| 2023-11-24 | 13 | Metalite | "Aurora" | Aurora 6 | Or it sweeps us up and says you were never a leper |
| 2023-11-24 | 14 | Alterium | "Siren's Call" | Siren's Call +2 | and the dreamworlds where we are heroes are the real ones |
| 2023-11-24 | 15 | Nova Prospect | "Végtelennek tűnt" | single | and the difference between nostalgic joy and the regular kind |
| 2023-11-24 | 16 | Wij | "Lucyferyna" | single | is the willingness to believe |
| 2023-11-24 | 20 | Northlane | "Dante" | single | amidst private hells |
| 2023-11-24 | 25 | Maladie | "And I Die Alone" | For We Are the Plague | not the guardrail metrics of expiry. |
| 2023-11-24 | 26 | RüYYn | "The Flames, the Fallen, the Fury part II" | single | It sounds like fires are portals |
| 2023-11-24 | 27 | Fawn Limbs | "Black Body Radiation Curve" | Vestigial Spectra | from complacency into the gloriously indeterminate. |
| 2023-11-24 | 28 | Vredehammer | "The Joker" | single | We cast our rituals against the sun, |
| 2023-11-24 | 29 | Farsot | "Nausea" | single | against the cloying pompatus of anything, |
| 2023-11-24 | 30 | Necrowretch | "Numidian Knowledge" | single | against the disingenuous idea that the dead are lost to us. |
| 2023-11-24 | 31 | Valdrin | "Neverafter" | Throne of the Lunar Soul | The song says these are the last six and half minutes of the world, |
| 2023-11-17 | 1 | Madder Mortem | "Towers" | single | An American band might hesitate, even in 2023, to cast the bringing down of towers as heroic, |
| 2023-11-17 | 2 | Hellgroove | "Horizon On Hold" | single | but Madder Mortem are Norwegian, and anyway, if we had to retire every metaphor |
| 2023-11-17 | 3 | Amaranthe | "Outer Dimensions" | Outer Dimensions +2 | that ever had a tragic real-world referent |
| 2023-11-17 | 4 | Everdawn | "Century Black" | single | we would be wordless, and no safer or happier. |
| 2023-11-17 | 5 | Beyond God | "A Siren's Cry" | single | Pain cannot be allowed to merely accumulate, |
| 2023-11-17 | 6 | Phoenix Lake | "Fractured Wings" | single | even when it cannot be forgotten. |
| 2023-11-17 | 7 | Kobra Paige | "Under One Sun" | single | The total amount of pain is not reduced by the allocation of blame |
| 2023-11-17 | 8 | Septarian | "Gravity" | single | or the application of vengeance, |
| 2023-11-17 | 9 | Therion | "Ayahuasca" | Ayahuasca +2 | and the first transformative step of becoming human is learning to consider perspectives beyond your own. |
| 2023-11-17 | 10 | Veil of Mist | "Indelible" | Another End Is Possible | Of course this is the implicit challenge of every new song, |
| 2023-11-17 | 11 | CELESTE | "Plisse les yeux jusqu'au sang" | Epilogue(s) 3 | and every new day, |
| 2023-11-17 | 12 | Hiraes | "Through The Storm" | single | whether they noisily embrace or confront the past or not. |
| 2023-11-17 | 13 | Ihsahn | "PILGRIMAGE TO OBLIVION" | PILGRIMAGE TO OBLIVION +1 | How do we continue our own purposeful actions |
| 2023-11-17 | 14 | Helfró | "Traðkandi Blómin í Eigin Hjartagarði" | Traðkandi Blómin í Eigin Hjartagarði +2 | when the casualties of purpose surround us? |
| 2023-11-17 | 15 | King | "Mountains Of Ice" | Fury and Death | How do we understand the derivation of vividly apparent evil from mundane humanity |
| 2023-11-17 | 16 | Malist | "Ode to the Night" | single | without lapsing into a self-defeating taxonomy of otherness? |
| 2023-11-17 | 17 | DGM | "The Calling" | Life | We are, individually, capable of assigning internal rationalization to stark insanities: |
| 2023-11-17 | 18 | Myrath | "Child of Prophecy" | Child of Prophecy +2 | shooting people at a music festival in the name of freedom, |
| 2023-11-17 | 19 | Astral Experience | "Volver a Empezar" | Espiral, Pt.2 4 | dropping bombs on children in hospitals in the name of safety, |
| 2023-11-17 | 20 | Eternal Storm | "A Dim Illusion" | single | constructing obdurately dehumanizing processes in the name of equity. |
| 2023-11-17 | 21 | Draconicon | "Slumber Paralysis" | Pestilence | But we are also, collectively, capable not just of slow comprehension, |
| 2023-11-17 | 22 | Master | "Walk in the Footsteps of Doom" | single | but of evolution. |
| 2023-11-17 | 23 | Eldritch | "Handful Of Sand" | Innervoid | We often only think we mean, when we say "change our minds", that we choose a different answer |
| 2023-11-17 | 24 | Abäk | "Balam" | single | from among a set that already exists, |
| 2023-11-17 | 25 | Crecended | "Victory" | Wasting Away | but this is circular: every new belief exists once it is believed, |
| 2023-11-17 | 26 | Fifth Dawn | "The Day Brings" | The Day Brings +3 | but maybe only just in time. |
| 2023-11-17 | 27 | Skarlett Riot | "Hold Tight" | single | We change our minds by accepting incompletion as a premise, |
| 2023-11-17 | 28 | Dogma | "Pleasure From Pain" | Dogma | by thinking of the things we already know as pieces of a new structure we don't, |
| 2023-11-17 | 75 | Pollen | "Hive Mind" | Uncanny Valley | This is the same emotional truth when you reach out a hand to a single other human you think you know, |
| 2023-11-17 | 76 | Olumbe Falú | "The Albatross" | single | or an unseen multitude you can barely integrate as individuals. |
| 2023-11-17 | 77 | The Genotype | "Oneiromancer" | single | Towers will be put up and pulled down |
| 2023-11-17 | 78 | DEATH'S-HEAD AND THE SPACE ALLUSION | "Graceless Under Pressure" | Luc-II-Farul | according to constantly changing needs. |
| 2023-11-17 | 79 | Vaudlow | "Embrace" | single | We're making up songs about things that we've all heard before, like romance and engage and divorce, |
| 2023-11-10 | 16 | Ling tosite sigure | "狐独の才望" | single | I keep looking them up when I remember that I don't remember them, only to forget again. |
| 2023-11-10 | 17 | ELFENSJóN | "緋灼の魔女 / REINCARNATE Ver" | REINCARNATE | I do not love them in order to address each member individually, |
| 2023-11-10 | 18 | Divided Island | "Fragile World" | single | in a library or a quiet stairwell, |
| 2023-11-10 | 19 | Secret Sphere | "Aura" | Blackened Heartbeat | or to make a point to myself or the bannisters or chairs. |
| 2023-11-10 | 20 | Secret Rule | "UNInVERSE" | single | What would I say? |
| 2023-11-10 | 21 | Weightless World | "What We'll Become" | Sleepwalker | "We love you where I'm from in Boston, too.", |
| 2023-11-10 | 22 | Enigmatic Entrance | "Rise of The Mortal" | Rise of The Mortal +1 | but maybe it's just me, and I could check and that's why I haven't. |
| 2023-11-10 | 23 | Lodestar | "Shooting Star" | Polaris | I am a guest in their worlds, |
| 2023-11-10 | 24 | Shereign | "Visual Animals" | single | forgetting their names, forgetting most of the translations of their lyrics |
| 2023-11-10 | 25 | We Are To Blame | "I Want This To End" | Duality II | but remembering the structures: |
| 2023-11-10 | 26 | Purple Nail | "Calling" | single | juxtapositions of the real and the possible; |
| 2023-11-10 | 27 | Rioghan | "Sweet Death" | single | conjectural explanations of tangible feelings; |
| 2023-11-10 | 31 | PARTICLES | "Burn" | Гореть | but this is alt- out past alt-idol, |
| 2023-11-10 | 32 | Glasgow Kiss | "My Own Monster" | single | and loving maximalism isn't an infidelity to minimalism. |
| 2023-11-10 | 33 | Night Crowned | "She Comes At Night" | Tales | We are not measured by the distance from any point, |
| 2023-11-10 | 34 | Vanir | "Twisting the Knife" | single | not our home or your home or the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum. |
| 2023-11-10 | 35 | Eramaa | "Luunkehrääjä" | single | We receive joy when we are given joy, |
| 2023-11-10 | 36 | Hinayana | "Slowly Light Collides" | Shatter And Fall | but our hearts also swell when we trade sadnesses, |
| 2023-11-10 | 37 | Shylmagoghnar | "Convergence" | Convergence | or when a stranger wraps up a sadness in green paper |
| 2023-11-10 | 38 | Chronoform | "Mary Celeste" | single | and places it on a window ledge next to an important road |
| 2023-11-10 | 39 | Hyrgal | "Nihil Est" | single | in an unimportant town, or vice versa, |
| 2023-11-10 | 40 | RüYYn | "The Flames, The Fallen, The Fury - Part III" | single | and then all of the things that were foreordained to happen |
| 2023-11-10 | 41 | Vastum | "In Bed With Death" | Inward to Gethsemane | still happen except for one. |
| 2023-11-10 | 42 | Morbid Saint | "Bleed Them Dry" | single | How do we fall in love with people, |
| 2023-11-10 | 43 | Spidergawd | "Dinosaur" | Spidergawd VII | when they are singing, that we do not know? |
| 2023-11-10 | 44 | Maladie | "With One Voice" | single | Or how do we not? Isn't this what singing is for, to dilute the nitrogen very slightly |
| 2023-11-10 | 45 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "For A New God" | single | until our eyes just barely gleam? |
| 2023-11-10 | 46 | Tides From Nebula | "The Haunting" | single | This is what all songs are about, inherently and inevitably, |
| 2023-11-10 | 47 | Giuseppe Gilardi | "era moderna" | single | whether they embrace their elemental nature or pretend to be concerned only with mysteriously once-abandoned ships, |
| 2023-11-10 | 48 | Pollen | "Glutamate" | single | but it's different when every other emotional background hum stops |
| 2023-11-10 | 49 | The Dark Atom | "Ocean" | single | and you have to make a decision about what you choose to hear. |
| 2023-11-10 | 125 | Megan Thee Stallion | "Cobra (Rock Remix) [feat. Spiritbox]" | Cobra (Rock Remix) [feat. Spiritbox] +1 | Wait, ow, come back. Let me explain how metalcore and gothic symphonic metal and rap are all going to develop in different directions only to end up in the same place. |
| 2023-11-10 | 126 | Dimmu Borgir | "Perfect Strangers" | Perfect Strangers +1 | Let me explain how the singer of your 15th-favorite band is going to end up making one album as the singer of your 2nd-favorite band, and this is part of how some maybe-Satanic Norwegians named after a volcano in Iceland will do a magnificent cover of a song you already know in a style you can't yet imagine. |
| 2023-11-10 | 128 | Captain Black Beard | "Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)" | single | and how the bands you're slightly embarrassed to like |
| 2023-11-10 | 129 | Judicator | "Mandy" | single | are going to turn out to be part of the same history as the ones you dread. |
| 2023-11-10 | 131 | Lion's Share | "Life on Mars?" | single | Not only have we not landed on Mars yet, but we haven't even mastered the art of not turning against good ideas if idiots say them aloud. |
| 2023-11-10 | 134 | First to Eleven | "Run to the Hills" | single | They'll have their own songs, which you'll love, and vice versa. |
| 2023-11-10 | 135 | The Animal In Me | "Paint The Town Red" | single | Let me explain how borders exist to demarcate spaces of possibility, not separate incommensurate dimensions. |
| 2023-11-10 | 136 | Halocene | "Amaranthine" | single | Let me explain how you don't have to do everything in a completely new way. |
| 2023-11-10 | 137 | Rain Paris | "Summertime Sadness" | single | You aren't really listening, but it doesn't matter. You don't need an elaborate preview of a future you're about to make. |
| 2023-11-10 | 138 | Our Last Night | "Bring Me To Life" | single | Sorry for the way this started. I do have a favorite band. They're three women from Japan named Moeka, Yurika and Hiroa, and the band's name is the Japanese translation of "sheep literature". The music is slightly sad, but in a hopeful way, and that's something you'll learn to like without unlearning how to like heavy metal. |
| 2023-11-03 | 2 | Toehider | "Horse Song" | Horse EP 4 | with a combination of love and judo, |
| 2023-11-03 | 3 | Inculter | "Morbid Origin" | single | turning it through leverage and core strength |
| 2023-11-03 | 4 | Insomnium | "Flowers of the Night" | Songs Of The Dusk - EP 3 | and a tongue in its ear |
| 2023-11-03 | 5 | ANGRA | "Dead Man On Display" | Cycles Of Pain | so that it ends up facing towards something more alluring, |
| 2023-11-03 | 6 | Eluria | "¿Dónde Van?" | Detrás de la Cerradura | and then nudging it in the direction it now wants to go. |
| 2023-11-03 | 7 | Dominic Gebhardt | "Witches Of Eldrathia" | Witches Of Eldrathia 5 | I say "some", but maybe my definition of joy is itself tangled in chaos, |
| 2023-11-03 | 8 | Deep Sun | "Eternal Love" | single | and movements away from the edge are transient needs for something else, |
| 2023-11-03 | 9 | Liliumdust | "Midnight" | single | comfort or a safe reference state we can use to calibrate every other feeling. |
| 2023-11-03 | 10 | Shattered Vessels | "In Silence" | single | I suspect that our emotional polarities betray themselves in our supposedly stolid politics, too, |
| 2023-11-03 | 11 | Serenity | "Sun of Justice" | Nemesis AD | and thus that the inward-facing movements towards nationalism and tribalism and walled stasis |
| 2023-11-03 | 12 | Delta | "At Last" | single | are expressions of the same woundedness as staging increasingly complicated basement listening rooms |
| 2023-11-03 | 13 | The Last Martyr | "Burn It Down" | single | in order to listen to the same Steely Dan albums in fractally greater fidelity. |
| 2023-11-03 | 14 | Koburg | "Silent Voices" | single | The new Marnie Stern songs are vastly detailed, but there's a kind of detail that invites you to dream of stopping time |
| 2023-11-03 | 15 | NOVELISTS | "Prisoner" | Prisoner +1 | in order to wander among suspended soundstages marveling at the placement of each instrument, |
| 2023-11-03 | 16 | Crashing Atlas | "Fake It With Me" | single | and there's a kind that wants to show you that you can be blastingly displaced |
| 2023-11-03 | 17 | Stoned Mary | "PUSH" | single | by the concerted effort of tiny notes and gestures. |
| 2023-11-03 | 18 | Spiritbox | "Too Close / Too Late" | The Fear of Fear | Because I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, |
| 2023-11-03 | 19 | TRiDENT | "twinkle" | single | there's a part of me that insists on trying to reframe every set of potential moral binaries |
| 2023-11-03 | 20 | She is Legend | "How's everything" | single | into a new real-world Alignment grid. |
| 2023-11-03 | 21 | RAISE A SUILEN | "STRAY CERBERUS" | REVELATION 5 | Good/Neutral/Evil, I realized while I was still very young, |
| 2023-11-03 | 65 | Unprocessed | "Glass" | single | misery, like any other contagion, cannot be mitigated by tolerance. |
| 2023-11-03 | 66 | Boris | "om strutsar" | single | Our grandest adventures involve travel to edges, |
| 2023-11-03 | 67 | SATÂNICOS | "Remphan Rites" | single | but not in order to hack at unprotected frayedness in a region with looser sword regulations. |
| 2023-11-03 | 68 | Lovecrose | "Rossz utakon" | Végtelen mint az óceán | The dungeons in D&D are convenient fabrications |
| 2023-11-03 | 69 | Axioma | "Spectre in the Code" | Primal Descent 4 | of environments free of moral complexity, |
| 2023-11-03 | 70 | Voutsa | "Nyrkkisääntö" | single | but the dragons are a reminder that sometimes our imagination becomes real. |
| 2023-11-03 | 87 | Serenity | "Crowned by an Angel" | Nemesis AD | We release ourselves from being the people who had never heard them yet, |
| 2023-10-27 | 7 | Plini | "Ember" | single | and we will say "Hmm!" like Taylor does |
| 2023-10-27 | 8 | DGM | "To The Core" | single | when she's becoming herself again. |
| 2023-10-27 | 9 | Cvlt Ov the Svn | "Square Hammer" | single | There's a difference between extrapolation and growth, |
| 2023-10-27 | 10 | La Mer | "Hell Can Wait" | Tetrahedra | especially when the extrapolation is interpolation with a surprising demo and a marketing plan. |
| 2023-10-27 | 11 | Scars of Solitude | "Luna" | Luna +1 | The eager ease with which we are impressed is, of course, part of our charm, |
| 2023-10-27 | 12 | Breath Of Wind | "The Stars Above Us" | single | one of the thousand noble impulses that can be nihilistically exploited, |
| 2023-10-27 | 13 | Varathron | "Hegemony of Chaos" | single | grand gates into our ultimately unguarded cities. |
| 2023-10-27 | 14 | Sangdragon | "Curse Of Desert (The Black Dragon)" | Hierophant | The black dragon circles twice before landing in our plaza and saying "Why should I spare this town?" |
| 2023-10-27 | 15 | Sonus Mortis | "Among the Marrow and the Machines" | Of Red Barren Earth | with flames for a tongue, |
| 2023-10-27 | 16 | Doro | "Fire in the Sky" | Conqueress - Forever Strong And Proud | and we smile and say "Who sent you? |
| 2023-10-27 | 17 | Lucifer | "At The Mortuary - Halloween Edit" | At The Mortuary 2 | Who drew you? |
| 2023-10-27 | 18 | Jasmine Cain | "Attitude is Everything" | single | You were magnificent in the air, but altitude is everything." |
| 2023-10-27 | 19 | Dead Sara | "Violent" | single | Be gently led away by Anima Control, like the other beautiful imaginary beasts before you. |
| 2023-10-27 | 20 | Solarcycles | "Nature's Blessing" | Lunar | We cannot be spared by extraneity, |
| 2023-10-27 | 21 | Neperia | "Vritra's Garden" | single | nor consumed by our own multiplicity. |
| 2023-10-27 | 22 | Snow White In The Dark | "MADE OF STONE" | single | You are made of words, letters, bending lines. |
| 2023-10-27 | 23 | Exit Eden | "Run! (feat. Marko Hietala)" | single | What would you want, if you were real? |
| 2023-10-27 | 24 | Serenity | "The End of Babylon" | The End of Babylon +3 | Food trucks, new songs, somebody who waves when you land. |
| 2023-10-27 | 25 | Altersight | "День, когда..." | single | All these eons of imagining dragons, though, |
| 2023-10-27 | 26 | Liv Sin | "Synthetic Generation" | single | and you'll notice we never do change the building codes |
| 2023-10-27 | 27 | IKINÄ | "Kohti kuolemaa" | IKINÄ | to account for wingspans or scales. |
| 2023-10-20 | 1 | Sister Shotgun | "Fin Du Monde" | single | End of the world, but not quite the end of the year. |
| 2023-10-20 | 2 | Temperance | "Darkness is just a Drawing" | Hermitage - Daruma's Eyes Pt. 2 | I work on statistical algorithms at Spotify, so I know that "Fin Du Monde" may not catch up, |
| 2023-10-20 | 3 | Within Temptation | "We Go To War" | Bleed Out | in pure math, with some of the Emma Hewitt and Hitsujibungaku songs that had more of my calendar year to work with. |
| 2023-10-20 | 4 | Secret Sphere | "Confession" | single | I tweak equations, lovingly, and then give the speech, again, |
| 2023-10-20 | 5 | Delight | "Whale's Lungs" | Eternity | to myself if no co-workers are around, |
| 2023-10-20 | 6 | Walk in Darkness | "Across the Oceans" | single | that tracking your behavior is not the same as reading your mind. |
| 2023-10-20 | 7 | Valcata | "Archangel" | single | I once proposed that the Echo Nest's marketing slogan should have been |
| 2023-10-20 | 8 | Witchcraft | "Сердце вуду" | single | "We're the Echo Nest. We take your brain out of your skull while you sleep, |
| 2023-10-20 | 9 | Aqvilea | "New World Era" | single | lick it, |
| 2023-10-20 | 10 | A Dark Reborn | "Hopeless" | Last Echo | and then put it back in." |
| 2023-10-20 | 11 | Nekonomicon | "Race of Life" | single | You can see why I'm never left in charge of marketing slogans, |
| 2023-10-20 | 12 | Derdian | "THE GRIN OF REVENGE" | NEW ERA Pt. 4 (RESURGENCE) | but also how the whole enterprise of marketing breeds stylish dishonesty. |
| 2023-10-20 | 13 | Rage Of Light | "Opaque" | Opaque +3 | At the Echo Nest we never got to even touch people's actual ears, |
| 2023-10-20 | 14 | Elegy Of Madness | "Revelation" | XI | never mind their cortices, |
| 2023-10-20 | 15 | Dol Ammad | "Swans of Orion" | single | and even now at Spotify the emotional component of our emotional surveillance |
| 2023-10-20 | 16 | Gåte | "Hamløypar" | Vandrar 5 | is an anti-marketing invention no more literal than the marketing ones. |
| 2023-10-20 | 17 | Intra | "Last Born" | Transition 4 | We do not know whether you play a song because you cannot focus on anything else, |
| 2023-10-20 | 18 | Myrkur | "Blazing Sky" | Spine | or because it attaches itself selflessly to all other distracting noises and drags them with it over a precipice of disregard. |
| 2023-10-20 | 19 | HELGA | "Burden" | Burden +1 | We cannot tell that I'm turning "Fin Du Monde" up louder |
| 2023-10-20 | 20 | Cirith Ungol | "Relentless" | Dark Parade | because I'm trying to discern if there's a volume level at which the |
| 2023-10-20 | 21 | Ankhara | "La Tierra de los Sueños" | De Aquí a la Eternidad 5 | mordant background hiss resolves into individual cymbal crashes, |
| 2023-10-20 | 22 | Therion | "Ruler Of Tamag" | Ruler of Tamag 2 | at which the way-too-precise kick fills betray any timing nuance, |
| 2023-10-20 | 23 | Teramaze | "Blemish" | single | at which the song's implicit threat to tear a betraying hole in the illusory sky |
| 2023-10-20 | 24 | Winter | "Last Thing On My Mind" | Heroes | succeeds. |
| 2023-10-20 | 25 | Atlas | "One More Night" | Built to Last | I suspect that Sister Shotgun have heard HIM and Nightwish and In This Moment |
| 2023-10-20 | 26 | Astral Experience | "Hechizo" | single | and thought to themselves "Yeah, but Generation Terrorists and |
| 2023-10-20 | 27 | Isra Ramos | "Cross the Line" | single | William Gibson and what if Anaal Nathrakh were sentimental and beautiful?" |
| 2023-10-20 | 28 | Fenrir's Scar | "Ruins of My Sanity" | Love | Hate | Hope | Despair | We do not have to dance, tearfully, on the farthest beach, |
| 2023-10-20 | 29 | Zártosztály | "Éltem, ahogy éltem" | single | awaiting the wavefront's transit. |
| 2023-10-20 | 30 | Machinae Supremacy | "WARRIORS, Pt. 1 (Final Stage)" | single | We can run into it, and thus maybe straight through. |
| 2023-10-20 | 31 | 戮-Riku- | "赤い絲" | 赤い絲 +1 | The blazing sky invites us aloft, |
| 2023-10-20 | 32 | Dimmu Borgir | "Black Metal" | single | if we learn its orthography, |
| 2023-10-20 | 33 | King | "Into The Fire" | Into The Fire +1 | and the grace with which we descend again, burned ecstatically wingless, |
| 2023-10-20 | 34 | Allegaeon | "Inhumation" | single | wins us one more night at a time. |
| 2023-10-20 | 35 | Rivers of Nihil | "Hellbirds" | single | We do not have to wait for the robots to tell us how to spend it. |
| 2023-10-20 | 36 | Cailleach Calling | "Glittering Delusion" | single | We do not have to ask them to take the shape of opinions they don't have. |
| 2023-10-20 | 37 | NEMOPHILA | "Master Of Puppets" | single | Math collates, it doesn't transform. |
| 2023-10-20 | 106 | Kuggur | "Nattsand" | single | End of the tectonic plate, but not the playlist. |
| 2023-10-20 | 114 | Gåte | "Ulveham" | Vandrar 5 | and what we imagine must be precious, |
| 2023-10-20 | 115 | Temperance | "In Search of Gold" | Hermitage - Daruma's Eyes Pt. 2 | and how we make it precious by yearning for it. |
| 2023-10-20 | 116 | Ninja Sex Party | "Let's Save the Earth" | single | End of the week, but not yet the world. |
| 2023-10-20 | 119 | Soulvapor | "Never Gonna Give You Up" | single | and you wouldn't get this from any other sky. |
| 2023-10-20 | 120 | The Haxans | "Ways To Be Wicked" | single | So many ways to be not quite sure, |
| 2023-10-20 | 121 | Tulip | "Thriller" | single | but the air this morning smells like flowers, still, again, maybe long enough, maybe enough. |
| 2023-10-13 | 29 | ULTRA | "flashback" | single | hold even our strongest feelings entirely inside our own hearts. |
| 2023-10-13 | 30 | JIEMEI | "AISURU" | LUNA4 | They escape us, and are nurtured or abandoned in collective space, |
| 2023-10-13 | 31 | Air Drawn Dagger | "The Collapse of Mount Plethora" | Songs To Fight The Gods To 5 | so that we may make our way unencumbered |
| 2023-10-13 | 32 | Ankor | "Stereo" | Stereo +3 | but reencounter them by arranged chance. |
| 2023-10-13 | 33 | Seas on the Moon | "Truth In Veins" | single | I think of this as a natural property of the air, |
| 2023-10-13 | 34 | Secret Rule | "Shards of Time" | single | but the streets probably used to smell of horses, too. |
| 2023-10-13 | 35 | Everdawn | "Cassiopeia" | single | We know we can change a little, |
| 2023-10-13 | 36 | THE ANSWER LIES IN THE BLACK VOID | "Ataraxia" | Thou Shalt | so we should not assume our emotional stability |
| 2023-10-13 | 37 | Varg | "Tyr" | Ewige Wacht | or social morality |
| 2023-10-13 | 38 | Saltatio Mortis | "Heute Nacht" | single | are self-maintaining. |
| 2023-10-13 | 39 | Theocracy | "Flicker" | Mosaic | Maybe these songs we love today, Discord stem-trading glitchbops or evangelic symphonic metal, |
| 2023-10-13 | 40 | ANGRA | "Gods Of The World" | Gods Of The World +2 | are stream-coated with a slowly-toxic memory anti-coagulant, |
| 2023-10-13 | 41 | Jason Bieler And The Baron Von Bielski Orchestra | "Zombies & Black Swans" | Zombies & Black Swans +2 | and our hearts feel illusorily full |
| 2023-10-13 | 43 | Edge Of Forever | "The Last One" | Ritual | The forever whose last edge we stand on is an oblivion, |
| 2023-10-13 | 44 | Ronnie Atkins | "Ode To A Madman" | Trinity | an event horizon over which we will belatedly realize we have been lost. |
| 2023-10-13 | 45 | Care of Night | "Tonight" | single | Tonight, we will not have known, was all we would ever have, |
| 2023-10-13 | 46 | One Morning Left | "Neon Inferno (Paradise)" | Neon Inferno (Paradise) +2 | and we can repeat it but not remember or relive it. |
| 2023-10-13 | 47 | Merta | "Katso mua silmiin" | single | We look through each other. We look through ourselves. |
| 2023-10-13 | 48 | IKINÄ | "Tapa loinen" | single | The sponsors of the background insist on the glazed regard for which they have paid, |
| 2023-10-13 | 49 | Eramaa | "Saitamieli" | single | and what they have purchased for us is a foregroundlessness. |
| 2023-10-13 | 50 | Fortíð | "Vefurinn sem ég spinn" | Narkissos | Or, just to briefly entertain a counter-theory, maybe not. |
| 2023-10-13 | 51 | Furia | "Zamawianie Trzecie" | Huta Luna | We do not escape predicted dystopias by relying on their pessimisms turning out to be foolish, |
| 2023-10-13 | 52 | Mānbryne | "Suma wszystkich strat" | Interregnum: O próbie wiary i jarzmie zwątpienia | but by inhabiting their details until the fear collects on the surface as a thin sheen which may be gently skimmed off. |
| 2023-10-13 | 53 | Maladie | "For We Are the Plague" | single | It is exactly your job to not listen so deafly that songs do not register. |
| 2023-10-13 | 54 | Catafalque | "Infestation" | Dybbuk | It will become your turn to reject disagency. |
| 2023-10-13 | 55 | Sulphur Aeon | "Hammer From The Howling Void" | Seven Crowns And Seven Seals | Without scarcity to protect the fortunate |
| 2023-10-13 | 56 | XAAXAA | "DRAW" | DRAW +2 | and obscure the rest, |
| 2023-10-13 | 57 | AURORIZE | "CESTRAL" | single | you cannot wait to be told what to love |
| 2023-10-13 | 77 | Vajra | "Love Is a Battlefield" | single | The people who used to aspire to tell us we were wrong lost this battle. |
| 2023-10-06 | 11 | Risky Melody | "Risky Melody" | Reflection | and the news coverage of toxic hatred packed into metal cylinders |
| 2023-10-06 | 14 | Blood Stain Child | "2045" | 2045 +1 | My feelings for Ed range from ambient tolerance to sporadic enthusiasm, |
| 2023-10-06 | 15 | Rave The Reqviem | "Zero Solace" | EX-EDEN | mostly circling in on admiration that he has gotten almost as famous as you can get for having written songs |
| 2023-10-06 | 16 | Rave The Reqviem | "Exit Babylon" | EX-EDEN | without seeming to have become any less interested in writing more of them. |
| 2023-10-06 | 17 | RAVDINA | "Измеряя шагами небо" | single | They're usually not complicated, but they're reliably decent, |
| 2023-10-06 | 18 | Metalite | "New Generation" | New Generation 5 | both of which are the opposite of the prisals and reprisals bloodily yet again being exchanged between intransigencies |
| 2023-10-06 | 19 | Alterium | "Bismarck" | Bismarck +1 | in a small corner of our beautiful planet we've discovered to have the perfect climate |
| 2023-10-06 | 20 | We Are the Catalyst | "Daydreamers" | Daydreamers +1 | for the cultivation of invasive grudges. |
| 2023-10-06 | 21 | ADHARMA | "Porcelain" | single | Ed has a new album, which is unpretentious and objectively fine on its own, I think, |
| 2023-10-06 | 22 | DARLAH | "Trials" | Trials +3 | modernly produced but not post-modernly beaten lifeless, |
| 2023-10-06 | 23 | Elegy Of Madness | "Hybrid Love" | single | but the second notional "disc" of the extra-double-bonus version |
| 2023-10-06 | 24 | Night Crowned | "Flickan Som Försvann" | Flickan Som Försvann +1 | has living room versions of all 14 songs, one gifted to each of 14 fans, |
| 2023-10-06 | 25 | Cirith Ungol | "Looking Glass" | single | and just listening to them I'm OK, functioning, not crying, |
| 2023-10-06 | 26 | Eldritch | "Elegy Of Lust" | single | not hating human weakness unmanageably as I play them and debug complaints about the new Fans Also Like algorithm |
| 2023-10-06 | 27 | Myrath | "Heroes" | single | that almost always turn out to stem from emotional indignance that faking your fans |
| 2023-10-06 | 28 | Nik Nocturnal | "Tsunderella" | single | casts you into an unflattering association with other fakers exactly no worse than you. |
| 2023-10-06 | 29 | TEMIC | "Mothallah" | Mothallah +2 | People will make music, one of the few things that deserves to be treated as holy, |
| 2023-10-06 | 30 | Imperialist | "CALL OF THE VULCAIN" | single | and then fuck it up with greed and impatient jealousy, |
| 2023-10-06 | 31 | Misertus | "only just unfolding" | single | so of course we also fuck up nationhood and coexistence and hopeless imbalances of power, |
| 2023-10-06 | 32 | Heretoir | "Glacierheart - Nightsphere Part II" | Nightsphere | all of which are inherently mired in logistics and sediment from which a chorus cannot lift you out. |
| 2023-10-06 | 33 | Sühnopfer | "Nous Sommes d'Hier" | Nous sommes d'Hier | Ed's songs are fine. Part of the reason this series of fan visitations works, |
| 2023-10-06 | 34 | Svalbard | "Defiance" | The Weight Of The Mask | even though Ed is playing them new songs instead of the ones for which they became his fans, |
| 2023-10-06 | 35 | Dominic Gebhardt | "Whispers Of Eldrathia" | Whispers Of Eldrathia +2 | is that all of his songs have the same basic qualities. |
| 2023-10-06 | 36 | Nocturnal Abbey | "Funerals empty chairs" | The great blackened swan | You can find reasons to choose between them, |
| 2023-10-06 | 37 | Myrkur | "Valkyriernes Sang" | Valkyriernes Sang +2 | but that will mostly be about you. Ed seems to very earnestly love them all. |
| 2023-09-29 | 1 | Massive Scar Era | "Between Waves" | Between Waves +1 | In principle the notable thing about Massive Scar Era is that it is a metal band started in Egypt by women. |
| 2023-09-29 | 2 | Nikki Stringfield | "No Surrender" | Apocrypha | In practice, there's enough folk-heritage cosplay in metal, in general, that you could listen to them without the bio open and mistake diaspora for tourism. |
| 2023-09-29 | 3 | Amaranthe | "Insatiable" | Insatiable +1 | The pharaohs on the cover of Powerslave watch us with a minor Phrygian wink as we listen, |
| 2023-09-29 | 4 | Within Temptation | "Ritual" | Ritual | but Cherine Amr's relocation to Montreal was to escape power, |
| 2023-09-29 | 5 | Serenity | "Reflections (of AD)" | Reflections (of AD) +2 | and the Egyptian figures in "Between Waves" are less unfamiliar in a metal context than her vocal delivery, |
| 2023-09-29 | 6 | Secret Sphere | "Blackened Heartbeat" | single | the shouty parts lacking the usual cartoon-monster grimness |
| 2023-09-29 | 7 | Blackbriar | "An Unwelcome Guest" | A Dark Euphony | and the melodic parts more earnest than operatic. |
| 2023-09-29 | 8 | Arshenic | "Nocturnal" | single | Nikki Stringfield is from Texas, which is still maybe marginally easier to escape than Egypt, |
| 2023-09-29 | 9 | Neperia | "Minokawa" | single | but was in a band called The Iron Maidens, whose only streaming-available song is a cover of "Powerslave", |
| 2023-09-29 | 10 | Alkonost | "Оберег" | single | but I discovered that only after sequencing the two songs at the beginning of this list based on how the singing makes me feel. |
| 2023-09-29 | 11 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "Genesis" | single | The tourist, I am well aware, is me, |
| 2023-09-29 | 12 | Draconicon | "Thorns" | single | assembling shards of other people's cultures into hurriedly effigial collage. |
| 2023-09-29 | 13 | Primordial | "How It Ends" | How It Ends | Amr's story is a book. This is a playlist. |
| 2023-09-29 | 14 | Gaerea | "Dormant - Bonus track" | single | Egyptian scars, LA dreams, Europeans flirting with synthwave and metalcore as if those are a single audience; |
| 2023-09-29 | 15 | Fortíð | "Rotinn arfur" | single | Serenity are Austrian, and "Reflections (of AD)" falls conveniently into a week between advance tracks from the upcoming album by their Italian cospirits Temperance; |
| 2023-09-29 | 16 | Lightlorn | "Of Longing Spirit and Infinite Solitude" | single | we build cities precisely to place all of these selves next to each other, |
| 2023-09-29 | 17 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Beholden to Clan" | Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge 4 | the gothic embrasures of converted custom houses |
| 2023-09-29 | 18 | Psychework | "Shape of a Ghost" | Spark of Hope | watching over the neo-brutalist apertures of what will soon be CBD dispensaries or bubble-tea imports, |
| 2023-09-29 | 19 | Stam1na | "Taivas" | X | the homeless and the vacant in an uneasy market standoff. |
| 2023-09-29 | 20 | Shiva | "ASTE-ROID" | ASTE-ROID +1 | In time, all our talismans will outlive their temporary oppositions, |
| 2023-09-29 | 21 | #2i2 | "BURNBURNBURN" | single | and we will strain to re-remember how it began and how it ends, |
| 2023-09-29 | 22 | Quubi | "Black out" | solid 4 | and re-forget the parts in the middle where we lost track. |
| 2023-09-29 | 23 | INUWASI | "Sacrifice" | Revive Your Faith 5 | All our legacies are rotten, |
| 2023-09-22 | 18 | Elegy Of Madness | "Crawling" | single | Or this is backwards, too, |
| 2023-09-22 | 19 | DIANNE | "Unleash the Siren" | single | and we hear songs how we are, |
| 2023-09-22 | 20 | Ewiniar | "Sister Moon" | single | caught out between certainties, |
| 2023-09-22 | 21 | Raven Tide | "Reach for Me" | single | close enough to touch the boundary between logistical despair |
| 2023-09-22 | 22 | A Dark Reborn | "Levitating the Void" | single | and restorative serenity |
| 2023-09-22 | 23 | Solarcycles | "Grows Then Dies" | single | with our own skin, |
| 2023-09-22 | 24 | Varg | "Eisenseite" | Eisenseite +1 | shivering to transmit catharsis inwards. |
| 2023-09-22 | 25 | Therion | "Twilight Of The Gods" | single | Everything goes through me, it feels like: |
| 2023-09-22 | 26 | Sulphur Aeon | "Usurper Of The Earth And Sea" | single | voices saying anything they've practiced, |
| 2023-09-22 | 27 | Heretoir | "Glacierheart - Nightsphere, Pt. 2" | single | guitars depicted in current or just magnets, |
| 2023-09-22 | 28 | Sgàile | "Lamentations By The Lochan" | single | any allegory of structure, |
| 2023-09-22 | 29 | Breath Of Wind | "A Natural Symphony" | A Natural Symphony +1 | anywhere in the measure to place a snare. |
| 2023-09-22 | 30 | Temperance | "No Return" | No Return +1 | It's reasonable to wonder, if you know of only two people with a given name, if they're related, |
| 2023-09-22 | 31 | DGM | "Unravel The Sorrow" | single | but it's even more reasonable to stipulate that we are all related, |
| 2023-09-22 | 32 | Subsignal | "The Art of Giving In" | A Poetry of Rain | and that we don't declare ourselves Ramones as much as acknowledge it. |
| 2023-09-22 | 33 | Apostolica | "Animae Haeretica" | Animae Haeretica | I am not, technically, either of two Australian soil chemists, |
| 2023-09-22 | 34 | 燐舞曲 | "夢想曲 -Träumerei-" | 夢想曲 -Träumerei- +1 | but I approve of their shed estimates |
| 2023-09-22 | 35 | Damian Hamada's Creatures | "The Beginning of the End" | 運命の支配者 | and mostly resist the impish urge to antagonize the sales representatives |
| 2023-09-22 | 89 | In This Moment | "ARMY OF ME" | ARMY OF ME +2 | Or this is backwards, and the reinforcements we represent |
| 2023-09-15 | 39 | IKINÄ | "Syvämeri" | single | that our love for music was never predicated on its scarcity or preciousness or acquisition cost or production expense, |
| 2023-09-15 | 40 | Stam1na | "Muistipalatsi" | single | and thus that it's exactly as possible to sequence fragments of love, |
| 2023-09-15 | 41 | Blackbriar | "Forever and a Day" | Forever and a Day +3 | one after another from wherever you are to any chosen horizon, |
| 2023-09-15 | 42 | ANGRA | "Tide Of Changes - Pt. II" | Tide Of Changes 2 | as to accept them only 8 or 12 at a time, |
| 2023-09-15 | 43 | Anaria | "Circle Of Love" | single | neatly divided into halves, |
| 2023-09-15 | 44 | Stream of Passion | "Tonight" | Beautiful Warrior 5 | except not so neatly in the LP era, because the sonic fidelity of spiral grooves |
| 2023-09-15 | 45 | Beyond God | "Aphantasia" | single | decreases as they wind in towards the heart, |
| 2023-09-15 | 46 | The Haxans | "The Dead And Restless" | The Dead and Restless | until "The Revealing Science of God" reveals that the god of LPs never reached out a hand to change the side for you, |
| 2023-09-15 | 47 | Never Obey Again | "What If" | single | and I reject any patronizing ploy to recast this as some kind of listening work-ethic |
| 2023-09-15 | 48 | Nungara | "Still Waters" | Reflections in Stillness 4 | unless you're going to follow through and claim that recorded music vacated the moral high ground, |
| 2023-09-15 | 49 | Doro | "Bond Unending" | Bond Unending +2 | in a time of floods, |
| 2023-09-15 | 50 | Apostolica | "Gloria" | single | once you no longer had to crank the victrola |
| 2023-09-15 | 51 | Altarage | "Enigma Signals" | Worst Case Scenario | with your own hands, |
| 2023-09-15 | 52 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Initiates of the White Hart" | Initiates of the White Hart +1 | like joy is a worm you have to draw out of the intestines of its hosts, |
| 2023-09-15 | 53 | Iron Savior | "Curse of the Machinery" | Curse of the Machinery +3 | and then you have to answer for the ways the turntable changed music, |
| 2023-09-15 | 54 | Eunomia | "The Search" | The Chronicles of Eunomia, Pt. 2 | and later the separation of woofers and tweeters, |
| 2023-09-15 | 55 | Theocracy | "Mosaic" | Mosaic +1 | and earlier the factional schisms of clefs, |
| 2023-09-15 | 56 | Symphony Of Sweden | "That Night" | single | and the inevitable realization awaiting us |
| 2023-09-15 | 57 | Ronnie Atkins | "If You Can Dream It (You Can Do It)" | single | as we reason forwards and backwards between transformations |
| 2023-09-15 | 58 | Brother Firetribe | "Just Another Night" | single | is that all of these countless transitional eras seem significant from within them, |
| 2023-09-15 | 59 | Ronnie Romero | "Mountain Of Light" | Too Many Lies, Too Many Masters | in detailed contrast to whatever prevailing context we had most intimately internalized, |
| 2023-09-15 | 60 | TesseracT | "Echoes" | War Of Being | but by two or three revolutions later all the previous ones will have begun to blur together, |
| 2023-09-15 | 63 | Rides In ReVellion | "YOAKE SAIZENSEN" | YOAKE SAIZENSEN +3 | that has nothing to teach us, |
| 2023-09-15 | 64 | XANVALA | "本能" | single | and we have no time to go back and raise it out of savagery, |
| 2023-09-15 | 65 | Damian Hamada's Creatures | "The Beginning of the End" | single | as much as we pity its monolithic ignorance, |
| 2023-09-15 | 66 | Utsu-P | "いのちをそまつに (feat. 初音ミク)" | HAPPYPILLS | because we are needed at the cultural front in the war of sacred human agency against demonbot AI, |
| 2023-09-15 | 107 | Gridlink | "Pitch Black Resolve" | Coronet Juniper | and frenetic |
| 2023-09-15 | 108 | Shipwreck Karpathos | "SCENE IX: Almost Colossus" | single | and as often distended in our catharsis |
| 2023-09-15 | 109 | Explosions In The Sky | "Loved Ones" | End | as concise in our regard, |
| 2023-09-15 | 110 | Collapse Under The Empire | "Forgiveness" | single | because the new systems still convey the same love |
| 2023-09-15 | 111 | Divided by Design | "The Cosmological Constant" | The Cosmological Constant | into the same starlit spaces between us |
| 2023-09-08 | 22 | Kvelertak | "Krøterveg Te Helvete" | Endling | It will refine, at best, towards an unobjectionable anonymity. |
| 2023-09-08 | 23 | Uada | "The Abyss Gazing Back" | Crepuscule Natura | The tiny, sinisterly glowing eyes in the menacing abyss always turn out to be ours. |
| 2023-09-08 | 24 | Mānbryne | "Piach i niepamięć" | single | You are complicit if you facilitate joylessness. |
| 2023-09-08 | 25 | Morokh | "Coma" | Insomnia | You are complicit if you direct collective action towards the likelihood of facilitating joylessness. |
| 2023-09-08 | 26 | Mephorash | "I Am" | single | You are complicit if you are not willing to stand up, as routinely as necessary, |
