess over, |
| 33 | SheeSawHarm | "equinoctial" | Karm even Falls 4 | but if you need more, and part of the problem with putting tech companies in charge of culture is that they always want you to want more, |
| 34 | Saedín | "Despierta" | single | there are at least two potential methods, and this is how I came to spend hours of my week plugging various starting songs into both of them in an attempt to understand their effective natures. |
| 35 | The Spectre Beneath | "Time Dilation" | single | The boring way, technically speaking, is to simply switch the level of abstraction from song to artist. |
| 36 | Carmilla | "Demon" | single | We are not just "Alföld" fans. We're listening to "Alföld", and we only know to listen to "Alföld" in the first place, |
| 37 | Edge Of Paradise | "Basilisk" | single | because we are Thy Catafalque fans, and the collective tastes of the Thy Catafalque fans who haven't played the new album yet, |
| 38 | Release Hallucination | "Sisters" | single | only a few days after its release, are still relevant. |
| 39 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "愛言葉Ⅳ" | Inside out 6 | I may have become a slightly more devoted Thy Catafalque fan from a little more listening, |
| 40 | sui sui | "Radio Wave Jack" | single | but I don't think I've become a different kind of fan, |
| 41 | LiSA | "REALiZE" | single | and thus shouldn't expect that the other Thy Catafalque fans need to be transformed by the new songs |
| 42 | mercuro | "SEISYOUNENIKUSEIIINKAI" | single | in order to qualify to contribute to our new collective wisdom. |
| 43 | Kannagi-TokiUsagi- | "Resonance" | single | With an artist-sized listening audience to work with, the same basic data and math that found us 3.5 hours of "Alföld"-like music |
| 44 | haju:harmonics | "神様へ" | Ember | easily finds 25.5 hours of music that fans of Thy Catafalque also like, |
| 45 | snooty | "calendula" | AIJITSU 6 | even with the same egalitarian rule about including only one song per artist. |
| 46 | the pullovers | "飽きている" | single | I don't have time to listen to this, because I also have hours of jangly Japanese indie pop |
| 47 | The Candace | "Riverside" | The Candace 2 5 | and choppy alt-idol rock to adore, |
| 48 | Kaneyorimasaru | "Watashitachi no Journey" | single | but also, although my vote in this collective doesn't count any more than anybody else's, |
| 49 | Mrs. GREEN APPLE | "Magic" | single | and my love for atmospheric black metal isn't necessarily greater than my love for ebullient, kaledoscopic J-pop, |
| 50 | RUINFEAR | "RUIN ARK" | single | it's longer-running and more deeply informed. I may have only just heard of RUINFEAR and Petit Brabancon and Leopardeath, |
| 51 | HYDE | "TAKING THEM DOWN" | single | but that 25.5-hour metal playlist is nearly full of bands I already know and also love, |
| 52 | Petit Brabancon | "Kodou" | Automata 6 | many of which I have put on these playlists, including three of them this week. |
| 53 | FEST VAINQUEUR | "TUKINOKAKERA" | KALEIDOSCOPE 6 | I have spent much more than 25.5 hours listening to that music already, |
| 54 | Leopardeath | "Start Screaming Again" | Start Screaming Again +2 | which is exactly why the method works. |
| 55 | PAIL OUT | "Maybe baby" | single | But there are other ways, and they don't all rely on humans doing listening-labor in order to amass collective knowledge. |
| 56 | Four Get Me A Nots | "One step forward" | single | One interesting way, technically, involves vector embeddings learned from playlist co-reference, |
| 57 | kanon | "Flowing" | single | augmented by acoustic vector embeddings for songs that aren't on enough playlists. |
| 58 | Pol 3.14 | "Guardar como" | single | This is also math, but the kind of math that is easier to gesture about than to write down. |
| 59 | Samantha Palos | "Nada X Ti" | single | Vector embeddings allow cultural questions to be recast as technical questions, |
| 60 | Joder Juan | "Tú y Yo y Todos Los Demás" | single | although a small universe of teleological ambiguity is compressed into the center of the "o" in the word "allow" in that phrase. |
| 61 | Samuraï | "Cuerpo A Tierra" | Artillería 6 | The acoustic part is especially tantalizing, since in principle it can materialize relationships between songs |
| 62 | Dagny | "Same Again (For Love)" | single | based on their inherent characteristics, without requiring human listeners, |
| 63 | Ida-Lova | "Tunnelbanan (Vi tar det en annan dag)" | single | and thus can recommend you songs that basically nobody else knows yet, |
| 64 | Des Rocs | "Nowhere Kid" | Nowhere Kid +1 | but which probably, supposedly, theoretically sound like the songs you already love. |
| 65 | THICK | "Doomer" | single | And like most purely technical methods, this one can also basically find any amount of music you ask it for, of which here's 23 more hours. |
| 66 | swim school | "BORED" | single | I don't have time to listen to all of that, either, |
| 67 | The Churchhill Garden | "Keep The Faith" | single | and I recognize a lot fewer of the bands, although three of them are also on this New Particles playlist and a couple more were on last week's. |
| 68 | Molly Ringworm | "Down/Out" | single | You will also recognize fewer of those bands, which I can say with confidence without knowing you, because almost nobody knows most of them. |
| 69 | The Dollyrots | "Missing You (I Can't Wait)" | single | There's a band on this sounds-like list who have three (3) monthly listeners, |