| 2023-09-08 | 27 | Wolfheart | "Iku-Turso" | single | and say "Wait, what are we doing here? And why?" |
| 2023-09-08 | 28 | Shylmagoghnar | "Follow the River" | single | You improve the future when you increase tangible joy, |
| 2023-09-08 | 29 | Finsterforst | "Kapitel IV - Katharsis" | Jenseits | but this is perilously circular: |
| 2023-09-08 | 30 | Kuggur | "Muhit al ahlam" | Outlived | if you are writing about the qualities of a particular burrito |
| 2023-09-08 | 32 | Secret Rule | "Disorder" | single | then all you can do is care. |
| 2023-09-08 | 33 | ExWHYZ | "NOT SORRY" | single | The generative abstraction removes you from this moment, |
| 2023-09-08 | 58 | Nitrate | "All The Right Moves" | single | how they linger along eroded contours, |
| 2023-09-08 | 59 | Edge Of Forever | "Where Are You" | single | how they echo at first with tentative repetition, |
| 2023-09-08 | 60 | Frozen Rain | "One Mile from Heartsville" | single | how they twirl when they think nobody is listening, |
| 2023-09-08 | 61 | Florian Grey | "Destroying Kingdoms" | Destroying Kingdoms | how they roar to get our attention again. |
| 2023-09-08 | 62 | The Dark Atom | "Reconstruct" | single | Pick an endeavor whose outcome matters to you more than its process, |
| 2023-09-08 | 63 | Tempus | "Red Flag" | Vida Colorida | and then learn whatever you have to learn to convince the process that you are right. |
| 2023-09-08 | 64 | Kuggur | "The Misanthrope" | Outlived | This is how you apply love to industry. |
| 2023-09-01 | 4 | ASTERISM | "Sunny" | BESIDE 5 | that will be successful only as long as it takes the rich to hire better temporary security |
| 2023-09-01 | 13 | ASTERISM | "No Way" | BESIDE 5 | and power is always happy to cower behind proxies. |
| 2023-09-01 | 14 | Without Warning | "Dark Abyss" | single | The powerful tolerate pickpockets along their routes with fond bemusement |
| 2023-09-01 | 15 | Bergfried | "The Ordeal" | Romantik II | and mental notes about where to bus the homeless. |
| 2023-09-01 | 16 | Arshenic | "For you" | single | All these things further confirm the establishments. |
| 2023-09-01 | 17 | Nereids | "Symphony of Gods" | single | The rich and poor remain. |
| 2023-09-01 | 18 | Halekin | "El Canto del Eltuwe" | single | Still, pointless flashes of ill-considered defiance are preferable to disingenuous flashes of petty bullying |
| 2023-09-01 | 19 | Never Obey Again | "9:45" | single | thinly disguised as benevolent brutalism. |
| 2023-09-01 | 20 | Stitched Up Heart | "Thunder" | To The Wolves | Thus, for example, Universal Music Group's ludicrous proposal to cut the royalty payments of "non-professional" musicians |
| 2023-09-01 | 21 | Madame Mayhem | "Get It Right" | single | in order to pay (their own) "professional" musicians more. |
| 2023-09-01 | 22 | Maggot Heart | "Archer" | single | This is regressive by definition, |
| 2023-09-01 | 23 | Ofdrykkja | "Bergakall" | single | but the particular thresholds selected make it also both baldly cruel and absurdly ineffective. |
| 2023-09-01 | 24 | Ekyrian | "Ítaca" | Cuentos Junto a la Hoguera | The press-release fails to explicitly note the numbers of artists involved, |
| 2023-09-01 | 25 | Icarus Witch | "Rise Of The Witches" | single | which is a bad enough sign in itself, |
| 2023-09-01 | 26 | Primal Fear | "Bring That Noise" | Code Red | but triangulating from other numbers later in the text we can tell that the "professional" musicians, |
| 2023-09-01 | 27 | Soen | "Sincere" | Memorial | by this definition, already account for 98% of the streams. |
| 2023-09-01 | 28 | Revolution Saints | "Eagle Flight" | Eagle Flight | This is supposed, I think, to underscore their professionalism, but it also clarifies |
| 2023-09-01 | 29 | Toehider | "PACK IT UP" | Snapshots From Beacontown Spring Dance '85 4 | that the proposed redistribution would cut the royalties of "amateur" artists in half |
| 2023-09-01 | 30 | Seventh Crystal | "Silence" | single | in order to spoon an additional uniform 1% raise onto the already-moneyed. |
| 2023-09-01 | 31 | Nomy | "Break me" | Break me | As you probably do not know, but they really should and I now do because I just checked, |
| 2023-09-01 | 32 | Draconicon | "Heresy" | single | the average month-to-month fluctuation in streaming royalties for even a semi-professional musician is about 10%. |
| 2023-09-01 | 33 | Lacrimas Profundere | "Breathing Souls" | single | So by taking from the poor, this scheme would be able to further enrich the rich by a factor an order of magnitude below the existing random variation in their inertial wealth. |
| 2023-09-01 | 34 | Insomnium | "Song of the Dusk" | single | In the end, though, post-structural redistribution is hopeless whether you do it with graceful irrelevance or awkward thuds. |
| 2023-09-01 | 35 | Marduk | "Memento Mori" | Memento Mori | The gap between the future we want for musicians and their lives, |
| 2023-09-01 | 36 | Fluisteraars | "De Maan, Zon van de Doden" | De Kronieken Van Het Verdwenen Kasteel II: Nergena 2 | and the presents we seem to be able to currently afford to give them, |
| 2023-09-01 | 37 | A Pregnant Light | "My Right Side" | The Eighth 5 | is not a bookkeeping challenge. |
| 2023-09-01 | 38 | Boris | "Nuclear Fission" | me when the when i | We won't fund a new middle class by raising the first step another inch, |
| 2023-09-01 | 40 | Heretoir | "Twilight of the Machines" | single | The richest musicians are barely rich by non-music standards, |
| 2023-09-01 | 41 | Spurv | "En brennende vogn over jordet" | En brennende vogn over jordet +3 | and a world with a million musicians living off their music currently looks more reachable |
| 2023-08-25 | 1 | Temperance | "Daruma (feat. Arjen Anthony Lucassen)" | single | The next person you pass is just starting over, |
| 2023-08-25 | 2 | VOLA | "Paper Wolf" | single | or just finally realizing an era has ended, |
| 2023-08-25 | 3 | Here We Are | "Együtt egyedül" | single | or just understanding that the era continues on a different path |
| 2023-08-25 | 4 | The Unity | "Masterpiece" | The Hellish Joyride | without them. |
| 2023-08-25 | 5 | Signum Regis | "Salt of the Earth" | single | Time to buy new pencils |
| 2023-08-25 | 6 | Noveria | "Origins" | The Gates Of The Underworld | and try to remember what we used to use them for. |
| 2023-08-25 | 7 | ShadowStrike | "Broken Hearted Journey" | single | I just spent a week in another country without ever touching its money, |
| 2023-08-25 | 8 | Bloodred Hourglass | "How's the Heart?" | How's The Heart? 4 | or using it to buy records. |
| 2023-08-25 | 9 | Marc Hudson | "Freedom Heart" | Starbound Stories | I brought a wallet, and all I used it for was giving a back pocket some structure |
| 2023-08-25 | 10 | Serenity | "The Fall of Man (feat. Roy Khan)" | The Fall of Man 2 | to protect the mask I mostly but not entirely didn't take out and wear. |
| 2023-08-25 | 11 | Derdian | "Derdian" | single | We rented a flat with almost no things in it, |
| 2023-08-25 | 12 | Elegy Of Madness | "Broken Soul" | single | and we didn't use them all. |
| 2023-08-25 | 13 | Myrkur | "Like Humans" | single | I brought a computer in case I had to suddenly do some part of my job, which I didn't. |
| 2023-08-25 | 14 | Kristin Starkey | "Einherjars" | single | The first time I left the country, it would have been insane to even consider trying to bring enough technology to not do my job. |
| 2023-08-25 | 15 | Edu Falaschi | "Señores Del Mar (Wield the Sword)" | Eldorado | I spent that first trip buying CDs |
| 2023-08-25 | 16 | Secret Sphere | "J.'s Serenade" | single | I couldn't hear until I got home again with them, |
| 2023-08-25 | 17 | Dogma | "Forbidden Zone" | Forbidden Zone +2 | but if I'd gone 4 years earlier it would have been LPs I couldn't even have carried. |
| 2023-08-25 | 18 | Nungara | "North Star" | single | Civilization progresses in the direction of weightlessness, |
| 2023-08-25 | 19 | SinHeresY | "Black Spirit" | Event Horizon | albeit fitfully. |
| 2023-08-25 | 109 | Mors Subita | "Vile" | Vile 5 | death metal is the new classic rock |
| 2023-08-25 | 110 | Incantation | "Exile (Defy The False) II" | Unholy Deification | and exile is the new commute? |
| 2023-08-25 | 111 | Full Of Hell | "A Ladder Made of Warped Light" | Full of Hell / Gasp | We climb towards the sun, |
| 2023-08-25 | 112 | Urfaust | "Untergang" | Untergang | our quivers full of darkness, |
| 2023-08-25 | 113 | Owl | "Inversion Wave" | single | beset all around by claws. |
| 2023-08-25 | 114 | Blut Aus Nord | "Forgotten Aeon" | Disharmonium - Nahab | Time to draw freshly transient pentagrams. |
| 2023-08-25 | 115 | Fortíð | "Þúsund þjáninga smiður" | single | Maybe this is what the pencils were for? |
| 2023-08-25 | 116 | Décembre Noir | "Against The Daylight" | single | It's definitely what the drums and guitars are for. |
| 2023-08-25 | 117 | Lightlorn | "Dimensionless Blackness" | single | Songs of dread and reservation limn the stories of survival |
| 2023-08-25 | 127 | UMC | "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" | Dancing With Tears In My Eyes +2 | we sing to welcome. |
| 2023-08-18 | 3 | Voice of Baceprot | "What's The Holy (Nobel) Today?" | RETAS | but the next English city or the next sidewalk block |
| 2023-08-18 | 48 | BABYMETAL | "METALI!! - feat. Tom Morello" | single | The iron footbridge that sneaks us from our Airbnb into Camden Market's East Yard is my new favorite. |
| 2023-08-18 | 49 | fripSide | "Red Liberation" | single | The Golden Jubilee bridge we use to confirm that there's still a froyo stand in a bus shell earns an honorable mention for practical service. |
| 2023-08-18 | 50 | Lezel | "後の祭り ~After Party~" | Plot | One of the most famous bridges is beautiful, the other beyond pedestrian. |
| 2023-08-18 | 53 | Ayasa | "Dualism" | single | When I let the paths and parks fling me out of their guarded orbits |
| 2023-08-18 | 54 | Artax | "The Hand That Feeds" | single | onto high streets I feel at least a little more conspicuous, |
| 2023-08-18 | 55 | Metalite | "Blazing Skies" | Blazing Skies 4 | but that's just as true at home. |
| 2023-08-18 | 56 | Within Temptation | "Bleed Out" | Bleed Out | Errands and exploration and rituals co-occur. |
| 2023-08-18 | 57 | SinHeresY | "The Calling" | single | I dodge different commuters and different tourists here, |
| 2023-08-18 | 58 | Death Dealer Union | "The Integument" | The Integument +1 | trying to concentrate on remembering to check for traffic in reverse. |
| 2023-08-18 | 59 | Divided Island | "Layering" | single | I've been here when it was only United, and then Unioned, and now is only what's left. |
| 2023-08-18 | 60 | Svalbard | "How To Swim Down" | How To Swim Down +2 | You only ever pretend to be free, |
| 2023-08-18 | 61 | SKÁLD | "Grótti" | Tides of Destiny 4 | and only ever pretend that your freedom is lightness. |
| 2023-08-18 | 62 | The Unity | "Saints And Sinners" | single | We come and stay and go without ever weighing a pound. |
| 2023-08-18 | 63 | Ronnie Romero | "Chased By Shadows" | single | I wave my phone at things. Invisible banks arbitrage the nominal currencies. |
| 2023-08-18 | 65 | Spirit Adrift | "Give Her to the River" | Ghost At The Gallows | It's hard to listen to music as a human and understand why we're afraid of other people. |
| 2023-08-18 | 66 | Andromida | "These Memories" | single | We have the same French gelato, the same British Italian cafes, the same Israeli cauliflower. |
| 2023-08-18 | 67 | Horrendous | "The Death Knell Ringeth" | Ontological Mysterium | We're reminded of this by shopping advice, which tends to send us to where we would shop if we were British versions of ourselves, |
| 2023-08-18 | 68 | Neorhythm | "Никто не должен умирать" | single | rather than brief fugitives from our own vans and anthropologies. |
| 2023-08-18 | 69 | Hexis | "Fallaciae" | single | We don't need power stations converted to soaring international malls, |
| 2023-08-18 | 70 | Nocte Obducta | "Conamara Chaos" | Karwoche - Die Sonne der Toten pulsiert | we need denim remixers wedged into portobello gills |
| 2023-08-18 | 71 | Skálmöld | "Ýdalir" | Ýdalir | or things there are only one of and the one of them is here, |
| 2023-08-18 | 72 | Bisa | "Drawn With Blood" | single | or at least things there are only eight of and none of them are in our Chelsea or Brighton. |
| 2023-08-18 | 73 | Primordial | "Victory Has 1000 Fathers, Defeat Is an Orphan" | single | We had a Waterstone's in Boston, once, but no more. |
| 2023-08-18 | 74 | Incantation | "Invocation (Chthonic Merge) X" | Invocation (Chthonic Merge) X +2 | At another Waterstone's on another of the king's roads I find Jon Alexander's Citizens, |
| 2023-08-18 | 75 | Violet Cold | "Multiverse" | Multiverse | which I wanted to see on a real-world shelf for reasons I will explain later, |
| 2023-08-18 | 76 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Twin Mouthed Spring" | single | but which uses paper to tell a story about all these dedicated roads of stolen empire, |
| 2023-08-18 | 77 | Déhà | "Estival" | Averses II | and another story about the divided roads of suburbs and strip malls where I'm nominally from, |
| 2023-08-18 | 90 | Voice of Baceprot | "The Enemy of Earth is You" | RETAS | are invitations to a revolution. |
| 2023-08-18 | 94 | CeLilly | "Amaranth" | single | There's little you can do alone: not end the world, not save it. |
| 2023-08-11 | 2 | Din of Celestial Birds | "Utopia" | The Night is for Dreamers | Or that's the fantasy, anyway, |
| 2023-08-11 | 3 | IKINÄ | "Tie" | single | that roaring Finnish gothcore |
| 2023-08-11 | 4 | Dark Princess | "Поднимаясь в небо" | single | or sinuous Russian metal grandeur |
| 2023-08-11 | 5 | Lacey Sturm | "Breathe With Me (feat. Lindsey Stirling)" | single | or Christian-hard-rock/talent-show crossovers |
| 2023-08-11 | 37 | Iron Savior | "In the Realm of Heavy Metal" | In the Realm of Heavy Metal +2 | This is how, and why, it can still be possible to make meaningful art that restates elemental truths. |
| 2023-08-11 | 38 | Angelus Apatrida | "Cold" | single | We have to constantly restate truths in order to preserve their relevance. |
| 2023-08-11 | 39 | Theocracy | "Return To Dust" | single | This, at least, scripturalists also enviously realize, |
| 2023-08-11 | 40 | Mercenary | "Anthem for the Anxious" | single | even as they conflate cause and effect and imagine that insistence is an assertion of truth |
| 2023-08-11 | 41 | Dokken | "Fugitive" | single | instead of its gift. |
| 2023-08-11 | 42 | Ronnie Atkins | "Trinity" | single | The creative trinity, a thoughtful deist and murder imaginer once explained, |
| 2023-08-11 | 43 | Sarayasign | "Blood From Stone" | The Lion's Road | consists of the idea, |
| 2023-08-11 | 45 | Moonaadem | "Givre" | Douleur de renaitre | and that execution's reception. |
| 2023-08-11 | 46 | URNE | "A Stumble Of Words" | A Feast On Sorrow | The despot's insane inversion stipulates a shallow fanaticism as reception, |
| 2023-08-11 | 47 | Shining | "Avsändare Okänd" | Avsändare Okänd +1 | and a strident artlessness as brutal execution, |
| 2023-08-11 | 48 | Nytt Land | "Nord" | single | and thus inhabits a shredded void where the heart should be. |
| 2023-08-04 | 10 | Hitler SA Massive Production | "Spuku" | single | operatic metal and coy Japanese indie-pop and Spanish love songs and cryptic cacophony. |
| 2023-08-04 | 74 | Coronatus | "Dark Ice - Single Version" | single | and eat them. |
| 2023-08-04 | 75 | Crown Solace | "Animus" | ANIMUS 5 | That's how you learn. |
| 2023-08-04 | 76 | Poemisia | "Soleste De’ Bardi" | single | Oyster experts can not only describe the oysters, but organize them, |
| 2023-08-04 | 77 | Opus Aeterna | "Waltz in the Forest" | single | and then you can navigate the organization of oysters by taste. |
| 2023-08-04 | 78 | Blame Zeus | "Left For Dead" | single | We can use algorithmic pattern-finding to organize music so that it may be navigated by listening, |
| 2023-08-04 | 79 | Valkeat | "Vana" | Vana +2 | and in this way allow the precise refinement of expertise by the expansive expression of love, |
| 2023-08-04 | 80 | Nervosa | "Seed Of Death" | Seed Of Death +1 | rather than tediously vice versa. |
| 2023-08-04 | 81 | Roses Unread | "Down and Out" | Down and Out +3 | I do not eat enough oysters to make a lot of progress in my oyster expertise, |
| 2023-08-04 | 82 | ANGRA | "Ride Into The Storm" | single | but I don't need a lot of oyster expertise to find oysters I like. |
| 2023-08-04 | 83 | Armored Dawn | "Brand New Way" | single | Actually, my experience is that oysters are too expensive to eat very many or often, |
| 2023-08-04 | 84 | Noveria | "Descent" | single | and thus at the rate I consume them I am not quickly developing notable preferences or aversions, |
| 2023-08-04 | 85 | Trowsholm | "Homeland" | Homeland +2 | and thus have no pressing need for expertise, |
| 2023-08-04 | 86 | Dwell in Doom | "Northern Cold" | Northern Cold +1 | and in fact can probably happily live the rest of my life |
| 2023-08-04 | 89 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "Changing Star" | single | and when I do I order one each of however many kinds they have, |
| 2023-08-04 | 90 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Blood Spilled" | Ashen | unless they have more than 6, |
| 2023-08-04 | 91 | Wayfarer | "False Constellation" | single | in which case I order a random 4". |
| 2023-08-04 | 92 | Marduk | "Shovel Beats Sceptre" | Shovel Beats Sceptre +1 | Presumably there are people who farm and serve oysters for a living |
| 2023-08-04 | 93 | Saħħar | "It-tarf tal-Kożmu u ta' Ruħi" | single | who would like me to have a less casual relationship with oysters, |
| 2023-08-04 | 94 | 夢遊病者 | "Mirrors Turned Inward" | Skopofoboexoskelett 4 | but in my Kantian mode I think I'm OK with the social-holistic implications of oysters as an occasional delicacy. |
| 2023-08-04 | 95 | Finsterforst | "Jenseits (Kapitel II - Dualitaet)" | Jenseits (Kapitel II - Dualitaet) +1 | I'm aware, of course, that there are also people for whom music occupies this same tier of significance, |
| 2023-08-04 | 96 | Nordicwinter | "Enshrouded by Winter" | single | who would be content to listen to whatever 4-6 songs somebody else decided to play |
| 2023-08-04 | 97 | Thumos | "Mysterium Cosmographicum" | Musica Universalis 4 | in their hearing while they were waiting for their oysters |
| 2023-08-04 | 98 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "Missed" | Closure | (3 Aunt Dotty's from Saquish, 4 Pink Moons from PEI, and just one King Caesar because those fuckers are a mouthful and you're not allowed to cut them in half). |
| 2023-08-04 | 99 | Spurv | "Som skyer" | Som Skyer 3 | But songs are not consumed, |
| 2023-08-04 | 100 | Abstract Void | "In the Dawn" | Forever | they are shared. |
| 2023-08-04 | 101 | Edge Of Forever | "Ritual, Pt. I" | single | I want you to want to hear them. |
| 2023-08-04 | 102 | Fierce Deity | "Leviarach" | single | I want you to want to have control, of or at least decisive influence over, your music. |
| 2023-08-04 | 118 | Lauren Babic | "Chandelier" | single | predictable transformations, |
| 2023-08-04 | 123 | Doro | "Living After Midnight" | Living After Midnight +1 | At most we might share part of the way, and then we're gone, |
| 2023-08-04 | 124 | The Iron Cross | "Ever Dream" | single | each into our own inexpert unknowns. |
| 2023-08-04 | 125 | Anaria | "Wings of a Butterfly" | single | But OK. Come on. We'll borrow wings and go together, and by the time we get there we'll be ready to show them our love. |
| 2023-07-28 | 11 | Dystopica | "Far From Perfect" | single | and I swear I'm listening, |
| 2023-07-28 | 12 | Anatomy of the Sacred | "Narcissi" | Ashes to Ashes 6 | but also I'm kind of dancing. |
| 2023-07-28 | 13 | Beyond The Black | "Call My Name" | single | You might blame yourself for putting your pain into a song, |
| 2023-07-28 | 14 | SinHeresY | "The Life You Left Behind" | single | but these are just the most obvious cases. |
| 2023-07-28 | 15 | Scarlett | "Cold" | single | We are foolishly magnificent, |
| 2023-07-28 | 16 | Celestial Ruin | "Lost My Mind" | single | and often irresistible at our worst. |
| 2023-07-28 | 17 | Daedric | "Titan" | Titan | But this is all even more true in reverse: |
| 2023-07-28 | 18 | Fate DeStroyed | "Peace With the Devil" | single | we are transformative and profound when we are only trying to make an indignant and enthralling noise. |
| 2023-07-28 | 19 | Kaleido | "MISERY" | single | We are right when we are distracted, |
| 2023-07-28 | 20 | Conquer Divide | "N E W H E A V E N" | N E W H E A V E N 5 | and true in our idle and private figures. |
| 2023-07-28 | 63 | Reino de Hades | "La Reina Oscura" | Siete Runas | Our personifications of our threats are invariably and indelibly alluring, |
| 2023-07-28 | 64 | Duskmourn | "The Herald and The Wanderer" | single | not because we don't know the difference between terror and beauty, |
| 2023-07-28 | 65 | Lokust | "The Sin of Doubt" | Infidel | but because every metaphor of fear reminds us of converse longings, |
| 2023-07-28 | 66 | Waldgeflüster | "Unter bronzenen Kronen" | single | and we can't look at the smooth surface of blood velvet |
| 2023-07-28 | 67 | Stortregn | "Xeno Chaos" | single | without imagining how the other side of it would feel against our arms, |
| 2023-07-28 | 68 | Arch Echo | "Angry Sprinkles" | Final Pitch | or as the bound spines of the volumes of a history of chords and glass. |
| 2023-07-28 | 69 | Organ Dealer | "Solitude Is Death" | The Weight of Being | Our rash graffiti of loathing self-assemble into sigils of reconciliation; |
| 2023-07-21 | 1 | Uada | "The Dark (Winter)" | The Dark (Winter) +1 | We make beauty out of pain, |
| 2023-07-21 | 2 | Violet Cold | "Ein Langer Weg - Extended Version" | single | or out of joy, |
| 2023-07-21 | 3 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "The Feels Like Dying" | single | and maybe sometimes the only thing we mean by "beauty" |
| 2023-07-21 | 4 | Explosions In The Sky | "Ten Billion People" | single | is the tension between the two. |
| 2023-07-21 | 5 | City of the Lost | "War Thunder" | Wasteland Guide IV | We don't always alleviate misery by simply confronting it, |
| 2023-07-21 | 6 | Blut Aus Nord | "Queen of the Dead Dimension" | single | but that's still usually the way to begin. |
| 2023-07-21 | 7 | Agriculture | "Look, Pt. 3" | Agriculture | Always? I don't know. |
| 2023-07-21 | 8 | Teeth Of The Sea | "Megafragma" | single | Did Sinéad have other viable choices she could have made? |
| 2023-07-21 | 9 | Night Verses | "Arrival" | single | I don't know. |
| 2023-07-21 | 10 | Horrendous | "Preterition Hymn" | Preterition Hymn +2 | We were the same age until a few days ago. |
| 2023-07-21 | 11 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Passage" | single | "The night is long, but the day will come", she sang in what is still my very favorite of her songs, |
| 2023-07-21 | 12 | Strega Nona | "Blinded, Bound" | Walk In Beauty | but the track on her Best album with the fewest streams. |
| 2023-07-21 | 13 | A Curtain Of Mist | "As" | AS I AM | The day only comes for you if you let it, |
| 2023-07-21 | 14 | Talking to Shadows | "Lost" | Lost +3 | if you refuse to allow yourself to be lost. |
| 2023-07-21 | 15 | Mystfall | "Endless" | Celestial Vision | Each day poses this same challenge again, |
| 2023-07-21 | 16 | ILLUMISHADE | "ENEMY" | single | and if you make it to 56 you will have had 20,440 chances to fail it, |
| 2023-07-21 | 17 | Carmilla | "Life" | single | and survived. |
| 2023-07-21 | 18 | Cinnamon Babe | "The Man" | single | I want to assume that Sinéad chose to stop, |
| 2023-07-21 | 19 | As December Falls | "Leave" | Join The Club | but part of what she accomplished by insisting on being herself in public, |
| 2023-07-21 | 20 | Meet Me @ The Altar | "Give It Up" | Give It Up | was demonstrating that choices are tenuous and complex. |
| 2023-07-21 | 21 | Crashing Atlas | "A Violent Affair" | single | "Everyone can see what's going on", she said. |
| 2023-07-21 | 22 | The Almas | "Crowns" | single | "They laugh 'cause they know they're untouchable, not because what I said was wrong." |
| 2023-07-21 | 23 | Living Dead Girl | "Dysfunctional" | single | "The Emperor's New Clothes" survives her as a moral and an epitaph, |
| 2023-07-21 | 24 | Satellite Citi | "Anxious Hearts" | single | maybe most of all because she wrote it before the things in her life it would end up best describing. |
| 2023-07-21 | 25 | Death Dealer Union | "The Vow of Silence" | single | She knew she was not going to choose silence |
| 2023-07-21 | 26 | Snow White In The Dark | "Don´t Cry" | single | or its attendant pity. |
| 2023-07-21 | 27 | RAVDINA | "За закрытой дверью" | single | "You asked for the truth and I told you." |
| 2023-07-21 | 28 | Arshenic | "Red" | single | We can hope for easier paths, |
| 2023-07-21 | 29 | Moran Magal | "Mouth Of History" | single | but not really for stronger purpose in walking them. |
| 2023-07-21 | 30 | Primal Fear | "Deep In The Night" | Deep In The Night +1 | "I will sleep with a clear conscience / I will sleep in peace." |
| 2023-07-21 | 31 | Sacred Outcry | "The City Of Stone" | Towers of Gold | One of these is a declaration, one a hope. |
| 2023-07-21 | 32 | Feuerschwanz | "Uruk-Hai" | Fegefeuer | The gap between the two is not the way to measure yourself. |
| 2023-07-21 | 33 | Skálmöld | "Verðandi" | Verðandi +1 | The argument for courage is not a promise of reward |
| 2023-07-21 | 34 | Fortíð | "Uppskera" | single | but precisely the realization that you cannot base moral actions on speculative outcomes. |
| 2023-07-21 | 35 | Skar | "Pump House" | single | Moral reasoning is not retroactive. |
| 2023-07-21 | 36 | Sarayasign | "When All Lights Go Out" | single | In the modern retelling of the picture-tearing fable, she holds up a green rectangle. |
| 2023-07-21 | 37 | GUNGIRE | "Summer Lover" | single | We can comp in different images for each audience cohort, |
| 2023-07-14 | 12 | Anoxia | "Relinquish The Quiet" | Relinquish The Quiet | marginally faster than we created them, |
| 2023-07-14 | 13 | Rave The Reqviem | "Doombreaker" | Doombreaker 5 | and thus that a performatively grim fascination with them is more sentimentally gothic than strictly nihilistic. |
| 2023-07-14 | 14 | Mystfall | "Kings Of Utopia" | single | I'm old enough to remember when metal was fantastical, |
| 2023-07-14 | 15 | Eleine | "Promise Of Apocalypse" | We Shall Remain | which it was always, but only sometimes, |
| 2023-07-14 | 16 | Edge Of Paradise | "One More Time" | Hologram | and nostalgia is usually also an exercise in orthogonality, |
| 2023-07-14 | 17 | Alia Tempora | "Superhero Mind" | Prismatica | a muscle you train to carry you along an ungrounded path. |
| 2023-07-14 | 18 | Project Renegade | "Apex" | Ultra Terra | But so are all of our disciplines and crafts, |
| 2023-07-14 | 19 | Rage Of Light | "Touch And Destroy" | single | ways to move through possibility-spaces without scattering them into entropy |
| 2023-07-14 | 20 | Existenter | "Be Unique" | Be Unique +3 | by the reckless passage of our wills. |
| 2023-07-14 | 21 | ArkRoyal | "Dystopia" | Clymenus | The simplest way to face evil is to name it, |
| 2023-07-14 | 22 | Sefirot | "Un Nuevo Viaje" | Viaje Al Fin del Mundo | but of course this is also the only way it can exist. |
| 2023-07-14 | 23 | Bjarla | "Духи гор" | single | We go to drive the demons out of the mountains, |
| 2023-07-14 | 25 | Woe | "Scavenger Prophets" | single | and when we get there they look up from some problem of their own. |
| 2023-07-14 | 26 | Sutekh Hexen | "Æscend Obsidia" | P:R:I:S:M | "Ah, good, you're here. Come, each of you, take a censer and stand on one of these gray stones. |
| 2023-07-14 | 27 | Hoarfrost Sky | "Irreplaceable" | single | No, sorry, the lighter gray ones with the two sets of three short lines. Yes, good. |
| 2023-07-14 | 28 | Nocte Obducta | "Sonne der Toten" | single | Aha. It's just as we feared. We have little time." |
| 2023-07-14 | 29 | NIDARE | "Weil sie es sagen" | Naehe und Flackern 3 | Somehow we have always arrived at a perilous moment. |
| 2023-07-14 | 30 | Psygnosis | "Öpik-Oort" | single | Often our grandest epics come down to this one idea, too. |
| 2023-07-14 | 31 | TesseracT | "War Of Being" | single | We have arrived at a perilous moment. |
| 2023-07-14 | 32 | Soen | "Memorial" | Memorial +1 | This allows us to feel special and necessary, |
| 2023-07-14 | 33 | Dååth | "Where the Slime Live (feat. Dave Davidson & Revocation)" | single | without having to already have been instrumental. |
| 2023-07-07 | 59 | Gacharic Spin | "The Come Up Chapter" | W | What if we took the guided tour of our own heart? |
| 2023-07-07 | 60 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Linger" | single | What if we learned to lead it, in the traditional costume of ourselves? |
| 2023-07-07 | 61 | Bloodbound | "Mimir's Crystal Eye" | Tales from the North | What if we listened as carefully to other people's secret truths before we cut off their heads as after? |
| 2023-07-07 | 62 | Feuerschwanz | "SGFRD Dragonslayer" | SGFRD Dragonslayer +3 | What if our fight songs are really about reticence? |
| 2023-07-07 | 63 | Degreed | "Who Are You (To Say)" | Public Address | What if we don't know and there's no one to ask? |
| 2023-07-07 | 64 | Shaft of Steel | "A Thousand Nights" | single | All stories begin with doubt. Don't we want more stories? |
| 2023-07-07 | 65 | Equilibrium | "Shelter" | single | Curiosity lures us out where the stars can see us, |
| 2023-07-07 | 66 | Ankor | "Darkbeat" | Darkbeat +2 | the near one and the far multitudes alike. |
| 2023-07-07 | 67 | Sharm | "Embark" | single | This is how a journey begins. |
| 2023-07-07 | 68 | Strega Nona | "Advisement" | single | Or, really, this is how we acknowledge a journey we can't help but already be on. |
| 2023-07-07 | 69 | Oceandvst | "Better Days" | single | The days repeat, the choruses, and it's often easier to get better at things than worse. |
| 2023-07-07 | 70 | Fen | "Monuments to Absence" | Monuments to Absence | Everyone is from somewhere that doesn't entirely exist any more, |
| 2023-07-07 | 71 | Lightlorn | "Amongs Stellar Remnants" | single | freshly obliterated amidst the pre-enduring ruins, |
| 2023-07-07 | 72 | Opus Aeterna | "Tristitia" | single | selectively wishful for however we have learned to tell ourselves it was, |
| 2023-07-07 | 73 | Copse | "Old Belief" | single | once. |
| 2023-07-07 | 74 | Altarage | "Cataract" | Cataract +2 | Is chaos a legible emotional state, |
| 2023-07-07 | 75 | Acherontas | "Intra Psyche" | single | or an inoperative thermodynamic metaphor |
| 2023-07-07 | 76 | Blackbraid | "The Wolf That Guides the Hunters Hand" | Blackbraid II | we choose precisely for its cautionary abstraction? |
| 2023-06-30 | 2 | Eclipse | "Hearts Collide" | single | OF THE LYRICS FOR A COVER |
| 2023-06-30 | 3 | SinHeresY | "Castaways" | single | OF THE BILLY JOEL SONG "We Didn't Start the Fire" |
| 2023-06-30 | 4 | Amaranthe | "Damnation Flame" | single | COVERING NEWSWORTHY ITEMS FROM 1989-2026 |
| 2023-06-30 | 5 | Dogma | "My First Peak" | single | WITH SOME AWKWARD CADENCES |
| 2023-06-30 | 6 | Dress the Dead | "Sinking in Ether" | Æther – EP 5 | AND MORE EXPOSITION AND ALLUSION |
| 2023-06-30 | 7 | Altersight | "Астарот" | single | THAN SIMPLE NAME-DROPPING |
| 2023-06-30 | 8 | Serenity | "Ritter Tod und Teufel (Knightfall)" | single | BUT AT LEAST ONE LINE PER YEAR |
| 2023-06-30 | 9 | Arendel | "Junto a Mí" | Sin Aliento | IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER |
| 2023-06-30 | 10 | Saurom | "Ojos Verdes" | El Pájaro Fantasma | AND ALSO WITHOUT LEAVING OUT THE LAST TWO VERSES |
| 2023-06-30 | 11 | Virgin Steele | "To Bind & Kill a God" | The Passion of Dionysus | - |
| 2023-06-30 | 12 | Bloodred Hourglass | "The End We Start From" | The End We Start From +2 | (1989) '89, new times, Berlin Wall falls |
| 2023-06-30 | 13 | Arshenic | "Extraterrestrial" | E.T. 4 | (1990) Nelson free, Web forms, yankees in a desert storm |
| 2023-06-30 | 14 | Spurv | "Urdråpene" | Urdråpene +1 | (1991) USS-ex-R, LA cannot get along |
| 2023-06-30 | 15 | Eldrvak | "Before the Storm" | single | (1992) Europeans unifying, SNL pope-defiling |
| 2023-06-30 | 16 | None | "Never Came Home" | Inevitable | - |
| 2023-06-30 | 17 | CELESTE | "Il se vide lentement" | single | (1993) President saxophone, you can't hide in a dome |
| 2023-06-23 | 11 | Silverhex | "Heaven on Earth" | Heaven on Earth +2 | imagine if we had said this; |
| 2023-06-23 | 12 | Metalite | "Disciples of the Stars" | Disciples of the Stars 3 | imagine if our difficult and researched sentences |
| 2023-06-23 | 13 | Degrees of Truth | "Thread of Life" | Alchemists | had been glibly typed out of nothing; |
| 2023-06-23 | 14 | Krashkarma | "15 Minutes Of Pain" | Falling To Pieces | imagine a future in which no one suffers more than 15 minutes of effort or intent. |
| 2023-06-23 | 15 | Andromida | "Abandon (feat. Daedric)" | single | The incompatible conceits of machine learning are that |
| 2023-06-23 | 16 | Absalem | "Haunted" | single | we are less trustworthy than our ghosts, |
| 2023-06-23 | 17 | Blackbriar | "Cicada" | Cicada +2 | but somehow also subliminally omniscient. |
| 2023-06-23 | 18 | Rainover | "A Constant Tide" | NOX | We tire of ascending to consult the oracle, |
| 2023-06-23 | 19 | Heart Line | "I am the night" | Rock 'N Roll Queen | so we have set out to auger the mountain down |
| 2023-06-23 | 20 | PassCode | "Lord of Light" | GROUNDSWELL ep. 4 | until wisdom is reduced to eye-level. |
| 2023-06-23 | 21 | Schrödinger's dog | "ADDICTED BUG" | single | "I was up there for your benefit, not mine", she says. |
| 2023-06-23 | 22 | 花冷え。 | "TOUSOU" | single | "Shh", we say. "We have a new machine to tell us what everybody would have expected you to say." |
| 2023-06-23 | 23 | Pimm's | "BEST WISHES" | single | We dreamed of teleporters, |
| 2023-06-23 | 25 | zanka | "Namaenonai Kimie" | single | without always crushing our toes. |
| 2023-06-16 | 1 | Thy Catafalque | "Alföld" | Alföld | We are emotionally infinite, but logistically constrained. |
| 2023-06-16 | 2 | Blut Aus Nord | "The Endless Multitude" | single | This is true both individually and collectively, |
| 2023-06-16 | 3 | Nocte Obducta | "Balder" | single | and although this is only one of the reasons why infinite personalized AI music is pointless, |
| 2023-06-16 | 4 | Boris | "The Look is a Flame" | Bright New Disease | it's enough. |
| 2023-06-16 | 5 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "I See You…but Never Clearly" | single | We already have more music than we have time, as listeners, |
| 2023-06-16 | 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. |
| 2023-06-16 | 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, |
| 2023-06-16 | 8 | Soulless | "The Supreme Resurgence" | The Supreme Resurgence | but that's neither the only imperative nor the only form of power. |
| 2023-06-16 | 9 | Arkona | "Razryvaya plot' ot bezyskhodnosti bytiya" | Kob' | Dissipation is not the same as distribution; |
| 2023-06-16 | 10 | Aprilmist | "Homesick" | single | there are no entropic utopias. |
| 2023-06-16 | 11 | Ethicist | "Monochrome" | Ethicist 4 | I'm reminded of this by something almost every day, |
| 2023-06-16 | 12 | AVKRVST | "Isolation" | The Approbation | but today by the laborious cross-checking of the outputs of different similar-song systems at work. |
| 2023-06-16 | 13 | Rivers of Nihil | "The Sub-Orbital Blues" | single | The new Thy Catafalque album just came out this week, |
| 2023-06-16 | 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, |
| 2023-06-16 | 15 | Horrendous | "Cult of Shaad'oah" | Cult of Shaad'oah +1 | so some people have already listened to it. |
| 2023-06-16 | 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. |
| 2023-06-16 | 17 | Nocte Obducta | "Karwoche" | single | "A csend hegyei" and "Testen túl", the second and third singles, have each been played 40k+ times. |
| 2023-06-16 | 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+. |
| 2023-06-16 | 19 | Spirit Adrift | "Barn Burner" | single | We are a small but enthusiastic audience, us attentive Thy Catafalque fans, |
| 2023-06-16 | 20 | OneFromTheNorth | "Church Burner" | Regime, Salvation & the Pyre | having learned over time that the project rewards patience and its songs reward immersion. |
| 2023-06-16 | 21 | Sarayasign | "Everdying Night" | single | There's no other band exactly like this one. |
| 2023-06-16 | 29 | Zorya | "Rise" | Mystic Lament | The current data-math I'm using for song-level Fans Also Like has significance thresholds, |
| 2023-06-16 | 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 |
| 2023-06-16 | 32 | PRO FORMA | "Tanikala" | single | and Filipino post-hardcore to obsess over, |
| 2023-06-16 | 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, |
| 2023-06-16 | 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. |
| 2023-06-16 | 35 | The Spectre Beneath | "Time Dilation" | single | The boring way, technically speaking, is to simply switch the level of abstraction from song to artist. |
| 2023-06-16 | 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, |
| 2023-06-16 | 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, |
| 2023-06-16 | 38 | Release Hallucination | "Sisters" | single | only a few days after its release, are still relevant. |
| 2023-06-16 | 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, |
| 2023-06-16 | 51 | HYDE | "TAKING THEM DOWN" | single | but that 25.5-hour metal playlist is nearly full of bands I already know and also love, |
| 2023-06-16 | 74 | Origami Angel | "The Brightest Days" | The Brightest Days | but it's almost all black metal of some sort. |
| 2023-06-16 | 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 |
| 2023-06-16 | 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. |
| 2023-06-09 | 1 | Black Veil Brides | "Temple of Love (feat. VV)" | single | In a long-ago era of plastic music, when I used to shelve my "metal" CDs separately from everything else, I kept The Sisters of Mercy in the metal section. |
| 2023-06-09 | 2 | Imperial Triumphant | "Paranoid Android" | single | I was aware, of course, that culturally speaking they were not a metal band, |
| 2023-06-09 | 3 | Violet Orlandi | "Moonage Daydream" | single | but my CD shelves weren't a cultural taxonomy, |
| 2023-06-09 | 4 | Crashing Atlas | "Capacities" | single | and my experience of the band resembled my experience of metal bands more than it didn't. |
| 2023-06-09 | 5 | Eleine | "Stand By The Flame" | Stand By The Flame +3 | This small-data assertion from an almost-pre-internet era retains maybe-surprising pertinence in my later project to model all the world's music genres and how people relate to them. |
| 2023-06-09 | 6 | Nereids | "Ascent" | single | Communities overlap, and project different vantages onto the same music. |
| 2023-06-09 | 7 | Degrees of Truth | "Alchemists" | single | Individual distinctions of taste cut cross-sections through these in slightly different dimensional rotations. |
| 2023-06-09 | 8 | Seas on the Moon | "Guiding Star" | single | New things you discover change your understanding of the things you already know. |
| 2023-06-09 | 9 | Kassogtha | "Awake" | single | I know a lot more bands now in the various dark interstices between gothic, industrial and metallic. |
| 2023-06-09 | 10 | Adgarios | "Sekhmet" | Raido | I also don't have to make that kind of material decision about music any more at all. |
| 2023-06-09 | 11 | Frayle | "Head Down" | single | Even metal and not-metal can overlap. |
| 2023-06-09 | 12 | Мещера | "Чёрный Туман" | Жатва | Neither Black Veil Brides nor Ville Valo (neither via HIM nor his VV solo project) count as metal according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, |
| 2023-06-09 | 13 | Thy Shade | "Go West" | single | but their collaboration on this gloriously bombastic cover of the already twice-immortal Sisters song "Temple of Love" |
| 2023-06-09 | 14 | 大山まき | "Ukiyo Drive" | Valkyrie | seems to me like a conclusive validation of my original point. |
| 2023-06-09 | 15 | Manntra | "The Hunter" | The Hunter +1 | Maybe sometimes you need to hear somebody play a song a different way |
| 2023-06-09 | 16 | Cyhra | "Life Is A Hurricane" | Life Is A Hurricane +1 | in order to hear the original a different way yourself. |
| 2023-06-09 | 17 | Art Nation | "The Last Of The Burned" | Inception | My CD-shelving metal separatism lives on in playlist subtagging here, |
| 2023-06-09 | 18 | Shakra | "Devil Left Hell" | Invincible | and in my long-ongoing curation of Exoskeleton, my playlist of metal covers of non-metal songs, |
| 2023-06-09 | 19 | Boys From Heaven | "Sailing On" | The Descendant | where you'll note that I have embraced the coexistence of metal and not-metal to assert that "Temple of Love" qualifies. |
| 2023-06-09 | 20 | The Defiants | "What Are We Waiting For" | Drive | To aggressively generalize, there are three main categories of such covers: |
| 2023-06-09 | 21 | Robledo | "Real World" | single | versions that evoke the latent metallic elements of their source material; |
| 2023-06-09 | 22 | Arch Echo | "Final Pitch" | single | versions that allow the source material to expose some hidden vulnerability in metal itself; |
| 2023-06-09 | 23 | Ray Alder | "Hands of Time" | II | and covers that sever this connection with a rusty broadsword and draw some new creature with the flowing blood. |
| 2023-06-09 | 24 | Metopia | "Rise Above" | Anthropozän 5 | Violet Orlandi has done some of all of these, but this deconstruction of Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" |
| 2023-06-09 | 25 | Mors Subita | "Don't Stop" | Don't Stop +3 | resembles Tori Amos' dissection of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" more than it does the BVBVV celebration of "Temple of Love". |
| 2023-06-09 | 26 | Scar Symmetry | "Overworld" | The Singularity (Phase II - Xenotaph) | And Imperial Triumphant's translation of "Paranoid Android" from Morlock to Klingon |
| 2023-06-09 | 27 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Instill" | single | is only maybe a little less startling than those because Radiohead's oblique original is already a cloud of its own anxious noises. |
| 2023-06-09 | 28 | Johnny the Boy | "Die Already" | You | "Cloud of anxious noises" is definitely a vibe I appreciate, |
| 2023-06-09 | 29 | GUHTS | "White Noise" | single | but I think it's also fair to say that I like clouds and noises more than anxiety, |
| 2023-06-09 | 31 | Fen | "Wracked" | single | more exuberantly than I do claustrophilic perimeters of self-doubt. |
| 2023-06-09 | 32 | Prognan | "Grob" | Sve Je Tiho Na Istocnom Frontu | I would rather think in stories about what we can become |
| 2023-06-09 | 33 | Uada | "Retraversing the Void" | single | than in disdain, however deserved, for what we have been. |
| 2023-06-09 | 34 | Verwilderd | "Prophecy Of Chaos" | single | Even my nostalgia tends to recall obsolete futurisms |
| 2023-06-09 | 35 | Krigsgrav | "The Black Oak" | single | more often than it rues abandoned traditions. |
| 2023-06-09 | 36 | Vreid | "Flammen" | single | I do not miss CDs, |
| 2023-06-09 | 37 | Thomas Cucé | "Eraser" | single | and I liked Radiohead better before they were important. |
| 2023-06-09 | 38 | Nik Nocturnal | "Devour" | single | Find an abyss to throw yourself into. |
| 2023-06-09 | 39 | Madmans Esprit | "죽었으면" | single | The endless darkness is rarely either. |
| 2023-06-09 | 40 | HAILROSE | "REPTILIAN" | single | You cross a boundary between logics and the perspective flips. |
| 2023-06-09 | 41 | DAMNED | "Fla:ill" | single | There's no moral precedence to frailty, |
| 2023-06-09 | 112 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "Ps 141 (Lord, I cry out to You … Let my prayer be set before You as incense)" | Kyrie Eleison | betraying our loneliness, but also revealing our position, |
| 2023-06-02 | 13 | RAY | "Frontire" | single | I speak Japanese well enough to program drums for pop-metal alt-idol backing tracks, |
| 2023-06-02 | 23 | DISH// | "エンドロールは悲しくない" | single | Kevin Eires makes a perfectly good Japanese-style idol despite being a Swedish kid whose dad was in Swedish American-style metal bands, |
| 2023-06-02 | 78 | Lancer | "Fan The Flames" | single | I learned guitar the same way I learned Japanese: |
| 2023-06-02 | 79 | Gloryhammer | "Fife Eternal" | Return to the Kingdom of Fife | barely, as a way of listening only semi-wordlessly |
| 2023-06-02 | 80 | Primal Fear | "Another Hero" | single | rather than a form of heroism. |
| 2023-06-02 | 81 | Sylvania | "Aunque Mi Alma Se Desgarre" | single | But this is the difference between a journey and a crusade, |
| 2023-06-02 | 82 | Sylosis | "Poison for the Lost" | Poison for the Lost +1 | and why we need not tour ruins in order to rebuild them, |
| 2023-06-02 | 83 | Omnium Gatherum | "Sacred" | Slasher - EP 4 | nor churches to believe. |
| 2023-06-02 | 84 | Dååth | "Purified by Vengeance (feat. Mark Holcomb, Periphery & Mick Gordon)" | single | We are not purified by vengeance, |
| 2023-06-02 | 85 | Minas Morgul | "Trümmer" | Nebelung | nor made whole by the recapture of fallen cities. |
| 2023-06-02 | 86 | Atlases | "Eyelids Of The New Dawn" | Between The Day & I | We do not purify, we begin again. |
| 2023-06-02 | 87 | The Anix | "Vitamin D (feat. Kellii Scott)" | NIGHTVISION | We are never rebuilt, we are only fortified. |
| 2023-06-02 | 88 | The Monolith Deathcult | "I Spew Thee out of My Mouth" | single | Ostensibly anti-radiant art measures the spaces between the rays of light, |
| 2023-06-02 | 89 | Johnny the Boy | "Endlessly Senseless" | Endlessly Senseless +2 | but to the same end, |
| 2023-06-02 | 90 | Thantifaxath | "Solar Witch" | Hive Mind Narcosis | and at the same cursed remove. |
| 2023-06-02 | 91 | Hemina | "Revelations" | single | Progress is abstrusely calibrated |
| 2023-06-02 | 92 | Soen | "Unbreakable" | single | and frequently predicated on willfully selective denial. |
| 2023-06-02 | 93 | Anubis Gate | "Dissonance Consonance" | Interference | We pretend to be better subsets of ourselves |
| 2023-06-02 | 94 | Lacuna Coil | "Never Dawn" | single | in order to triangulate the space between despair |
| 2023-06-02 | 95 | Metopia | "New Dawn" | single | and determination. |
| 2023-06-02 | 96 | Inraza | "Crowning" | single | The difference between idol groups and metalcore bands is mostly semantic, |
| 2023-06-02 | 97 | Linx | "The Hunter" | single | but the difference between anything is semantic, |
| 2023-06-02 | 98 | Dahlia | "Fix Me" | single | we talk inevitably about the space between us |
| 2023-06-02 | 99 | Tales of Time | "Little Hope" | single | in order to adjust its pressure so that we draw closer or apart. |
| 2023-06-02 | 100 | Brightstorm | "Powerful" | single | When we feel impatient, we blast that space apart, |
| 2023-06-02 | 101 | A Dark Reborn | "Last Echo" | Ritual 3 | and then whirl it dramatically back together with majestic gestures. |
| 2023-06-02 | 102 | Hellscore | "The Eagle Flies Alone" | single | Sometimes the wind blows the smoke the wrong way, and gestures that should have been majestic turn out to look ridiculous. |
| 2023-06-02 | 110 | Loather | "Mortuary" | single | I could probably have learned to play black metal drums, too. |
| 2023-06-02 | 141 | Omnium Gatherum | "Maniac - Cover Version" | Slasher - EP 4 | Discipline is overrated as a prerequisite, |
| 2023-06-02 | 142 | Skar | "Blinding Lights" | single | underrated as an adaptation. |
| 2023-06-02 | 143 | Fame on Fire | "Fast Car" | single | We polish our machines, not noticing that their radiance is entirely reflective. |
| 2023-05-26 | 1 | Mesarthim | "Arrival, Pt. 6" | Arrival | Our journeys are not defined by their ends, |
| 2023-05-26 | 2 | Mournful Congregation | "The Forbidden Abysm" | The Exuviae of Gods - Part 2 | which are always already familiar or about to become so, |
| 2023-05-26 | 3 | Usnea | "Bathed in Light" | Bathed in Light | but by the least expected points they pass through. |
| 2023-05-26 | 4 | Kostnatění | "Řemen" | Úpal | You do not know, from the first :15 of a Mesarthim song, what the next 9:45 will be like. |
| 2023-05-26 | 5 | Yakuza | "2is1" | Sutra | You don't even know what the second :15 will be like. |
| 2023-05-26 | 6 | Boris | "Not Surprised" | Not Surprised +1 | Black metal has genre conventions, of course, |
| 2023-05-26 | 7 | Immortal | "Thunders Of Darkness" | War Against All | sonic and structural, |
| 2023-05-26 | 8 | Cloak | "Black Flame Eternal" | Black Flame Eternal | but it is also predicated on a sense of cryptic expeditionary curiosity. |
| 2023-05-26 | 9 | Horrendous | "Ontological Mysterium" | single | You might be able to limp through a 2:15 pop song on a single chord-vamp, |
| 2023-05-26 | 10 | Nattverd | "En gammel Kriger Trosser Vind Og Vaer" | I Helvetes Forakt | but you won't last 10 minutes that way, |
| 2023-05-26 | 11 | Blackbraid | "The Spirit Returns" | single | or else your listeners won't. |
| 2023-05-26 | 12 | Black Autumn | "Come Cold Morning Bliss" | The Harvest Of Our Bitter Labours | It's possible to listen to experimental metal as background music, |
| 2023-05-26 | 13 | Krigsgrav | "An Everflowing Vessel" | single | but only in the way that it's possible to complain about the wifi on your commuter train |
| 2023-05-26 | 14 | Avdagata | "Shimmering Black" | Shimmering Black +1 | as it is passing through the Fifth Circle of Hell and you're sitting on the side with the best views. |
| 2023-05-26 | 15 | Aetherian | "ΠΥΡ ΑΕΝΑΟΝ" | ΠΥΡ ΑΕΝΑΟΝ +1 | The essential dogmatic schism of black metal is the inversion of various acquired metal tropes |
| 2023-05-26 | 16 | Kalmah | "Veil of Sin" | Kalmah | into proscriptions: |
| 2023-05-26 | 17 | Balance Breach | "Heart Like Siberia" | ABYZMAL | no preening machismo, |
| 2023-05-26 | 18 | Ray Alder | "My Oblivion" | single | no texture-mapped superficial floridity, |
| 2023-05-26 | 19 | Induction | "A Call Beyond" | single | no sing-alongs, |
| 2023-05-26 | 20 | Sirenia | "Wintry Heart" | 1977 | no simplistic overbearing clarity. |
| 2023-05-26 | 21 | Rage Of Light | "The Scent Of Dead Leaves" | single | All these reasonable qualities are then extrapolated obsessively, |
| 2023-05-26 | 22 | Krashkarma | "Survive The Afterlife" | single | well into the abstract perverse, |
| 2023-05-26 | 23 | Aline Happ | "Sea of Dreams" | single | until even band-name legibility is transcended. |
| 2023-05-26 | 24 | Reasons Behind | "A New Breed" | Architecture of an Ego | It's as telling an irony as anything that the flight from superhero logotypes |
| 2023-05-26 | 25 | Edge Of Paradise | "Soldiers Of Danger" | single | ends up as an anti-aesthetic so consolidated that one artist could become its de facto registrar. |
| 2023-05-26 | 26 | ÊTRE | "Apolune" | single | I have not, obviously, adopted black metal as an exclusionary moral code. |
| 2023-05-26 | 27 | Blind Hex | "Halcyon" | Dystopia | Black metal aspires to a grim asceticism, |
| 2023-05-26 | 28 | The Foreshadowing | "We the Others" | Forsaken Songs | and I stand by, admiringly, offering to be helpful |
| 2023-05-26 | 29 | Oryad | "Blood" | Sacred & Profane | by collecting the disavowed brightnesses. |
| 2023-05-26 | 30 | Mass of Amara | "Rebirth" | single | NO CLEAN SINGING, you bark. |
| 2023-05-26 | 31 | Opus Aeterna | "Lumen Ad Mortem" | Tempus Fugit | Excellent, I say. |
| 2023-05-26 | 32 | Sirenia | "A Thousand Scars" | 1977 | I love singing, |
| 2023-05-26 | 117 | Kuggur | "Aurinko ja kuu" | single | Some of the places you have not been, you will have to invent: |
| 2023-05-26 | 118 | Maud The Moth | "Jardincito De Rosa Y Tierra" | Bordando El Manto Terrestre | small spaces of grief and nurture, |
| 2023-05-26 | 119 | Sutekh Hexen | "Fractal: Void" | single | tiny vortices of furious resolution, |
| 2023-05-26 | 120 | Xasthur | "A Future To Fear II" | single | a place where you can meet with those who may have betrayed you, |
| 2023-05-26 | 121 | Phyllomedusa | "I Nourish and Extinguish" | Evading the Cauldron (One Fret Ov Death) | a pond deep enough to conceal beasts. |
| 2023-05-26 | 131 | SOM | "Personal Jesus" | Faith 4 | The gargoyles can now see forever, and all their new songs are about what it was like to have lived briefly among us. |
| 2023-05-26 | 132 | Silverhex | "Don't You Want Me" | Don't You Want Me +2 | But then our songs, too, are about living briefly among us. They look down, we look up. Neither song ends like this. Not yet. |
| 2023-05-19 | 57 | Eleine | "War Das Alles" | War Das Alles +2 | but the deeply internalized belief that you have not yet heard your favorite song. |
| 2023-05-19 | 58 | Within Temptation | "Wireless" | Wireless | It could come from anywhere, in the most familiar or most unexpected form, |
| 2023-05-19 | 59 | Desdæmona | "Nemesis (Blackened Heart)" | single | but accepting this idea is only the beginning of a transformation |
| 2023-05-19 | 60 | Walk in Darkness | "Towards Chang'an" | single | from reductive acquisitiveness |
| 2023-05-19 | 61 | Degrees of Truth | "Over the Tide" | single | to openhearted receptivity. |
| 2023-05-19 | 62 | Solarcycles | "Raven's Call" | single | Once you realize that you might fall in love with a song |
| 2023-05-19 | 63 | Pyramaze | "Alliance" | Alliance +2 | you would never have heard before, |
| 2023-05-19 | 64 | Arogya | "Spell" | SuperNatural | you're about 3 minutes from realizing that if this happens once, |
| 2023-05-19 | 65 | Reasons Behind | "The Flame Inside" | single | it can happen again, |
| 2023-05-19 | 66 | False Memories | "The Other Side" | single | and then the only possible stable state |
| 2023-05-19 | 67 | Divided Island | "To the End of Life" | single | is that every new song could be your favorite for its duration. |
| 2023-05-19 | 68 | The Artificials | "Soul Catcher" | single | The only end is rapture. |
| 2023-05-19 | 69 | Red Eleven | "Blackbird" | single | Music is not an intricately intermediated dating app, |
| 2023-05-19 | 70 | Lucifer | "A Coffin Has No Silver Lining - The Sistine Version" | single | it's a joy conductor. |
| 2023-05-19 | 71 | Stormburst | "Get Up On Your Feet" | III | Persona crushes are not misconstruals of the boundary between artist and art, |
| 2023-05-19 | 72 | Stardust | "Losing Me" | single | they are resonances with ways of being. |
| 2023-05-19 | 73 | Imperium | "Together Forever" | Never Surrender | Crushes are a pragmatics of immersion in delight. |
| 2023-05-19 | 74 | House of Shakira | "Toxic Train" | XIT | The new category I've only, this week, fully realized I have, |
| 2023-05-19 | 75 | Mystic Prophecy | "Demons Of The Night" | Hellriot | as the rest of this long awaited album of Emma Hewitt songs spins through my obsession, |
| 2023-05-19 | 76 | Kataklysm | "Bringer of Vengeance" | single | is voice crush. |
| 2023-05-19 | 77 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "Where Pain Begins" | single | I know very little about Emma Hewitt, |
| 2023-05-19 | 78 | Sweet Sadness | "A Journey in Failure" | As Failure Was Part of the Journey 3 | and even less about my other voice crush, ReoNa. |
| 2023-05-19 | 79 | Thulcandra | "In the Eye of Heaven" | Hail the Abyss | I am not going to run into them at Whole Foods. |
| 2023-05-19 | 80 | Frostnatt | "Isens Rike" | Den Russiske Frosten | I'm at Whole Foods to buy food to take home and cook for my family, anyway, |
| 2023-05-19 | 81 | moreru | "夕暮れに伝えて" | single | and I'm not going to meet people because I'm wearing noise-canceling earbuds |
| 2023-05-19 | 103 | Acadence | "Standstill" | single | but to hear more of them, |
| 2023-05-19 | 104 | Corrupt-R | "Harbinger" | Lost in Millennia | for joy to be liberated by disembodiment |
| 2023-05-19 | 116 | Arjen Lucassen's Supersonic Revolution | "Children Of The Revolution - Bonus Track" | Golden Age of Music | the ways they failed, |
| 2023-05-19 | 117 | Arctic Rain | "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" | single | how that failure made you kinder. |
| 2023-05-19 | 118 | Ghost | "See No Evil" | Phantomime 5 | These songs spin themselves into a reflective sheen that shows us ourselves, |
| 2023-05-19 | 122 | Sarah Jezebel Deva | "Cities in Dust" | single | That's what it sounds like. |
| 2023-05-12 | 28 | heidi. | "エゴ" | エゴ +1 | but the pain you tolerate, you can't unhave. |
| 2023-05-12 | 29 | Sefirot | "Quimera" | single | Tiny victories don't always compound, |
| 2023-05-12 | 30 | The Dark Side of the Moon | "New Horizons" | Metamorphosis | but you can give them a chance. |
| 2023-05-12 | 31 | MagiTech | "Love and Pain" | The Power Within EP 5 | Love first, and maybe time will expire before the reciprocal pain arrives. |
| 2023-05-12 | 32 | Unén | "Made Of Stone" | single | Or maybe love and pain are not complementary inevitabilities, but two different ways the probability wave function could collapse. |
| 2023-05-12 | 33 | Averlanche | "In the Theater of Fire" | Arctic Atlas | Whenever Schrödinger leaves to mail a parcel, we take the cat out of the box and let it run around the apartment. |
| 2023-05-12 | 34 | Yenne | "The Wolves" | single | It's safe enough in there when he's around, |
| 2023-05-12 | 35 | Sicksense | "Feed Them To The Wolves" | single | or other wolves who know too much about how our particles hum. |
| 2023-05-12 | 36 | Stitched Up Heart | "To The Wolves" | single | The missing verses tell awkward parts of the story, sometimes, |
| 2023-05-12 | 37 | A Dark Reborn | "Ritual" | single | but that's how we live: |
| 2023-05-12 | 38 | Belle Morte | "Blame Me" | single | culpably, |
| 2023-05-12 | 39 | Art Nation | "1001" | single | expansively finite, |
| 2023-05-12 | 40 | In Victory | "While Singing a Final Song" | single | grabbing at premature and unearned closure. |
| 2023-05-12 | 41 | Ray Alder | "Waiting for Some Sun" | single | The planet has a way of moving its darkness to warn you that fate |
| 2023-05-12 | 42 | Karmanjakah | "Listening" | Ancient Skills EP 4 | is only an avoidant way of talking about the future |
| 2023-05-12 | 43 | URNE | "Becoming The Ocean" | single | as if you have already willed it into being. |
| 2023-05-12 | 44 | A Pregnant Light | "Mandarine" | Mandarine / Tangèrin 2 | But the light has come 93 million miles to fall down at your door, |
| 2023-05-12 | 45 | Thy Catafalque | "Testen túl" | single | and the darkness never leaves home. |
| 2023-05-12 | 46 | REX | "Laplace" | single | This is why the hero taking a journey is heroic by default, |
| 2023-05-12 | 47 | Óreiða | "The Path" | The Eternal | and thus why all paths are exploratory. |
| 2023-05-12 | 48 | Impetuous Ritual | "Sanguinary Abstraction" | Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis | They do not hurry us past our world, |
| 2023-05-12 | 49 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Labyrinthian" | single | they take us to every one of its hidden places |
| 2023-05-12 | 50 | Cattle Decapitation | "Just Another Body" | Terrasite | and dare us to step off and find: |
| 2023-05-12 | 89 | Bernth | "Unreal" | Unreal +1 | We do not listen to stories in order to spot their untruths, |
| 2023-05-12 | 90 | Their Dogs Were Astronauts | "Panopticon" | Momentum | we hear them to hear more. |
| 2023-05-12 | 94 | Charlotte Wessels | "Mary On A Cross" | single | The bands we leave become chapters of our legends, |
| 2023-05-12 | 95 | Otep | "You Should See Me In A Crown" | single | and cautions against assignments of power. |
| 2023-05-12 | 96 | SOM | "Policy of Truth" | Policy of Truth +1 | "Again", we only have to say: |
| 2023-05-05 | 55 | Daeria | "El Alquimista" | Morfeo | so the other robots can see what it feels like to confuse yourself with your skin. |
| 2023-05-05 | 56 | Lumsk | "En Harmoni" | Fremmede Toner | Woody gets back from South Africa and heads north into Norway in search of trolls, |
| 2023-05-05 | 57 | Sammary | "Cascades" | single | into lands that do not exist to be claimed. |
| 2023-05-05 | 58 | Tulip | "Black Rainbow" | The Perpetual Dream | We rise up, |
| 2023-05-05 | 59 | Shattered Vessels | "Beautiful Lies" | single | and then there we are, standing, |
| 2023-05-05 | 60 | Delta | "The Tower" | single | at the black gates. |
| 2023-05-05 | 61 | Crown Solace | "Dangerous Eyes" | single | They just unlatch. |
| 2023-05-05 | 62 | Nereids | "Flying to the Sun" | single | We had problems with feral pigs, and we always liked ironwork. |
| 2023-05-05 | 63 | MistoriA | "SANDGLASS" | CURSE 6 | There's no dark empire, |
| 2023-05-05 | 64 | Metamorph | "Spellbound" | Spellbound Empress 6 | but we always kind of wanted one, too, |
| 2023-05-05 | 65 | The Spectre Beneath | "Forsaken... We All Fall" | single | so we wrote some of its songs. |
| 2023-05-05 | 66 | Friendship Commanders | "Fail" | Fail +1 | We have plenty of millet. |
| 2023-05-05 | 67 | Cyan Kicks | "I Never Said 4ever" | I Never Said 4ever | Too much, really. We ordered some at the beginning of Covid, |
| 2023-05-05 | 68 | Halocene | "Maleficent" | Maleficent 6 | and confused boxes with cases, and you can only eat a little of it at a time. |
| 2023-05-05 | 69 | Barbe-Q-Barbies | "Come Back" | single | You can't chew any faster with AI. |
| 2023-05-05 | 70 | How We End | "Levitate" | single | Superfoods, supergroups: |
| 2023-05-05 | 71 | VENUES | "Haunted House" | Haunted House +2 | terrible biographies you write yourself like you imagine you want to be adored. |
| 2023-05-05 | 72 | Scarlet Aura | "Îngeri și demoni" | Rock în sânge și voință | You don't need to understand Romanian to tell that this is a metal band. |
| 2023-05-05 | 73 | Once There Was | "Kom Nu" | Kom Nu +1 | Ironwork, vines: |
| 2023-05-05 | 74 | Pagan Throne | "Mourning Night" | single | metonymy for entwined belief. |
| 2023-05-05 | 75 | Winterstorm | "The Phoenix Died (Remember)" | The Phoenix Died (Remember) +2 | Marching is the self-conscious version of bouncing, |
| 2023-05-05 | 76 | Horn | "Höhen" | 20 | and you learn something about yourself when you find out which one you're embarrassed to do while you're being watched. |
| 2023-05-05 | 77 | Kostnatění | "Rukojmí empatie" | single | The reverent evocation of evil |
| 2023-05-05 | 78 | Spirit Adrift | "I Shall Return" | single | is an allegorical alternative to millions of actual people living as foes. |
| 2023-05-05 | 79 | Stormburst | "Peace Of Mind" | single | We find the robot standing in the hallway, looking at itself in the mirror, |
| 2023-05-05 | 80 | Tygers Of Pan Tang | "Light of Hope" | Bloodlines | one hand tracing spherical figures at its side. |
| 2023-05-05 | 81 | Winger | "Heaven's Falling" | Seven | There are schools that will teach you the fifth, sixth and seventh chords, |
| 2023-05-05 | 82 | Gloryhammer | "Holy Flaming Hammer of Unholy Cosmic Frost" | Holy Flaming Hammer of Unholy Cosmic Frost +1 | but we've heard a millions songs with those already, too. |
| 2023-05-05 | 83 | CALETWOLF | "ASTRAY" | ASTRAY +1 | The shadows of K-pop and reggaeton are projections of the light from your eyes, |
| 2023-05-05 | 84 | Finally | "tou" | single | and thus will confirm any canon you choose to love: |
| 2023-05-05 | 101 | Vintersea | "Devil's Churn" | Woven Into Ashes | Sometimes the bounce is more of a sway, |
| 2023-05-05 | 102 | Wounds of Recollection | "You Were Never Loved" | You Were Never Loved +1 | a thrashing in near-darkness that renders loneliness as triumphalism |
| 2023-05-05 | 103 | Blackbraid | "Moss Covered Bones on the Altar of the Moon" | single | until your flailing empty hand hits another. |
| 2023-05-05 | 104 | Rise to the Sky | "Funeral For My Home" | single | What if the AI stopped trying to fill the empty space in front of each of us, |
| 2023-05-05 | 105 | Ingrina | "Ice Flares" | single | and instead poured its love into the fissures that divide us: |
| 2023-05-05 | 106 | Heretoir | "At Dusk" | At Dusk +2 | from each other, |
| 2023-05-05 | 107 | Blissful Euphoria | "Celestial Melancholy" | single | from the void, |
| 2023-05-05 | 108 | Forgotten. | "In A Constant State Of Pain Part 1" | Forgive Me Please | from joy. |
| 2023-05-05 | 109 | Boris | "You Are the Beginning" | single | You are the beginning. |
| 2023-05-05 | 110 | Minas Morgul | "Inter Stellas" | single | You are watched by chattering idiot gods |
| 2023-05-05 | 111 | Omega Virus | "THOUSAND YARD STARE" | THOUSAND YARD STARE +2 | who will try to finish your sandwiches. |
| 2023-05-05 | 112 | Violet Cold | "Fluorescence" | single | Woody died before loop pedals and reverb models. |
| 2023-05-05 | 120 | Kadmium | "Tell It To My Heart - Metal Cover Version" | single | but that we're the only ones. |
| 2023-05-05 | 122 | UMC | "Remedy" | Remedy +3 | but at least we have each other. |
| 2023-05-05 | 123 | PelleK | "Kizuna no Kiseki (From "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba") - Full Japanese Version" | single | And millet. |
| 2023-04-28 | 1 | Teramaze | "Navigate In Solitude" | Dalla Volta | I love everything I've ever loved, basically and intricately, |
| 2023-04-28 | 2 | TAKH | "Salomonne" | single | and like every other non-labor, love might reward time or effort |
| 2023-04-28 | 3 | Perfect View | "Birth" | Bushido | but never requires it. |
| 2023-04-28 | 4 | Degreed | "Big Plans" | single | I could easily love "絆ノ奇跡", today, as much as I ever loved "Red Barchetta" or "Wonderland" or "Silent All These Years". |
| 2023-04-28 | 5 | Seventh Crystal | "Shut Up" | single | I could love a jubilant Guyanese carnival proposition I only just heard |
| 2023-04-28 | 6 | Arogya | "Fade Away" | Fade Away +3 | as much as a pensive shipwreck dirge I grew up on. |
| 2023-04-28 | 7 | Chrome Waves | "Forward" | Earth Will Shed Its Skin | These loves do not flourish in isolation, exactly, but they invoke associative networks, |
| 2023-04-28 | 8 | Rave The Reqviem | "How To Hate Again" | How To Hate Again +3 | not logistical ones. |
| 2023-04-28 | 9 | Krashkarma | "Falling To Pieces" | single | Every love evokes another. |
| 2023-04-28 | 10 | Ewiniar | "Cyanide" | single | Joy and elation compound. |
| 2023-04-28 | 11 | DAMPF | "No Angels Alive" | single | If it did, if love were sedimentary instead of sentimental, |
| 2023-04-28 | 12 | Reasons Behind | "I³" | single | it would be hard to compete with a good progressive-rock epic |
| 2023-04-28 | 13 | Ignea | "Camera Obscura" | Dreams of Lands Unseen | for my accreted adorations. |
| 2023-04-28 | 14 | Cornoctuan | "Silence of the Dead Birds" | Beyond the Polaris | My parents no longer live in the house where I grew up, |
| 2023-04-28 | 15 | Enchantya | "Lunar Fire" | Cerberus | and we changed the plaid-grid carpets before we moved out, anyway, |
| 2023-04-28 | 16 | Degrees of Truth | "Flightmare" | single | but I can feel the patterns of it on my chest, still, |
| 2023-04-28 | 17 | Locus Animæ | "Crisalide" | Crisalide +1 | from hours spent in front of a record-player wearing whatever ungainly contraptions passed for headphones in the 80s, |
| 2023-04-28 | 18 | Bullet to the Heart | "Death By The Sea" | Death, Oddities & Romance 5 | listening to stories of Syrinx or Cygnus X-1 |
| 2023-04-28 | 19 | Isiliel | "Koumyou Kishi" | Moonbow Genesis | and probably reading some installment of Future History or Ringworld. |
| 2023-04-28 | 20 | Cran Arcanaria | "Karasu" | Raging Raven | "Progressive rock" was always a preposterous claim, |
| 2023-04-28 | 21 | Roselia | "THRONE OF ROSE" | THRONE OF ROSE +2 | as is plainly obvious from the fact that most of the ways 2023 Teramaze is different from 1983 Rush |
| 2023-04-28 | 92 | Perdition Winds | "Predecessors to Flesh" | Burning Spiritual Crypts | or a nation's bard wins a final sundown. |
| 2023-04-28 | 93 | Taurwen | "Reign of Death is Prophecy" | Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit 5 | Permission to remember the departed as if they remain in their songs and your pictures. |
| 2023-04-28 | 94 | SOM | "Enjoy The Silence" | single | All we ever needed, |
| 2023-04-28 | 95 | Sugar Horse | "Head Over Heels" | Head Over Heels +1 | unwasted time. |
| 2023-04-21 | 42 | Isiliel | "浄土独唱" | single | and if you don't want to do it, you should probably let them. |
| 2023-04-21 | 43 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "ロミオとシンデレラ" | single | Anything you can automate becomes teleologically neutral and thus morally obsolete. |
| 2023-04-21 | 44 | Tulip | "Starseed" | single | We could send robots to colonize Mars, and accomplish nothing; |
| 2023-04-21 | 45 | Sefirot | "Desde Tu Sombra" | single | add just one human to the mission, chosen carefully, |
| 2023-04-21 | 46 | Eleine | "Never Forget" | Never Forget +1 | and at least we would have a productive use of penis-shaped rockets; |
| 2023-04-21 | 47 | Against Myself | "The Tempest" | Tides Of Insanity | add a community and we would have a human diaspora |
| 2023-04-21 | 48 | As Everything Unfolds | "Saint or Rogue" | Ultraviolet | out of this maybe-poisoned well. |
| 2023-04-21 | 49 | Saurom | "El Pájaro Fantasma" | single | Precarious years accelerate into ungovernable weeks and unmanageable moments, |
| 2023-04-21 | 50 | Liv Kristine | "Our Immortal Day" | River of Diamonds | and yet somehow we still write songs about forever |
| 2023-04-21 | 51 | Anna Fiori | "Torments of My Past" | single | or forevers occluded, |
| 2023-04-21 | 52 | Sirenia | "Deadlight" | Deadlight +1 | arrayed in gothic grace. |
| 2023-04-21 | 53 | RedHook | "Inarticulate" | Postcard From A Living Hell | Show me a talking machine with the sense to shut up, |
| 2023-04-21 | 54 | Evermore | "I Am the Flame" | In Memoriam | or enough curiosity to be distracted, |
| 2023-04-21 | 55 | Mob Rules | "Hymn Of The Damned" | single | or enough self-awareness for hypothesis to be heroic. |
| 2023-04-21 | 56 | Immortal | "Wargod" | Wargod +1 | Show me gods, for once, that are not iconographs of our weaknesses. |
| 2023-04-21 | 57 | Dååth | "The Philosopher (feat. Dan Sugarman, Ice Nine Kills & Rafael Trujillo)" | single | Show me the empty appointed shells of sinecurial oracles |
| 2023-04-21 | 58 | All For Metal | "Mountain of Power" | Mountain of Power 5 | who quit the mountains of answers in search of more questions than the ones they were given. |
| 2023-04-21 | 59 | Arjen Lucassen's Supersonic Revolution | "Golden Age Of Music" | Golden Age Of Music +2 | Show me a new song made out of love of old songs, |
| 2023-04-21 | 64 | The Dark Atom | "Time" | Time +1 | in dimmer-later performative ambient-lo-fi reticence |
| 2023-04-21 | 65 | Teramaze | "These Crystal Walls" | single | instead of dying in his parents' house. |
| 2023-04-21 | 66 | Avalanch | "Sonrisa de un Ángel" | El Dilema de los Dioses | Angels do not return to us our losses, |
| 2023-04-21 | 96 | Botanist | "Selenotrope" | single | are a petulant response to earnest provocations. |
| 2023-04-21 | 97 | Korribann | "Birth of Tragedy" | Autarkeia | You accomplish no good by refusing to automate your job and then doing it badly. |
| 2023-04-21 | 98 | Vargrav | "Encircle the Spectral Dimension" | Encircle The Spectral Dimension 3 | Evil's core value-proposition is equating the banality of intent with the nominality of redemption. |
| 2023-04-21 | 99 | Thy Catafalque | "A csend hegyei" | single | You climb a treacherous ascent to get answers, and at the top you find a sign that says "Welcome to the Mountain of Silence", and a vacant house that can be yours. |
| 2023-04-21 | 100 | Blissful Euphoria | "The King's Tavern" | single | I fear AI sentience, but only the way I already fear all the unruly, irrational sentience we already are surrounded by and comprise. |
| 2023-04-14 | 10 | Aimi | "MAGICAL DESTROYER" | single | and won't be sold anything by association with grief if there's grief, |
| 2023-04-14 | 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, |
| 2023-04-14 | 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 |
| 2023-04-14 | 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. |
| 2023-04-14 | 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, |
| 2023-04-14 | 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. |
| 2023-04-14 | 35 | Sepsiss | "Bleedlines" | single | I do like meeting and talking to other human beings, |
| 2023-04-14 | 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. |
| 2023-04-14 | 37 | Smoulder | "Dragonslayer's Doom" | Violent Creed of Vengeance | Art is not a proxy for human relationships, |
| 2023-04-14 | 38 | Rage Of Light | "Upriser" | single | which is why making it more immersive is not inherently a goal. |
| 2023-04-14 | 39 | Hail Sagan | "Hyperphantastic" | Disclosure 6 | I spent 6 hours of my life watching 2 Avatar movies in I guess a total of 6D, |
| 2023-04-14 | 40 | Evermore | "Queen of Woe" | single | and Cameron spent $700 million making them, |
| 2023-04-14 | 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" |
| 2023-04-14 | 42 | Tete Novoa | "Seremos Tú y Yo" | single | if somehow only those two things have been properly nominated. |
| 2023-04-14 | 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 |
| 2023-04-14 | 44 | Kvelertak | "Krøterveg Te Helvete - Single Version" | single | than the dry, clattering kick-drum gallops in "The Last Battle", |
| 2023-04-14 | 45 | Atreyu | "God/Devil" | The Hope Of A Spark 4 | and although I learned something about myself from sitting through the second film, |
| 2023-04-14 | 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, |
| 2023-04-14 | 47 | Overkill | "Scorched" | Scorched | it would probably have been the greatest movie of all time. |
| 2023-04-14 | 48 | Axeheart | "Sword of the Gods" | Sword Of The Gods | The thing about the sword of the gods is that there are no gods, |
| 2023-04-14 | 49 | Metopia | "Zu den Sternen" | single | and if there were gods, they wouldn't need swords, |
| 2023-04-14 | 50 | Vintersea | "Unveiling Light" | single | so rendering the sword in uncanny simulation is a point-displacing literalism, |
| 2023-04-14 | 51 | Forest of Ember Skies | "Compass" | single | whereas saying "sword of the gods" invokes centuries of theocratic authoritarianism |
| 2023-04-14 | 52 | Wounds of Recollection | "Nearest Place to Hide" | single | and all its attendant human resistance. |
| 2023-04-14 | 53 | Óreiða | "The River" | single | The Way of Water is like the Muzak version of Moana, |
| 2023-04-14 | 54 | Heretoir | "Wastelands" | Wastelands +1 | or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover as reenacted by corporate catering, |
| 2023-04-14 | 55 | Raat | "Nocturne" | Nocturne +2 | or ChatGPT writing you a letter from a completely living relative as if they are already dead. |
| 2023-04-14 | 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. |
| 2023-04-14 | 57 | Mesmur | "Refraction" | Chthonic | The Avatar movies are too long, and yet both exhausting and unsatisfyingly shallow, |
| 2023-04-14 | 58 | Lustre | "Reverence" | single | while this Lustre song is too long but lovely and you can hit ⏩️ when it has been lovely enough. |
| 2023-04-14 | 59 | Arkona | "Kob'" | single | The gods understood that our lives are short, |
| 2023-04-14 | 110 | Ghost | "Jesus He Knows Me" | single | in which we have no side. |
| 2023-04-07 | 20 | FATE GEAR | "Romancer feat.KOKOMI" | single | I am a strange guide to anything Japanese, |
| 2023-04-07 | 24 | Unveil Raze | "Pay You Back" | single | "There has to be somebody below average" you snort, |
| 2023-04-07 | 25 | UNDEAD CORPORATION | "Fear Me" | single | but there doesn't. We can all be immeasurably perfect. |
| 2023-04-07 | 26 | Tulip | "Near Death" | single | We can be just barely immortal for 5:01 at a time. |
| 2023-04-07 | 27 | Nereids | "Dark Storm" | single | There may be notes that Geraldine Jeannot of Nereids can sing, and you cannot, |
| 2023-04-07 | 28 | Liliumdust | "Compliant Masks" | Our Deepest Hollows | but they're well within the range of human hearing. |
| 2023-04-07 | 29 | RAVDINA | "Иди за мной" | single | Singing is a mode of sharing, but so is listening. |
| 2023-04-07 | 30 | Doll Skin | "Melancholia" | single | You don't need to be sad. |
| 2023-04-07 | 31 | Reasons Behind | "Heart Begins to Break" | single | I'm not saying you don't have reasons, |
| 2023-04-07 | 32 | Sicksense | "Fools Tomorrow" | single | I'm saying that reasons, like songs, do not have to be collected or owned. |
| 2023-04-07 | 33 | Healthyliving | "Until" | Songs of Abundance, Psalms of Grief | Grief and joy are both abundant, |
| 2023-04-07 | 34 | Penumbra | "Inferno" | Eden | but so too are nitrogen and the scent of kouign-amann. |
| 2023-04-07 | 35 | Dol Ammad | "Ghost in the Shell: Reincarnation" | single | We do not calculate our happiness by the magnitude of our immersion. |
| 2023-04-07 | 36 | Gloryhammer | "Keeper of the Celestial Flame of Abernethy" | single | The unicorns came out of the river, and we turned them back. |
| 2023-04-07 | 37 | Battle Born | "Dragon Heart" | single | Our myths imagined us as our own foes, |
| 2023-04-07 | 38 | Feuerschwanz | "Bastard von Asgard (feat. Fabienne Erni)" | single | and we kept the costumes in a box we come across occasionally while we're looking for something else, |
| 2023-04-07 | 39 | Ulvedharr | "Wasteland" | single | or pretending to, |
| 2023-04-07 | 40 | Powerwolf | "Wolves Of War" | Interludium | and quietly remember those dreams. |
| 2023-04-07 | 41 | Ray Alder | "This Hollow Shell" | single | Armored fantasies do not depend on ever fighting another war. |
| 2023-04-07 | 42 | Winger | "It All Comes Back Around" | single | The riders we idolized, and then ridiculed, |
| 2023-04-07 | 43 | Aisles | "Megalomania" | Beyond Drama | took advantage of the distraction to get another degree. |
| 2023-04-07 | 44 | Kyros | "The End in Mind" | single | The ubiquity of joy doesn't mean there aren't techniques you can learn, |
| 2023-04-07 | 47 | Ruadh | "Sack of Berwick" | 1296 | You can carry a grudge |
| 2023-04-07 | 48 | Septicflesh | "Salvation" | Reconstruction 3 | to a show-and-tell. |
| 2023-04-07 | 49 | Raat | "She Walks In Beauty" | single | Tell us its history, the stories of the lives that it united and separated, |
| 2023-04-07 | 50 | Bacchus | "II.II" | II | the ways it made people feel heroic when they thought the only alternative was hopelessness. |
| 2023-04-07 | 51 | Mournful Congregation | "The Forbidden Abysm" | single | In this way remember that we are trying to shake these binary choices out of our world: |
| 2023-04-07 | 52 | Vananidr | "In Absence" | Beneath the Mold (Deluxe Version) | by furious vibration |
| 2023-04-07 | 53 | Graywave | "Blur Into One" | single | or monolithium, |
| 2023-04-07 | 67 | Aline Happ | "Join Me" | single | I might be an expert witness on the solo projects of female singers of metal bands, |
| 2023-03-31 | 14 | Nervosa | "Endless Ambition" | single | then lead us into it along better paths. |
| 2023-03-31 | 15 | Ellereve | "Levitate" | Reminiscence | All leadership is hope: |
| 2023-03-31 | 16 | Beyond Frequencies | "Burning Bridges" | Me Megalomaniac | that things can always be better, |
| 2023-03-31 | 17 | Juliet Ruin | "Give me the Crown" | single | in foreseeable practice if not absolute theory. |
| 2023-03-31 | 18 | Sever The Light | "No Sense" | DIES IRAE 5 | This is why progressivism, in its most lowercase sense, is not a political orientation |
| 2023-03-31 | 19 | Autumn Bride | "H.eart.h" | single | but a formulation of humanity. |
| 2023-03-31 | 20 | Dead End Finland | "Heavy Rain" | Victory | We believe that the quantities of misery and joy are not fixed. |
| 2023-03-31 | 21 | Bisa | "Keyhouse" | The Sinner I Am | Rights and freedoms increase, glum inequities succumb to our relentless effusive nuzzling. |
| 2023-03-31 | 22 | Vedalia | "Among the Stars" | Cormorant | We go forward far enough that where we are now becomes largely indistinguishable from where we have been, |
| 2023-03-31 | 23 | Argion | "El Juicio Final" | Lux Umbra | but that's the best consolation I can offer to the recalcitrant and conservative. |
| 2023-03-31 | 24 | Death & Legacy | "Beyond the Veil" | Beyond the Veil +3 | We're probably not going to go back. |
| 2023-03-31 | 25 | Cloak | "Seven Thunders" | single | The fearful say "If we tolerate this, how do we know our children won't be next?" |
| 2023-03-31 | 26 | Spirit Possession | "Inhale the Hovering Keys" | Of the Sign… | And the hopeful smile in loving pity and say "Oh, dear ones, the future is all your children have ever known. |
| 2023-03-31 | 27 | Owl | "Cryptic Deities" | single | Once you open your hearts and embrace this, your parents will be next." |
| 2023-03-31 | 28 | Aara | "Heimgesucht" | Triade III : Nyx | I believed this about civil rights, whose canonical wars were won before I was born, |
| 2023-03-31 | 29 | Лёдъ | "Ушкуйники" | single | no matter how many postscriptural battles remain. |
| 2023-03-31 | 30 | LYRRE | "Valley of Tears" | Not All Who Dream Are Asleep | I believe it about marriage equality and gender diversity, |
| 2023-03-31 | 31 | Liv Kristine | "Love Me High" | single | whose canonical wars we are still somewhere between fighting and negotiating. |
| 2023-03-31 | 32 | Jessica Wolff | "Sleeping Beast" | single | "If we tolerate same-sex marriage", the fearful sneered, "won't polygamy and divorce-at-whim be next?" |
| 2023-03-31 | 33 | Headon | "Canto De Sirena" | Éxodo | Sarcasm is the tone the ignorant use to speak the truth. |
| 2023-03-31 | 34 | Sefirot | "Viaje Al Fin del Mundo" | single | Those and countless other freedoms of individual assembly should be next, |
| 2023-03-31 | 35 | Ad Infinitum | "The Underworld" | Chapter III - Downfall | and then we'll start on freedoms of collective assembly. |
| 2023-03-31 | 36 | a crowd of rebellion | "Lightning-Syndrome" | ALVA 6 | Same-sex marriage doesn't just lead towards group marriage and the collapse of the divorce-law industry, |