| 70 | Fefe Dobson | "HUNGOVER" | single | and my threshold for conclusive obscurity is however many monthly listeners I have myself, which is currently 14. |
| 71 | BAMBII | "WICKED GYAL" | single | But either of us can scan through the list, at least, and I've done so, |
| 72 | The XCERTS | "Blame" | Blame +3 | and it's mostly not wrong. It's music that is like "Alföld". |
| 73 | Spanish Love Songs | "Clean-Up Crew" | Clean-Up Crew +1 | It's mostly not as interesting, or ambitious, or Hungarian, |
| 74 | Origami Angel | "The Brightest Days" | The Brightest Days | but it's almost all black metal of some sort. |
| 75 | 408 | "againagainagain" | againagainagain +2 | Some of those bands with dozens of fans deserve to have hundreds, and if you're the ten thousandth Thy Catafalque fan, you might also be the hundredth fan of Signs of the Dying Summer, or Mortis Mutilati. |
| 76 | Cimonti | "Empty Handed" | single | If you put the Fans Also Like list and the Sounds Like list next to each other, though, |
| 77 | Krayola | "Sandata" | single | and sometimes I think my main function at my job is putting lists next to each other, |
| 78 | Varjola | "Ääriviivat" | single | you can quickly discover that most of the music on the Fans Also Like is also acoustically similar, |
| 79 | Empire Group | "Seven Colours (Happzah)" | Seven Colours | but much of the acoustic list has less cultural validation. |
| 80 | Aso Tandwa | "Uqobo Lwakho" | Uqobo Lwakho +1 | The acoustic method finds some answers. It has the whole of the world's music to choose from, so it can find a lot of answers, |
| 81 | Echo Deep | "Shining" | Music Is Music Part 3 | and given this is astonishingly good at picking grim black metal instead of springy afro soul |
| 82 | Ampee S.A | "Yena Oreng" | single | or zap-bass Bolobedu house grooves. |
| 83 | Playco RSA | "Matome" | single | But it is conversely bad at distinguishing between roughly similar songs. |
| 84 | Bad Company (SA) | "Ke tshweri bosso yaka" | Ke tshweri bosso yaka | The ones at the top of the list are scored as if they are more similar to "Alföld" than the ones further down, but I don't find this to be subjectively true and I don't think you will, either. |
| 85 | Maredi Maredi | "DIKGOMO" | Hlompho | Analysis distills many numbers into a few numbers, but that's not what we do with our hearts. We fixate on different songs for different reasons: because it comes from somewhere unknown, and we want to follow it to whatever it is people do for which this is the music; |
| 86 | Amabunjwa | "Ivosho" | I Uber | or because we hear something from far away that makes us feel like we may have been there all along. |
| 87 | Maqhikiza | "Silver Bullet" | single | Our distances and movements are not abstract coordinates in a borderless and uniform space, |
| 88 | Isitha sama ex | "WAYEZITHANDELA UTSHWALA" | single | they are negotiations with conscience and potential. |
| 89 | MudeMude | "Uwe owavuma" | Uwe owavuma | The discontinuities in attention-space are not topological flaws to be eliminated, |
| 90 | Mnyovu Uyatinyela | "Ngehlula i-Earthquake" | single | but points of congregation and connection. |
| 91 | Mbongeni Ngema | "Thina Bant'a Bamnyama" | Thina Bant'a Bamnyama +3 | We come to a new Thy Catafalque album not just because it collects many moments that sound a way we like moments to sound, |
| 92 | Inkabi Zezwe | "Sayona" | single | but because it continues a complex history of which our presence is part. |
| 93 | Qadasi | "Mtsheleni" | Asibonge | We look at Qadasi and Maqhinga and think about Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu. There are lots of answers that aren't wrong, but the best answers are often best for important reasons. |
| 94 | Balmorhea | "Oscuros" | Pendant World | We ask questions for which we already know some answers, because if the new answers are better, we learn something, |
| 95 | Sigur Rós | "Klettur" | ÁTTA | and if the new answers are worse, we teach. |
| 96 | Snorri Hallgrímsson | "Behind the Sun" | I Am Weary, Don't Let Me Rest | The alternative is a series of roughly interchangeable moments, unimprovable; |
| 97 | Library Tapes | "Through Glass" | single | an endless hum of bands with fewer and fewer listeners until it's only us. |
| 98 | Eolya | "Reiði" | single | The human argument against infinite generatively-personalized AI music is also an argument against infinite contextless personalization of the music that already exists. |
| 99 | Nubian Rose | "Gonna Get Close To You" | single | You might like it, but that's not enough. We're not trying to fill our short time until it runs out, we're trying to organize it into lives, into stories. |
| 100 | Dolly Parton | "Bygones (feat. Rob Halford)" | single | A gift of magic is a challenge to earn the next one. |
| 101 | Dolly Parton | "Magic Man (Carl Version)(feat. Ann Wilson)" | single | These systems we make to tell you what you should listen to next are provocations, both at best and at worst. |
| 102 | Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith | "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" | I Wanna Dance With Somebody +1 | A comfortable, suffocating warmth always awaits. |
| 103 | Bastille | "No Angels" | single | We defy it. It's not enough. |
| 104 | Elisapie | "Uummati Attanarsimat (Heart of Glass)" | single | Our hearts are glass, our dreams are glass. We align their curvatures and look for new things to love. |