| 2023-03-31 | 87 | H.E.A.T | "Freedom" | Freedom +2 | or our rickety houses or interminable jobs or officious marriages of any cardinality. |
| 2023-03-31 | 88 | Grand Design | "Love or a Fantasy" | single | We imagine them pursuing us; |
| 2023-03-31 | 101 | Laura Cannell | "Swarm Intelligence" | No Sound is Lost 3 | with the unconvincing metal ear we were trying to attach to our Creature. |
| 2023-03-31 | 103 | Xasthur | "Inevitably Dark" | single | It doesn't lack ears, it lacks envy. |
| 2023-03-24 | 5 | BABYMETAL | "Mirror Mirror" | THE OTHER ONE | out of context as a critical philistine. |
| 2023-03-24 | 6 | KRD8 | "NADESIKORANBU" | single | Whether Ed Sheeran does or doesn't understand the enduring cultural role of thoughtful criticism |
| 2023-03-24 | 7 | mercuro | "Gekijyouhoukai literacy" | single | I do not really know, |
| 2023-03-24 | 8 | ExWHYZ | "ANSWER" | single | although if you subject a demonstrably competent musician to a simultaneous barrage |
| 2023-03-24 | 37 | As Everything Unfolds | "Slow Down" | Slow Down 5 | Can't Slow Down does it. |
| 2023-03-24 | 38 | A Dark Reborn | "Illusions" | The Flight 3 | Major Labels does it. |
| 2023-03-24 | 39 | Enchantya | "Collective Souls" | single | It's harder, but still doable, at shorter lengths with shorter lead-times. |
| 2023-03-24 | 40 | Asylum Pyre | "The True Crown (I seek Your War)" | Call Me Inhuman | It's also very clearly not what a lot of perfectly good writing about music mainly achieves, |
| 2023-03-24 | 41 | Ignea | "Dunes" | Dunes +1 | or even intends to. |
| 2023-03-24 | 42 | Eleine | "We Are Legion" | single | Most of our experiences are far more experience than culture, individually, |
| 2023-03-24 | 43 | Scarlet Aura | "Rock în sânge și voință" | single | and share a cultural significance with countless similars. |
| 2023-03-24 | 44 | Floor Jansen | "My Paragon" | Paragon | You can explain the use of autotune as a deliberate sonic element |
| 2023-03-24 | 45 | Decadence Dust | "Rejected" | Lighthouse | rather than a surreptitious corrective |
| 2023-03-24 | 46 | LYRRE | "Chariot of Sun" | single | once, |
| 2023-03-24 | 47 | Dragony | "The Dead Queen's Race" | single | but there were a hundred songs that seemed briefly novel for their mechanized discretion, |
| 2023-03-24 | 48 | Smoulder | "Victims of Fate" | single | and now it's just a thing we do. |
| 2023-03-24 | 49 | Ihsahn | "The Observer" | Fascination Street Sessions 3 | Songs outnumber cultures. |
| 2023-03-24 | 50 | Pyramaze | "Fortress" | Fortress +1 | If you only write about one to explicate the other, |
| 2023-03-24 | 51 | Teramaze | "Chaos In The Way" | single | you can afford to hibernate or learn to shovel coal with the years between changes. |
| 2023-03-24 | 52 | Nerve End | "The Big Sleep" | single | We keep writing about music in between upheavals, if we do, |
| 2023-03-24 | 53 | Excalion | "Amuse Me" | Once Upon a Time | because it's a thing in itself, a learnable craft |
| 2023-03-24 | 54 | Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall | "Holy Ground" | single | with its own capacity for elucidating joy or evoking it. |
| 2023-03-24 | 55 | Arjen Lucassen's Supersonic Revolution | "The Rise Of The Starman" | The Rise Of The Starman +1 | We write into the thrumming spaces around the music |
| 2023-03-24 | 56 | Lion's Share | "United" | single | for the same reasons we dance, or air-drum, or hold hauntedly still: |
| 2023-03-24 | 57 | Hanging Garden | "The Construct" | The Garden | to form a participatory space around majestic inspiration. |
| 2023-03-24 | 58 | Marianas Rest | "Auer" | Auer | A less-glib put-down of Ed Sheeran wouldn't be "I made up my own mind and you suck", |
| 2023-03-24 | 59 | Kalmah | "Drifting in a Dream" | Drifting in a Dream +1 | it would be "nobody feels inspiredly and expressibly more human while your soulless songs are pointlessly humming". |
| 2023-03-24 | 60 | Immortal | "War Against All" | single | Except, as is usually the case, refining your hatred clarifies your own weaknesses. |
| 2023-03-24 | 61 | Keep Of Kalessin | "Hellride" | Katharsis | Ed Sheeran's fans aren't living any culturally impoverished way that substituting Elliott Smith would enrich. |
| 2023-03-24 | 62 | Wormwitch | "Weapons Against Despair" | single | Arguably Ed Sheeran is exactly what you get by turning Elliott Smith's depression down far enough that he stays alive to keep making music, |
| 2023-03-24 | 63 | Mork | "Indre Demoner" | Dypet | but now who's settling for cheap soundbites that don't reward scrutiny? |
| 2023-03-24 | 64 | Breath Of Wind | "Feelings" | single | And isn't that the only aesthetic judgment that matters, or at least endures? |
| 2023-03-24 | 65 | Ne Obliviscaris | "Misericorde I - As the Flesh Falls" | Exul | When you pay attention, does it buy you anything? |
| 2023-03-24 | 66 | Oath Of Cranes | "Puja - Celebrate the Negation of Hope" | single | We do not read about art to be taught the correct response, |
| 2023-03-24 | 67 | Bonjour Tristesse | "Against Leviathan" | single | nor usually to be taught the correct elements of a canonical repsonse; |
| 2023-03-24 | 68 | Usnea | "The Compleated Sage" | The Compleated Sage +1 | we read for the same reason that we listen: |
| 2023-03-24 | 69 | Liturgy | "Djennaration" | 93696 | to appreciate encodings of joy. |
| 2023-03-24 | 73 | Cruachan | "The Queen" | The Living and The Dead | or brief illuminations of barely condensed weeks. |
| 2023-03-24 | 74 | Shores Of Null | "Darkness Won't Take Me" | The Loss of Beauty | Failures of synergy are sometimes merely victims of mismatched scale. |
| 2023-03-24 | 75 | Antichrisis | "One Last Time" | single | An 8-second visual loop would have to be pretty dense to reward the amount of scrutiny |
| 2023-03-24 | 76 | A Pregnant Light | "In Gaul" | Capacity For Living | a 3:42 song proposes. |
| 2023-03-24 | 79 | Saltatio Mortis | "Taugenichts" | single | We write about music exactly to liberate ourselves from enforced simultaneity, |
| 2023-03-24 | 80 | Subway To Sally | "Weit ist das Meer" | Himmelfahrt | to make a world in which we are not always required to attend in a room |
| 2023-03-24 | 130 | Spirit Adrift | "Death Won't Stop Me" | single | in which our loneliness then resounds. |
| 2023-03-24 | 131 | Botanist | "Epidendrum Nocturnum" | single | The kingdoms drawn in around these grave errors of solipsism |
| 2023-03-24 | 132 | Thy Catafalque | "Néma vermek" | single | can choose to be synchronized in mob envy |
| 2023-03-24 | 151 | Saxon | "Tales of Brave Ulysses" | More Inspirations | Steam engines turn out to have been a terrible idea, |
| 2023-03-24 | 152 | Sirenia | "Twist in my Sobriety" | single | but we made the best bad decisions we knew how to make. |
| 2023-03-24 | 157 | The Foreshadowing | "Such a Shame" | single | I believe in escape. |
| 2023-03-17 | 17 | Majesty | "Freedom Child" | single | Learning to drown this out is both a betrayal of our future |
| 2023-03-17 | 18 | Last in Line | "House Party at the End of the World" | House Party At The End Of The World 3 | and a basic survival skill. |
| 2023-03-17 | 19 | Revolution Saints | "Crime of the Century" | single | Which century would we like to live in? |
| 2023-03-17 | 20 | Redemption | "The Emotional Depiction of Light" | I Am the Storm | The ones made of ancient numbers or the one that starts today? |
| 2023-03-17 | 21 | Einar Solberg | "A Beautiful Life" | A Beautiful Life +1 | Like a lot of good questions, it's not good as a result of how we choose to answer it. |
| 2023-03-17 | 22 | Narnia | "Thief" | Ghost Town | It's good because it reminds us that portals between worlds are artifacts of perspective. |
| 2023-03-17 | 23 | Kamelot | "The Great Divide" | The Awakening | All the universes we can imagine are equally real. |
| 2023-03-17 | 24 | Suotana | "The Ancient" | Ounas I | We create. |
| 2023-03-17 | 25 | Heathen Foray | "Oathbreaker" | Oathbreaker +2 | We forget in order to make space to recreate. |
| 2023-03-17 | 26 | Prevail in Darkness | "All That Avails Is Flight" | single | We lie about names because that's the only way they exist, |
| 2023-03-17 | 27 | Atlases | "Singulars" | single | maybe the only way we exist. |
| 2023-03-17 | 28 | Foretoken | "A Tyrant Rises as Titans Fall" | Triumphs | We invent nemeses because who else is going to? |
| 2023-03-17 | 29 | Reino de Hades | "Árido Edén" | single | We crawled out of the sea with the water right behind us. |
| 2023-03-17 | 30 | Valley of Chrome | "Luha Ng Kaaway" | single | We comfort our enemies with release |
| 2023-03-17 | 31 | Cisza | "Jaki piękny świat" | Jaki piękny świat +3 | when they only asked to remain. |
| 2023-03-17 | 32 | Hyrgal | "Phalanges Assassines" | single | Enter this into the minutes of the guild of the end: |
| 2023-03-17 | 33 | Óreiða | "The Eternal" | single | we discarded our gifts as if they would be perpetually regiven, |
| 2023-03-17 | 34 | Heretoir | "Anima" | single | and then begrudged each other's surreptitious judgment. |
| 2023-03-17 | 35 | Downfall Of Gaia | "The Whir of Flies" | Silhouettes of Disgust | Little wonder that all our best plagues have followed us into the whir of files. |
| 2023-03-17 | 36 | Dødheimsgard | "Abyss Perihelion Transit" | single | Our origin and our doom are magnetic shards |
| 2023-03-17 | 37 | Stömb | "The Realm of Delirium" | Massive Disturbed Meta Art | pinched on either side of a thrumming membrane that might be our sanity, |
| 2023-03-17 | 38 | Vintersea | "At the Gloaming Void" | single | which is as much of why any movement of either one seems like inexplicable magic |
| 2023-03-17 | 39 | Smoulder | "The Talisman and the Blade" | single | as it is of why our journey from one to the other sometimes seems to cover no actual distance. |
| 2023-03-17 | 40 | Metalite | "Take My Hand" | Take My Hand +1 | The power of the subtle knife is not that it subverts theocracies, |
| 2023-03-17 | 41 | Phantom Elite | "Daydark" | Blue Blood | it's that it reminds us to offer mutual transformation. |
| 2023-03-17 | 42 | The Dark Side of the Moon | "The Gates of Time" | The Gates of Time +3 | The theocracies will inevitably subvert themselves. |
| 2023-03-17 | 43 | Asylum Pyre | "There, I Could Die" | single | The gods have other problems. |
| 2023-03-17 | 44 | Silent Utopia | "My Human Nature" | single | It's us who need our belief, |
| 2023-03-17 | 45 | Transworld Identity | "I'm Such a Liar" | Seven Worlds | us who need names so badly that we are willing to burn them as fast as we sign, |
| 2023-03-17 | 46 | Elysion | "Blink Of An Eye" | Bring Out Your Dead | inhaling each moment so we can hope to remember how it smelled |
| 2023-03-17 | 47 | Phantom Divine | "Babylon" | single | after we forget how to tell any story in which it wasn't already foregone. |
| 2023-03-17 | 48 | Eternal Frequency | "Running from Ghosts" | single | You can't prevent the impossible with diligence. |
| 2023-03-17 | 52 | Angel Wolf-Black | "Haunted" | single | as your intolerant ghosts. |
| 2023-03-17 | 53 | Liv Kristine | "In Your Blue Eyes" | single | The things you love, you don't hurl to be returned in the mouths of dogs |
| 2023-03-17 | 54 | ARLEQUIN | "Tebanashite tsukamu zero" | single | or commission to be biographied by the heartless. |
| 2023-03-17 | 104 | Killus | "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! - ABBA Version" | single | Prayer is useless, but grandly knowing uselessness is also kind of the foundation of all art, |
| 2023-03-10 | 1 | Tulip | "Assassins" | single | There's operatic metal and symphonic metal and Tulip have an ex-opera-singer and frequent orchestral flourishes, but in context those things basically just keep this tense, pounding song out of metalcore territory. |
| 2023-03-10 | 2 | Frozen Crown | "In a Moment" | Call of the North | We are living in an era of absurd and glorious abundance for metal as melodic/rhythmic maximalism. |
| 2023-03-10 | 3 | Nereids | "Fight for the Fallen" | single | Nereids have, as I write this, 17 monthly listeners on Spotify. |
| 2023-03-10 | 4 | Mission In Black | "What Does It Take to Be Alive" | single | As best I have been able to tell, there is essentially no end of astonishingly good metal bands waiting for you if you want to go looking for them. |
| 2023-03-10 | 5 | Infinitas | "Xana" | Xana +1 | Every time I figure out some improvement in algorithmic techniques at work to help the world's collective listening self-organize |
| 2023-03-10 | 6 | Evermore | "Forevermore" | single | I point it at the most not-yet-famous metal bands I know, |
| 2023-03-10 | 7 | Sefirot | "El Encuentro" | single | and I find more. |
| 2023-03-10 | 8 | Haunted Gods | "Descending" | Haunted Gods | Frozen Crown are giants, relatively speaking: 100,000+ listeners and comfortably among the 100,000 most popular artists on Spotify worldwide. |
| 2023-03-10 | 9 | Ember Sea | "Shine (My Dying Star)" | Shine (My Dying Star) +1 | These others are fond dreams of love waiting for their turns in our sleep, |
| 2023-03-10 | 10 | Lodestar | "Polaris" | single | practicing their band-photo glower for provisional audiences of thousands |
| 2023-03-10 | 11 | Lumsk | "Det Døde Barn" | Det Døde Barn / Das Tode Kind 2 | or hundreds |
| 2023-03-10 | 12 | Frozen Crown | "Far Away" | Call of the North | or tens. |
| 2023-03-10 | 13 | Rides In ReVellion | "MORE THAN WORDS" | single | Spotify has a stated goal of helping a million creative artists make a living from their art |
| 2023-03-10 | 14 | a crowd of rebellion | "ALVA" | single | by reaching a billion fans. |
| 2023-03-10 | 15 | ALICETOPIA | "The latter part of the NIGHTMARE" | single | If we grant that a corporate mission-statement has to be memorably succinct, |
| 2023-03-10 | 16 | NEMOPHILA | "RISE" | single | then these are almost the numbers that have to be. |
| 2023-03-10 | 76 | Winger | "Proud Desperado" | single | or else other collective social-structures have to inject that missing order of fiscal magnitude from some other direction. |
| 2023-03-10 | 77 | Enter Shikari | "Bloodshot" | Bloodshot +2 | The companies that broker the current flow, like the one I work for, have inevitable incentives to think in the former terms, |
| 2023-03-10 | 78 | Daeria | "Maléfica" | single | but as the workers that do or don't comprise those companies |
| 2023-03-10 | 79 | Periphery | "Wax Wings" | Periphery V: Djent Is Not A Genre | we are still human before and after the temporary alignments of commerce. |
| 2023-03-10 | 80 | Keep Of Kalessin | "Katharsis" | single | Asking streaming to have already solved this problem, or its glass-half-empty correlate of blaming streaming for having caused it, |
| 2023-03-10 | 81 | Mork | "Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen" | Tilbake Til Opprinnelsen +1 | is a performative exercise in grudge-wielding that supports no rational scrutiny. |
| 2023-03-10 | 82 | Moongates Guardian | "II" | Incompleteness X | As of 2022 the recorded-music industry has surpassed its CD-era peak in face-value dollars, |
| 2023-03-10 | 83 | Gorod | "Chrematheism" | The Orb | and has recovered to about two-thirds of that peak in inflation-adjusted terms. |
| 2023-03-10 | 84 | Isole | "Vanity" | Anesidora | The other way of saying this is that never in human history has recorded music, as a business, been more than half again as big as it is now. |
| 2023-03-10 | 85 | Afraid of Destiny | "Anti" | single | There were not a million artists living off of their music in the goldenest of golden years of the CD boom. |
| 2023-03-10 | 86 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "Och canel och timjan och salfwa och rökelse och win och olja och semlor och hwete och boskap och får och hästar och wagnar och kroppar och menniskors själar." | Emet Amen : The dark night of the faith | Returning to that gold might get us from 17,800 to 26,700, |
| 2023-03-10 | 87 | E-An-Na | "O, romaniţa" | Alveolar | or our millionth artist from $50 to $75. |
| 2023-03-10 | 112 | Reverorum ib Malacht | ".letipaX .81" | Emet Amen : The dark night of the faith | We will do it by learning to hear their noise-floors as solid ground, |
| 2023-03-03 | 13 | lynch. | "ECLIPSE" | REBORN | I had to look up 永遠, which means "eternal". |
| 2023-03-03 | 14 | NIGAI | "replica" | single | I had to look up "Hitsujibungaku" (羊文学), which means "Sheep Literature". |
| 2023-03-03 | 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", |
| 2023-03-03 | 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 |
| 2023-03-03 | 17 | Elysion | "Raid The Universe" | Raid The Universe +1 | instead of 青 in kanji, and maybe it's important. |
| 2023-03-03 | 18 | Alwaid | "Illuyanka" | Twelve Daemons | I didn't spot-translate any of "永遠のブルー" from just hearing it, |
| 2023-03-03 | 19 | Liv Kristine | "River Of Diamonds" | single | and that's normal and doesn't usually faze me, |
| 2023-03-03 | 20 | Velkhanos | "Gunpowder" | single | but it's my favorite song ever for now, |
| 2023-03-03 | 21 | Moyra | "Unleashed Spirits" | OMEN | and I keep playing it over and over and then eventually for whatever reason I have to stop, |
| 2023-03-03 | 22 | LYRRE | "Crown" | single | and I want to be able to keep singing it in my head as I walk away, |
| 2023-03-03 | 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. |
| 2023-03-03 | 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 |
| 2023-03-03 | 25 | Djunah | "Hallway" | Femina Furens | 愛をしてるから as "because I am in love". "Ai wo shiteru kara...". |
| 2023-03-03 | 26 | Iress | "Ricochet" | single | I would have been wrong, but not too badly wrong, if I had tried to say this idea myself, |
| 2023-03-03 | 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. |
| 2023-03-03 | 28 | An Danzza | "Fólkvangr (Freya's Abode)" | single | So there's my line: "Because I am in love." "Ai wo shiteru kara..." |
| 2023-03-03 | 29 | GALNERYUS | "BRAVEHEARTS" | BETWEEN DREAD AND VALOR | If you walked past me this week and I seemed ethereal and lost, that's why. |
| 2023-03-03 | 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, |
| 2023-03-03 | 31 | Powerwolf | "No Prayer At Midnight" | No Prayer At Midnight +2 | still, again, 今も, even now. |
| 2023-03-03 | 32 | Elvenking | "Bride of Night" | Bride of Night +2 | They have names, the three women in Hitsujibungaku, |
| 2023-03-03 | 33 | Narnia | "Hold On" | Hold On +1 | I could probably learn what they are. |
| 2023-03-03 | 34 | Omnium Gatherum | "Slasher" | single | I've been listening to them for almost 5 years, |
| 2023-03-03 | 35 | Enslaved | "Behind The Mirror" | Heimdal | and in that time they've made at least 3 of my favorite songs ever. |
| 2023-03-03 | 36 | Black & Damned | "Hyena's Call" | single | But I need their songs more than they need my love, I think. |
| 2023-03-03 | 37 | Marras | "Musta Heijastin" | single | 80,000 people in Tokyo have listened to them on Spotify in the last month. |
| 2023-03-03 | 38 | Liturgy | "Before I Knew the Truth" | single | They are witnessed. They will not be forgotten. |
| 2023-03-03 | 39 | Spirit Possession | "Orthodox Weapons" | single | Their songs are heard by people who understand them completely. |
| 2023-03-03 | 40 | Majesties | "Verdant Paths to Radiance" | Vast Reaches Unclaimed | I could walk among them as a politely tolerated intrusion, |
| 2023-03-03 | 41 | CHTHONIC | "護國山 Pattonkan" | single | albeit one that is sometimes capable of comprehending public-transit announcement, |
| 2023-03-03 | 42 | Cradle Of Filth | "She is a Fire" | single | but love is only rarely a symmetric exchange. |
| 2023-03-03 | 43 | The 69 Eyes | "Death of Darkness" | single | Mostly it is a substance we uncontrollably exude. |
| 2023-03-03 | 44 | Deathstars | "Midnight Party" | Midnight Party +1 | It mixes with nitrogen in a layer around the surface of the world |
| 2023-03-03 | 49 | Ihsahn | "Dom Andra" | Dom Andra +1 | You could begin half your sentences with "Because I am in love", |
| 2023-03-03 | 50 | Haken | "Sempiternal Beings" | Fauna | and maybe in doing so identify the other half that would be better unsaid. |
| 2023-03-03 | 56 | Kirkkovene | "Se on kuin yö" | single | I'm in love with a French melodic metal band I thought were Belgian, |
| 2023-03-03 | 115 | UMC | "Flowers" | Flowers +1 | and then drive home blasting covers we know would infuriate them. |
| 2023-02-24 | 57 | LOVEBITES | "We Are The Resurrection" | JUDGEMENT DAY | I asked ChatGPT to describe this LOVEBITES song, |
| 2023-02-24 | 58 | BABYMETAL | "Light and Darkness" | Light and Darkness +3 | which of course it doesn't know about because it didn't exist |
| 2023-02-24 | 59 | ILLUMISHADE | "Hymn" | Hymn +1 | when ChatGPT's nihilistic world ended, |
| 2023-02-24 | 60 | Soulspell | "Dead Silence" | single | and it did so with magnificently banal obliviousness, |
| 2023-02-24 | 61 | Xeria | "Una Lágrima Más" | single | enthusing over musical features it plausibly could have had |
| 2023-02-24 | 62 | Leah | "Before This War Is Over" | single | but doesn't, |
| 2023-02-24 | 63 | Floor Jansen | "Daydream" | Daydream +2 | and calling out the anthemic repetition of the song's title in its chorus, |
| 2023-02-24 | 64 | Angel Wolf-Black | "Energize Me" | single | which is not a thing. |
| 2023-02-24 | 65 | Burning Witches | "The Dark Tower" | single | The failure to avoid making up clichéd bullshit is a mordant indictment of artificial "intelligence", |
| 2023-02-24 | 66 | Enemy of Reality | "Downfall" | Where Truth May Lie | but an interpretive ballet of testimony |
| 2023-02-24 | 67 | Against Myself | "Providence" | single | to how immanently music is embedded in our collective mimesis. |
| 2023-02-24 | 68 | Transworld Identity | "Play & Pretend" | single | We built a monster we shouldn't have built, |
| 2023-02-24 | 69 | Exilia | "Supernova" | single | and maybe don't exactly know how to take apart again, |
| 2023-02-24 | 70 | Manigance | "Forgotten Survivor" | The Shadows Ball | but it sometimes looks fairly hot for a few moments while it's dancing, |
| 2023-02-24 | 71 | Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall | "Far from Home" | single | because so do we and we don't know how to make a world where things don't. |
| 2023-02-24 | 72 | Excalion | "Resolution" | single | This is why deliberate dystopia is inevitably plaintive and self-defeating: |
| 2023-02-24 | 73 | Majesty | "Back To Attack" | single | you can't warn people against monstrosity without depicting monsters monstrously, |
| 2023-02-24 | 74 | Firewind | "Destiny Is Calling" | single | but nobody needs to be warned against monsters |
| 2023-02-24 | 75 | Redemption | "Remember the Dawn" | Remember the Dawn +2 | emerging out of tranquil darkness into the edges of our gruesomely flicking firelight. |
| 2023-02-24 | 76 | Time Primer | "Aligning Hearts" | Artefact | What we need to be warned against, |
| 2023-02-24 | 77 | Coridian | "Coexist" | single | in constantly novel ways so that we pay attention, |
| 2023-02-24 | 78 | E-An-Na | "Fântânile de la Capătul Lumii" | single | is gradually assuming those monsters' internal structure and moral intent ourselves |
| 2023-02-24 | 79 | Heidevolk | "Raidho" | Wederkeer | while we sit too-comfortably too close to that fire. |
| 2023-02-24 | 87 | Dead Crown | "Neiges éternelles" | midgard 5 | Everything we try to say |
| 2023-02-24 | 88 | Insomnium | "1696" | Anno 1696 | always risked trivial solubility in the imagined primordial, |
| 2023-02-24 | 89 | Mors Subita | "Regenerate" | Regenerate +1 | no matter how startling it is to see that nominal ooze tackily reified. |
| 2023-02-24 | 90 | Kalmah | "Haunted by Guilt" | single | Shelley realized we would make our successors, |
| 2023-02-24 | 91 | Downfall Of Gaia | "Existence of Awe" | single | ineptly at first, |
| 2023-02-24 | 92 | Autrest | "December Dusk" | Follow the Cold Path | and Orwell realized we would become anonymous in omnisurveillance |
| 2023-02-24 | 93 | Rheia | "Dirt-Born" | single | before we became indelible in omniscience, |
| 2023-02-24 | 94 | Botanist | "Angel's Trumpet" | single | but neither were able to situate these inevitabilities within redemption. |
| 2023-02-24 | 95 | Mustan Kuun Lapset | "Muistoa kunnioittaen" | single | This is how you write a fight song -- |
| 2023-02-17 | 4 | Sirgaus | "Monti Pallidi" | L'Anguana e la Gemma del Mare Ancestrale | and magic is our word for everything else. |
| 2023-02-17 | 5 | Setanera | "Losing Control" | Equilibrium | The cold that enwraps you is not polished steel, |
| 2023-02-17 | 6 | Katra | "Ever After" | single | it's fear, but at least you were right about the polished part. |
| 2023-02-17 | 7 | Aqvilea | "Activm" | single | If you are journeying into danger, what you want is not a tensile exoskeleton, |
| 2023-02-17 | 8 | Enchantya | "All Down in Flames" | single | it's a bathysphere and a retrieval ship. |
| 2023-02-17 | 9 | Synthwailer | "Dream Pantheon" | single | In the movie version, the bathysphere is a motive transparency, |
| 2023-02-17 | 10 | Beyond God | "Frostbite" | single | not a mute vault on a wishful tether, |
| 2023-02-17 | 11 | Ignea | "Nomad's Luck" | single | and this is what our expeditionary technology aspires to: |
| 2023-02-17 | 12 | Moyra | "Bloody Hands" | single | safe spaces for self-propelled regard. |
| 2023-02-17 | 13 | ODC | "Lost in a Circle" | single | In the movie version, |
| 2023-02-17 | 14 | Setanera | "The Promise" | Equilibrium | armor is accentuation for musculature |
| 2023-02-17 | 15 | Smackbound | "Change" | single | or vulnerability, |
| 2023-02-17 | 16 | Cyan Kicks | "Into You" | Into You +1 | and better when it's the latter, |
| 2023-02-17 | 17 | Bullet to the Heart | "Graveyard Lovers" | single | and this is also what our reticence should aspire to: |
| 2023-02-17 | 18 | Blind Hex | "Dystopia" | single | wild attraction whenever our gravity is undirected, |
| 2023-02-17 | 19 | Sirgaus | "Sotto una Luna Crescente" | L'Anguana e la Gemma del Mare Ancestrale | so at least there's some weak force holding us together. |
| 2023-02-17 | 20 | Faun | "Ylfa Spere" | single | This is why, although our fantasies make take innumerable personal forms, |
| 2023-02-17 | 22 | Frozen Crown | "Fire in the Sky" | single | glistening in either luminous or incandescent light. |
| 2023-02-17 | 23 | Kardinal Sin | "They Crashed In The Storm" | They Crashed In The Storm +1 | But it's also why the tantalizing technical challenge of synthesizing ideals |
| 2023-02-17 | 24 | Dark The Suns | "Phoenix" | single | is inherently self-negating: |
| 2023-02-17 | 25 | Creye | "How Far" | III: Weightless | the product manager knows that no individual hero is ever maximally heroic, |
| 2023-02-17 | 26 | First Signal | "Unbreakable" | Face Your Fears | and thus that we can train an arbitrarily more beautiful goddess than any mortal. |
| 2023-02-17 | 27 | Seventh Crystal | "Million Times" | single | Technology recapitulates teleology, |
| 2023-02-17 | 28 | Steel Rhino | "Blades" | single | but without the purpose. |
| 2023-02-17 | 29 | Robin McAuley | "When the Time Has Come" | Alive | Our collective idols are perfected by our devotion, |
| 2023-02-17 | 30 | L.A. Guns | "Rewind" | single | not trained on their own features. |
| 2023-02-17 | 31 | Black Nazareth | "True Self" | single | The natural equilibrium of art is omnipresence, |
| 2023-02-17 | 32 | Periphery | "Atropos" | Atropos +2 | despite centuries of apparent counter-precedence |
| 2023-02-17 | 33 | Kamelot | "Opus of the Night (Ghost Requiem) (feat. Tina Guo)" | Opus of the Night (Ghost Requiem) 2 | imposed as much by the media's capacitances as their resistances. |
| 2023-02-17 | 34 | Haken | "Lovebite" | Lovebite +3 | What Warhol welcomed was not the imminent dissolution of hierarchical celebrity, |
| 2023-02-17 | 35 | Aragon | "The Calm Before The Storm" | single | but the serene cognizance that the unfamous were never any more deserving of obscurity |
| 2023-02-17 | 36 | Creye | "In the Shadows" | III: Weightless | than the famous were of worship. |
| 2023-02-17 | 37 | FRUITPOCHETTE | "MIRAI -I don't give a damn-" | MIRAI -I don't give a damn- +1 | In the future, the distances between us are subject to instantaneous collapse. |
| 2023-02-17 | 38 | ALICETOPIA | "Butterfly Mirage" | single | Andy, for an artist with a love for the numerable, |
| 2023-02-17 | 39 | Quubi | "The voice you saved" | Take me now 3 | was a few orders of magnitude off with his math. |
| 2023-02-17 | 40 | FaM | "Evergreen" | single | In the equitable future, assuming life-expectancy and world population remain implausibly in roughly current proportion, |
| 2023-02-17 | 41 | GRATIA-ALA | "familiar" | single | we may each be world-famous for about half a second. |
| 2023-02-17 | 112 | Andromida | "Paradox" | single | as a charged substrate through which we throw off sparks; |
| 2023-02-17 | 113 | CHILD | "Hate Well Spent" | Meditations In Filth | as a crisis blast we can definitionally survive; |
| 2023-02-17 | 114 | Lana Del Rabies | "Prayers of Consequence" | single | as an infinity coiled up into our grasp. |
| 2023-02-17 | 115 | Full Of Hell | "Tunnels to God" | Tunnels to God +1 | Our notional elysia were always homogenous and thus mundane, |
| 2023-02-17 | 116 | Usnea | "From Soot and Pyre" | single | and LLM AIs are new episodes of the same uncancellable franchise. |
| 2023-02-17 | 117 | WOE BATHER | "OH ACHLYS PLEASE LOVE ME ONCE MORE II" | OH ACHLYS PLEASE LOVE ME ONCE MORE | Are we sad? Are we lonely? |
| 2023-02-17 | 119 | Chez Kane | "Mary on a Cross" | single | Andy, did you hear about this one? |
| 2023-02-10 | 1 | Delain | "Hideaway Paradise" | Dark Waters | This is a golden era for melodic metal albums, |
| 2023-02-10 | 2 | Elyose | "Ils t'ont dit" | Déviante | and by "era" I mean "three weeks": Dark Sarah; Xandria and REXORIA; |
| 2023-02-10 | 3 | Infinite & Divine | "Ashes to Ashes" | Ascendancy | Delain, Elyose and Infinite & Divine. |
| 2023-02-10 | 4 | Ankor | "Oblivion" | Oblivion +1 | Bright swords, gothic gradients, regal serifs. |
| 2023-02-10 | 5 | Delain | "Invictus (feat. Marko Hietala & Paolo Ribaldini)" | Dark Waters | But take those six records away and it's still an inexhaustibility of hyperbolic grandeur. |
| 2023-02-10 | 6 | Elysion | "Crossing Over" | single | This is how it is with everything, now: |
| 2023-02-10 | 7 | Elyose | "De la Lune à la Terre" | Déviante | mastered beyond all historical precedent, |
| 2023-02-10 | 8 | Forever We Roam | "A Crash Course in the Laws of Gravity" | single | but then also infinite; |
| 2023-02-10 | 9 | Infinite & Divine | "Remedy" | Ascendancy | meticulously assembled, |
| 2023-02-10 | 10 | Fraser Edwards | "My Great Escape" | single | but then also casually plundered; |
| 2023-02-10 | 12 | IKINÄ | "Riivaaja" | single | and afraid of nothing. |
| 2023-02-10 | 13 | Locus Animæ | "Magia D'Inchiostro" | single | I've been listening to metal like this since there wasn't any metal like this, |
| 2023-02-10 | 14 | Djunah | "Phaethon" | single | and every week its unmanageable extents seems to exponentiate: |
| 2023-02-10 | 15 | Shores Of Null | "My Darkest Years" | My Darkest Years +2 | airy transcendence and grim catharses, |
| 2023-02-10 | 16 | Vvilderness | "Orm's Odyssey" | Path | cryptic lexicons and stormbringers, |
| 2023-02-10 | 17 | Wounds of Recollection | "Pale Blue Light" | Warm Glow of the End of Everything | the void's regard. |
| 2023-02-10 | 18 | Entropia | "Final" | single | You could forget everything you think you know about the ending world |
| 2023-02-10 | 19 | Moonthoth | "MARtwe TWe żywOTA" | Uroczysko | and redestroy it from scratch starting every Friday. |
| 2023-02-10 | 20 | Old Forest | "Faust Recants (Satan Cometh)" | single | Satan no longer arrives with a demon host |
| 2023-02-10 | 21 | Doomas | "Cult Yog-Sothoth" | R´LYEH | at an epochal moment of cosmic prolapse, |
| 2023-02-10 | 23 | Narnia | "Rebel" | single | install an app on our phones that singes us with notifications every 45 seconds. |
| 2023-02-10 | 24 | Avaland | "Betrayers" | single | There is a new song. |
| 2023-02-10 | 25 | Wig Wam | "Uppercut Shazam" | Out of the Dark | There is another new song. |
| 2023-02-10 | 26 | Revolution Saints | "Talking Like Strangers" | single | The next one is a pastiche of ideas that were dubious when they were Journey songs, |
| 2023-02-10 | 27 | Khymera | "Don't Wait for Love" | Hold Your Ground | but somehow become transformed to marvel by double kick-drums. |
| 2023-02-10 | 28 | Klone | "Elusive" | Meanwhile | The next one is evasive, reticent, |
| 2023-02-10 | 29 | Osada Vida | "Make Us Proud" | single | and we follow it into countries whose silhouettes we would never recognize in Worldle, |
| 2023-02-10 | 30 | The Antarctica Project | "Owari" | Owari +1 | or the vortices between and outside of them, |
| 2023-02-10 | 99 | The Dark Atom | "Unrestricted" | Unrestricted +1 | to hear yourself explode. |
| 2023-02-10 | 100 | Divided by Design | "I, Establish" | The Fear of Being Forgotten | The next song wants you to disassemble yourself in studious preparation, |
| 2023-02-10 | 101 | Teeth Of The Sea | "Vortex of Release" | Vortex of Release +3 | and rebuild as a boat or a bridge or diving bell that rings. |
| 2023-02-03 | 3 | LOVEBITES | "Dissonance" | single | and an anonymous backing band that must have existed in a studio for at least an hour, |
| 2023-02-03 | 11 | Xandria | "Two Worlds" | The Wonders Still Awaiting | I assume there is some other aspect of the Japanese idol economy they participate in, |
| 2023-02-03 | 12 | Manigance | "All Your Excesses" | single | but maybe there isn't, and they don't. Maybe this is it. |
| 2023-02-03 | 13 | REXORIA | "Paradigm" | Imperial Dawn | The German symphonic metal band Xandria falls, or at least circles around, the other end of a spectrum of ambition, |
| 2023-02-03 | 14 | Frozen Crown | "Black Heart" | single | at least ostensibly. They have existed in some form for 8 studio albums over almost 30 years, |
| 2023-02-03 | 15 | Nereids | "Sail to Hades" | single | making music that sounds like it probably requires a small kingdom's worth of infrastructure to produce. |
| 2023-02-03 | 16 | ShadoWhisperS | "Däischter Gedanken" | single | "Two Worlds" could also easily end up being my favorite song of the year, |
| 2023-02-03 | 17 | Rave The Reqviem | "Anti-Savior" | Anti-Savior +2 | especially if it comes down to "Before You Light Up" and "Two Worlds" engaging in some form of ritual combat. |
| 2023-02-03 | 18 | Phantom Elite | "Skin of My Teeth" | single | Not all perfect songs are invincible. |
| 2023-02-03 | 19 | RedHook | "Off With Your Head" | Off With Your Head 5 | Not that all invincible songs are perfect, either, or even invincible for long. |
| 2023-02-03 | 20 | Divina PH | "Burn the Bridge" | single | Xandria have gone through 22 members in their time, with several full cycles of everybody other than Marco Heubaum. |
| 2023-02-03 | 21 | SÄÄDÖT | "Emännätön talo" | single | The songs are real; |
| 2023-02-03 | 22 | Dream State | "Chain Reactions" | Untethered 3 | the implied continuum they form is an illusion sustained at least partially by graphic design. |
| 2023-02-03 | 23 | Stand Atlantic | "kill[h]er" | single | We create these notional, confectionary joys, |
| 2023-02-03 | 24 | Vigil Of War | "Domino" | single | and then they outlive our expedient unions, |
| 2023-02-03 | 25 | Enigmatic Entrance | "Out of Time" | Out of Time +1 | and maybe ultimately also our intransigent bodies. |
| 2023-02-03 | 26 | Saint Deamon | "At Break of Dawn" | single | It is fair to ask how the music industry supports the noble labor |
| 2023-02-03 | 27 | Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall | "Hunt the Flame" | single | that it clearly requires, |
| 2023-02-03 | 28 | Seventh Crystal | "Wonderland" | single | but maybe only fair in the way that it is "fair" to explain the shimmer of wishable stars |
| 2023-02-03 | 29 | Volver Al Origen | "Heridas" | Initium Vulnera 4 | in erratic trajectories of photons through not-quite-empty emptiness. |
| 2023-02-03 | 30 | JJ Mist | "Night Queen" | single | Labor differs from undeserving action by exerting monotony: |
| 2023-02-03 | 31 | Xandria | "Mirror of Time" | The Wonders Still Awaiting | the large rocks broken into smaller rocks do not spontaneously reform, |
| 2023-02-03 | 39 | Falaise | "A Dream Of Relief" | After All This Time | It is cynical, but logical, to hire the victims of economic imbalance to perform work |
| 2023-02-03 | 40 | Déhà | "Everything Is Going to Be Okay" | A Fleur de Peau - V - At The Poles of Everything | that the more-enfranchised are content to recognize as repugnant, |
| 2023-02-03 | 41 | Austere | "Sullen" | single | at least as long as the work remains necessary at all: |
| 2023-02-03 | 42 | Spirit Possession | "Second Possession" | single | mitigation of toxicity into wet and dry goods, |
| 2023-02-03 | 43 | Depravation | "Im Schatten" | single | the breeding of defenseless food, |
| 2023-02-03 | 111 | Powerwolf | "Poison" | single | Not all idol-lines wear eye-liner. |
| 2023-01-27 | 1 | Dark Sarah | "Attack Of Orym" | Attack Of Orym | I've been looking forward to Amberian Dawn's upcoming album of ABBA covers for months, |
| 2023-01-27 | 2 | Amberian Dawn | "Angeleyes" | Take a Chance - a Metal Tribute to Abba | and I spend a frankly inordinate amount of my attention and an even more absurd fraction of my time keeping up with new releases, |
| 2023-01-27 | 3 | Metalite | "Hurricane" | single | so I was borderline mortified to realize that I've spent two solid months |
| 2023-01-27 | 4 | Tulip | "Gemini" | single | looking forward to an album-release that was behind me. |
| 2023-01-27 | 5 | Averlanche | "Little Lotus" | single | Take a Chance came out at the beginning of December, along with its third single ("Super Trouper") the same day, |
| 2023-01-27 | 6 | Liv Sin | "Karma" | KaliYuga | and somehow the single occluded the album in my tools. |
| 2023-01-27 | 7 | Belle Morte | "Exorcism" | single | I have opened a major investigation into this debacle. |
| 2023-01-27 | 8 | Halflives | "everybody knows it" | everybody knows it +2 | Meanwhile, though, the new Dark Sarah album came out last week, and contains no literal metal covers of ABBA songs, |
| 2023-01-27 | 9 | Forever Still | "Can't Begin To Explain" | single | but you might reasonably guess otherwise if you didn't know ABBA's catalog very well. |
| 2023-01-27 | 10 | Dark Sarah | "Goth Disco" | Attack Of Orym | I had somehow also forgotten that Heidi Parviainen formed Dark Sarah after leaving Amberian Dawn, |
| 2023-01-27 | 11 | Ravenlight | "Masque of the Red Death" | Immemorial | so associating them with each other is not my personal genius, |
| 2023-01-27 | 12 | Against Myself | "Sweet Chants Of Death" | single | but if you love things enough, they will find you, |
| 2023-01-27 | 13 | A Light Divided | "Inhale / Exhale" | Inhale / Exhale +1 | will run down the street after you and grab your hand and turn you around. |
| 2023-01-27 | 14 | Hail Sagan | "Alongside Their Own" | single | "Oh!", you might say. |
| 2023-01-27 | 15 | Brachmond | "Die Schlacht" | single | I said "Oh!" a lot this week: |
| 2023-01-27 | 16 | DEAR MOTHER | "Heart" | single | realizing I could barely pick any of these new Dark Sarah songs to not play; |
| 2023-01-27 | 17 | Moyra | "Rage of the Sky" | single | basking in the ABBA; |
| 2023-01-27 | 18 | Death & Legacy | "The Unnamed Shadow" | The Unnamed Shadow +1 | pasting the URIs of half of these bands into my random work tools for collating collective knowledge, |
| 2023-01-27 | 19 | Seeker Pearl | "Ouroboros" | single | wondering gleefully what else I have missed, |
| 2023-01-27 | 20 | Ravenlight | "Springtime Lament" | Immemorial | as if I weren't already unmanageably immersed in joy; |
| 2023-01-27 | 21 | Cornoctuan | "Weight of Light (The Lightless, Pt. III)" | single | looking at the negative Fs in the weather forecast; |
| 2023-01-27 | 22 | Marras | "Parasiitti" | single | emailing Aaron that Gracie's' new Peanut Butter Sriracha flavor is definitive; |
| 2023-01-27 | 23 | Dead End Finland | "Up so High, Down so Low" | single | playing old Comsat Angels records; |
| 2023-01-27 | 24 | Dark Sarah | "Delirium" | Attack Of Orym | feeling the bones of my aging, declining cat so close under her skin |
| 2023-01-27 | 25 | Uriah Heep | "You'll Never Be Alone" | Chaos & Colour | as she falls lovingly asleep in the bend of my arms with her tiny nose |
| 2023-01-27 | 26 | Ronnie Romero | "The Battle Rages On" | Raised on Heavy Radio | on my trackpad. |
| 2023-01-27 | 27 | Wig Wam | "Forevermore" | single | Did you know that Uriah Heep are still making albums? |
| 2023-01-27 | 28 | Crowne | "Just Believe" | Operation Phoenix | Did you care that they were ever making albums in the first place? They've been doing it for 54 years, |
| 2023-01-27 | 29 | Arctic Rain | "One World" | Unity | 3 longer than Magnum and only a year less than UFO and Deep Purple, |
| 2023-01-27 | 30 | Mono Inc. | "Wiedersehen Woanders" | Ravenblack | and I admit that I kind of confused them with Foghat until well into both bands' post-mainstream stubbornness, |
| 2023-01-27 | 31 | Subway To Sally | "Leinen los" | Leinen los +1 | but where Foghat have settled into a comfortable legacy-tour bluesiness and more live albums than studio ones, |
| 2023-01-27 | 32 | All For Metal | "Raise Your Hammer" | Raise Your Hammer +2 | Uriah Heep have kept up the expansive, Hammond-heavy hard-prog-rock ambition. |
| 2023-01-27 | 33 | Cruachan | "The Reaper" | single | I too aspire to get old in defiantly assiduous dedication to unfashionable arts |
| 2023-01-27 | 34 | Vengeant | "Gaia's Throne" | Mana 5 | with unexhausted implications: |
| 2023-01-27 | 35 | Norwald | "Nekaroth, the Undefeated" | The Spark of Freedom | sentences unimproved by Large Language Models, |
| 2023-01-27 | 36 | Vorna | "Hiljaisuus ei kestä" | single | listening as a reagent for mood instead of a thickener of it, |
| 2023-01-27 | 37 | Finrir | "Power of Mjolnir" | Viking Metal 5 | wild crushes, |
| 2023-01-27 | 38 | Aara | "Emphase der Seelenpein" | single | refusing inscrutable magic sold into ignorance |
| 2023-01-27 | 39 | 'Iisnááhí | "Ma’iitsoh ‘Ałchinígíí" | single | in favor of scrutable magic that gets better with explanation, |
| 2023-01-27 | 40 | Heretoir | "Fatigue (2022)" | Fatigue (2022) +1 | things cooked in pans, |
| 2023-01-27 | 41 | Enslaved | "Forest Dweller" | Forest Dweller +3 | trying to answer good questions with better questions, |
| 2023-01-27 | 42 | Ne Obliviscaris | "Graal" | single | tapping gently on one's moral compass when the needle gets briefly stuck. |
| 2023-01-27 | 43 | Bisa | "The Sinner I Am" | single | Optimism isn't a function of selective perspective |
| 2023-01-27 | 44 | Transworld Identity | "Everything Must Burn" | single | any more than globalism is a dream of uniformity. |
| 2023-01-27 | 45 | Dark Sarah | "Piece Of My Heart" | Attack Of Orym | Localists seek a world made for them, |
| 2023-01-27 | 46 | Isiliel | "聖暗顕現" | single | and thus naturally mistake globalism for a simple inverse that seeks a world made for not them. |
| 2023-01-27 | 47 | ELFENSJóN | "禍つ闇に詠う" | single | But the opposite of what you already know isn't a different textbook, |
| 2023-01-27 | 48 | sui sui | "Being Alive" | LIFE | it is the library of all of the books, |
| 2023-01-27 | 95 | Amberian Dawn | "Mamma Mia" | Take A Chance - A Metal Tribute To ABBA | There's a tent, and some cover band is playing ABBA songs inside, |
| 2023-01-27 | 96 | Dark Sarah | "Breaking Free" | Attack Of Orym | but a few people have drifted out to watch you, |
| 2023-01-27 | 104 | Andromida | "Judgement II" | Judgement II +3 | All the things you anticipate are cliffs, |
| 2023-01-27 | 105 | Xavier Boscher | "Fox" | Zoologica Duodecim #4 : Forest 5 | but only from the angle of your approach. |
| 2023-01-27 | 106 | Olympus Lenticular | "A Thousand Winds" | When the Silence of Absence Deepens | You get to the edge of the world, and there's just more world. |
| 2023-01-27 | 109 | Teramaze | "EASY LOVER" | single | When you reach the end of one, run out of words, there's always "oh!" |
| 2023-01-27 | 111 | Amberian Dawn | "Under Attack" | Take A Chance - A Metal Tribute To ABBA | Most of the things you think you missed are close behind you, following patiently. |
| 2023-01-27 | 112 | Dark Sarah | "Hero And A Villain" | Attack Of Orym | The rest are right in front of you. |
| 2023-01-20 | 1 | BABYMETAL | "METAL KINGDOM" | METAL KINGDOM +2 | The contrived identities we assume are layers we wrap around |
| 2023-01-20 | 2 | OCTAVIAGRACE | "Hardenbergia" | single | the contrived identities we discover within ourselves |
| 2023-01-20 | 3 | Ayasa | "Rou-chou-ren-un" | single | by seeing our reflection in the surface of our skin. |
| 2023-01-20 | 4 | PLEVAIL | "Coda." | single | Careful authenticity, cultivated charm, effusive faith, practiced humility: |
| 2023-01-20 | 5 | Zsasz | "Ultra Heroine" | Ultra Heroine +2 | these are all wishful epilogues backformed |
| 2023-01-20 | 6 | *Luna | "ΔV" | single | from the way we squirm when we discover where the costumes we sent away for |
| 2023-01-20 | 7 | GANGDEMIC | "CRIMIE" | single | came from, and where they rub against our stipulations. |
| 2023-01-20 | 8 | yosugala | "ace of spades" | single | "We have no choice but to retreat", we try to imbue with solemnity, |
| 2023-01-20 | 17 | ONMYO-ZA | "龍葬" | 龍凰童子 | to have it printed on the cloth in the shape of a shirt. |
| 2023-01-20 | 18 | Issa | "Seize the Day" | Lights of Japan | Flip it over, whatever it is. |
| 2023-01-20 | 19 | Shereign | "Six Feet Deep" | Ghost Diaries | If it was made with love and intent, there will be something printed on the back too, |
| 2023-01-20 | 20 | Dark Princess | "Taste of Freedom" | Phoenix | and glistening organs inside. |
| 2023-01-20 | 21 | Daedric | "Alchemy" | Alchemy 6 | This is how you can always tell the difference between somebody earnestly telling you something they have decided to believe |
| 2023-01-20 | 22 | Angel Wolf-Black | "Our Truth" | single | and somebody telling you where following intrinsic beliefs has directed them; |
| 2023-01-20 | 23 | For I Am King | "Avarice" | Crown | between answers in the shape of the truth |
| 2023-01-20 | 24 | Liv Sin | "I Am the Storm" | single | and truth in any of the innumerable shadows it casts against the background of chaos; |
| 2023-01-20 | 25 | Ad Infinitum | "Seth" | Seth +2 | between how people talk when they're talking to you |
| 2023-01-20 | 26 | Twilight Aura | "Sacred Earth" | single | and how they talk when they're talking past you toward some other audience they imagine |
| 2023-01-20 | 27 | As Everything Unfolds | "Ultraviolet" | Ultraviolet +2 | and fear. |
| 2023-01-20 | 28 | Sabaton | "The First Soldier" | Heroes of the Great War | The difference between victory and defeat is never 6%, |
| 2023-01-20 | 29 | The Lightbringer of Sweden | "The beast is rising" | The new world order | nor a scrupulous avoidance of the literal terms of clauses meant to transcribe love |
| 2023-01-20 | 30 | Silver Bullet | "Shadow Of A Curse" | Shadowfall | into the language of demons. |
| 2023-01-20 | 31 | In Victory | "Till the Break of Dawn" | single | You can always have the feeling of declaring old history concluded |
| 2023-01-20 | 32 | Kardinal Sin | "Siege Of Jerusalem" | single | by waiting to say your lines just as the gates are closing |
| 2023-01-20 | 33 | Legado de una Tragedia | "Misantropía" | Misantropía +1 | for the night, careful to stand on the other side of them |
| 2023-01-20 | 34 | Twilight Force | "At the Heart of Wintervale" | At the Heart of Wintervale | from everybody whose love you crave. |
| 2023-01-20 | 35 | Elvenking | "The Hanging Tree" | The Hanging Tree +1 | But they climb the trees that hang over the walls, |
| 2023-01-20 | 36 | Shakra | "Invincible" | Invincible +1 | and settle in the branches to watch you realize |
| 2023-01-20 | 37 | Nekonomicon | "Brand New Journey" | single | there's nothing out here to sleep in except suddenly-expensive mud. |
| 2023-01-20 | 38 | Big City | "Sons of Desire" | Sunwind Sails | You can't just dismiss your friends, |
| 2023-01-20 | 39 | Khymera | "Hear Me Calling" | single | and you can't walk a shared journey without your steps and theirs |
| 2023-01-20 | 40 | Tygers Of Pan Tang | "Edge of the World" | single | cooperating to make new paths towards places that didn't used to be places. |
| 2023-01-20 | 42 | First Signal | "Shoot the Bullet" | single | but you still have to decide if you're going to tell them the story of loss you've practiced on yourself, |
| 2023-01-20 | 43 | GALNERYUS | "RUN TO THE EDGE" | single | or the story of gain that begins when that dream-sequence ends, and leads everywhere. |
| 2023-01-20 | 89 | Insomnium | "The Witch Hunter" | single | but "love and life are deep". |
| 2023-01-20 | 90 | Imperium Dekadenz | "Forests in Gale" | Into Sorrow Evermore | What you say about our company is what we say to society. |
| 2023-01-20 | 91 | Dead Wasteland | "Black Rose" | single | Fools obey commands. |
| 2023-01-20 | 92 | Leipa | "Fremdkörper" | Reue | We chose to arrive here, our rewards unpromised, |
| 2023-01-20 | 93 | Vitrail | "Cette source" | Le mépris du monde | not because we distrust the rest of the world, |
| 2023-01-20 | 94 | Atrocity | "Teufelsmarsch" | OKKULT III | but to dance: |
| 2023-01-20 | 95 | Full Of Hell | "Rubble Home" | single | among ruins, when storms bring ruins; |
| 2023-01-20 | 96 | Stömb | "The Realm of Delirium" | single | loyally oblivious in periodic darkness; |
| 2023-01-20 | 97 | Hypno5e | "Lava from the Sky" | Lava from the Sky +2 | burned by debris from beyond our control; |
| 2023-01-20 | 98 | Isole | "The Songs of the Whales" | single | but justified by the sound. |
| 2023-01-20 | 99 | The Ocean | "Preboreal" | single | We have come to be the ones who carry us from before to during. |
| 2023-01-20 | 100 | Oak Pantheon | "Dissociate" | The Absence | Severance is our privilege, not yours. |
| 2023-01-20 | 101 | Katatonia | "Colossal Shade" | Sky Void of Stars | You may not know our names, |
| 2023-01-20 | 123 | Shereign | "Strong" | Ghost Diaries | We don't band together to infuse a single purpose with more certainty, |
| 2023-01-20 | 124 | Issa | "It's Over" | Lights of Japan | we do it to shred selfishness's conviction. |
| 2023-01-20 | 125 | Broken Peach | "What A Feeling" | single | "Positioned for the future" is our fond attempt to make you feel less bad for standing around, not yet unscared of dancing, less like that defines you. |
| 2023-01-20 | 126 | Megaraptor | "A Thousand Miles" | single | The distance from the wall to the center of the floor is short, and yet crosses worlds, |
| 2023-01-20 | 127 | Agordas | "Running Up That Hill" | single | transcends negotiations. |
| 2023-01-13 | 1 | Kamelot | "One More Flag in the Ground" | single | A language model doesn't have pronouns, |
| 2023-01-13 | 2 | Meadows | "Forgive Me" | single | particularly not "you" or "I", |
| 2023-01-13 | 3 | Lattermath | "Waking Life" | Winter's Painting | but maybe more usefully not even "it". |
| 2023-01-13 | 4 | Enter Shikari | "(pls) set me on fire" | single | We collaborate with solipsism when we infer an imaginary self |
| 2023-01-13 | 5 | VV | "Neon Noir" | Neon Noir | in between each other. |
| 2023-01-13 | 6 | Viikate | "Älä pelkää pimeää" | single | We do not talk about the volition of the air |
| 2023-01-13 | 7 | Beyond Awareness | "Crime" | single | that our songs transit. |
| 2023-01-13 | 8 | Bloody Falls | "Dancing with Flames" | single | We do not fault it for failing to render our voices with more variety |
| 2023-01-13 | 9 | Ruinthrone | "The Dreamweaver" | The Unconscious Mind of Arda | than we are numbered. |
| 2023-01-13 | 10 | Bloodbound | "Odin's Prayer" | single | We do not measure it by our satisfaction with what we do with our breath. |
| 2023-01-13 | 11 | Grá | "White City Devil" | Lycaon | "I am not a robot", I am required to testify before prodding grimly at ChatGPT. |
| 2023-01-13 | 12 | Warg | "In the Eye of the Beholder" | The Endless Travel | Even the robots are wary of robots, |
| 2023-01-13 | 13 | Oceanhoarse | "Brick" | Brick | but the corrupt property of offering a preconstrained grammar of denial |
| 2023-01-13 | 14 | Drakwald | "Storm of Embers" | Black Moon Falls | is that is inherently heartless even when it separates admitted hearts. |
| 2023-01-13 | 15 | Amras Numenesse | "Rise From the Ashes" | Indestructible 3 | The implied question is offensive, both meaningfully and formally. |
| 2023-01-13 | 16 | E-An-Na | "Trecătoare" | single | The soul of the Turing Test is that it separates those who correctly categorize it as a moral injunction phrased as a thought experiment |
| 2023-01-13 | 17 | NanowaR of Steel | "Winterstorm in the Night (Feat. Madeleine Liljestam)" | single | from those who obtusely interpret it as a challenge. |
| 2023-01-13 | 18 | Delain | "Moth to a Flame" | Moth to a Flame +2 | Our new Houdinis brag that they will escape from a falling parachute, |
| 2023-01-13 | 19 | Phantom Elite | "Inner Beast" | single | or from our forgiveness, |
| 2023-01-13 | 20 | Beyond The Black | "Free Me" | Beyond The Black | or from their own empathy, |
| 2023-01-13 | 21 | Shereign | "Dying Sun" | single | and then ask, from a midair rapidly running out of mid-, for loans to fund their ambitions for impact. |
| 2023-01-13 | 22 | Frozen Crown | "Victorious" | single | At least, I think that's what they were asking. |
| 2023-01-13 | 23 | Enchantya | "Existence" | single | Conversations with the falling are plagued by wind noise. |
| 2023-01-13 | 24 | Existenter | "Symbols" | Symbols +2 | We are iterations away from a machine intended to listen for us, |
| 2023-01-13 | 25 | Segmentia | "Fighter" | Alone 5 | and this will be one of its ebulliently shaped but joyless premises: |
| 2023-01-13 | 26 | LOVEBITES | "The Spirit Lives On" | single | it can hear the mercifully unsung |
| 2023-01-13 | 66 | Floor Jansen | "Invincible" | Invincible +2 | Even on the dark side we could see that light. |
| 2023-01-13 | 67 | Creye | "Air" | single | The thing you need answers to be is less varied, less variously wrong, |
| 2023-01-13 | 68 | First Night | "Savage Heart" | Deep Connection | perfected memorably, once each, as the basis for new questions. |
| 2023-01-13 | 69 | All My Shadows | "The Phantoms of the Dawn" | single | The thing you need is to touch each other, |
| 2023-01-13 | 70 | Seventh Crystal | "Higher Ground" | single | to feel each other's bodies humming silently |
| 2023-01-13 | 71 | T3nors | "Set Fire to the Rain" | single | and then not silently. |
| 2023-01-13 | 72 | Robin McAuley | "Feel Like Hell" | single | Recordings of those signals are memory and yearning, |
| 2023-01-13 | 106 | False Gods | "Time For Heresy" | Time For Heresy +1 | It's not, of course, that there were no interesting questions to be asked of moon rocks, |
| 2023-01-13 | 107 | WuW | "Orchaostre 2" | Orchaostre 2 +1 | any more than there's no point to modeling human language. |
| 2023-01-13 | 108 | Walg | "Harteloos" | III | Pointlessly teaching a machine to listen to human songs is a waste of machines and fuel, but the songs themselves are not consumed. |
| 2023-01-13 | 109 | Depravation | "Vampire Burial" | single | You can't unshare and unlove what we have already sung to each other. |
| 2023-01-13 | 110 | Ahab | "Mobilis in Mobili" | The Coral Tombs | How does it feel being covered in water, you wonder? How does it feel being covered in space? |
| 2023-01-13 | 111 | Blood Stained Dusk | "No Light Shall Penetrate" | single | It's the same: it doesn't. That not how we live. |
| 2023-01-13 | 112 | Fvnerals | "Yearning" | single | It might be how we die, but is drowning worse than being torn from your home by gloved hands, |
| 2023-01-13 | 113 | God Disease | "Ashes" | single | only to be interrogated in languages that are all unnatural to you. |
| 2023-01-13 | 114 | Wounds of Recollection | "Vacancy" | single | Even the rocks know not to talk to rocks. |
| 2023-01-13 | 116 | The Dark Atom | "Cosmic Annihilation" | Ancients 2 | gray rocks and gradient nihilisms and great doubts. |
| 2023-01-13 | 117 | Outrun The Sunlight | "Quark 2.0" | Quark 2.0 +2 | When we looked inside of our atoms we found nothing there, too. |
| 2023-01-06 | 1 | Ainur | "Forging of the Rings" | single | If you avoid things that do not appear to have taken the most rudimental precautions against self-embarrassment, you will probably pass on 2023 folk-/power-metal songs about The Lord of the Rings, |
| 2023-01-06 | 2 | Manigance | "The Shadows Ball" | single | especially ones that don't even justify their nerdiness by explicating some obscure detail of Númenórean backstory. |
| 2023-01-06 | 3 | Hadadanza | "La Última Función" | single | "Forging of the Rings" is about...the forging of the Rings. The Rings that the Lords of the Rings are Lords of. |
| 2023-01-06 | 4 | Grimgotts | "Ride the Storm" | single | This is like a band called Paris writing a song about how the Eiffel Tower is tall and thus visible, or Runrig covering "Loch Lomond", |
| 2023-01-06 | 5 | Above the Stars | "Ангел" | single | or, come to think of it, most sports commentary. |
| 2023-01-06 | 6 | Obituary | "My Will to Live" | My Will to Live +2 | Ainur, to be fair, have spent 17 years writing folk/prog/metal songs about, mostly, reasonable metal subjects, |
| 2023-01-06 | 7 | Silver Bullet | "Creatures Of The Night" | Creatures Of The Night +2 | by which we mean details from The Silmarillion, |
| 2023-01-06 | 8 | Crowne | "Operation Phoenix" | single | with the exception of, as guitarist Luca Catalano notes, "and only one time with The Hobbit ones". |
| 2023-01-06 | 9 | Revolution Saints | "Need Each Other" | single | But, really, there's no evasive imperative to pretend that you don't love what you love. |
| 2023-01-06 | 10 | Stargazer | "Can You Conceive It" | single | "Forging of the Rings" is as much a culmination of the folk-hard-rock impulses of Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin, |
| 2023-01-06 | 11 | REXORIA | "Light up the Sky" | single | folded through the bellows of Queen's harmonic theatricality, |
| 2023-01-06 | 12 | Annacrusa | "La Espina" | single | as it is any kind of variation on Eluveitie or, |
| 2023-01-06 | 13 | Motive Black | "Caged" | Caged 5 | to pick another example completely at random, Oakenshield. |
| 2023-01-06 | 14 | For I Am King | "Trojans" | Trojans +2 | I had to Ctrl-F Ainur's discography page to make sure they have not already written a song called "Beleriand Rhapsody". |
| 2023-01-06 | 15 | LÝSIS | "Handprints" | single | Whether that will still be true by the time you read this, I feel less sure. |
| 2023-01-06 | 16 | Katatonia | "Birds" | Birds +2 | In general, you'll appreciate metal more if you aren't afraid to take goofy things seriously without forgetting that they're goofy, |
| 2023-01-06 | 17 | Mroh | "Truth" | single | but then that's probably true of everything, |
| 2023-01-06 | 18 | Black Tomb | "The Core" | Black Tomb | and helpfully suggests that most kinds of creative failure stem from either failing to take a goofy thing seriously enough, |
| 2022-12-30 | 1 | Lonesome_Blue | "Blue Like Sapphire (The Flower Of Hope)" | Second To None | The last couple weeks of the year are traditionally a lull in the music-release calendar. |
| 2022-12-30 | 2 | PassCode | "Clouds Across The Moon" | REVERBERATE ep. 4 | The word "traditionally" is your cue to look up and think about whose entrenched power-structures are being reinforced by asserted habit, |
| 2022-12-30 | 3 | LOVEBITES | "Judgement Day" | single | and in which arbitrary contexts. |
| 2022-12-30 | 4 | LIV MOON | "Addiction" | OUR STORIES | Meanwhile, people keep making songs and "releasing" them from their own interior monologues, |
| 2022-12-30 | 5 | Eir Aoi | "ANSWER" | single | and the kinds of Japanese bands I like seem, collectively, particularly disinclined to regard calendar-year days as a resource to be budgeted. |
| 2022-12-30 | 6 | Magistina Saga | "eclipse" | Abyss Grey Heron 6 | Or else my curiosity expands to fill any nominal void, and I am aesthetically defenseless against young Japanese women in short skirts, |
| 2022-12-30 | 7 | ELFENSJóN | "ECLIPSE" | single | or cartoons wearing gloves, |
| 2022-12-30 | 9 | Underbeasty | "beast" | single | or headless guitars or idol groups playing their own instruments |
| 2022-12-30 | 11 | My Criminal Lovers' | "ANTHEM." | single | nor which things are instruments or effigies or metaphors. |
| 2022-12-30 | 25 | Lonesome_Blue | "Mine" | Second To None | These blue lakes of fire are part of a methodical irrigation of joy, |
| 2022-12-30 | 36 | Rides In ReVellion | "FALLING STAR" | single | in the light of old orbits decaying, |
| 2022-12-30 | 37 | 616 | "Cathedral of Scars" | single | in the temples of what we believe we have lost |
| 2022-12-30 | 38 | Lord Of The Lost | "Blood & Glitter" | Blood & Glitter | but aren't sure whether to celebrate or mourn, |
| 2022-12-30 | 39 | Arogya | "Desire" | Desire +1 | in temperance or abandon. |
| 2022-12-30 | 40 | Atrocity | "Malicious Sukkubus" | Malicious Sukkubus +3 | The opportunity to have your name written in chrome |
| 2022-12-30 | 41 | Dead Wasteland | "Ocean Song" | single | is also an invitation to prepare yourself for tarnish |
| 2022-12-30 | 42 | GhostSeeker | "Who We Are" | single | and the other graceful corrosions of the same elements that sustain us. |
| 2022-12-30 | 43 | Besna | "Neha" | single | I am not appreciably more defenseful against ambiguously-aged Slovakian dudes lurking dubiously behind trees. |
| 2022-12-30 | 44 | Noumena | "Murhenäytelmä" | Murhenäytelmä +1 | We write uplifting stories about misery, |
| 2022-12-30 | 45 | Elyose | "L'Assemblée" | single | or essays about fear and potential, |
| 2022-12-30 | 46 | Anchor Thought | "Built To Bow" | single | or lists of what we found inside arbitrary boundaries, |
| 2022-12-30 | 47 | Seas on the Moon | "The Rule Of 21" | single | because all we know to expect on new worlds are the things we loved in the old lives |
| 2022-12-30 | 48 | Existenter | "Memento Mori" | single | we lived before we reached them. |
| 2022-12-30 | 49 | The Big Deal | "Intuition" | single | And then we arrive, and realize we have crossed the universe in generation ships only to step onto a new planet humming songs we loved in middle school. |
| 2022-12-23 | 1 | Mare Infinitum | "Celestial Escapist" | Cryosleep | Take a three-minute pop song and add six minutes of extended coda grandeur, |
| 2022-12-23 | 2 | Frozen Crown | "Call of the North" | single | or just attach it to an engine and fire the assembly into the secret abyss hidden at the Pole. |
| 2022-12-23 | 3 | Hanging Garden | "The Four Winds" | single | We are the creatures of monumental impulse |
| 2022-12-23 | 4 | Klaymore | "Phrygian Dominate Me" | single | or reverent regard. |
| 2022-12-23 | 5 | Niovel | "First Acolyte" | Long Way From Neverland | Thus I hate superstition, but can't pretend I don't understand the appeal of the imaginary immortal. |
| 2022-12-23 | 6 | Eons Enthroned | "Best Served Cold" | single | These songs overflow with it. |
| 2022-12-23 | 8 | Dark Sarah | "Invincible" | single | into our throats from a glittery space beyond us. |
| 2022-12-23 | 9 | The Dark Side of the Moon | "Double Trouble / Lumos! (Hedwig´s Theme)" | Double Trouble / Lumos! (Hedwig´s Theme) +2 | Half of our legends are about these crossings |
| 2022-12-23 | 10 | Ankor | "Prisoner" | single | from notional majesty into mundane reality, |
| 2022-12-23 | 11 | Silver Bullet | "The Thirteen Nails" | The Thirteen Nails +1 | or the corresponding precariousness with which we remain real |
| 2022-12-23 | 12 | Haunted Gods | "Threshold" | single | against the metagravitational pull of regal abstraction |
| 2022-12-23 | 13 | Carmilla | "Evil" | single | and disingenuous rapture. |
| 2022-12-23 | 14 | Martin Gonzalez | "From the Ground Up" | single | We begin rooted, but then we look up. |
| 2022-12-23 | 15 | E-An-Na | "'colo 'mbia" | single | Point a flashlight at the stars, |
| 2022-12-23 | 16 | Inchaos | "My Gallaxy" | single | and claim them, one by one. |
| 2022-12-23 | 17 | ONMYO-ZA | "茨木童子" | single | But then don't be surprised when they fight back. |
| 2022-12-23 | 18 | NEMOPHILA | "炎天 -ENTEN-" | Seize the Fate | The real heavens are made of gossamer emptiness strung between blazing fires |
| 2022-12-23 | 19 | NEO JAPONISM | "Howl out" | single | waiting for our rising wings with eager tongues. |
| 2022-12-23 | 22 | SAISEIGA | "SPORTS" | single | This is why we see ourselves most sharply in slow motion, |
| 2022-12-23 | 64 | Defueld | "Touch The Sky" | single | polished to our impression of a supernatural sheen, |
| 2022-12-23 | 65 | A Pregnant Light | "Eating Emeralds" | Eating Emeralds / Threshold Angel 2 | as if showing the stars themselves would lure then down into our hands, |
| 2022-12-23 | 66 | Breath Of Wind | "Ocean" | single | into our quenching thirst. |
| 2022-12-23 | 67 | Oceanhoarse | "Carved in Stone" | Carved in Stone 5 | Half of our legends are about these doomed yearnings |
| 2022-12-23 | 68 | Insomnium | "White Christ (feat. Sakis Tolis)" | single | in which we try to improvise, |
| 2022-12-23 | 69 | Depravation | "War Dreams of Itself" | single | but recapitulate long-existing dreams: |
| 2022-12-23 | 70 | Archierophant | "Scenes From A Mirador" | single | of witness as command; |
| 2022-12-23 | 71 | Antecantamentum | "In the Green Petrichor" | Saturnine December | of cyclicality as rebirth; |
| 2022-12-23 | 72 | Vitrail | "La tentation" | single | of desire as resolve. |
| 2022-12-23 | 73 | Wounds of Recollection | "Leo Minor" | single | Take a three-minute pop song and fold it upon itself |
| 2022-12-23 | 74 | THE ANSWER LIES IN THE BLACK VOID | "In Obsidian Clouds" | In Obsidian Clouds +1 | until it becomes the blade of a black sword sharp enough to cut the sky. |
| 2022-12-23 | 80 | Shores Of Null | "Nothing Left to Burn" | single | we fan through our possessions choosing the next one to sacrifice |
| 2022-12-23 | 81 | Subway To Sally | "Was ihr wollt" | single | in order to appease a god only brought into existence by the act. |
| 2022-12-09 | 12 | Senamile Mhlongo | "Ngaze Ngamuhle" | ANGINAFRONTAL 6 | that I usually put towards the end of these lists not because they are inherently more other than Japanese idol rock or cryptic metal or Scottish electropop, |
| 2022-12-09 | 35 | PassCode | "SIREN" | single | but any week can offer you at least this. |
| 2022-12-09 | 43 | GARNiDELiA | "Soten" | single | languages in which the past and present are not oppositional nouns, |
| 2022-12-09 | 44 | ARTiCLEAR | "KAGUNE" | HAIIRO NO NINGEN | languages that do not impose an identity debate onto simple referential grammar. |
| 2022-12-09 | 46 | ASTERISM | "一途" | 一途 / unravel 2 | In all of these songs we are inscrutable and unmistakable and fully generalizable, |
| 2022-12-09 | 47 | Issa | "Live Again" | single | and it should be blissfully no more surprising to hear echoes of your internal monologue in the voice of a Norwegian rock singer or a Senegalese R&B producer or an Atlanta rapper. |
| 2022-12-09 | 48 | IT'sALIE | "Unbroken" | Emosphere | We have made many terrible machines with our dubious hands, |
| 2022-12-09 | 49 | Nevena | "Writer's Block" | Nevena | but we have also made the ones that carry songs beyond their original accidental clearings, |
| 2022-12-09 | 50 | Beyond Frequencies | "All In" | single | over skeptical horizons. |
| 2022-12-09 | 51 | Mhelyssa | "La Trampa" | single | We are engines of the distorted transmission of grace, |
| 2022-12-09 | 52 | Xandria | "The Wonders Still Awaiting" | The Wonders Still Awaiting +3 | of the fragmentary translation of rapture, |
| 2022-12-09 | 53 | Within Temptation | "The Fire Within" | Forgotten Songs 2 | of the tentative transmutation of nominal elements. |
| 2022-12-09 | 54 | Against Myself | "Beyond The Deep" | single | Each step can be flight or witness. |
| 2022-12-09 | 55 | Deathless Legacy | "Hollow" | Mater Larvarum | Maybe each step can only be flight or witness, |
| 2022-12-09 | 56 | Gomorra | "A Chance for the Better" | Dealer of Souls | and flight is the ruptured detachment of movement from self-awareness |
| 2022-12-09 | 57 | Symphony Of Sweden | "Just Let It Bleed" | Just Let It Bleed +1 | in the hopes of evading consequence. |
| 2022-12-09 | 58 | Redemption | "I Am the Storm" | single | But of course that is never how the journeys or stories end. |
| 2022-12-09 | 59 | First Signal | "Never Gonna Let You Go" | single | Consequences are a manifold in intent-space, not a wolf distractable by voles. |
| 2022-12-09 | 60 | The Foreshadowing | "Memento" | single | Or a wolf, but a wolf that sees you once and then never forgets. |
| 2022-12-09 | 63 | Maladie | "So Close" | Wound of Gods | and thus wards we send before us to ask for preparatory forgiveness. |
| 2022-12-09 | 64 | Fvnerals | "Ashen Era" | single | There may or may not be a chorus; I am happy to apologize if you think that helps, |
| 2022-12-09 | 65 | Imperium Dekadenz | "November Monument" | November Monument +1 | but I suspect our immunity or culpability will not be so easily triangulated |
| 2022-12-09 | 66 | Woods of Desolation | "Beneath a Sea of Stars" | The Falling Tide | on this round world in infinite shapeless space. |
| 2022-12-09 | 67 | Shaam Larein | "Flesh of Gold" | Sticka En Kniv I Världen | And of course this is just as true of the songs whose parameters you can enumerate |
| 2022-12-09 | 89 | No Resolve | "Hallelujah" | single | We spin. All the chords are secrets we share. |
| 2022-12-09 | 91 | Tragedy | "Venus" | single | We take turns imagining the divine, quickly in the way that tectonics are slow, |
| 2022-12-02 | 2 | Rave The Reqviem | "Ofelia" | Ofelia +1 | don't touch it until you find out, |
| 2022-12-02 | 3 | Theicon | "Nonexistent" | single | or turn it up. |
| 2022-12-02 | 4 | REXORIA | "Set Me on Fire" | single | Obvious choices are rarely the only choices, of course, |
| 2022-12-02 | 5 | Delain | "Beneath (Feat. Paolo Ribaldini)" | Beneath 2 | and I have loved songs that found others: |
| 2022-12-02 | 6 | Beyond The Black | "Dancing In The Dark" | Dancing In The Dark +3 | tear the wires out of the back so the knob is useless; |
| 2022-12-02 | 7 | Asylum Pyre | "Virtual Guns" | single | pull it off with your teeth; |
| 2022-12-02 | 8 | Flowerleaf | "Fireflies" | Fireflies +2 | turn all the knobs to their zeros and see what is left; |
| 2022-12-02 | 9 | Deathless Legacy | "Ora Pro Nobis" | single | find the person who invented that knob and let them show you why it's there; |
| 2022-12-02 | 10 | Upon These Scars | "Manifestation" | single | unplug yourself from everything that knob is connected to |
| 2022-12-02 | 11 | Brothers of Metal | "Berserkir" | Berserkir +1 | and start over. |
| 2022-12-02 | 12 | Wig Wam | "Out of the Dark" | single | But all joyful solutions to the unknown |
| 2022-12-02 | 13 | Krilloan | "Emperor Rising" | single | regard ignorance with bemused eagerness. |
| 2022-12-02 | 14 | Obituary | "Dying of Everything" | Dying of Everything +1 | They do not begin with anonymous RFCs |
| 2022-12-02 | 15 | Atrocity | "Faces From Beyond" | Faces From Beyond +2 | pasted into email bodies in awkward and inexplicable Caslon. |
| 2022-12-02 | 16 | Metallica | "Lux Æterna" | single | They do not seek to use this knob to get 1.4% more of anything unprecious. |
| 2022-12-02 | 17 | Katatonia | "Austerity" | Austerity +1 | They do not yearn to itemize grievances |
| 2022-12-02 | 18 | Jours Pâles | "Tensions" | Tensions | or define themselves in indignant opposition to the inevitable. |
| 2022-12-02 | 19 | Imha Tarikat | "Touch Of Mercy" | Hearts Unchained - At War With A Passionless World | They do not quietly accede. |
| 2022-12-02 | 20 | Revolution Saints | "Eagle Flight" | single | So not only do I usually prefer the songs made by the curious and exuberant, |
| 2022-12-02 | 21 | LIV MOON | "Never..." | single | but I consider it part of my responsibility as a listener to contribute to the curiosity and exuberance by how I hear. |
| 2022-12-02 | 31 | Maki Ohguro | "君に届け feat, doa, 川島だりあ" | single | Idol rock, metal, disco, hyperpop: |
| 2022-12-02 | 64 | Dwell in Doom | "The Witch in Me" | Songs from the Deadland | but that it cannot even negotiate in that currency. |
| 2022-12-02 | 67 | Krvna | "Tithonus I" | Long Forgotten Relic | the same kind that seeks mortal guidance from an unquestionable immortal |
| 2022-12-02 | 68 | Lisieux | "Révolution" | Abide! | that can definitionally be only one of relevant or real, |
| 2022-12-02 | 69 | Udånde | "I’m Not a Pessimist, I’m a Realist" | Slow Death - A Celebration of Self-Hatred | the same kind that imagines the knob was put there by a committee of petty Norns, |
| 2022-12-02 | 70 | Sullen | "Headspace" | Nodus Tollens - Act 2: Ascension | rather than a product designer with a parts catalog and a manufacturing deadline. |
| 2022-12-02 | 71 | Hourglass | "Void Within" | single | Maybe when you turn it up, it turns three-minute glitchpop songs about our tenuous sense of self |
| 2022-12-02 | 72 | Riverside | "Self-Aware - Single Edit" | single | into five- or twenty-five-minute prog-metal essays about our tenuous sense of self. |
| 2022-12-02 | 73 | Tnne | "No Man's Land" | single | Maybe the knob lets in evil, |
| 2022-12-02 | 75 | E-An-Na | "Fagure Negru" | single | maybe it does nothing to mitigate a machine that transmits evil |
| 2022-12-02 | 85 | Feuerschwanz | "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" | Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! +1 | It's not that there's no one to hear your prayers, |
| 2022-12-02 | 86 | Amberian Dawn | "Super Trouper" | Super Trouper +2 | it's that we are all here, somewhere, in a crowd that is only ever us. Do you want to be heard, to hear? Maybe now you know what that knob must do. |
| 2022-11-25 | 18 | Brightstorm | "Deep Higher Thoughts" | single | and as a result there must also be a decision-tree of some defined cardinality. |
| 2022-11-25 | 19 | Season of Ghosts | "In Hubris" | single | Thus the usual insulation between joy and agony is stripped away. |
| 2022-11-25 | 20 | Oceandvst | "Nme" | single | A single goal in a single tournament game can change the fate |
| 2022-11-25 | 21 | ODC | "The Lie" | single | not only of the two teams playing that game, |
| 2022-11-25 | 22 | Ad Infinitum | "Somewhere Better" | Somewhere Better +1 | but of others, innocently standing by, |
| 2022-11-25 | 23 | ILLUMISHADE | "Elegy" | Elegy +1 | or playing in their own matches of incomplete agency, |
| 2022-11-25 | 24 | Thy Shade | "Never Enough" | single | or standing in the center circle after doing everything under their own control, |
| 2022-11-25 | 25 | Circus of Fools | "Head of Medusa" | A Broadcast from GEN .0 | waiting to be doomed or raptured |
| 2022-11-25 | 26 | Carved | "Red Dwarf" | Ares | into the next round. |
| 2022-11-25 | 27 | Walk in Darkness | "Ships to Atlantis" | Leaves Rolling in Time | It is tempting to believe that the possibility of joy justifies the risk of agony, |
| 2022-11-25 | 28 | Molllust | "Uranus - The Butterfly and the Spider" | Mother Universe | and even more insidiously, that joy cannot exist without agony, |
| 2022-11-25 | 29 | Oceans | "Hell Is Where The Heart Is" | Hell Is Where The Heart Is | that love and hate are subjective polarities imposed on an inevitable spectrum, |
| 2022-11-25 | 30 | Winter | "Into The Void" | Into The Void +2 | inescapable except by obliteration. |
| 2022-11-25 | 31 | In The Woods... | "We Sinful Converge" | Diversum | Distrust all such self-righteous dualities. |
| 2022-11-25 | 32 | Astral Experience | "Reloj de Arena" | single | The cynical know that two wrongs can be counterposed |
| 2022-11-25 | 33 | ACME | "Resisted temptation" | Resisted temptation | to offer a false choice of rights. |
| 2022-11-25 | 34 | Elder | "Catastasis" | Innate Passage | Government, and every other social construct, ought to be a system of consensus and consent, |
| 2022-11-25 | 35 | Djevel | "Afgrundsferd" | Naa skrider natten sort | not an exhausting fight to be the least-bad anti-hero. |
| 2022-11-25 | 36 | Violet Cold | "Sülh" | single | We can see this in an occasional syzygy of circumstantial alignment, |
| 2022-11-25 | 37 | Zetra | "Hopeless Odyssey" | single | when the fight is both meticulously photographed and |
| 2022-11-25 | 38 | Lykotonon | "The Apocryphal Self" | Promethean Pathology | happily far away from us: |
| 2022-11-25 | 39 | Istårn | "Dawn" | Eschatology | a far-foreign city under draconian quarantine; |
| 2022-11-25 | 40 | Monolithe | "Voskhod" | Kosmodrom | a sand-glossed arena built by slave-tantamount labor; |
| 2022-11-25 | 70 | I Built the Sky | "Push Play" | single | There is a champion, but at least they do not suffer a resulting burden of power. |
| 2022-11-25 | 71 | Outrun The Sunlight | "Ambivalence 2.0" | Ambivalence 2.0 +1 | Thus ambivalence may be revised and refined. |
| 2022-11-25 | 72 | Dav Dralleon | "Dark Gates Ov R'lyeh" | Kthullu | We do not leave ourselves in the arena. The game ends, and we go back: |
| 2022-11-18 | 1 | Tulip | "Ghost of Kyiv" | single | Learn the names things call themselves, |
| 2022-11-18 | 2 | Dark Sarah | "Warning Sign" | single | and you become more than yourself. |
| 2022-11-18 | 3 | Averlanche | "Killing Floor" | single | Nihilism seeks to erase distinctions |
| 2022-11-18 | 4 | Cold Kingdom | "Blackout" | Life//Love | out of a desperate evangelical emptiness. |
| 2022-11-18 | 5 | Shattered Vessels | "Exile" | single | The temporary retreat from the shores of the leaking void |
| 2022-11-18 | 6 | Blackbriar | "Crimson Faces" | single | cedes no natural rights, |
| 2022-11-18 | 7 | Sisters of Suffocation | "Cordon Sanitaire" | Cordon Sanitaire +2 | but merely establishes a moral boundary |
| 2022-11-18 | 8 | The Inferno Doll | "Renfield" | single | in order to quantify its current displacement from the physical one. |
| 2022-11-18 | 9 | Dark Moon Lilith | "Eclipse" | single | We are called to stand in the way of the gaze of evil. |
| 2022-11-18 | 10 | Evol Walks | "Sleeping with a Ghost" | single | Learn the names things try to hide from themselves |
| 2022-11-18 | 11 | Violet | "Blame It on the Night" | Illusions | and you gain the power to redeem them, |
| 2022-11-18 | 12 | Disturbed | "Don't Tell Me (feat. Ann Wilson)" | Divisive | but not necessarily the will. |
| 2022-11-18 | 13 | BABYMETAL | "Monochrome" | Monochrome +1 | The light has no colors of its own, |
| 2022-11-18 | 14 | Underbeasty | "Nyx" | single | and we have innumerable colors but no internal fire, |
| 2022-11-18 | 15 | ELFENSJóN | "DAWN" | single | and these two things meet and the day begins: |
| 2022-11-18 | 16 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "Sound Of My Heart" | 連星アスペクト 3 | with thanks and forgiveness, |
| 2022-11-18 | 17 | IBUKI | "Disappear" | My Life | with illusions and protractions, |
| 2022-11-18 | 62 | Candlemass | "Wizard of the Vortex" | Sweet Evil Sun | Our cities are made of erratic magic |
| 2022-11-18 | 63 | Enslaved | "Congelia" | Congelia +2 | accumulated over prismatic aeons. |
| 2022-11-18 | 64 | Neopera | "A New God" | single | Ah, no, wait. Now I remember. |
| 2022-11-18 | 65 | Threshold | "Haunted" | Dividing Lines | This is exactly how half of all our other history happened, too: |
| 2022-11-18 | 66 | Retrospective | "Log Out" | Introvert | as the manifest destiny of cynical concentrations of power, |
| 2022-11-18 | 67 | Arc Of Life | "Real Time World" | Don't Look Down | built by conscripted and systematically betrayed labor, |
| 2022-11-18 | 68 | Soen | "Modesty" | ATLANTIS | and at least initially lorded over. |
| 2022-11-18 | 69 | Arctic Rain | "Fire in My Eyes" | single | So maybe these soon-useless venues will be liberated the same way, |
| 2022-11-18 | 70 | Arogya | "Supernatural" | single | by the inexorable repatriation of blood and loyalty, |
| 2022-11-18 | 71 | SpellBlast | "The Dancing Plague" | Classified - V | and by the same ironic regard sought. |
| 2022-11-18 | 72 | Grimner | "Där Fröet Skall Spira" | Urfader | You invite the world to witness your majesty, |
| 2022-11-18 | 73 | Heidevolk | "Klauwen Vooruit" | single | while wearing open-toed shoes, |
| 2022-11-18 | 74 | Leipa | "01.09.2015" | single | and then refuse to sell them beer. |
| 2022-11-18 | 75 | Dead Crown | "The Particle Of Gods" | single | They will see you exactly as you are: |
| 2022-11-18 | 76 | Rise to the Sky | "A Time I Was Loved" | Stay With Me When You're Gone | crude, and rich only in the ways that will not long matter. |
| 2022-11-18 | 77 | Imha Tarikat | "Brute Majesty" | single | You cannot earn royalty. |
| 2022-11-18 | 78 | Fortíð | "Fimbulvetur" | Dómur Um Dauðan Hvern 2 | You can defer your abdication for a little longer, maybe, |
| 2022-11-18 | 79 | Harakiri for the Sky | "Homecoming: Denied!" | Homecoming: Denied! +1 | but you can't buy the world's adoration, |
| 2022-11-18 | 80 | Mindless Paradise | "Anemoia" | Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz | and you can't buy a team that represents any aspect of you but your entitlement. |
| 2022-11-18 | 81 | Grave Circles | "Disintegrated Suns" | Pestilence and Death 4 | I know the names your people call themselves, |
| 2022-11-18 | 82 | 16 | "Dead Eyes" | Into Dust | the people that built your doomed city |
| 2022-11-18 | 83 | Jours Pâles | "Ecumante de rage" | single | and fill it for a few weeks |
| 2022-11-11 | 9 | Skar | "Anti-Hero" | single | of the kiss-off anthem "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", |
| 2022-11-11 | 13 | Amberian Dawn | "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" | Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) +1 | on the way somewhere else: |
| 2022-11-11 | 14 | Epica | "Wake The World (feat. Phil Lanzon & Tommy Karevik)" | The Alchemy Project | into the gleeful quadruple rhyme-schemes |
| 2022-11-11 | 15 | Tigersclaw | "Joan of Arc" | Titan's Dawn | that are technically AABCCC, |
| 2022-11-11 | 16 | Kassogtha | "Save Us" | rEvolve | but she wedges extra As and Cs into the middles of the lines too; |
| 2022-11-11 | 17 | Crown Solace | "Inside My Mind" | single | into the delirious disarming choruses of "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me", |
| 2022-11-11 | 18 | REMINA | "The Endless City" | STRATA | with the rhymes bracketing the line, |
| 2022-11-11 | 19 | Fate DeStroyed | "47" | single | accepting blame and attention in the same glamorously self-conscious swirl; |
| 2022-11-11 | 20 | Chase the Comet | "Broken Toys" | single | into the elegiac sub-lede "I stare directly into the sun but never in the mirror", |
| 2022-11-11 | 21 | Rioghan | "Home" | single | which could be a chorus in any other song, |
| 2022-11-11 | 22 | Everfrost | "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" | Frostbites 4 | or the end of any other story; |
| 2022-11-11 | 23 | LIV MOON | "El Dorado" | single | into the almost-everything-stops missing-bridge verse about |
| 2022-11-11 | 24 | FATE GEAR | "Unbreakable Wings" | Killers in the Sky Part 2 | murder and wills and hell, where the camera flips around and-- |
| 2022-11-11 | 79 | The Dark Atom | "Wormhole" | Luminescence | Taylor, you'll be fine. |
| 2022-11-11 | 84 | About Us | "Lead My Heart" | About Us | but nobody should have that much power. |
| 2022-11-11 | 85 | Conquest | "Man on the Silver Mountain" | single | We do not gather around the bejeweled firepits of billionaires, |
| 2022-11-11 | 86 | Stormburner | "Burn the Storm" | single | on their skyscraper parapets, |
| 2022-11-11 | 87 | Lion's Share | "Run for Your Life" | single | we stand here on the ground, waiting for walk lights under the glow of Targets, |
| 2022-11-11 | 88 | Galderia | "Answer The Call" | Endless Horizon | trading smiles that want to remind us of something and we let them. |
| 2022-11-11 | 89 | Freternia | "Elvenstar" | single | I have this thing where I get older |
| 2022-11-11 | 90 | Warkings | "Hellfire (feat. Morgana le Fay)" | Morgana | but there's never any less music. |
| 2022-11-11 | 91 | Obituary | "The Wrong Time" | single | All of the bands I've ever loved |
| 2022-11-11 | 92 | Twilight Force | "Twilight Force" | single | are there waiting to be loved again. |
| 2022-11-11 | 93 | Mantric Momentum | "(I'll Never Be) Maria Magdalena - Bonus Track" | Trial by Fire | I used to dream of devices: |
| 2022-11-11 | 94 | Powerwolf | "Blood for Blood (Faoladh) (feat. Melissa Bonny)" | Missa Cantorem II | towering stacks of components and pulsing monoliths at carefully calibrated angels. |
| 2022-11-11 | 95 | Grimner | "Ur Vågorna" | single | Instead I have invisible angels holding themselves against the sides of my ear canals. |
| 2022-11-11 | 96 | NanowaR of Steel | "Armpits of Immortals" | single | The methodical anticipation of other people's criticisms is just an operationalization of doubt. |
| 2022-11-11 | 97 | Kampfar | "Dødens aperitiff" | Til Klovers Takt | We are all monstrous if you stare directly at us. |
| 2022-11-11 | 98 | Oak Pantheon | "Listen!" | single | Mirrors reverse the vertical axis, but not the judgment. |
| 2022-11-11 | 99 | Woods of Desolation | "Illumination" | Illumination +2 | The anti-hero is what's left of the hero after the costume is chewed off by rats. |
| 2022-11-11 | 100 | Drudkh | "Нічний - The Nocturnal One" | All Belong to the Night | It's a popular hobby to infer romantic revelations into Taylor's songs, |
| 2022-11-11 | 101 | Fvnerals | "For Horror Eats The Light" | single | but the main thing you learn from this one |
| 2022-11-11 | 102 | Ahab | "Prof. Arronax' Descent into the Vast Oceans (Feat. Ultha)" | single | is that Taylor has not lost her parents. |
| 2022-11-11 | 103 | Imperium Dekadenz | "Memories ... a Raging River" | single | Of course we root for the anti-hero. |
| 2022-11-11 | 104 | Alles Wird In Flammen Stehen | "Traurigkeit I" | III - Traurigkeit | We respond to need. |
| 2022-11-11 | 105 | Sabackthanny | "River Dream" | River Dream +3 | All of the people we let down fall where we drop them, |
| 2022-11-04 | 36 | Free As Birds | "Strike Masses" | single | Bring all the world's music together doesn't make it indistinguishable, |
| 2022-11-04 | 37 | BabyKingdom | "dakuramento" | dakuramento +3 | it just makes it free. |
| 2022-11-04 | 38 | OMNI666 | "Jigoku-Matsuri" | single | You can go to Japan, but songs are faster. |
| 2022-11-04 | 39 | JAMBINAI | "from the place been erased" | single | I've never seen JAMBINAI, but I first started paying attention to them because my friend Erich saw them at WOMAD and had to tell somebody. |
| 2022-11-04 | 40 | Xandria | "Ghosts" | Ghosts +2 | Be the person that your friends think of when they see something wonderful that they don't understand. |
| 2022-11-04 | 41 | Carpathia | "Everstone" | The Mooring | When I discover a particularly good gothic symphonic metal band, I tell my friend Paul, |
| 2022-11-04 | 42 | Crimson Sun | "My Revolution" | single | and then later we know how to cross-check any work things designed to measure what two listeners have in common, |
| 2022-11-04 | 43 | Unleash The Archers | "Acoustipex" | Acoustipex +1 | and how to commiserate about projects that treat us as if we exist in sealed vats, |
| 2022-11-04 | 44 | Deathless Legacy | "Absolution" | single | fed by tubes, |
| 2022-11-04 | 45 | Stoned Statues | "Until Falling" | single | and can only be explained to each other by intermediation and coincidence. |
| 2022-11-04 | 46 | Halocene | "Hold Me, Help Me" | Hold Me, Help Me 5 | I hear the new Halocene, and remember a thread John started about Lacuna Coil and time. |
| 2022-11-04 | 47 | The Nearly Deads | "Relentless" | single | Context isn't a sticker-backing we peel songs off of, |
| 2022-11-04 | 48 | Molllust | "Sun - Journey of Icarus" | Sun - Journey of Icarus +3 | it's a world we make by allowing music into everything else we do, |
| 2022-11-04 | 49 | Loz Campbell | "Beautiful Liar" | single | or by tolerating everything other than music as accompaniment |
| 2022-11-04 | 50 | Cassidy Paris | "Danger" | single | or a tractably limited distraction from listening and singing. |
| 2022-11-04 | 51 | About Us | "Our Fairyland" | single | I bet you don't think this song is about you, |
| 2022-11-04 | 52 | Under Threat | "Impermanence" | Impermanence | and you're right, but you've asked a backwards question. |
| 2022-11-04 | 53 | Disillusion | "From the Embers" | Ayam | Songs are born, embodying potential, |
| 2022-11-04 | 54 | Silent Cry | "Pactum Earth" | Terra | and then they lead lives among us. |
| 2022-11-04 | 55 | Devin Townsend | "Celestial Signals" | Lightwork | I saw Mimi Parker play, |
| 2022-11-04 | 56 | Earthside | "We Who Lament" | single | and it made Low my favorite band for a while, |
| 2022-11-04 | 57 | Indigo Storm | "Duplicity" | single | and now they don't remain, |
| 2022-11-04 | 58 | Sisters of Suffocation | "Pay My Dues" | Pay My Dues +1 | except they do. |
| 2022-11-04 | 59 | Mob Rules | "Ghost Town" | single | The songs she gave us are ours to keep, unconditionally, |
| 2022-11-04 | 60 | Insomnium | "Lilian" | single | or maybe not quite without conditions, really, but the conditions |
| 2022-11-04 | 61 | Amorphis | "The Well" | single | are not rules that march ahead, they are contexts that pursue, |
| 2022-11-04 | 62 | Mandragora Thuringia | "Ausbruch" | Rex Silvarum | or circle overhead in drones, |
| 2022-11-04 | 63 | Tyrmfar | "Supreme Justice" | Dialectic of Ego and the Unconscious | or buzz in your ears like a physical memory of drones |
| 2022-11-04 | 64 | Equilibrium Falls | "Fractured Reality" | Fractured Reality +1 | or an overdriven intimation of death. |
| 2022-11-04 | 65 | Second To Sun | "North Metal Legion" | Nocturnal Philosophy | I saw Juliana Hatfield play with the Blake Babies in my college dining hall. |
| 2022-11-04 | 66 | Karg | "Generation ohne Abschied" | single | I saw Jewel do an in-store at Newbury Comics, backed up against the New Release rack with just an acoustic guitar. |
| 2022-11-04 | 67 | Jours Pâles | "Jour de pluie, jour de fête" | single | I saw Big Country play on a barge in the fake lagoon behind the CambridgeSide Galleria. |
| 2022-11-04 | 68 | Harakiri for the Sky | "02:19 AM, Psychosis" | single | These moments of presence don't just linger, |
| 2022-11-04 | 69 | Iffernet | "Waiting" | Silences | they expand. |
| 2022-11-04 | 72 | VV | "The Foreverlost" | single | but having seen Low play I can now listen to other bands recordings and feel transported by analogy. |
| 2022-11-04 | 109 | Carpathia | "Telepathy" | The Mooring | and in return you discover your superpowers. |
| 2022-11-04 | 110 | Palace | "Kyrie" | single | When I was young I thought my heart was a vessel |
| 2022-11-04 | 111 | Glass Tides | "Unholy" | single | to be filled |
| 2022-11-04 | 112 | Our Last Night | "Unholy" | single | and then measured, |
| 2022-11-04 | 113 | The Animal In Me | "Unholy" | single | but you assert humanity by allowing joy to flow into and throughout you and then away again, |
| 2022-10-28 | 19 | KAMIJO | "Habsburg" | OSCAR | or a notional Europe hidden in ornate tunnels under Tokyo. |
| 2022-10-28 | 20 | Liv Sin | "Antihero" | single | I want to hear covers of 3:20 Taylor Swift songs somehow completed within 6:40 of their release. |
| 2022-10-28 | 21 | Carved | "Sovereign" | single | I want to dance with creatures of iron and flesh, |
| 2022-10-28 | 22 | Docker's Guild | "Machine Messiah" | The Mystic Technocracy - Season 2: The Age of Entropy | our mutual divinity conferred by proximity and regard. |
| 2022-10-28 | 23 | MindAhead | "Beautiful Mistake" | 6119, Pt. 1 | I want to wave at clouds flashing overhead on their own guardian missions. |
| 2022-10-28 | 24 | Nevena | "Too Late" | single | I want infinite chances |
| 2022-10-28 | 25 | Tulip | "The Hanged Man" | single | for all of us, |
| 2022-10-28 | 26 | Nereids | "A Message from Beyond" | single | stories that arc only onwards, |
| 2022-10-28 | 27 | Solitude Within | "When Kingdoms Fall" | When Kingdoms Fall | downfall relegated to legend. |
| 2022-10-28 | 28 | Kliodna | "Wind of Freedom (Hymn for Nations)" | Way of Heroes | I want to follow no flags into battles |
| 2022-10-28 | 29 | Memoira | "Autumn´s Heart" | single | on perfect November afternoons, |
| 2022-10-28 | 30 | Hoaxed | "Where Good Won't Go" | Two Shadows | not by defiant will but by the ardent properties of cooperative identity |
| 2022-10-28 | 32 | Megara | "Oxígeno" | Truco o trato | I give you this air and then stand there, breathing too quickly, |
| 2022-10-28 | 49 | Sebastien | "Odkaz bojovníka" | single | and Adams comes a long way before Asimov. |
| 2022-10-28 | 50 | Pomegranate Tiger | "The Cryptographer" | single | This is why trading clear and unenforceable strictures for inscrutable sigils |
| 2022-10-28 | 51 | Binary Creed | "Air" | Inferno | is never prudent and always wise. |
| 2022-10-28 | 52 | Maladie | "Dying Immortality" | single | Dignity and indignity are sewn into a reversible cloak, |
| 2022-10-28 | 53 | Antipope | "Rex Mundi Aeternum" | Rex Mundi | which sounds inspired until you realize that this means neither side will have decent pockets. |
| 2022-10-28 | 54 | Norrsköld | "Witness The Illusion" | single | Shards of epics will wedge themselves into the treads of your shoes |
| 2022-10-28 | 55 | Golgotha | "My Burden" | Mors Diligentis | and click against the surfaces of rainbows |
| 2022-10-28 | 56 | Callejon | "Eternia" | Eternia | so that the gods turn from their kouign-amann to watch you as you limp past. |
| 2022-10-28 | 57 | Katatonia | "Atrium" | single | We are mesmerizing already in our uncertain balance |
| 2022-10-28 | 58 | Teramaze | "Dangerous Me" | single | and our least daring clothes; |
| 2022-10-28 | 59 | Divided by Design | "IV, Legacy" | single | wait until you see us tonight. |
| 2022-10-28 | 60 | Cantu Ignis | "Acquisition of Telekinesis" | Euphoric Divination | You will not remain unmoved. If necessary, we will move you with our hands, |
| 2022-10-28 | 61 | Devin Townsend | "Lightworker" | Lightworker +2 | cupping illumination onto the shadowlines between your muscles, |
| 2022-10-28 | 62 | Morbikon | "In Ritual Isolation" | Ov Mournful Twilight | pulling you up against your skin. Up, out. Anywhere but back into loneliness. |
| 2022-10-28 | 63 | Varjola | "Kaipuu" | single | The next folder will have drawings of a boat you never built, |
| 2022-10-28 | 64 | Timor et Tremor | "A Hundred Days of Rain" | Realm of Ashes | but we are usually saved from drowning by movements of our bodies |
| 2022-10-28 | 65 | Vintertodt | "Tongues" | Under Endless Invented Night | long before their new hulls can be fabricated. |
| 2022-10-28 | 66 | Darkthrone | "Impeccable Caverns of Satan" | Astral Fortress | Our dreamships displace more water |
| 2022-10-28 | 67 | Noctem | "SOVEREIGN PROVIDENCE" | CREDO CERTE NE CRAS | than our fears pour into the ocean, |
| 2022-10-28 | 68 | Moonthoth | "Wołchwowe widziadła" | single | and anyways the difference between an ocean and a lake |
| 2022-10-28 | 69 | Saħħar | "Fl-għajnejn Għomja tal-Anġli" | Difna Fl-Infern | is that sometimes we remember that the world extends beyond our immediate sight. |
| 2022-10-28 | 70 | Fugit | "Electromagnetic Lucifer" | Electromagnetic Lucifer +1 | There's a box in the basement full of compasses so old that we hadn't even discovered the fourth cardinal direction yet. |
| 2022-10-28 | 71 | Dwell in Doom | "The Sign of Doom" | single | We used to believe that there was an edge of the world, and we would reach it in 2000 or 2038 or 1984. |
| 2022-10-28 | 72 | Forlesen | "Black Terrain" | Black Terrain +3 | It's not that we were wrong, exactly, |
| 2022-10-28 | 73 | dArtagnan | "Teufelsgeiger" | Felsenfest | because we rarely do anything exactly, |
| 2022-10-21 | 1 | BABYMETAL | "Divine Attack - Shingeki -" | single | It's fairly undeniably true that BABYMETAL is a terrible name, a permanent commitment to an initial gimmickry that has long since become just another magnificent variation on kinetic joy, |
| 2022-10-21 | 2 | Hikicomoteikoku | "Empire" | single | but you probably don't know what Hikicomoteikoku means, and thus maybe that's even worse. |
| 2022-10-21 | 5 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "シャルル feat.松下" | single | but learning enough to understand how kanji are constructed isn't nearly as intractable. |
| 2022-10-21 | 10 | CALETWOLF | "AVALON" | single | you just have to be willing to walk up and down it |
| 2022-10-21 | 11 | Sede Vacante | "Mistaken" | Conium | until it becomes fond of your weird shoes, |
| 2022-10-21 | 12 | Ann My Guard | "Martyrium" | single | curious about how you decide where to stop, |
| 2022-10-21 | 13 | Antillia | "Из пепла" | single | brave enough to ask you what's playing in your mint-green earbuds |
| 2022-10-21 | 14 | Tarja | "Eye of the Storm - Single Version" | single | that makes you micro-oscillate at wait lights. |
| 2022-10-21 | 15 | Neopera | "Tuba Mirum" | single | Now you have something to trade. |
| 2022-10-21 | 16 | BREAK ME DOWN | "The Other Life" | single | In this way quiet tourism modulates into audibility, |
| 2022-10-21 | 17 | As Everything Unfolds | "Felt Like Home" | single | but your presence was already never silent. |
| 2022-10-21 | 19 | SCARLET | "In And Out" | single | Sometimes, when you can't read the signs, |
| 2022-10-21 | 20 | In This Moment | "Burn 1983" | Blood 1983 5 | you have to duck through doorway curtains into warm darkness |
| 2022-10-21 | 21 | Chez Kane | "Children of Tomorrow Gone" | Powerzone | to find out whether this is a ramen restaurant |
| 2022-10-21 | 23 | Brutus | "Brave" | Unison Life | but neither enterprise is abstruse on its own terms. |
| 2022-10-21 | 24 | The Otolith | "Ekpyrotic" | Folium Limina | The unfamiliar does not exist to mock you |
| 2022-10-21 | 25 | The Lord | "Rise to Diminish" | Devotional | the way the familiar does, |
| 2022-10-21 | 26 | BIG|BRAVE | "carvers, farriers and knaves" | single | but you can learn. |
| 2022-10-21 | 27 | Black Math Horseman | "Black Math Horseman" | Black Math Horseman +3 | Be generous with your ignorance |
| 2022-10-21 | 28 | Avatarium | "Nocturne" | Death, Where Is Your Sting | and you end up with less of it. |
| 2022-10-21 | 29 | Ruby the Hatchet | "The Change" | Fear Is a Cruel Master | All of our cities reach towards each other, |
| 2022-10-21 | 30 | Brutus | "Dreamlife" | Unison Life | like all of our hands, |
| 2022-10-21 | 31 | Avantasia | "Welcome To The Shadows" | A Paranormal Evening with the Moonflower Society | because there is nothing else. |
| 2022-10-21 | 32 | MindAhead | "Burning Horizon" | single | Other people's cryptic symbols |
| 2022-10-21 | 33 | Orden Ogan | "December" | Final Days | are just their way of saying the same things you would say if you were here: |
| 2022-10-21 | 34 | SpellBlast | "The Dyatlov Pass" | single | "Recruitment is also an empire", |
| 2022-10-21 | 35 | Grimner | "Hämtad av Valkyrior" | single | or "Now we push the wolves into the sea", |
| 2022-10-21 | 36 | Galderia | "Striking The Earth" | single | or "Angels were always really meteors". |
| 2022-10-21 | 37 | The Division Red | "Chroma" | Chroma +1 | Different linguistic systems arrange their compositely conserved complexities into different internal configurations. |
| 2022-10-21 | 38 | Sullen | "Locust" | single | You can't really change the things you need to say, |
| 2022-10-21 | 39 | Avantasia | "Kill The Pain Away" | A Paranormal Evening with the Moonflower Society | but there are infinite ways to say them, |
| 2022-10-21 | 40 | Iron Kingdom | "Queen of the Crystal Throne" | single | in which the infinite is variously evident or elided. |
| 2022-10-21 | 41 | Elder | "Endless Return" | single | I think, in general, because I believe in the infinite only as a literal abstraction, |
| 2022-10-21 | 42 | Bloodred Hourglass | "In Lieu of Flowers" | single | I would rather hear it celebrated than assumed. |
| 2022-10-21 | 43 | Marras | "Poissaoleva" | single | Or maybe that's pointing causation in the wrong direction. |
| 2022-10-21 | 44 | Iskandr | "Knagend Zout" | single | The pious warned us that black metal was driving the lost into the disciplines of Satan |
| 2022-10-21 | 45 | Darkthrone | "Caravan of Broken Ghosts" | single | but disciplines were the only religious impulses I actually understood. |
| 2022-10-21 | 46 | Abduction | "Dismantling The Corpse Of Demeter" | Black Blood | I remember when we found the gods stretched out dead, |
| 2022-10-21 | 47 | Ggu:ll | "Voertuig der Verlorenen" | Ex Est | or rocks that looked like they might once have been gods, |
| 2022-10-21 | 48 | Mroh | "Whispers from Nowhere" | XII | or pictures from the surface of Mars that appear to show HM-2 pedals. |
| 2022-10-21 | 49 | Full Of Hell | "Swarming Hornets" | Aurora Leaking from an Open Wound 3 | None of these other planets are real until we can stomp on them. |
| 2022-10-21 | 50 | Imha Tarikat | "Streams Of Power - Canavar" | single | Here before the colonies are planted in the sky, |
| 2022-10-21 | 51 | Gothminister | "Sinister" | Pandemonium | all our cities glower at each other |
| 2022-10-21 | 52 | Avantasia | "Arabesque" | A Paranormal Evening with the Moonflower Society | across whatever distances and boundaries separate them |
| 2022-10-21 | 53 | HYDE | "PANDORA" | single | until there no longer are any. |
| 2022-10-21 | 99 | Byrdy | "Running Up That Hill" | single | into the gods that looked like rocks from which all of our moments are stolen |
| 2022-10-21 | 100 | Rage Of Light | "Running Up That Hill" | single | and the recruited empire of the rest of us who are ready to not be unhappy. |
| 2022-10-14 | 1 | My Own Ghost | "Remember" | Shadow People | I would probably distrust myself. |
| 2022-10-14 | 2 | Dream State | "Taunt Me" | single | I love a lot of things, |
| 2022-10-14 | 3 | Falconshield | "Death To The King" | single | and individual humans who don't love many unrelated things puzzle and sadden me, |
| 2022-10-14 | 4 | The Spider Accomplice | "Fire The Sorrow" | The Venomous Montage 6 | but I instinctively expect authority and creativity to be diverse |
| 2022-10-14 | 5 | Epica | "The Great Tribulation (feat. Fleshgod Apocalypse)" | The Great Tribulation (feat. Fleshgod Apocalypse) +1 | only in aggregate. |
| 2022-10-14 | 6 | Carpathia | "Beloved" | single | My dream world, |
| 2022-10-14 | 7 | Victoria K | "Raptum" | Kore | and in this case I mean this literally, as there is a city that recurs in my dreams |
| 2022-10-14 | 8 | Antonamasia | "Kinesis" | single | and as best I know exists there alone, |
| 2022-10-14 | 9 | Eternal Frequency | "War" | single | in which the subterranean layer beneath the buildings is an endless irregular labyrinth |
| 2022-10-14 | 10 | Carmilla | "Hear My Voice" | single | of hyperspecialized food stalls: |
| 2022-10-14 | 11 | Defueld | "Saints & Sinners" | single | makers of a single perfect burrito; |
| 2022-10-14 | 12 | KiaRa | "We Are the Stardust" | Archangel | bakers of one otherwise-unattainable caramel-oatmeal donut; |
| 2022-10-14 | 13 | Molllust | "Venus - Poems of Love" | Venus - Poems of Love +2 | embowlers of ramen who offer you only the choice between too much garlic and way too much garlic; |
| 2022-10-14 | 14 | Debler Eternia | "Catrina" | Perversso | Liege waffletiers who hand you a gleaming, crackly waffle in a fold of thin velum if you get anywhere near them. |
| 2022-10-14 | 15 | Everfrost | "Hacking to the Gate" | single | The notional corresponding nightmare, which I mercifully don't actually have, |
| 2022-10-14 | 16 | My Own Ghost | "Home" | Shadow People | is a suburban office-park Cheesecake Factory that has run out of cheesecake, |
| 2022-10-14 | 17 | Eluveitie | "Exile Of The Gods" | Exile Of The Gods +1 | in which every culinary precedent is reduced to a hashtag aesthetic |
| 2022-10-14 | 18 | E-An-Na | "Suit în Nor" | single | applied to ponderous calorie overload with a willful distaste for actual culture |
| 2022-10-14 | 19 | Lodestar | "Show Me A Sign" | Wanderers 4 | and a comprehensive style-guide of brand identity. |
| 2022-10-14 | 20 | Hoaxed | "The Knowing" | The Knowing +2 | I recoil with a flourish from the telltale clues of audient commodification: |
| 2022-10-14 | 21 | Bloody Hammers | "And Soon the Darkness" | Washed In the Blood | pervasive stock photography; |
| 2022-10-14 | 22 | Powerwolf | "My Will Be Done" | My Will Be Done +2 | swellingly emotive music that sounds like somebody peeled the backing off of a real song you can't quite place, |
| 2022-10-14 | 23 | Dreamtale | "Powerplay" | Wellon 3 | and then dropped the rest of it in the street; |
| 2022-10-14 | 24 | Dragonland | "Resurrecting an Ancient Technology" | The Power Of The Nightstar | aspirational labeling intent on telling you the kind of person it wants you to want to be |
| 2022-10-14 | 25 | Freternia | "Dark And The Light" | single | instead of admitting what it's selling |
| 2022-10-14 | 26 | Gomorra | "Stand United" | Stand United +1 | or celebrating what it emits; |
| 2022-10-14 | 27 | Onward | "Onward We Sail" | Onward We Sail +1 | carefully curated anonymity designed not only to keep you from seeking other sources, |
| 2022-10-14 | 28 | Induction | "Go To Hell" | Go To Hell +2 | but to render "other sources" structurally suspicious. |
| 2022-10-14 | 29 | White Skull | "Ad Maiora Semper" | single | Why do you think Amazon cheerfully buries you in endless nonsensically-named vendors you've never heard of |
| 2022-10-14 | 30 | Molotov Train | "Worlds Together" | Worlds Together 5 | all claiming very unapologetically to be selling the same exact image |
| 2022-10-14 | 31 | Saltatio Mortis | "Odins Raben" | single | of an uncannily compelling color-block hoodie |
| 2022-10-14 | 32 | U.D.O. | "Wilder Life" | Wilder Life +1 | that may or may not even exist? |
| 2022-10-14 | 33 | Alter Bridge | "Dead Among the Living" | Pawns & Kings | They have turned online shopping into a two-sided casino |
| 2022-10-14 | 34 | Soen | "Snuff" | Snuff +1 | in which the self-employed operators of rigged games are allowed |
| 2022-10-14 | 35 | Astral Experience | "Marioneta de Cristal" | single | to cheat themselves out of business by quantifying gamblers' gullibilities, |
| 2022-10-14 | 36 | Scars of Solitude | "Cruelty has a Human Heart" | single | after which they can be rehired as minimum-possible-wage suppliers |
| 2022-10-14 | 37 | Gothminister | "Star" | Star +2 | of the same thing to be re-sold under the only brand anybody is allowed to still trust. |
| 2022-10-14 | 38 | The Sade | "King and Queen" | single | My dream food-maze is a two-sided marketplace, too, in at least some underlying sense. |
| 2022-10-14 | 39 | Timor et Tremor | "Voices from the Coffin" | single | Somebody dream-owns the dream buildings above it. |
| 2022-10-14 | 40 | Gevurah | "At the Orient of Eden" | Gehinnom | Each stall must be rented, dream-logistically. |
| 2022-10-14 | 41 | Firtan | "Lethe" | Marter | Some nights, when it appears again, there are differences. |
| 2022-10-14 | 42 | Oferwintran | "Prince Kelyddon" | It Often Befalls Those | The enchilada kiosk has been replaced with corn dogs sold over a counter shaped, |
| 2022-10-14 | 43 | Cornoctuan | "Leaden Star (The Lightless, Pt. I)" | single | for reasons that are not immediately obvious, like a komodo dragon |
| 2022-10-14 | 44 | envy | "Seimei" | single | in brocaded slippers. |
| 2022-10-14 | 99 | Vandroya | "Heaven" | single | This should not be all that you want. It's not even all I want, it's just all that I've had time to integrate |
| 2022-10-14 | 101 | SMR LVE | "Time After Time" | single | The clock ticks; confusion is always a clue or a call |
| 2022-10-14 | 103 | Harakiri for the Sky | "Mad World" | single | Informed enthusiasm shares more with naive glee than with studied disdain. |
| 2022-10-14 | 104 | The Animal In Me | "I2I" | single | I don't even remember this song. I don't know what's in these dumplings. |
| 2022-10-14 | 105 | Sunday Friend | "We Are Never Getting Back Together" | Throwback - EP 4 | I turn a corner of the maze and the girl at the chai stand is playing "Take the Money and Run" on a pink bluetooth speaker, and I love everything I have ever loved and it doesn't stop. |
| 2022-10-14 | 106 | Halocene | "Unholy" | single | We draw arbitrary boundaries in order to make it easier, and thus safer, |
| 2022-10-14 | 108 | For I Am King | "Running Up That Hill" | single | and then we look at each other across them as if our positions encode choices we cannot unmake without divine intervention. |
| 2022-10-14 | 109 | My Own Ghost | "Dark River" | Shadow People | I'm not asking for your trust. I pull you into the next world and then I let go of your hand. I don't need you to want these songs, no matter how perfect they seem to me. We too are perfect. Perfection is not scarce. I just want you to believe that and want to follow any paths that lead towards even more of it. |
| 2022-10-07 | 1 | Amberian Dawn | "SOS" | single | I usually describe Amberian Dawn as ABBA-in-metal, so another Amberian Dawn ABBA cover feels like a little personal gift. Until I realize that it's the advance single for a full album of Amberian Dawn ABBA covers, at which point I become dangerously suspicious about solipsism again. |
| 2022-10-07 | 2 | Ad Infinitum | "Upside Down" | single | This is the reward for curiosity, though: |
| 2022-10-07 | 3 | Rave The Reqviem | "God, Demon, Machine" | single | the more you learn to love, the more the universe seems conceived for your joy, |
| 2022-10-07 | 4 | Amaranthe | "Find Life" | single | and if it doesn't feel like this to you yet, it's probably not because the universe has work to do. |
| 2022-10-07 | 5 | Beyond The Black | "Winter Is Coming" | Winter Is Coming +2 | Few of the enemies we hold still to imagine are as powerful as inertia, |
| 2022-10-07 | 6 | Elyose | "Retour au réel" | single | or as cheerfully unconcerned with our movements. |
| 2022-10-07 | 7 | IKINÄ | "Hattara" | single | Move, and you change the air you displace. |
| 2022-10-07 | 10 | Deathless Legacy | "Moonless Night" | single | or it won't, because of course it doesn't |
| 2022-10-07 | 11 | Charlotte Wessels | "The Phantom Touch" | Tales from Six Feet Under Vol. II | until you take the gleaming steps that make paths. |
| 2022-10-07 | 12 | Sede Vacante | "Conium" | single | If you hate self-actualizing circularity, you should have chosen a squarer planet. |
| 2022-10-07 | 13 | Seas on the Moon | "The Waiting" | single | The Amberian Dawn ABBA-covers album is called Take a Chance, but the published track-listing claims it doesn't include a cover of "Take a Chance on Me". |
| 2022-10-07 | 14 | Sleeping Romance | "Resemblance of Light" | We All Are Shadows | We name things according to our intentions, |
| 2022-10-07 | 15 | Debler Eternia | "Afrodissia" | single | and they become historiographies of how we have intended. |
| 2022-10-07 | 16 | NUMENTO | "The Vile Entity" | single | We walk over dry grass in flaming boots. |
| 2022-10-07 | 17 | Dorothy Polonium | "Goat" | single | Maybe "gleaming" is not quite the right word for the resulting paths, |
| 2022-10-07 | 18 | Circus of Fools | "Orgy of Indulgence" | single | or "paths" an aspirational way to describe scars. |
| 2022-10-07 | 22 | LEIWAN | "Aburakatabura" | single | All these frissons of metal and other elements are invitational alchemistries |
| 2022-10-07 | 23 | PRSMIN | "eve" | single | that recruit us as boundary technicians |
| 2022-10-07 | 33 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "だれかの心臓になれたなら feat.榊原ゆい" | single | by patiently leading us through searing radiance |
| 2022-10-07 | 34 | NEMOPHILA | "Seize the Fate" | single | until we notice where we are, |
| 2022-10-07 | 35 | Borealis | "My Fortress" | Illusions | where we have always been. |
| 2022-10-07 | 36 | SpellBlast | "The Flannan Lighthouse" | single | We learn to lose ourselves |
| 2022-10-07 | 37 | Aara | "Phthonos I" | Phthonos 2 | by triangulating wildly on a single point at a time. |
| 2022-10-07 | 38 | The Antichrist Imperium | "The Sweetest Juice" | Volume III: Satan in His Original Glory | Bad ideas are usually good ideas worn down by earnest use. |
| 2022-10-07 | 39 | Liturgy | "93" | As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time 4 | Arguably this is literally what we mean by utility |
| 2022-10-07 | 40 | Illyria | "Let Me Take You Somewhere Beautiful And We'll Never Want To Leave" | Take Me Somewhere Beautiful | as an antithesis to art: |
| 2022-10-07 | 41 | A Pregnant Light | "The Master" | The Master B/W the Mail 2 | actions that abrade the joyful surfaces before the miserable ones. |
| 2022-10-07 | 42 | Cloud Rat | "Imaging Order" | Threshold | Pragmatic dogma is entropy's favorite disguise, |
| 2022-10-07 | 43 | Counterparts | "A Eulogy for Those Still Here" | A Eulogy for Those Still Here | a preacher invoking every color's divine right to converge upon gray, |
| 2022-10-07 | 44 | Judicator | "Ursa Major" | single | and inviting us to look up at the gray gods they draw over the brightest points in the dark. |
| 2022-10-07 | 45 | Maraton | "In Syzygy" | Unseen Color | Let their voices recede to resonance. |
| 2022-10-07 | 46 | Threshold | "Complex" | Complex +2 | Let your eyes unfocus until you can look where they describe gates and eternity |
| 2022-10-07 | 47 | Teramaze | "In the Ruins of Angels" | Flight of the Wounded | and see a sailboat that can take you away. |
| 2022-10-07 | 48 | Parius | "Arecibo" | The Signal Heard Throughout Space | The deepest scars you find on your body are karsts for the most delicate sensors: |
| 2022-10-07 | 49 | Queensrÿche | "Tormentum" | Digital Noise Alliance | speculative dystopia, |
| 2022-10-07 | 50 | Alter Bridge | "This is War" | This Is War 4 | speculative capitulation, |
| 2022-10-07 | 51 | Heavy Metal Perse | "Uusi Alkemia" | Jumalia Paossa | new alchemy, |
| 2022-09-30 | 2 | My Own Ghost | "Somebody Else's Sky" | single | We write songs about moments |
| 2022-09-30 | 3 | Cowherence | "Maybe" | single | because it's easier to explain a single feeling at a time |
| 2022-09-30 | 4 | Silentlie | "Taste Of Solitude" | Equilibrium | than it is to stop having all the other ones at once. |
| 2022-09-30 | 52 | HEXED | "Pagans Rising" | Pagans Rising | We yearn not for mythical eras when we knew better, |
| 2022-09-30 | 53 | April Art | "Leave It Behind" | P.O.K.E.R.F.A.C.E. | but for the way we are scoured clean by the atmospheric reentry |
| 2022-09-30 | 54 | Motive Black | "Fight Alone" | single | of orbital nostalgia. |
| 2022-09-30 | 55 | Kuolemanlaakso | "Kuolleiden laulu" | single | Sometimes the look in someone's eye only really says |
| 2022-09-30 | 56 | Nekonomicon | "Midnight Danger" | single | "you and I are ordinary in different commons". |
| 2022-09-30 | 57 | Kassogtha | "Complacency" | Complacency +2 | We confuse surprise with allure, |
| 2022-09-30 | 58 | Therion | "Marijin Min Nar" | Marijin Min Nar +3 | in order to feel chosen, |
| 2022-09-30 | 59 | White Skull | "Metal Never Rusts" | single | but we misunderstand chosenness as scarcity. |
| 2022-09-30 | 60 | Majesty Of Revival | "The Newborn Sun" | Battlefield | We are ordinated each into dubious orthodoxies declaimed in funny accents, |
| 2022-09-30 | 61 | Dark Forest | "Skylark" | Ridge & Furrow | our own the funniest and most glorious of them, |
| 2022-09-30 | 62 | Candlemass | "Sweet Evil Sun" | Sweet Evil Sun +1 | of course. |
| 2022-09-30 | 63 | Kampfar | "Rekviem" | Rekviem +1 | Imagine yourself in robes, flanked by censers. |
| 2022-09-30 | 64 | Imha Tarikat | "Son Of Ultradevotion" | single | That's how cults endure: |
| 2022-09-30 | 65 | Karg | "Grab der Wellen" | single | not by relying on your specific submission |
| 2022-09-30 | 66 | Jordfäst | "Abortologen, Pt. 3" | single | but by invoking your secret awes |
| 2022-09-30 | 67 | Labyrinth of Stars | "Vacuum" | Spectrum Xenomorph | as their shields. |
| 2022-09-30 | 68 | Doedsvangr | "The Drewl from Their Mouths" | Koinonia 3 | Atheists sustain theologies by cherishing their icons, |
| 2022-09-30 | 69 | Strigoi | "United in Viscera" | Viscera | and thus we are freed from our atavistic imperatives not through convulsions of defiance |
| 2022-09-30 | 70 | Forlesen | "Harrowed Earth" | single | but embrace. |
| 2022-09-30 | 71 | Sinister Downfall | "Souls Enslaved" | The Last Witness | We defeat our enemies by singing their songs, |
| 2022-09-30 | 77 | Lunar Mercia | "Leaving the Fragile Space" | Leaving the Fragile Space +3 | until all the people are on one side, |
| 2022-09-30 | 78 | Soul Dissolution | "SORA II" | SORA | and all the hatreds are on the other, |
| 2022-09-30 | 79 | ColdWorld | "Hymnus" | Isolation | and then we snap the blades of the equals sign shut |
| 2022-09-30 | 80 | NYGMA | "Nygma" | NYGMA | and walk away. |
| 2022-09-30 | 81 | Kuggur | "حَصَادِ الْخرِيفِ" | حصاد ضَوْءٌ النُّجُومِ | The lines that connect us run straight through the Earth, |
| 2022-09-30 | 84 | Avatarium | "Stockholm" | Stockholm +2 | Halfway through falling, we change our minds and fly, |
| 2022-09-30 | 85 | The Otolith | "Hubris" | single | heedless of the canonical literature of how foolish and inevitable this renders our doom. |
| 2022-09-30 | 86 | Ruby the Hatchet | "Deceiver" | single | But did you ever actually try to melt yourself in the dangling sun? |
| 2022-09-30 | 87 | Sammary | "219" | single | It looks like you could touch it, |
| 2022-09-30 | 110 | Devin Townsend | "Call of the Void" | Call of the Void +1 | but so is the ground. So is the useless core of our temporarily only planet. |
| 2022-09-30 | 111 | Infinitome | "Day I Lost You" | Beyond the Beyond | We do not lose or lack hope. |
| 2022-09-30 | 112 | Hourglass | "Void Within" | single | Our stories of our own fears are screenplays for epics of redemption. |
| 2022-09-30 | 113 | Mokita | "Color Me In" | Color Me In +3 | We do not find or deserve redemption, |
| 2022-09-30 | 129 | Nestor | "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" | Kids in a ghost town | Loneliness calls. I understand that. I hear it, too. That's what one of the looks in my eyes would mean, if you had time to write it down. |
| 2022-09-30 | 130 | Sergio Rodríguez | "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" | single | We don't wait for futures, we hurl ourselves forward slowly in time. |
| 2022-09-23 | 29 | THE UNCROWNED | "COLD SIGH" | WITNESS | We fear that in other people's future, |
| 2022-09-23 | 30 | Daedric | "Coldharbour" | Coldharbour 5 | we ourselves will be obsolete, |
| 2022-09-23 | 31 | Sleeping Romance | "Ghost Shadows" | Ghost Shadows +3 | and thus that the fight for control of the future is existential. |
| 2022-09-23 | 32 | Eva Under Fire | "Ghost" | Love, Drugs & Misery | Manic convolutionary self-reference, however, is logistically complicated to sustain. |
| 2022-09-23 | 33 | Sede Vacante | "Raindrops" | single | It's a lot easier to write a song and then not fabricate a matchingly glossy |
| 2022-09-23 | 34 | Avantasia | "The Inmost Light" | The Inmost Light +3 | energy drink that didn't and maybe still doesn't exist. |
| 2022-09-23 | 35 | Loch Vostok | "Black Neon Manifesto" | single | And thus hyperpop as hypercollaborational Pop |
| 2022-09-23 | 36 | Teramaze | "For the Thrill" | single | necessarily and self-preservationally became hyperpop as hyperactive pop, |
| 2022-09-23 | 37 | Borealis | "Ashes Turn to Rain" | Ashes Turn to Rain +1 | a mercifully and tractably musical style instead of a Whole Art performance. |
| 2022-09-23 | 38 | Bloody Hammers | "Phantasmagoria" | single | Pop Art becomes a color palette; |
| 2022-09-23 | 39 | Disturbed | "Unstoppable" | Unstoppable +1 | Poptimism becomes another canon we drag into the same battles |
| 2022-09-23 | 40 | Grimner | "Helvandrarna" | single | we already know how to fight. |
| 2022-09-23 | 41 | Frosttide | "Warrior" | single | But this is what happens to everything, |
| 2022-09-23 | 42 | Bakahira | "They Are Coming" | single | is how cults are liberated, |
| 2022-09-23 | 43 | Petbrick | "Arboria" | Liminal | is how secrets become resonant wisdom |
| 2022-09-23 | 44 | Timor et Tremor | "Of Wolf and Sun" | single | and then ominous legends |
| 2022-09-23 | 45 | OTUS | "Through the Flesh" | Torch | and then diffident myths. |
| 2022-09-23 | 46 | Nordjevel | "I Djevelens Skygge" | Gnavhòl | Dancing carefully in the careless footprints of elves |
| 2022-09-23 | 47 | Firtan | "Fadir" | Faðir 3 | is how we learn to approximate their grace, barely. |
| 2022-09-23 | 48 | Mo'ynoq | "Effigies Adorned in Fire" | A Place for Ash | Except of course it's the other way around. Our feet are the first. |
| 2022-09-23 | 49 | Imha Tarikat | "Radical Righteousness" | single | The elves we imagine are our exaggerated selves. |
| 2022-09-23 | 50 | Kuggur | "يَا لَيْلِ" | single | We dream of futures |
| 2022-09-23 | 51 | Gaerea | "Ebb" | Mirage | in which our constricting twinges have vanished, |
| 2022-09-23 | 52 | Hoaxed | "Guilty Ones" | Guilty Ones +1 | and been replaced with attentive crowds, |
| 2022-09-23 | 53 | Frayle | "Ipecac" | Skin & Sorrow | and thus that the choreography of the future is improvisational |
| 2022-09-23 | 80 | Gaerea | "Laude" | Mirage | The good news, if you're scared of the future, is that it's not scheduled to happen today, and tomorrow has probably been booked and danced already, too. |
| 2022-09-23 | 81 | Anchors & Hearts | "Running up That Hill (a Deal with God)" | single | The good news, if you miss the things you used to think were the future, is that they're all still as possible and inevitable as they were when you fell in love with them. |
| 2022-09-23 | 82 | Eva Under Fire | "With or Without You" | Love, Drugs & Misery | You have been given it all. You are right to want more. |
| 2022-09-16 | 1 | Vrylnia | "Invocation" | The Other World | I got a new pair of earbuds for running, |
| 2022-09-16 | 2 | The Erinyes | "On My Way to Love" | The Erinyes | and also a new pair of supposedly slightly fancier shoes. |
| 2022-09-16 | 3 | Epica | "The Final Lullaby (feat. Shining)" | single | The thing about running gear is that running is hard, |
| 2022-09-16 | 4 | Edenbridge | "At First Light" | Shangri-La | and bad gear can make it even harder, |
| 2022-09-16 | 5 | ELYSATIUM | "Destiny" | single | but good gear doesn't really make it easier. |
| 2022-09-16 | 6 | Ghosther | "Resistance" | Immersion | Nor would you want it to. |
| 2022-09-16 | 7 | Ксюша на Марсе | "Колыбельная" | Колыбельная +1 | Running is not a transportation mode. |
| 2022-09-16 | 8 | RedHook | "SAY" | single | If I wanted to reach a destination with less effort, |
| 2022-09-16 | 9 | Evol Walks | "Back Where You Belong" | single | I would use pretty much any other method. |
| 2022-09-16 | 10 | The Erinyes | "Where Do We Go" | The Erinyes | I run to force my body to expend energy it would otherwise unimaginatively conserve, |
| 2022-09-16 | 11 | Praise the Sun | "The Curtain of Life" | The Proffer of Light | and to confront my brain with a provocation of effort |
| 2022-09-16 | 12 | LOST NEBULA | "Doomsday" | single | that offers emotional potential for essentially no risk. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 14 | E-An-Na | "Cenuşiu" | single | The new shoes do not make this unlikely outcome differently unlikely. |
| 2022-09-16 | 15 | RAVDINA | "Капли" | single | I'm trying them, instead of the supposedly slightly unfancier model I've been running in for a couple years, |
| 2022-09-16 | 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, |
| 2022-09-16 | 17 | Unleash The Archers | "Falsewave" | single | and I know a veiled warning when I hear one. |
| 2022-09-16 | 18 | Debler Eternia | "Eternia" | single | As with all choices, I want to know if I'd be sad to have only this one |
| 2022-09-16 | 19 | The Erinyes | "Take Me" | The Erinyes | while I still have others. |
| 2022-09-16 | 20 | OCTAVIAGRACE | "追想列車" | single | Are they better? Maybe. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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, |
| 2022-09-16 | 63 | Jesus Jones | "Wired and Windburned" | single | They do not appear to degrade from the act of playing anthemic symphonic metal |
| 2022-09-16 | 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: |
| 2022-09-16 | 84 | Wolfheart | "Knell" | King of the North | - the shift from LPs to CDs making essentially-full-fidelity playback possible in portable devices; |
| 2022-09-16 | 85 | In Flames | "Foregone Pt. 1" | Foregone, Pt. 1 3 | - the shift from CDs to iPods making collections as portable as individual albums; |
| 2022-09-16 | 86 | Stratovarius | "Frozen in Time" | Frozen in Time +3 | - the shift from downloads to streaming making collecting no longer a prerequisite of listening; |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 88 | Perfect Plan | "Can't Let You Win" | single | I assume the next one will involve implants and/or angels. |
| 2022-09-16 | 89 | House Of Lords | "Take It All" | Saints and Sinners | This new running set belongs to the same era as the previous ones, |
| 2022-09-16 | 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, |
| 2022-09-16 | 91 | Mentalist | "Tears Within A Paradise" | Empires Falling | and I would have been surprised if I didn't like them better than their predecessors. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 93 | Virtual Symmetry | "The Paradise of Lies" | Virtual Symmetry | Progress elides tradeoffs. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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, |
| 2022-09-16 | 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, |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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, |
| 2022-09-16 | 98 | The Antichrist Imperium | "Misotheist" | single | and the reproduction of misotheism is cheerfully superior. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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 |
| 2022-09-16 | 100 | Ellende | "Freier Fall" | single | when they need a phone or computer to do anything and those gadgets can do many other interesting things, |
| 2022-09-16 | 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 |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 103 | Cloud Rat | "Corset" | single | We're still just beginning to understand the constraints and possibilities of music streaming, I think, |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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 |
| 2022-09-16 | 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, |
| 2022-09-16 | 107 | Violet Cold | "Shazam the Void" | single | and the Great American Radio Show aired in Dallas after my bedtime. |
| 2022-09-16 | 108 | Lybica | "Ascend" | Lybica | Our spirits have always flown with our available wings. |
| 2022-09-16 | 112 | Bakahira | "My Mother Told Me" | single | Earbuds are a technology of immersion, not isolation; |
| 2022-09-16 | 118 | A.A. Williams | "The Echo" | single | If we can reach each other with a whisper, |
| 2022-09-16 | 119 | REZN | "Possession" | single | what other seemingly intractable distances exist to limn diversity |
| 2022-09-16 | 120 | No Devotion | "No Oblivion" | No Oblivion | instead of inviting the void? |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-16 | 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. |
| 2022-09-09 | 51 | SHIN | "ECHO" | single | and the way the people tried so earnestly to help you find what you were looking for, |
| 2022-09-09 | 52 | CrowsAlive | "Neo Romancers" | single | even though it was not at all unclear if you had explained it well enough. |
| 2022-09-09 | 53 | ASTERISM | "空に歌えば" | Animetic | How do you say, in a language you have only borrowed, |
| 2022-09-09 | 54 | Xandria | "You Will Never Be Our God" | You Will Never Be Our God +1 | that you wish to stand in the doorways of their temples, |
| 2022-09-09 | 55 | Allen/Olzon | "Look at Me" | Army of Dreamers | waiting for your life to adjust to the darkness? |
| 2022-09-09 | 56 | Cassyette | "September Rain" | single | without calling their interior light "darkness"? |
| 2022-09-09 | 57 | Seas on the Moon | "The Warrior" | single | How do you move, when moving requires you to admit that you measure other people's origins |
| 2022-09-09 | 58 | Cold Kingdom | "Finally" | Finally +3 | in steps from yours? |
| 2022-09-09 | 59 | South Haven | "Lost in the Feeling" | Lost in the Feeling +1 | How do we meet, in either of our spaces or any other space neutral only to our myopic perspectives, |
| 2022-09-09 | 60 | September Mourning | "Guardian" | single | without merely pressing together the shinily non-porous surfaces of mirror solipsisms? |
| 2022-09-09 | 61 | Lunarian | "Burn the Beauty" | Burn the Beauty | We offer our names to each other as descriptions of how we change by meeting, |
| 2022-09-09 | 62 | Splitmind | "The World Will Never Be the Same" | single | and thus your name becomes the first name of everything you allow to reach you, |
| 2022-09-09 | 63 | Morphide | "Catharsis" | Anhedonia | and the last name of everything you let go. |
| 2022-09-09 | 64 | One Morning Left | "Tonight" | Tonight +1 | Nothing is ever so perfect that it cannot be improved by movement, |
| 2022-09-09 | 65 | Vermilia | "Marras" | Ruska | by the next movement, by any movement, |
| 2022-09-09 | 66 | Psideralica | "Better Than Us" | single | by being willing to contemplate new movements. |
| 2022-09-09 | 67 | Wednesday | "Bull Believer" | single | We ask for change |
| 2022-09-09 | 68 | Brutus | "Victoria" | Victoria +2 | in order to give ourselves the opportunity to accept the possibility of it. |
| 2022-09-09 | 69 | Victoria K | "Tower" | single | Civilization is a not a result or description or context of an increased speed of change, |
| 2022-09-09 | 70 | A Sound of Thunder | "The Golden Age" | The Krimson Kult | it is the name of it. |
| 2022-09-09 | 71 | Osyron | "Beyond the Sun" | single | We move away from doom, from destiny, |
| 2022-09-09 | 72 | Teramaze | "The Thieves Are Out" | single | or we reach them in a detonational impact; |
| 2022-09-09 | 73 | Virtual Symmetry | "The Paradise of Lies" | single | the opposite of impact is transcendence, |
| 2022-09-09 | 74 | Fallujah | "Artifacts" | Empyrean | both of them only nominally nouns. |
| 2022-09-09 | 75 | Revocation | "Lessons in Occult Theft" | Netherheaven | This is your lesson in rejecting divine gifts: |
| 2022-09-09 | 76 | U.D.O. | "Dust and Rust" | single | anything immortal is useless to you while you are alive. |
| 2022-09-09 | 77 | Winter | "Pray - Single Edit" | Pray 3 | Prayer is the name we give to the weak moments in which we can't face this, |
| 2022-09-09 | 78 | Ozzy Osbourne | "Immortal (feat. Mike McCready)" | Patient Number 9 | in which our frailties seem too present, |
| 2022-09-09 | 82 | JAMBINAI | "once more from that frozen bottom" | single | Sinking does not cede victory to deeper attractors |
| 2022-09-09 | 83 | Blackbraid | "The River of Time Flows Through Me" | Blackbraid I | we will anyways never reach. |
| 2022-09-09 | 84 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Rose of Jericho" | Banefyre | There is always more story: |
| 2022-09-02 | 13 | VV | "Echolocate Your Love" | single | This is what we never know about each other, |
| 2022-09-02 | 14 | Lesbian Bed Death | "The Antichrist" | single | the third or the seventh of the uncountable things we are always still learning: |
| 2022-09-02 | 15 | My Own Ghost | "Shadow In Your Room" | single | what fates we believe ourselves to deserve |
| 2022-09-02 | 16 | The Darling Fire | "Hers" | Hers 5 | in stories. |
| 2022-09-02 | 17 | HEXED | "Stigma Diaboli - Radio Edit" | single | This is how theologies allow themselves to become mired in guilt, |
| 2022-09-02 | 18 | NOILION | "Break All Chains" | single | or free themselves for allegory. |
| 2022-09-02 | 19 | Carpathia | "Low Tides" | single | We are at our most obtuse and pedantic |
| 2022-09-02 | 20 | Gallia | "Return of Time" | Obscura | when we attempt to measure a journey |
| 2022-09-02 | 21 | Sede Vacante | "Dead New World" | single | by where we are when we think it's over. |
| 2022-09-02 | 22 | Ranthiel | "Je Veux Vivre" | single | All of these waypoints are more beginning than end, |
| 2022-09-02 | 23 | Pin Up Went Down | "Porcelain Hours" | 342 | like all steps are falling. |
| 2022-09-02 | 52 | Main-De-Gloire | "One Step Closer" | One Step Closer +1 | is the process of trying to explain the broken and silent world |
| 2022-09-02 | 53 | The Untold | "Albatross" | Thunder and Water : Act One | aloud. |
| 2022-09-02 | 54 | Queensrÿche | "Behind the Walls" | single | I'm not going to tell you whether they approve the ocean in the end. |
| 2022-09-02 | 55 | House Of Lords | "Saints and Sinners" | single | This is what we rarely remember, as we watch other people confront their own opportunities |
| 2022-09-02 | 56 | Opera Magna | "Where Once Was Beating My Dark Heart" | Where Once Was Beating My Dark Heart +2 | for grandeur or grief: |
| 2022-09-02 | 57 | The HU | "Bii Biyelgee" | Rumble Of Thunder | we are at our most human and serene |
| 2022-09-02 | 60 | Striborg | "An Unfamiliar Journey" | single | when the demons appear on our doorsteps in simmering robes |
| 2022-09-02 | 61 | Violet Cold | "Ehtiras Hisslər / Ehtiyat Hissələr" | single | and we say "demons! come in, come in!", |
| 2022-09-02 | 62 | Starer | "Five Minutes Before Dawn" | Remorse Defines Me 3 | and take the dish of whatever it is from them. |
| 2022-09-02 | 63 | Panychida | "Pustina" | Říruřec - Dreisessel 5 | "Vegan takoyaki...", they explain, |
| 2022-09-02 | 64 | Walg | "Geselberg" | single | in a tone that suggests they are ready to apologize |
| 2022-09-02 | 65 | Foraoisí gan Iniúchadh | "See The Sun Rise" | Isolation | for either the "vegan" part or the history of octopus slaughter, |
| 2022-09-02 | 66 | Einsamkeit | "The Owl Eyes (Chapter. I)" | The Owl Eyes 5 | if taking unearned responsibility for either one will help. |
| 2022-09-02 | 67 | Alles Wird In Flammen Stehen | "Sunset over the river-I" | II - Sunset over the river | The octopi are upstairs at the moment, anyway. They found the shower. |
| 2022-08-26 | 1 | The Erinyes | "Death by a Broken Heart" | single | I assume if I were a better fan, I could have recognized the three singers in the Erinyes from either their voices or their pictures, since they're each also in bands I already knew and liked: Justine Daaé in Elyose, Mizuho Lin in Semblant, Nicoletta Rosellini in both Walk In Darkness and Kalidia. |
| 2022-08-26 | 2 | The Spider Accomplice | "Fight" | single | In the version of the world where every band lives on the patronage of 1000 true fans, I am not the fan you want. |
| 2022-08-26 | 3 | Allen/Olzon | "So Quiet Here" | single | We were cross-checking a data thing at work last week, and I knew it was broken because it said I had listened to over 800 artists so far this year. |
| 2022-08-26 | 4 | Beyond The Black | "Is There Anybody Out There?" | Is There Anybody Out There? +1 | I was right that it was wrong. My correct number was 5685 with four months still to go in the year, and that's only counting artists if I listened to at least :30 of one of their songs. |
| 2022-08-26 | 5 | Inferiority Complex | "Till Death Do Us Part" | single | I've heard at least 2 seconds of songs by thousands more in the process of scanning new releases. |
| 2022-08-26 | 6 | Sever The Light | "Blinded & Miserable" | single | 800 was the number of bands where I've listened to at least 3 different songs, and on 3 different days. |
| 2022-08-26 | 7 | Silentlie | "On My Skin" | single | The 1000-fan model is predicated on getting each of those fans to spend $100 on you. |
| 2022-08-26 | 8 | Imperial Age | "Distant Shores" | New World | I do not have $586,500 to spend supporting these bands, never mind $852,750 scaled to the whole year. |
| 2022-08-26 | 9 | Circus of Fools | "Primal Force Humanity" | single | I do not have $80,000 to spend on the 800 bands I've played repeatedly. |
| 2022-08-26 | 10 | Kassogtha | "Eclipse" | Eclipse +1 | I go to concerts occasionally in non-plague times, |
| 2022-08-26 | 11 | Therion | "Pazuzu" | Pazuzu +2 | and I bought a Zola Jesus T-shirt when her new record came out. |
| 2022-08-26 | 12 | Dynazty | "All the Devils Are Here" | Final Advent | I do not buy "vinyls". |
| 2022-08-26 | 13 | Kaledon | "The Story Comes to an End?" | single | I am not a patron. |
| 2022-08-26 | 14 | Induction | "Queen Of Light" | Queen Of Light +1 | I love you but I have chosen the infinite. |
| 2022-08-26 | 15 | Brymir | "Fly with Me" | Voices in the Sky | I will listen to this song, but then |
| 2022-08-26 | 16 | Enigmatic Entrance | "Time & Tide" | single | the next one. |
| 2022-08-26 | 17 | Grimner | "Västerled" | single | And while I don't think anybody else should listen this way unless you want to, |
| 2022-08-26 | 18 | Tad Morose | "Witches Dance" | March of the Obsequious | in which case you should because we can, |
| 2022-08-26 | 19 | Kampfar | "Flammen fra Nord" | Flammen fra Nord +1 | I also don't want a world whose culture is predicated on patronage, either. |
| 2022-08-26 | 20 | ColdWorld | "Soundtrack to Isolation" | Soundtrack to Isolation +1 | The peril of relying on 1000 fans is that you have to get $100 out of each of them, |
| 2022-08-26 | 21 | Weltenbrandt | "Apotropaion" | single | and that's assuming you're a solo artist with negligible production costs |
| 2022-08-26 | 22 | All The Cold | "Zero Coordinates" | single | and don't want to live in an expensive city. |
| 2022-08-26 | 23 | Gaerea | "Mirage" | Mirage +2 | Maybe it assumes your fans don't live in an expensive city, either. |
| 2022-08-26 | 24 | Hexis | "Letum" | Aeternum | Most music-buyers in the CD age spent a lot less than $100/year on CDs, |
| 2022-08-26 | 25 | Valborg | "Asbach" | single | so the number of potentially-true fans available has to be small. |
| 2022-08-26 | 26 | Cloud Rat | "Kaleidoscope" | single | You have to find somebody who is temperamentally willing and financially able to spend $100/year on a single artist, |
| 2022-08-26 | 27 | Sigh | "Kuroi Kage" | Shiki | but who despite this willingness and ability hasn't already pledged their truth to some other artist. |
| 2022-08-26 | 28 | Enslaved | "Kingdom" | single | The patronage model, conveniently, is always described in artificial isolation: |
| 2022-08-26 | 29 | Choronzon | "Madness Swallows This Flesh" | ...and Battlements Rose Out of Hallowed Ground | one artist, reaching out to an attentive audience of casual fans |
| 2022-08-26 | 30 | Lacrimas Profundere | "Nebula" | How to Shroud Yourself with Night | eager to become loved |
| 2022-08-26 | 31 | Dwell in Doom | "Nevermore" | Forest of Mourning Souls | and thus devoted. |
| 2022-08-26 | 32 | Bloody Hammers | "Black Sunday" | single | It sounds a bit less appealing |
| 2022-08-26 | 33 | Teramaze | "Gold" | single | and a lot less indie |
| 2022-08-26 | 34 | Threshold | "King Of Nothing" | King Of Nothing +1 | if you describe it as a tiny audience of the idle barely-rich |
| 2022-08-26 | 118 | The Giant Void | "Billie Jean" | single | We are the ones who will follow all of them at once. |
| 2022-08-26 | 119 | Edge Of Paradise | "Welcome to the Jungle" | single | We can find whatever we need: |
| 2022-08-26 | 120 | RichaadEB | "Running Up That Hill - Instrumental" | single | one true fan who won't give us money and walk away, or offer, no more helpfully, to trade roles, |
| 2022-08-19 | 19 | DAIDA LAIDA | "象牙色の嘘" | single | and truth against expedience. |
| 2022-08-19 | 20 | Empress | "Legion" | Fateweaver | Make decisions as if you were you. |
| 2022-08-19 | 21 | Kalah | "The River" | Descent into Human Weakness | Act as if you were you. |
| 2022-08-19 | 22 | ELYSATIUM | "Who We Are" | single | That's the only way any of this ever gets better, |
| 2022-08-19 | 23 | Liliumdust | "Compliant Masks" | Our Deepest Hollows | or stays better. |
| 2022-08-19 | 24 | Avatarium | "Death, Where Is Your Sting" | Death, Where Is Your Sting? 2 | That's the only reason to put off the impatiently awaiting forever. |
| 2022-08-19 | 25 | Kalah | "Crows Calling at Night" | Descent into Human Weakness | Entropy doesn't need your love, |
| 2022-08-19 | 26 | Empress | "Beyond the Sleep" | Fateweaver | and will not reward your fealty, |
| 2022-08-19 | 27 | Wings of Destiny | "Never Surrender" | single | but will greedily accept your capitulation. |
| 2022-08-19 | 28 | Splintered Throne | "The Crossing" | The Greater Good of Man | Maps on the back of your hands draw out your loss |
| 2022-08-19 | 29 | Borealis | "Pray for Water" | single | until it shines into the sky |
| 2022-08-19 | 30 | Oceanhoarse | "Nails" | single | like a beacon meant not to warn of weather |
| 2022-08-19 | 31 | Wolfheart | "The King" | The King +1 | but to invite it. |
| 2022-08-19 | 32 | Candlemass | "Scandinavian Gods" | single | Fame and longitude both appear to converge, |
| 2022-08-19 | 33 | Behemoth | "Thy Becoming Eternal" | Thy Becoming Eternal +3 | appear to be defined by that convergence, |
| 2022-08-19 | 34 | Nordjevel | "Of Rats and Men" | Of Rats and Men +3 | until you stand unchanged at the coordinates of a vertex. |
| 2022-08-19 | 35 | Noctem | "CREDO CERTE NE CRAS" | single | We will not escape geography with geometry, |
| 2022-08-19 | 36 | Sabackthanny | "Setsuna Plus" | single | will not triangulate our way to a portal out of all of this joy and doubt. |
| 2022-08-19 | 82 | 616 | "Everything Dies" | single | Fall in love like you're still able, and willing, to get back up again afterwards. Leave the love there for other people to fall in. |
| 2022-08-19 | 83 | Spirit Adrift | "Everything Dies" | 20 Centuries Gone | It takes courage to walk around on the fragile surface of this place, a thin layer of constructed composure over sinkholes of love and sewage and fire, |
| 2022-08-12 | 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". |
| 2022-08-12 | 2 | Dynazty | "The White" | single | The whole song is gloriously oversolemn, because that's the Avantasia aesthetic and one not often executed more ruthlessly. |
| 2022-08-12 | 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. |
| 2022-08-12 | 4 | Terra Atlantica | "The Scarlet Banners" | single | You have this decision to make in a song, in an artwork, in a life: |
| 2022-08-12 | 5 | Volver Al Origen | "No Más" | single | to follow the obdurate yearnings of the form in which you find yourself, |
| 2022-08-12 | 6 | Varjola | "Viaton ihminen" | single | or to say what you came to say. |
| 2022-08-12 | 7 | Lacrimas Profundere | "To Disappear in You" | single | The note wants to die. |
| 2022-08-12 | 8 | Mono Inc. | "Princess of the Night" | single | The word wants to end. |
| 2022-08-12 | 9 | Sylosis | "Heavy Is The Crown" | single | Tobias Sammet wrote them both, and so Floor sings them both, |
| 2022-08-12 | 10 | Dress the Dead | "Painless Injection" | single | even though the "t" breaks spell, |
| 2022-08-12 | 11 | Arch Enemy | "The Watcher" | Deceivers | or maybe because of it. |
| 2022-08-12 | 12 | Marlene Mendoza | "Empty Soul" | Insanity 3 | This is the decision you have to make every time you say anything, |
| 2022-08-12 | 13 | Reliqa | "Safety" | single | every time you move: |
| 2022-08-12 | 14 | Delain | "The Quest and the Curse" | single | are you completing a pattern of expectation, |
| 2022-08-12 | 15 | Lunarian | "Endless Sleep" | single | or are you dancing towards a goal? |
| 2022-08-12 | 16 | Nereids | "Pandora" | single | The best songs do not arrive at iterative perfection, |
| 2022-08-12 | 17 | Molllust | "Mars - The Game is Over" | single | they remind you, even in lament, to demand joy. |
| 2022-08-12 | 18 | Zio | "Close" | single | They demonstrate, in a memento mori of awkwardness, |
| 2022-08-12 | 19 | Sharm | "Fly with the Dragons" | single | the idea that the will to live comes from a belief in the uncertainty of the future. |
| 2022-08-12 | 20 | HEXED | "Resurrection" | single | Maybe we will be triumphant. |
| 2022-08-12 | 21 | Cold Kingdom | "Apologies" | Apologies +2 | Maybe by feeling triumphant we will let go of some plaintive need to feel like we are winning |
| 2022-08-12 | 22 | Forever May Fall | "Undertow" | Undertow +2 | long enough to see another way to resolve our story logic. |
| 2022-08-12 | 23 | New Years Day | "Hurts Like Hell" | single | This is not a war. |
| 2022-08-12 | 24 | RinRin | "Guns and Grenades" | single | Even our wars are not really wars any more, |
| 2022-08-12 | 25 | April Art | "Headline" | single | proxy nihilism for ideologies of denial |
| 2022-08-12 | 26 | Enter Shikari | "The Void Stares Back" | single | hoping somebody will believe that they can die for a cause |
| 2022-08-12 | 27 | 塞壬唱片-MSR | "All hail Savior!" | All hail Savior! +1 | without invalidating it. |
| 2022-08-12 | 28 | 花冷え。 | "NEET GAME" | single | Any game is serious to its pieces, |
| 2022-08-12 | 67 | FEST VAINQUEUR | "Earendel" | single | that you always had. |
| 2022-08-12 | 68 | Boris | "Cramper" | Heavy Rocks (2022) | Every piece can always move in any direction. |
| 2022-08-12 | 69 | GUHTS | "Burn My Body" | single | Try it. |
| 2022-08-12 | 70 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Bonefire" | single | We line the streets for the passage of royalty, |
| 2022-08-12 | 71 | Sigh | "Satsui - Geshi No Ato" | single | but afterwards their carriages remain where the route leads |
| 2022-08-12 | 72 | Shining | "Ugly and Cold" | single | and we go home, |
| 2022-08-12 | 73 | Cosmophobe | "Fractional Velocity" | Moons of Jupiter 3 | or out for ice cream and then |
| 2022-08-12 | 74 | Vananidr | "Awake" | single | to Target for cat litter and AAA batteries. |
| 2022-08-12 | 75 | Lustre | "Thirst" | single | There is no war to win. |
| 2022-08-12 | 76 | Thessa | "The Devil's Lair" | Losing Sleep | We take turns in armor to remember what it feels like to guard each other, |
| 2022-08-12 | 77 | The Dark Atom | "Dystopia" | single | to give unarmoredness as a gift. |
| 2022-08-12 | 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. |
| 2022-08-05 | 17 | Empress | "Chimera" | single | It's not like that. |
| 2022-08-05 | 18 | Arvandil | "Sirens Calling" | single | It's sunny and old. |
| 2022-08-05 | 19 | Season of Ghosts | "The Great Unknown" | single | The sidewalks aren't maglev conveyor-belts, |
| 2022-08-05 | 20 | Dystopica | "For You" | single | they're battered bricks forever in the process of being dug up to fix something buried underneath: |
| 2022-08-05 | 21 | Slaverty | "Blue" | single | legacies of regret, |
| 2022-08-05 | 22 | Upon Wings | "Last Love" | single | the other side of the world, |
| 2022-08-05 | 23 | Allen/Olzon | "All Alone" | single | drainage. |
| 2022-08-05 | 24 | Clödie | "Mój jest ten kawałek podłogi" | single | I never got the armor. |
| 2022-08-05 | 25 | Stratovarius | "Firefly" | Firefly +2 | Why did I want armor? |
| 2022-08-05 | 26 | Symphony Of Sweden | "Lay Them Down (A broken son's cry)" | single | Why did I think I would be wearing it in a sealed electronic monitoring nest? |
| 2022-08-05 | 27 | Mentalist | "If You Really Want" | single | By the time technology becomes ubiquitous, |
| 2022-08-05 | 28 | Virtual Symmetry | "Butterfly Effect" | single | it has already had to become mundane. |
| 2022-08-05 | 32 | In Flames | "The Great Deceiver" | The Great Deceiver +1 | inside other people's ears. |
| 2022-08-05 | 33 | Amon Amarth | "Saxons and Vikings" | The Great Heathen Army | I dreamed of songs; |
| 2022-08-05 | 34 | Fallujah | "Soulbreaker" | Soulbreaker +2 | I had no idea. |
| 2022-08-05 | 35 | Cosmophobe | "Consuming Isolation" | single | I signal ahead to have bubble-tea prepared in my path, |
| 2022-08-05 | 36 | Walg | "Daar Waar We Komen Om Te Sterven" | single | forward along these hurriedly replaced bricks. |
| 2022-08-05 | 37 | Liminal Shroud | "Mists Along Florencia" | All Virtues Ablaze | We are all connected, |
| 2022-08-05 | 59 | Wildness | "Tragedy" | single | Thank you, I tell them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh no, thank you for telling me. Thank you. |
| 2022-08-05 | 60 | H.E.A.T | "Tainted Blood" | Force Majeure | For a moment that seems to be enough. |
| 2022-08-05 | 61 | Alter Bridge | "Silver Tongue" | Silver Tongue +1 | I put my phone back in my pocket. Just listen. |
| 2022-08-05 | 62 | Chez Kane | "I Just Want You" | single | Another songs plays. I get too distracted by listening to remember that mindfulness is a euphemism for monopolized attention. I check my phone for messages. |
| 2022-07-29 | 20 | Frayle | "Bright Eyes" | single | But you can be euphoric, too, amidst maelstroms |
| 2022-07-29 | 21 | Brutus | "Liar" | Liar +1 | and against backdrops of fire or fear, |
| 2022-07-29 | 22 | Edenbridge | "The Call of Eden" | The Call of Eden +2 | and measuring the boundary of heaven. |
| 2022-07-29 | 23 | The Erinyes | "Betrayed" | single | Vengeance is a delusion formed in the absence of introspection. |
| 2022-07-29 | 24 | Crystal Gates | "Alive for the Journey" | Torment & Wonder: The Ways of the Lonely Ones | You won't heal your own heart |
| 2022-07-29 | 25 | Ranthiel | "Sleeping sun" | single | by any change to other hearts, |
| 2022-07-29 | 26 | Alwaid | "Alghavil Altannin" | Lacus Somniorum | including reducing their number. |
| 2022-07-29 | 27 | OU | "Farewell" | one | You do not become gods, |
| 2022-07-29 | 28 | Vermilia | "Tuonen Joki" | single | you make a more-eternal kingdom out of just these rocks and this air. |
| 2022-07-29 | 29 | Daedric | "Only" | Only +3 | There is nothing else, |
| 2022-07-29 | 46 | Asunojokei | "Heavenward" | Island | until we are burned a more appealing color |
| 2022-07-29 | 47 | Grima | "Gloomy Heart of the Coldest Land" | Frostbitten | without ever learning how to fly any closer to it. |
| 2022-07-29 | 48 | Firtan | "Amor Fati" | single | We can forget all of this tomorrow, |
| 2022-07-29 | 49 | ColdWorld | "Walz" | single | or whenever we are ready. |
| 2022-07-29 | 50 | Woewarden | "The Name Of Suffering" | single | We do not bring about the dawn by an assiduous application of misery to darkness, |
| 2022-07-29 | 51 | Gaerea | "Mantle" | Mantle +1 | but it's just as wrong to imagine that nothing we do in darkness matters in light. |
| 2022-07-29 | 52 | Hadal Maw | "Scourge of Iron" | single | Gods fall, temples survive. |
| 2022-07-29 | 53 | Ars Onirica | "Daydream" | single | Their floorplans become insignia, |
| 2022-07-29 | 54 | Breathelast | "Ne ajunge nimic" | single | first for new squatter sects among their ruins, |
| 2022-07-29 | 55 | Brymir | "Herald of Aegir" | Herald of Aegir +1 | later for the psychogeography of outliving the illusions of providence |
| 2022-07-29 | 56 | Sahg | "Fall into the Fire" | Fall into the Fire +2 | and corruptions. |
| 2022-07-29 | 57 | Dragonland | "Flight from Destruction" | Flight from Destruction +1 | Streets are made of rubble, |
| 2022-07-29 | 88 | Exilia | "Blinding Lights" | single | Judgment is a conceit formed in the absence of purpose. |
| 2022-07-29 | 90 | Violet Orlandi | "B.Y.O.B." | single | and they say that wishes are temporarily out of stock, but we have these hypnotic computers, freshly refurbished, |
| 2022-07-22 | 13 | B.O.L.T | "BY MY SIDE" | single | The armorer sells you metal skin as an apology to themselves, |
| 2022-07-22 | 26 | XANVALA | "DAYS" | single | but long after we imagine. |
| 2022-07-22 | 27 | Oceans of Slumber | "Just a Day" | Starlight And Ash | It's not really us who is waiting for them, |
| 2022-07-22 | 28 | Oknos | "Haven of Tranquility" | From Ashes | imaginary angels of virtualized purity, |
| 2022-07-22 | 29 | Edge Of Paradise | "Go Higher" | single | but our diaphanous notion of our own souls |
| 2022-07-22 | 30 | Empress | "Eventide" | single | that has to be discretized before we can |
| 2022-07-22 | 31 | ELYSATIUM | "My Nothingness" | single | measure anything else in its units: |
| 2022-07-22 | 32 | Crystal Gates | "Moonshine & Sorrow" | single | grief coiled around pride; |
| 2022-07-22 | 33 | Onyria | "Price Of Souls" | Feed The Monster | allowing our dreams for others to become |
| 2022-07-22 | 34 | Powerwolf | "Call of the Wild" | single | practices for ourselves; |
| 2022-07-22 | 35 | Megadeth | "Night Stalkers" | Night Stalkers / We’ll Be Back 2 | the abuses we intend to condone |
| 2022-07-22 | 36 | Ozzy Osbourne | "Degradation Rules (feat. Tony Iommi)" | Degradation Rules (feat. Tony Iommi) +1 | only provisionally and purposefully, |
| 2022-07-22 | 37 | Valborg | "Hektor" | single | but end up bargaining with |
| 2022-07-22 | 38 | Lamori | "Valley of Great Dismay" | single | to ransom our sense of self; |
| 2022-07-22 | 39 | Violet Cold | "Stellvr" | single | the emotional dimension of moments; |
| 2022-07-22 | 40 | A Pregnant Light | "Hysterectomy" | Hysterectomy / Too Pure 2 | fear. |
| 2022-07-22 | 41 | Dressed In Streams | "The Queen of Awadh Addresses Her Fighters from an Elephant on the Battlefield" | लड़ाई का मैदान 2 | A woman on an elephant berates us for ten minutes in a ravishing and unintelligible language. |
| 2022-07-22 | 42 | Breath Of Wind | "The Place Where The Sun Rises" | The Place Where The Sun Rises +1 | We are not fighters. This isn't a battlefield, it's only a field, |
| 2022-07-22 | 43 | Wake | "Mourning Dirge (Repose of the Dead)" | Thought Form Descent | and the blood we poor into it is as poor a solution for nitrogen fixing, |
| 2022-07-22 | 44 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Everything is Beautiful but Us" | single | as it is for fixing anything else. |
| 2022-07-22 | 45 | Imperial Triumphant | "In the Pleasure of Their Company" | Spirit Of Ecstasy | My pronouns are a state-machine, |
| 2022-07-22 | 71 | Seas on the Moon | "Titanium" | single | or let go of indelible ones. |
| 2022-07-15 | 7 | Avantasia | "The Moonflower Society" | The Moonflower Society +1 | and play in my head without requiring external accompaniment. |
| 2022-07-15 | 8 | Kaledon | "The Eye of the Storm" | single | Comfort, when I need it, comes more readily from revisiting later things, |
| 2022-07-15 | 9 | Arch Enemy | "In the Eye of the Storm" | single | music that I know I love, but feel like I haven't yet loved fully, |
| 2022-07-15 | 10 | Naufragant | "The Black Corsair" | A Short Life | songs that suggest I could still have more first loves, |
| 2022-07-15 | 11 | Vaasa Palaa | "hvrmvvtv" | single | that the whole span between birth and death is all a first life. |
| 2022-07-15 | 12 | Here on Earth | "Drzewo i Kwiat" | single | Mostly this is Burn the Sky Down, Emma Hewitt's 2012 solo album. |
| 2022-07-15 | 13 | Lucifer Ascending | "Tetragrammaton" | single | Hewitt is usually a trance guest-vocalist, and I like her fine in that role, |
| 2022-07-15 | 14 | A Sound of Thunder | "The Wizard of Crow County" | single | but Burn the Sky Down is another thing entirely, |
| 2022-07-15 | 15 | Allen/Olzon | "Army of Dreamers" | single | haunting and mutedly anthemic, |
| 2022-07-15 | 16 | Graveshadow | "Shadow Battles" | The Uncertain Hour | EDM in lineage but songwriterly in presence, |
| 2022-07-15 | 17 | Icon For Hire | "Breakdown" | single | made of spells I want to feel linger. |
| 2022-07-15 | 18 | Roses Unread | "Fireflies" | Fireflies +2 | Every collaboration she has done in the ensuing decade, |
| 2022-07-15 | 19 | LOST NEBULA | "Technophobia" | single | however much I've enjoyed it, |
| 2022-07-15 | 31 | Shiva | "Sen no ideology" | Sen no ideology +1 | It's perfect, it's serenely whole, |
| 2022-07-15 | 68 | Andromida | "Savage World" | single | It is not your goal to perfect it. |
| 2022-07-15 | 69 | Stömb | "The Altered" | single | You do not learn to love by perfecting a single loss, |
| 2022-07-15 | 70 | Disturbed | "Hey You" | single | or by choosing one emotional idealized future. |
| 2022-07-15 | 71 | Mantar | "Egoisto" | Pain is Forever and This is the End | Joy and loss sing together. |
| 2022-07-15 | 72 | Nephilim | "Crown Of The Beggar" | single | A perfect song's perfection is not a function of your devotion, |
| 2022-07-15 | 73 | Foraoisí gan Iniúchadh | "The Abyss" | single | or any other songs' submission, |
| 2022-07-08 | 1 | Ardours | "Insomniac" | Anatomy of a Moment | I do not want to sleep. I do not want this song to end. |
| 2022-07-08 | 2 | The Spider Accomplice | "Rebels and Riders" | single | I do not want any of these songs to end, even to give way to next week's new songs, |
| 2022-07-08 | 3 | Within Temptation | "Don't Pray For Me" | Don't Pray For Me | even knowing that if we ran time backwards I would feel exactly the same. |
| 2022-07-08 | 4 | Victoria K | "Persephone" | single | Time is not consumed by songs, it is sustained, |
| 2022-07-08 | 8 | Somehow Jo | "Fata Morgana" | single | the fault is not joy's for its insistence |
| 2022-07-08 | 9 | Veil of Mist | "Death In Your Eyes" | Death In Your Eyes +1 | or indivisibility. |
| 2022-07-08 | 10 | Infinitum | "Monster Part 2" | single | An expedient moral economy, at least notionally, rewards attention, |
| 2022-07-08 | 11 | Sleeping Romance | "Call My Name" | single | but thus flounders on the unmeasurable and fluctuating subjectivity of engagement. |
| 2022-07-08 | 12 | Madame Mayhem | "Inside Out" | single | Should this song be worth less if it plays during a long-run segment plagued with wind noise, |
| 2022-07-08 | 13 | Blackwater Drowning | "The Filth Element" | Sonder//Satori | or while I'm trying to fix other people's query bugs, |
| 2022-07-08 | 14 | Revocation | "Diabolical Majesty" | single | than now, when I'm holding still to see which precipice it's trying to drive me towards? |
| 2022-07-08 | 15 | THOUSAND EYES | "Everlasting Trail" | single | The song has not changed. I have not changed very much. |
| 2022-07-08 | 16 | DaizyStripper | "HATSUYUME" | single | Billing by transformation is unusably self-referential. |
| 2022-07-08 | 103 | ERRA | "Pull From The Ghost" | single | The questions they think define them are how we got our names. |
| 2022-07-08 | 104 | Second To Sun | "North Metal Legion" | single | Their flags are cloth, |
| 2022-07-08 | 105 | The Sluagh | "I bhFolach EXT - Enivid Creatures Bonus Track" | single | their songs are songs, |
| 2022-07-08 | 106 | Homeskin | "Dripping Chalice" | Life's Wishes to Tears | their blood is ours, |
| 2022-07-08 | 107 | Wormrot | "Broken Maze" | Hiss | our twisting ways are entwined. |
| 2022-07-08 | 108 | Imperial Triumphant | "Tower of Glory, City of Shame" | single | Entwining is how the ways became twisted into shining empires |
| 2022-07-08 | 109 | Panzerfaust | "The Far Bank at the River Styx" | The Far Bank at the River Styx +1 | and dark realms, |
| 2022-07-08 | 110 | Soul Dissolution | "The Absolving Tide" | single | and patient repeated unraveling is how we untwist them, |
| 2022-07-08 | 111 | Aldaaron | "Arcane Mountain Cult" | single | how we become undevoted to our makeshift remotenesses. |
| 2022-07-08 | 112 | UZLAGA | "Warhorns Cry As The World Waves Goodbye" | THE MIGHT OF WAVES | Days spent learning how to fight, |
| 2022-07-08 | 113 | The HU | "Black Thunder" | Black Thunder +2 | accompanied by pragmatic battle anthems, |
| 2022-07-08 | 120 | NinDjent0 | "Lavender Town" | single | We do not exist to serve others. |
| 2022-07-08 | 123 | Master Sword | "Come Sail Away" | single | The angels aren't coming with a spaceship, |
| 2022-07-01 | 19 | 幻想ばっどえんど | "meisei" | single | of self from surface. |
| 2022-07-01 | 21 | Broken By The Scream | "メラメラセニョリータ" | single | compromises rebranded as progress |
| 2022-07-01 | 22 | Secret Rule | "The Showdown" | The Resilient | and process as identity; |
| 2022-07-01 | 23 | Seas on the Moon | "Unearth Life" | single | treadmills for simulated movement; |
| 2022-07-01 | 24 | Scarlet Dorn | "Unstill Life" | Unstill Life +1 | clothes that make people who look better than you |
| 2022-07-01 | 25 | Carmilla | "Two-Faced" | single | look better than you feel. |
| 2022-07-01 | 26 | Dark Princess | "Phoenix" | Phoenix +2 | The best answers do not try to settle a question |
| 2022-07-01 | 27 | Orden Ogan | "Absolution for Our Final Days" | Absolution for Our Final Days +1 | into rooted complacency, |
| 2022-07-01 | 28 | Crystal Gates | "My Glorious Fall" | single | but to set it on a curious journey |
| 2022-07-01 | 29 | Carved | "Doom" | single | and then cheerfully demand to tag along. |
| 2022-07-01 | 30 | Tales of a Sleeping Giant | "Blut & Alraune" | Blut & Alraune +1 | The best questions, thus, |
| 2022-07-01 | 31 | Stratovarius | "World on Fire" | World on Fire +1 | are proactive recognitions of a vital shortage of doubt, |
| 2022-07-01 | 32 | Virtual Symmetry | "Come Alive" | single | not palliative measures against it. |
| 2022-07-01 | 33 | We are Legend | "I Don't Care" | single | Exploration is not defined by goals |
| 2022-07-01 | 34 | Black Paisley | "Not Alone" | single | but by the willingness to leave your home, |
| 2022-07-01 | 35 | Baron Carta | "Relanar" | Shards of Black | and not measured by what you return with |
| 2022-07-01 | 36 | Tidal Dreams | "We've Risen Again" | single | but what you notice while you are away, |
| 2022-07-01 | 37 | Dovorian | "New Faith" | Kneel and Follow | which is to say not primarily measured. |
| 2022-07-01 | 38 | Brymir | "Voices in the Sky" | single | All of Schrödinger's pets learn, quickly, |
| 2022-07-01 | 39 | Xaon | "The Hunt" | The Lethean | about his weird thing with boxes, |
| 2022-07-01 | 40 | Gaerea | "Salve" | single | and that almost-wink eye-twitch he has as he explains, |
| 2022-07-01 | 41 | Grima | "Giant’s Eternal Sleep" | single | while closing the flaps, |
| 2022-07-01 | 42 | NORDLOTH | "To Enchant the World Again" | single | that he will be carefully avoiding any form of observation of the contents. |
| 2022-07-01 | 43 | Al-Namrood | "Protector of the Herd" | Worship the Degenerate | He goes to bed, and the other animals quietly let the new dog out |
| 2022-07-01 | 44 | МЁРТВАЯ ВЕРА | "Ржавый крест" | Ржавый крест +3 | and close the box up again, empty, |
| 2022-07-01 | 97 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "New Sun" | New Sun | All the countries you haven't been to are adjacent |
| 2022-07-01 | 98 | Conjurer | "All You Will Remember" | Páthos | until you gently draw them apart |
| 2022-07-01 | 99 | Mutiara Damansara | "Car Wreck" | Pearls | by falling in love with their post-metal bands |
| 2022-07-01 | 100 | Kuggur | "يَا لَيْلِ" | single | and whatever they call it when they wrap non-bread in bread |
| 2022-07-01 | 101 | Brutus | "Dust" | single | and what distracts them from being afraid of you. |
| 2022-07-01 | 102 | OvO | "La Morte Muore - Part 2" | single | Labels, whether you make them out of concrete |
| 2022-07-01 | 103 | Aronious | "Negeltu" | single | or spandex |
| 2022-07-01 | 104 | Church of Cthulhu | "TSOAHPWAA" | single | or the names of political parties, |
| 2022-07-01 | 105 | Orthodox | "Past Seers" | Proceed | describe you more tellingly the closer you allow them to come to your skin. |
| 2022-07-01 | 121 | Quintessente | "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" | single | Everybody needs to know what unruly skin looks like. |
| 2022-07-01 | 125 | Mutiara Damansara | "Wrecking Ball" | Pearls | We've got nowhere to hide, any of us. |
| 2022-06-24 | 31 | NEMOPHILA | "徒花 -ADABANA-" | single | it's a way of hearing in emotional context, |
| 2022-06-24 | 32 | Hikari Shiina | "Blind love Syndrome" | Blind love Syndrome +1 | and thus of converting each incoming inertia |
| 2022-06-24 | 34 | Isiliel | "光明生死" | single | I have spent what I assume will end up having been significant fractions of my lifespan writing about, |
| 2022-06-24 | 35 | SHOW-YA | "組曲 ~Battle Orchestra~" | single | or on behalf of, |
| 2022-06-24 | 36 | YYNOT | "Mask" | Light and Shade | music, and much of that on ways to describe it, |
| 2022-06-24 | 37 | Novena | "Ghosts" | single | but mainly what I've learned is that description is a stasis |
| 2022-06-24 | 38 | The Soap Girls | "Liar" | In My Skin | that feels like a movement, |
| 2022-06-24 | 39 | Eye of Melian | "Vita Nova" | Legends of Light | a cargo-cult version of causality |
| 2022-06-24 | 40 | Empress | "Into the Grey" | single | that elides all the most interesting ambiguities |
| 2022-06-24 | 41 | I Miss My Death | "Ой ходить сон" | single | as if certainty can be blithely substituted for clarity, |
| 2022-06-24 | 42 | Dawn of Destiny | "Silence" | Of Silence | and then clarity for cohesion. |
| 2022-06-24 | 43 | Dynazty | "Natural Born Killer" | Natural Born Killer +3 | Thus, in a quest for identity |
| 2022-06-24 | 44 | Fallen Sanctuary | "Rise Against the World" | Terranova | we end up with brands, |
| 2022-06-24 | 45 | Victorius | "Jurassic Jetfighters" | Dinosaur Warfare Pt. 2 – The Great Ninja War | and yearning for communities |
| 2022-06-24 | 46 | Machine Head | "UNHALLØWED" | UNHALLØWED +1 | we get names for the places where nobody lives. |
| 2022-06-24 | 47 | Megadeth | "We’ll Be Back" | single | We have spent centuries writing books about faraway places you might eventually and laboriously visit, |
| 2022-06-24 | 48 | Queensrÿche | "In Extremis" | single | and then not realizing that we are now always among them. |
| 2022-06-24 | 49 | Marja Üldine | "UnFear" | single | You do not need to be outfitted for an overland ordeal |
| 2022-06-24 | 50 | Khold | "Ødslet Blod" | Svartsyn | when you can step through a portal to the farthest nearby or nearest Nether, |
| 2022-06-24 | 51 | Darkane | "Embrace The Flames" | Inhuman Spirits | and then just as easily back, or even more enticingly onwards. |
| 2022-06-24 | 52 | Saor | "Call of the Carnyx" | Origins | It is enough to bring things into contact, |
| 2022-06-24 | 53 | Hiroe | "Doom Moon" | Doom Moon +2 | or any other kind of juxtapositional awareness. |
| 2022-06-24 | 54 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "Nyx" | single | These tendrils of air will be capillaries of euphoria or regret, |
| 2022-06-24 | 55 | BardoMagno | "Game Of Signorie" | single | of resolve or reservation, |
| 2022-06-24 | 56 | STRYDEGOR | "Atmosfear" | Atmosfear +1 | suspended in whatever space lingers hesitantly between our skin. |
| 2022-06-24 | 57 | Forgotten North | "Rette sich wer kann" | Ära II | Change the singer, and you get a different band. |
| 2022-06-24 | 58 | Lándevir | "Never Stop Dreaming" | single | The Levenshtein distance between the member lists is an employment metric, |
| 2022-06-24 | 59 | Lutavierje | "Khadzili dzieuki" | Na Kupallie 5 | not a quantification of aesthetic stability |
| 2022-06-24 | 60 | Kiberspassk | "Daleko" | Daleko +2 | or a predictor of your pulse. |
| 2022-06-24 | 84 | Earthists. | "Cure" | Have A Good Cult | changed by the vulnerable orbits, |
| 2022-06-24 | 85 | DEXCORE | "THE LIGHT" | THE LIGHT +1 | inverted by re-entry. |
| 2022-06-24 | 86 | Matenrou Opera | "Koboreochiteikumirai" | Shinjitsu wo shittiku monogatari | If you ever ran out of songs, you could just sing more, |
| 2022-06-24 | 103 | Dust in Mind | "Awake" | single | Do you want to hear about the deal you're making |
| 2022-06-24 | 108 | Minniva | "Summer of '69" | single | "nothing lasts forever" say all the songs |
| 2022-06-17 | 1 | Crimson Sun | "The Flame" | single | "The critical question is whether the Constitution, properly understood...", |
| 2022-06-17 | 2 | Memoremains | "We Are One" | Pop Metal | begins a document that defines a nominally modern democracy's supposed Supreme Court |
| 2022-06-17 | 3 | Onyria | "Be Yourself" | single | as an intentionally obtuse tribunal of literally religious doctrine. |
| 2022-06-17 | 4 | Chaos Magic | "Hearts Gone Dark" | Emerge | The "properly" there, and probably everywhere, |
| 2022-06-17 | 5 | Secret Rule | "The Illusion" | single | is not a rational basis, but an assertion of unjustified power, |
| 2022-06-17 | 6 | Beyond The Black | "Reincarnation" | single | and an arbitrary and unapologetically immoral claim of immunity to justice. |
| 2022-06-17 | 7 | Seven Kingdoms | "A Silent Remedy" | Zenith | Invoking originalism on a historical document of contingent rebellion is a preposterous act of |
| 2022-06-17 | 8 | Empire of Giants | "The Rain" | Troposphere | remote myopia, deliberately trying to see nothing but what you claim to imagine |
| 2022-06-17 | 9 | Tigersclaw | "Titan's Dawn" | single | some dudes were concerned about in 1787. |
| 2022-06-17 | 10 | ADHARMA | "Divide and Conquer" | Mirror Mirror | You might as well revoke the rest of the Constitution |
| 2022-06-17 | 11 | Rioghan | "Sight" | Sight +2 | by pointing out how it contradicts both Magna Carta |
| 2022-06-17 | 12 | Morpheus' Dreams | "When Galatea Rode North" | single | and the rules of Uno. |
| 2022-06-17 | 14 | April Art | "See The Light" | P.O.K.E.R.F.A.C.E. | even without knowing as stated fact that some of them will as an immediate consequence |
| 2022-06-17 | 15 | Blame Me! | "Musket Fire" | single | enact laws that declare a life to begin earlier than a pregnancy, |
| 2022-06-17 | 16 | Oceans of Slumber | "The Lighthouse" | single | is of exactly the same moral standing |
| 2022-06-17 | 17 | A Sound of Thunder | "Grave Troopers" | single | as revoking the Geneva Convention to restore individual nations' |
| 2022-06-17 | 18 | Jorn | "Dead London" | Over the Horizon Radar | proper right to torture and genocide, |
| 2022-06-17 | 19 | Nordic Union | "In Every Waking Hour" | single | or unmaking any other law in order to protect the free will |
| 2022-06-17 | 20 | Kaledon | "The Dawn of Dawns" | single | of its declared and future disobedients. |
| 2022-06-17 | 21 | Civil War | "Carry On" | Invaders | The whole point of law is to express a collective will and clarity |
| 2022-06-17 | 22 | Noumena | "Ihmisen tie" | single | better than our inevitable lowest ebbs of individual weakness and ignorance. |
| 2022-06-17 | 23 | Mantar | "Odysseus" | single | The appeal to legalism isn't wrong, per se. |
| 2022-06-17 | 24 | Inexorum | "Creation Myth" | Equinox Vigil | States are permitted to pass progressive laws. |
| 2022-06-17 | 25 | 616 | "Blood and Silver and Gold" | single | Thieves are permitted to leave behind affidavits for tax purposes. |
| 2022-06-17 | 30 | Fleur du Mal | "Grâce" | Spleen III | that there is no such thing as states' rights, |
| 2022-06-17 | 31 | Blissful Euphoria | "A Feast with The Naiads" | single | because humans do not consent to inhumanity |
| 2022-06-17 | 39 | DIR EN GREY | "御伽 (Otogi)" | PHALARIS | was made, by deliberate kleptocratic action, |
| 2022-06-17 | 40 | Sigh | "Mayonaka No Kaii" | single | to bring this specific case in front of this specific configuration of tenuous power. |
| 2022-06-17 | 41 | Stellarleap | "Thunderous" | single | Not only was the decision not made independently of the reverently atavistic pending laws, |
| 2022-06-17 | 42 | MIYAVI | "Futurism" | Futurism +1 | but the two are tightly coordinated steps of a unified effort to undo social progress |
| 2022-06-17 | 108 | Sørgmodig | "Catastrophic Melancholy" | single | and not a second further than, |
| 2022-06-17 | 109 | Kuggur | "بعلة" | single | this moment when you temporarily stopped anybody else from |
| 2022-06-17 | 110 | The Dark Atom | "The Dark Knight" | Stargate Synchronicity | continuing to make things better. |
| 2022-06-17 | 111 | Andromida | "Flight" | single | If you care about people and the lives they are leading right now, |
| 2022-06-17 | 112 | Johari | "Head Mounted Sideways" | single | you don't tell them "We give you this darkness |
| 2022-06-17 | 113 | Rings of Saturn | "Shinigami" | Rings of Saturn | because it is somebody else's job to sell you light", |
| 2022-06-17 | 114 | Atomic Symphony | "Chimera" | single | even if you believe it is somebody else's job to sell them light. |
| 2022-06-17 | 115 | Charlie Griffiths | "In Alluvium" | Tiktaalika | We don't tell racists in coal towns that they can go fuck themselves in silence until they build a wind farm. |
| 2022-06-17 | 129 | Violet Orlandi | "I Will Survive" | single | You can't even necessarily live through this. It may pass, but it won't pass on its own. |
| 2022-06-10 | 11 | Ardours | "Epitaph for a Spark" | single | but it will at least be less charmless. |
| 2022-06-10 | 12 | Deep Sun | "Euphoria" | Dreamland - Behind The Shades | There are bricks, and some trees, |
| 2022-06-10 | 13 | Dol Theeta | "Remember" | Monad | and the large space is rearranged into a set of smaller patterns, |
| 2022-06-10 | 14 | Venus 5 | "Bury Me" | Venus 5 | and there's an elevated ramplike feature at one end that looks, |
| 2022-06-10 | 15 | Future Palace | "Dead Inside" | Run | in its current half-constructed state, |
| 2022-06-10 | 16 | Without Warning | "Black Venom" | single | like it will be used in an attempt to jump an electric motorcycle |
| 2022-06-10 | 17 | Carmilla | "The One" | single | over the nearby Holocaust memorial |
| 2022-06-10 | 18 | HEXED | "Repentance" | single | into the historic sign for the Union Oyster House, |
| 2022-06-10 | 19 | Thy Shade | "What If" | single | the shards of which would then presumably crash down festively, |
| 2022-06-10 | 21 | Cecile Monique | "Engel" | single | onto the passing Freedom Trail. |
| 2022-06-10 | 22 | Scarlet Dorn | "Falling" | single | Boston is an extended exercise in layering: |
| 2022-06-10 | 23 | Averlanche | "In The Theater Of Fire" | single | oversimplified reverence and stern object lessons coexisting plentifully, |
| 2022-06-10 | 24 | Powerwolf | "Glaubenskraft - The Monumental Mass" | Glaubenskraft 2 | if not always peacefully; |
| 2022-06-10 | 25 | Wind Rose | "Army of Stone" | Warfront | alternating landmarks and landfill; |
| 2022-06-10 | 26 | Keldian | "The Million Dollar Mile" | The Bloodwater Rebellion | passive-aggressively lingering segregation |
| 2022-06-10 | 27 | Ember Falls | "Avalanche" | Experiments 4 | and small noble efforts at globalist exemplification; |
| 2022-06-10 | 28 | Seventh Wonder | "I Carry the Blame" | The Testament | traditionalist intransigence somehow both delaying |
| 2022-06-10 | 29 | MCC [Magna Carta Cartel] | "Darling" | The Dying Option | and facilitating |
| 2022-06-10 | 30 | Tierra Santa | "Por el Valle de las Sombras" | Destino | grand infrastructural ambition. |
| 2022-06-10 | 31 | Sleeper Ship | "Wasting Love" | single | City Hall lurks malignantly in the middle of this, |
| 2022-06-10 | 33 | Kreator | "Killer Of Jesus" | Hate Über Alles | but until just recently, on the timescales of cities, |
| 2022-06-10 | 34 | Whisper of Runes | "Minne (Minnesang II)" | single | there was an at-least-equally regrettable elevated freeway slicing grimly down the middle of downtown, |
| 2022-06-10 | 35 | Corvus Corax | "Béowulf is mín nama - Era Metallum - Bonus Track" | single | as if "spine" were a pejorative or a punishment. |
| 2022-06-10 | 36 | dArtagnan | "Westwind" | single | We buried the road and put a green way on top of it. |
| 2022-06-10 | 37 | Elkir | "Fight For The Empire" | single | Greenish, anyway: |
| 2022-06-10 | 43 | Vermilia | "Hautavajo" | single | in the naively ambitious way of most of our less-bad bad ideas. |
| 2022-06-10 | 44 | Imperial Triumphant | "Merkurius Gilded" | single | As a tourist destination this is a visually underwhelming |
| 2022-06-10 | 45 | Kardashev | "Silvered Shadows" | Liminal Rite | challenge to the narrator: |
| 2022-06-10 | 47 | Axioma | "God Extraction" | God Extraction +2 | and the weight of its exhaust, |
| 2022-06-10 | 48 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Blackout77" | single | imaginarily in the open air and sunlight left behind, |
| 2022-06-10 | 49 | Avatarium | "God Is Silent" | single | to evoke the psychogeography of the transformation |
| 2022-06-03 | 2 | Torn Between Two Worlds | "The Woman That Never Was" | single | in the acceptance of loneliness as our emotional origin |
| 2022-06-03 | 3 | Eye of Melian | "Light" | Light 5 | and thus human contact as its only resonant resolution. |
| 2022-06-03 | 4 | Blackwater Drowning | "Mortal Coil" | single | The denial of loneliness, |
| 2022-06-03 | 5 | Nocturnal Pestilence | "Standing Aside" | single | and with it the denial of the need for incorporating other people's needs |
| 2022-06-03 | 6 | We are Legend | "Fallen Angel" | single | into your own abstract worldview and chosen actions, |
| 2022-06-03 | 7 | Snow White In The Dark | "Let´s Fight" | single | is at least personal misanthropy and collective nihilism, |
| 2022-06-03 | 8 | Neperia | "The Story Is Told" | Ptesmata | and probably either elemental self-loathing or a dubiously detached loathing for mortal specificity. |
| 2022-06-03 | 9 | Shereign | "Remedy" | single | You can't really detach. |
| 2022-06-03 | 10 | Mindmaze | "Forever Too Late" | single | Detachment is a mythology of separatism, |
| 2022-06-03 | 11 | Forgotten North | "Hinter den Wolken" | single | and there is nowhere to draw your petty new borders |
| 2022-06-03 | 12 | Brachmond | "Labyrinth" | single | except through other people's grandly existing nations or aspirationally notional states. |
| 2022-06-03 | 13 | Eluveitie | "Aidus" | single | There are no meaningfully benevolent dictators |
| 2022-06-03 | 14 | FEST VAINQUEUR | "Venous Blood Vessel" | GLARE | or enduring utopian cults, |
| 2022-06-03 | 15 | Imperial Circus Dead Decadence | "禊祓の神産は宣い、禍祓の贖罪は誓う。feat.あらまり" | 殯――死へ耽る想いは戮辱すら喰らい、彼方の生を愛する為に命を讃える――。 | because a stentorian unity based on ceremonial antipathy |
| 2022-06-03 | 59 | Maximus | "Tack ändå" | single | travelers who conflated tourism |
| 2022-06-03 | 64 | Hexis | "Nunquam" | single | and mistook it for a frontier |
| 2022-06-03 | 65 | Amon Amarth | "Get in the Ring" | single | at the limit of their inherited myopia; |
| 2022-06-03 | 66 | The Halo Effect | "The Needless End" | The Needless End +3 | slave lords cosplaying as federalists; |
| 2022-06-03 | 67 | Hypermass | "Hivemind" | Empyrean | émigrés misunderstanding the allegory of the parting sea |
| 2022-06-03 | 68 | Wrang | "Doodgeslagen onschuld" | De vaendrig | as if, once closed behind them, the sea could never be parted again. |
| 2022-06-03 | 69 | DAMPF | "Winterland" | The Arrival | This country is defined by its constitution, not its Constitution, not anything capitalized, |
| 2022-06-03 | 70 | Defiatory | "Apocalypse" | Apokalyps | and in this way is the same as every country, |
| 2022-06-03 | 71 | Temple of Void | "A Sequence of Rot" | Summoning the Slayer | conclusively failed or optimistically still only inconclusively failing. |
| 2022-06-03 | 72 | Don't Drop the Sword | "Sands Of Time" | Prelude To The Age Of Heroes 3 | Proud squalling toddlers climbing through a smashed window into the Capitol was a point of failure |
| 2022-06-03 | 73 | Battlelore | "Minas Morgul" | The Return of the Shadow | for glass, |
| 2022-06-03 | 74 | Stratovarius | "Survive" | single | but the point of failure for the society happened long before that: |
| 2022-06-03 | 75 | Merta | "Laiva" | single | before Trump tried not to let go of power, |
| 2022-06-03 | 76 | Magistarium | "No World Without Hero" | Dreamlord Opera | before he got it, |
| 2022-06-03 | 77 | Veter Daemonaz | "Moon Sorcery - Single edit version" | single | before he failed to learn a value-system not based on hoarding power, |
| 2022-06-03 | 78 | Рожь | "Аминь" | single | before we failed to teach him, |
| 2022-06-03 | 83 | Astronoid | "Sedative" | Radiant Bloom | and not a secret shame to be desperately hidden by crudely billowing suits |
| 2022-06-03 | 93 | The Algorithm | "Inline Assembly" | Data Renaissance | reaching out like a fist to make you pay |
| 2022-06-03 | 94 | Astronoid | "Decades" | Radiant Bloom | for something you both don't need |
| 2022-06-03 | 98 | Control the Storm | "Holding out for a Hero" | single | willing to become more perfect, made of chaos and glee, always fresh from a fight that solved nothing, or the hearings that try to insist that the story of the last fight will teach us how to not have the next one. |
| 2022-06-03 | 99 | Drewsif | "All Eyes On Me" | single | Which has always just begun. |
| 2022-05-27 | 1 | Mournful Congregation | "Mountainous Shadows, Cast Through Time" | The Exuviae of Gods - Part 1 | We built churches in our own image, |
| 2022-05-27 | 2 | Foraoisí gan Iniúchadh | "The Kingdom Will Die" | single | even before we realized our gods were images of ourselves, |
| 2022-05-27 | 3 | Liminal Shroud | "Hypoxic" | single | and thus reverence is inevitably rehabilitated as ornate heresy. |
| 2022-05-27 | 4 | Temple of Void | "The Transcending Horror" | The Transcending Horror +2 | Our enemies will preserve our gifts, |
| 2022-05-27 | 5 | Black Void | "Tenebrism of Life" | Antithesis | every one but the last. |
| 2022-05-27 | 6 | Khold | "I Demonens Bok" | I Demonens Bok +1 | War is the process power uses |
| 2022-05-27 | 7 | Saor | "Beyond the Wall" | single | to turn the preconditions for conflict |
| 2022-05-27 | 8 | Cosmophobe | "Withdrawn" | single | into assumptions: |
| 2022-05-27 | 9 | Crematory | "Trümmerwelten" | Inglorious Darkness | to score chalk lines with knife blades |
| 2022-05-27 | 10 | Black Void | "No Right, No Wrong" | Antithesis | and give exhortational names to uneasily fluttering flags. |
| 2022-05-27 | 11 | Corvus Corax | "Na láma-sa - Era Metallum - Bonus Track" | single | By the time fighting starts, |
| 2022-05-27 | 13 | Circus of Fools | "In the Name of Science" | single | and A/B tested, |
| 2022-05-27 | 14 | Sick n' beautiful | "This is Not the End" | single | not to choose between A and B, |
| 2022-05-27 | 15 | LOST NEBULA | "Darwin Among The Machines" | single | but to ensure that there seem to be no other choices. |
| 2022-05-27 | 17 | Xandria | "Reborn" | single | purged and therapied, |
| 2022-05-27 | 18 | Dol Theeta | "We Die Alone" | single | are rehired as our captains, |
| 2022-05-27 | 19 | Cinnamun Beloved | "Out of Sight" | single | allocating our waiting ships into exactly two doomed fleets. |
| 2022-05-27 | 20 | Evol Walks | "Drag Me Down" | single | The anthem market marshals eager hordes for "Crash" |
| 2022-05-27 | 21 | Chez Kane | "Powerzone" | single | and "Burn", |
| 2022-05-27 | 22 | Yohei Kimura | "Dawn" | single | and administrative fees for "ponder what you remember most fondly from yesterday" |
| 2022-05-20 | 2 | Mutiara Damansara | "Réminiscences" | Annual Winter Depression | You can't pray for the families of murdered third graders. |
| 2022-05-20 | 3 | Spheric Universe Experience | "Final Fate" | Back Home | If your gods exist |
| 2022-05-20 | 4 | Azure | "Spark Madrigal" | single | and have any power, |
| 2022-05-20 | 5 | Evergrey | "Ominous" | A Heartless Portrait (The Orphéan Testament) | they already chose not to use it. |
| 2022-05-20 | 6 | Jorn | "One Man War" | single | You are not praying for the parents of dead children, |
| 2022-05-20 | 7 | Эйдол | "Пропасть разума" | single | you are praying that you will be allowed |
| 2022-05-20 | 8 | YYNOT | "Living Proof" | single | to keep hoarding |
| 2022-05-20 | 9 | Edenbridge | "The Road To Shangri-La - Single Edit" | single | what you believe to be the guilty treasure |
| 2022-05-20 | 10 | Magica | "Little Girl" | single | of moral piracy. |
| 2022-05-20 | 11 | Chaos Magic | "In the Depth of Night" | single | You are praying for a way to keep believing that you are special, |
| 2022-05-20 | 12 | Whispering Tales | "Embers" | A Matter of Time | and that your petty, uncritical urges |
| 2022-05-20 | 13 | Avantasia | "The Wicked Rule The Night" | single | have inherent divinity. |
| 2022-05-20 | 14 | Graveshadow | "The Swordsman (feat. Chelsea Murphy)" | single | You are praying to be forgiven for your fears, |
| 2022-05-20 | 15 | Deep Sun | "Killer In A Dream" | single | but confusing forgiveness for exoneration. |
| 2022-05-20 | 16 | Volturian | "Stay" | Red Dragon | Your prayers are a desperately disingenuous attempt at a selfish alibi |
| 2022-05-20 | 17 | NUMENTO | "Scarlet Haze" | single | for crimes in which we are all ultimately complicit. |
| 2022-05-20 | 18 | RedHook | "Jabberwocky" | single | We are all here. |
| 2022-05-20 | 19 | Oxidize | "Stand up for the Masses" | Stand up for the Masses | What currently passes for civilization is only whatever illusion |
| 2022-05-20 | 20 | Ксюша на Марсе | "Я здесь" | single | we collectively sustain. |
| 2022-05-20 | 21 | Ibridoma | "Ti ho visto andare via" | Norimberga 2.0 | It doesn't just go inexplicably |
| 2022-05-20 | 22 | A Sound of Thunder | "Orb Weaver" | single | and occasionally |
| 2022-05-20 | 23 | Victorius | "Mighty Magic Mammoth - Radio Edit" | Mighty Magic Mammoth 4 | and unrepresentatively awry, |
| 2022-05-20 | 24 | Ember Falls | "Cloud Connected" | single | it goes miserably and laboriously wrong |
| 2022-05-20 | 25 | Arch Enemy | "Sunset over the Empire" | single | as an inevitable result of our deliberate practices. |
| 2022-05-20 | 26 | Amiensus | "Gehenna" | All Paths Lead to Death | We don't merely tolerate the unfortunate possibility |
| 2022-05-20 | 27 | Vaamatar | "Medievalgeist" | Medievalgeist | of 18-year-olds with assault rifles |
| 2022-05-20 | 28 | Septicflesh | "The Collector" | Modern Primitive | murdering even-younger children, |
| 2022-05-20 | 29 | Exocrine | "Dying Light" | single | we meticulously optimize the rifles for only and exactly this purpose, |
| 2022-05-20 | 30 | Serpent Sermon | "Anka" | single | and an economy for treating ammunition as productivity, |
| 2022-05-20 | 31 | Blut Aus Nord | "Chants Of The Deep Ones" | Disharmonium - Undreamable Abysses | and a legal system for treating laws as "enforcement" |
| 2022-05-20 | 32 | Hyrgal | "Diablerie" | Hyrgal | and thus both valorizing and militarizing defiance, |
| 2022-05-20 | 33 | Imperial Triumphant | "Maximalist Scream" | single | and a media for grimly picking at wounds |
| 2022-05-20 | 34 | Luminous Vault | "Invoke Radiant Gleam" | Animate the Emptiness | to make them feel more familiar |
| 2022-05-20 | 35 | Boris | "She is burning" | single | instead of treating them, |
| 2022-05-20 | 136 | FalKKonE | "This Will Be the Day (From "RWBY")" | Intense Symphonic Metal Covers: Crescent Rose Edition | until we all recognize that we are not divided up into isolatable towns |
| 2022-05-20 | 138 | Tombs | "Killed by Death" | single | You can't send away prayers to echo around in other people's walls. |
| 2022-05-20 | 141 | Violet Orlandi | "All Star" | single | This world on fire is the only one our streets reach. |
| 2022-05-20 | 142 | Shameless | "Pretty In Pink" | So Good, You Should... | It's beautiful. We're beautiful. Some of us are gone, but they are not the last. We are not the last. |
| 2022-05-13 | 11 | Nekonomicon | "One-Winged Angel of Death" | Nekonomicon | I'm sure about almost nothing, |
| 2022-05-13 | 12 | Secret Rule | "Obsession" | single | but I can be convinced to try earnest or ecstatic experiments |
| 2022-05-13 | 13 | Anniken | "Just Walk" | Climb Out Of Hell | for three or five minutes at a time, |
| 2022-05-13 | 14 | Dol Theeta | "Monolith" | single | as long as after that we stop |
| 2022-05-13 | 15 | Megara | "Ni Contigo Ni Sin Ti" | Truco o Trato Capítulo II 3 | and re-have this fight |
| 2022-05-13 | 16 | Lena Scissorhands | "Free (feat. Vervain St. Project)" | single | in a very slightly better or worse world |
| 2022-05-13 | 17 | Oceans of Slumber | "Hearts of Stone" | single | to see if we can tell. |
| 2022-05-13 | 18 | Thessa | "Débris" | single | Horizons always beckon, |
| 2022-05-13 | 19 | Stömb | "An Absence of Sun" | single | but the contours of a horizon |
| 2022-05-13 | 20 | Cold Kingdom | "Agony" | single | are evaluations of how you think you feel |
| 2022-05-13 | 21 | Xaon | "Wayward Sun" | single | about where you begin your gaze. |
| 2022-05-13 | 22 | Mob Rules | "Sacred Heart" | single | The architecture of skyscrapers |
| 2022-05-13 | 23 | Visions of Atlantis | "Master the Hurricane" | Pirates | will always amount to "not this mud" |
| 2022-05-13 | 24 | Moon Tooth | "I Revere" | Phototroph | until their construction can be rendered trivial |
| 2022-05-13 | 27 | Aara | "Phantasmagorie" | Triade II : Hemera | cannot be understood in actual detail. |
| 2022-05-13 | 28 | Nechochwen | "Kanawha Black" | Kanawha Black | We invent deceptive machines to lie to us coldly |
| 2022-05-13 | 29 | Unendlich | "No Light Will Take Me" | Misanthrope Divine 5 | about this, and thermodynamics, and privilege, |
| 2022-05-13 | 30 | Mutiara Damansara | "Farewell" | Farewell +1 | and then we're surprised by the warm truth, |
| 2022-05-13 | 31 | Moon Tooth | "Phototroph" | Phototroph | and the persistence of skin. |
| 2022-05-06 | 15 | LANTANA | "Kioku" | single | I cannot measure it. |
| 2022-05-06 | 16 | Megara | "Estanque de Tormentas" | single | I'm not saying it can't be measured, necessarily, |
| 2022-05-06 | 17 | Volturian | "Empty World" | single | but I definitely can't experience it and measure it at once, |
| 2022-05-06 | 18 | Seventh Wonder | "The Light" | single | and if a scientist chooses observation over implication, |
| 2022-05-06 | 19 | Carmilla | "Who Gives a Fuck" | single | I am an alchemist. |
| 2022-05-06 | 20 | Cadaveria | "Emptiness" | single | We aspire ineffectually to not fear death, |
| 2022-05-06 | 21 | Therion | "Litany Of The Fallen" | single | but in failure get better at not fearing |
| 2022-05-06 | 22 | Opera Magna | "What Was Dreamt and Lived" | What Was Dreamt and Lived +1 | the things we might have thought we could become, |
| 2022-05-06 | 23 | Jani Liimatainen | "Breathing Divinity" | My Father's Son | particularly the ones whose untenability we understood |
| 2022-05-06 | 24 | Powerwolf | "Venom of Venus - The Monumental Mass" | single | before their appeal. |
| 2022-05-06 | 25 | Lord Of The Lost | "The Heartbeat of the Devil - Single Version" | The Heartbeat of the Devil 5 | The stations of joy: |
| 2022-05-06 | 26 | Lacrimas Profundere | "A Cloak Woven of Stars" | single | ownership is not a precondition of understanding; |
| 2022-05-06 | 27 | Edge Of Forever | "Calling" | single | understanding is not a prerequisite for experience; |
| 2022-05-06 | 28 | Grimgotts | "Ignite the Flame" | Ignite the Flame +2 | consumption is not the only way to fill the world with more of something. |
| 2022-05-06 | 29 | Battlelore | "Chambers of Fire" | Chambers of Fire +1 | If libertarian entropy replaces hoarded power with a fetid warmth, |
| 2022-05-06 | 30 | Kreator | "Midnight Sun" | single | viridian extropy converts carefully far-too-abundant power into reckless elation |
| 2022-05-06 | 31 | Kampfar | "Fandens Trall" | Fandens Trall +1 | in every ethereal or guttural argot. |
| 2022-05-06 | 32 | Djevelkult | "Perfect Obliterate" | Drep Alle Guder | Joy is propositional, |
| 2022-05-06 | 33 | Rise to the Sky | "I Can See You When I Dream" | Every Day, A Funeral | and thus linguistic |
| 2022-05-06 | 34 | Vital Spirit | "Blood and Smoke" | Still as the Night, Cold as the Wind | even when wordless or technically unintelligible |
| 2022-05-06 | 37 | Riverwood | "Rise Of The Fallen" | single | merely instead of merrily, |
| 2022-05-06 | 38 | Bucium | "Vânător / Orion (Hunter)" | single | as if we were given a problem-set in the form of a planet, |
| 2022-05-06 | 39 | Krypton | "Păcate și ispite" | single | and have wasted most of our time arguing over how |
| 2022-05-06 | 40 | Corvus Corax | "Ragnarök - Era Metallum - Bonus Track" | single | or when |
| 2022-05-06 | 41 | Triddana | "The Ground of the Fallen" | single | it will be graded. |
| 2022-04-29 | 1 | IKINÄ | "Burn" | single | Originalism isn't a legislative philosophy, |
| 2022-04-29 | 2 | Anniken | "Spotlight" | single | it's a reading of the Constitution as scripture, |
| 2022-04-29 | 3 | After Forever | "Sweet Enclosure" | single | and like any scriptural reading of anything, |
| 2022-04-29 | 4 | Battle Beast | "Tempest Of Blades" | Circus Of Doom | it is an attempt to interpret inertial privilege |
| 2022-04-29 | 5 | The Gathering | "When We Fall" | Beautiful Distortion | and contingent tradition |
| 2022-04-29 | 6 | Rioghan | "Promises" | Promises +1 | as natural law, |
| 2022-04-29 | 7 | Eternal Frequency | "A.I." | single | but like any other invocation of points in space as destiny, |
| 2022-04-29 | 8 | Liv Sin | "The Process" | single | it is inherently opposed to progress and will. |
| 2022-04-29 | 9 | Venus 5 | "We Are Dynamite" | single | Portraying this tension as a left-right one-dimensionality |
| 2022-04-29 | 10 | Crimson Sun | "Feed the Fire" | single | is itself a trivialization for the benefit of existing establishments |
| 2022-04-29 | 11 | Metopia | "Liebes Ich" | Wiedergeburt | built on property they believe they own |
| 2022-04-29 | 12 | Dol Theeta | "Enchanted" | single | along this one narrow line. |
| 2022-04-29 | 13 | Deep Sun | "Living The Dream" | single | Heaven and Hell is a cosmology for earthworms |
| 2022-04-29 | 14 | LÝSIS | "Scorched" | single | peering moistly out of reassuringly quiescent mud |
| 2022-04-29 | 15 | Synthwailer | "Rest upon the Stars" | Crimson Betrayals 4 | into thrumming air, |
| 2022-04-29 | 16 | Manntra | "Tanz" | Tanz +1 | except upside-down. |
| 2022-04-29 | 17 | dArtagnan | "Tanz in den Mai" | single | It facilitates the reduction of pseudo-moral reasoning to tug-of-war |
| 2022-04-29 | 18 | Zenobia | "No Me Dejes Caer (feat. Isra Ramos)" | single | by allowing any movement to be trivially portrayed as movement towards an abhorent |
| 2022-04-29 | 19 | Evergrey | "Blindfolded" | Blindfolded +2 | oversimplified extreme. |
| 2022-04-29 | 20 | Circle Of Silence | "Triumph Over Tragedy" | single | The animating conceit of Alito's smugly scornful dismissal of abortion precedent |
| 2022-04-29 | 21 | Gloryhammer | "Fly Away" | single | isn't a respect for established law, |
| 2022-04-29 | 22 | Fallen Sanctuary | "Terranova" | Terranova +1 | it is a disrespect for disestablished humanity. |
| 2022-04-29 | 23 | Gladenfold | "Carnival Of The Hunter" | Nemesis | Abortion is in some senses a moral distraction, |
| 2022-04-29 | 24 | Dristeig | "Distance" | single | because it focuses so specifically on a moment and dilemma |
| 2022-04-29 | 25 | Darkane | "Inhuman Spirits" | single | that is a complex result of so many other factors |
| 2022-04-29 | 26 | Watain | "Ecstasies in night infinite" | The Agony & Ecstasy of Watain | in every individual case, |
| 2022-04-29 | 27 | Fallujah | "Radiant Ascension" | single | and an even more complex phenomenon at the level of communities and humanity, |
| 2022-04-29 | 28 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Three-Headed Death Machine" | single | but of course this is exactly the point. |
| 2022-04-29 | 29 | Vaasa Palaa | "en tiedä, mutta toivon" | single | A single-issue fight over abortion allows racists and theocrats |
| 2022-04-29 | 30 | Medium Arvet | "Kaksin Käsin" | single | to be for "life", |
| 2022-04-29 | 32 | SHOW-YA | "限界LOVERS ~Battle Orchestra~" | single | instead of social equity. |
| 2022-04-29 | 100 | Crashdïet | "Shine On" | Automaton | This will not be our final battle between fear and hope, |
| 2022-04-29 | 101 | Gräce | "Evergarden" | single | nor our final loss. |
| 2022-04-29 | 105 | Astronoid | "Sleep Whisper" | Sleep Whisper +1 | Imagining a two-dimensional politics is hard; |
| 2022-04-29 | 106 | Mutiara Damansara | "Annual Winter Depression" | single | maybe "politics" is the name for not doing so, |
| 2022-04-29 | 107 | Acadence | "The Arrival" | Eternal Warfare 4 | in the same way that "power" is the name for hoarding something that everybody needs. |
| 2022-04-29 | 108 | Graywave | "Rebirth" | Rebirth +1 | But if you push against these drawn lines, |
| 2022-04-29 | 109 | Hereafter | "Weathering the Storm" | single | even on the days when it feels like you cannot pull apart their edges, |
| 2022-04-29 | 110 | Rise to the Sky | "Just Say Goodbye" | single | you can sometimes jar them into a slightly different orientation in the beckoning space. |
| 2022-04-29 | 111 | Saor | "Origins" | single | These disasters -- |
| 2022-04-29 | 112 | Blissful Euphoria | "The Sumerian King Aria" | The Sumerian King 2 | war, pandemics, verdicts, |
| 2022-04-22 | 14 | Seas on the Moon | "Anhedonia" | single | Our fear takes so many forms. |
| 2022-04-22 | 15 | Secret Rule | "One More" | single | There are moments when I feel like I have run out of fear, too, though, |
| 2022-04-22 | 16 | Future Palace | "Defeating Gravity" | Defeating Gravity 5 | and then I notice that I am standing at a window |
| 2022-04-22 | 17 | Red Handed Denial | "White Water" | White Water +2 | or walking over a bridge |
| 2022-04-22 | 18 | Daedric | "Dawnbreaker" | Dawnbreaker +2 | or typing sentences about hope, |
| 2022-04-22 | 19 | Volturian | "Bury Me" | single | but with headphones, |
| 2022-04-22 | 20 | Chaos Magic | "Emerge" | single | and these bands from some other side of the world |
| 2022-04-22 | 21 | Phantom Divine | "The Wraith of the Lake" | The Wraith of the Lake +3 | have swarmed grandly into my head. |
| 2022-04-22 | 22 | Sorrowful Knight | "Остара" | Остара +3 | Each second of a song invites the next moment to jump |
| 2022-04-22 | 23 | The Power of the Pudú | "Bachametal" | single | or spin or crash. |
| 2022-04-22 | 24 | Hadadanza | "¡Bienvenidos al Circo!" | El Circo de los Muertos | Every song welcomes or beckons us to something: |
| 2022-04-22 | 25 | Faun | "Caer" | Pagan | to a heritage of aspiration and exoneration, |
| 2022-04-22 | 32 | Horizon Ignited | "Servant" | Servant +2 | if you remember to see by listening. |
| 2022-04-22 | 33 | Blut Aus Nord | "Tales Of The Old Dreamer" | single | Our old dreams were always like this: |
| 2022-04-22 | 34 | Rotting Christ | "Holy Mountain" | single | vantage fables |
| 2022-04-22 | 35 | Septicflesh | "A Desert Throne" | A Desert Throne +2 | of subjective kingdoms |
| 2022-04-22 | 36 | Khold | "Apostel" | single | from which we awaken evangelically, |
| 2022-04-22 | 37 | Einvigi | "Yö Kulje Kanssani" | Yö Kulje Kanssani | and then try to remember that the first heretics we need to convert |
| 2022-04-22 | 38 | White Ward | "Leviathan" | single | are the ones we invented to admonish us for our pride. |
| 2022-04-22 | 39 | FREJA | "Scattered Shields" | Tides | We are made of water and sky. |
| 2022-04-22 | 40 | Cisza | "Withered, Blackened Heart" | single | Of course we mistake ourselves for gods. |
| 2022-04-22 | 41 | Te Ruki | "Huero a Tamaera" | Marako Te Ruki | The actual gods are standing at windows in silence, |
| 2022-04-22 | 42 | Escaping Aghartha | "Consuming Drought" | Croak | waiting for us to develop efficient aircars |
| 2022-04-22 | 43 | Helioss | "La chute du tyran" | Contre ma lumière | so they can justify not drowning us |
| 2022-04-22 | 44 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "1a10" | Vacuum. The mystery of faith. We proclaim your death oh Lord, and profess your resurrection, until you come again. Förlåtelse och Levitation. | in our own incomprehensible seas. |
| 2022-04-22 | 45 | Veil Of Maya | "Synthwave Vegan" | single | We debate their criteria as a symbolic gesture of respect, |
| 2022-04-22 | 46 | The HAARP Machine | "Forsaken" | single | but they knew before we did that they were only now ever going to watch |
| 2022-04-15 | 47 | Brightstorm | "To Follow My Heart" | single | Memory is not an archive, |
| 2022-04-15 | 48 | Eye of Melian | "Everstrong" | Everstrong +3 | it's a demonstration of our ability to convert joy into an energy, |
| 2022-04-15 | 49 | Withering Season | "Dreams of Sorrow" | single | but only after it makes us want to. |
| 2022-04-15 | 50 | The Big Deal | "Top Heaven" | single | You can tell if you're playing or working |
| 2022-04-15 | 51 | DeVicious | "A Special Mind" | Black Heart | by whether you're hoping you get to keep doing it |
| 2022-04-15 | 52 | Aevum | "Lullaby" | Glitch | or counting the hours until merciful sleep. |
| 2022-04-15 | 53 | Semblant | "Bloodred Monarch (Legacy of Blood, Pt. VII)" | Vermilion Eclipse | We thought we had legacies of blood. |
| 2022-04-15 | 54 | Visions of Atlantis | "Melancholy Angel" | Melancholy Angel +1 | The blood knew it was a moving and tragic compromise |
| 2022-04-15 | 55 | Lodestar | "Creeping In My Soul" | single | between irreproducible nucleic acid and irreducible air. |
| 2022-04-15 | 56 | Darkher | "Immortals" | The Buried Storm | It's not that we live forever, |
| 2022-04-15 | 57 | Alunah | "Over The Hills" | Strange Machine | it's that the substances that make our lives different |
| 2022-04-15 | 58 | Boris | "Funnel of Love" | single | from our deaths are not consumed by living |
| 2022-04-15 | 59 | Thou | "Night" | single | but produced by it. |
| 2022-04-15 | 60 | A Pregnant Light | "Jinx!" | Jinx! / Purple Lips 2 | The drums do that thing where they smash into a wall that only they can see |
| 2022-04-15 | 61 | Vansind | "Asgaards Kald" | single | until everybody can hear it |
| 2022-04-15 | 62 | Schandmaul | "Königsgarde" | Königsgarde +1 | crack. |
| 2022-04-15 | 64 | Månegarm | "Adils fall" | Ynglingaättens Öde | these hands of vessels. |
| 2022-04-15 | 65 | Djevelkult | "I Kuldens Vold" | single | The gray throngs are us, too. |
| 2022-04-15 | 66 | Exocrine | "The Hybrid Suns" | single | It's all us, until we reach the next inhabited star |
| 2022-04-15 | 67 | Demonic Resurrection | "The Mask" | single | in search of true others to blame, |
| 2022-04-15 | 68 | Crematory | "Break Down the Walls" | Break Down the Walls +1 | only to find that reaching them makes us into them. |
| 2022-04-15 | 69 | Zero Hour | "Agenda 21" | single | We go to find ourselves, |
| 2022-04-15 | 70 | Shaman | "Don't Let It Rain" | Rescue | and then, hilariously, are surprised when we succeed. |
| 2022-04-15 | 72 | Spheric Universe Experience | "Where We Belong" | single | which in itself ought to be enough to give away the self-serving expedience of economy: |
| 2022-04-15 | 73 | Thessa | "Free Fall" | single | From each according to their need, |
| 2022-04-15 | 74 | Moon Tooth | "Alpha Howl" | Alpha Howl +3 | to each according to their unaccountability. |
| 2022-04-08 | 1 | Onyria | "Denial" | single | Sometimes the "symphonic" in "symphonic metal" means the arrangements are at least partially orchestral, |
| 2022-04-08 | 2 | Dark Princess | "My Shadow Self" | My Shadow Self +1 | but sometimes it's just a coded way of admitting to a maximalist ambition |
| 2022-04-08 | 3 | Faun | "Gwydion" | single | to be good by exuberant technique. |
| 2022-04-08 | 4 | Mute Prophet | "Designer Scars" | Cycle of Fire | Metal, as a whole, |
| 2022-04-08 | 5 | Neperia | "Contrast" | single | oscillates through this Lagrange point over time, |
| 2022-04-08 | 6 | Empire of Giants | "Dying Star" | Dying Star +2 | spinning off into shredding and double-kick polyrhythm for a while |
| 2022-04-08 | 7 | Seven Kingdoms | "Universal Terrestrial" | single | before orbiting back into monospaced blastbeats and deliberately noteless grunting. |
| 2022-04-08 | 8 | Giant Walker | "Katoomba" | single | Maybe all musical forms, if not all art forms, do this, |
| 2022-04-08 | 9 | Flowerleaf | "The Storm" | The Storm +2 | and not over time as much as throughout it, |
| 2022-04-08 | 10 | New Saviors | "My Demise" | single | a cloud of possibility stretching from abstruse nominal complexity |
| 2022-04-08 | 11 | Osatia | "Decode" | Decode +1 | to confrontational apparent simplicity. |
| 2022-04-08 | 12 | Eternal Psycho | "Religion" | Trail of Agony | Clouds don't hover along a single sharp axis, though, |
| 2022-04-08 | 13 | Tales of a Sleeping Giant | "Morgana" | single | they billow and blur and suffuse. |
| 2022-04-08 | 14 | April Weeps | "Crossing the Waves" | single | Art, like most human obsessions, doesn't gain and lose complexity |
| 2022-04-08 | 15 | Lena Scissorhands | "Borderlines (feat. Death Dealer Union)" | single | as much as it moves it around. |
| 2022-04-08 | 19 | SIPP | "DON'T WARP" | single | Choosing a death-metal rasp, or a single shade of blue paint, |
| 2022-04-08 | 37 | TeZATalks | "Lex Luthor" | single | as it is in hip hop and metal and pizza, |
| 2022-04-08 | 53 | VV | "Loveletting - 7" Cut" | single | Metaphor is a relationship, not a state, |
| 2022-04-08 | 54 | All Things Fallen | "Pandemonium" | single | and everything that poses as a state |
| 2022-04-08 | 55 | Egor Lappo | "Crepuscular" | Naturealism | is an accumulation of relationships teetering on the structural verge |
| 2022-04-08 | 56 | Helsott | "Independence Night" | single | of achieving unity |
| 2022-04-08 | 57 | Unherz | "Löwenherz" | single | by forgetting itself. |
| 2022-04-08 | 58 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "The Entropic Queen" | single | We can blame Putin for bombing Ukrainian hospitals, |
| 2022-04-08 | 59 | Morthifera | "Apostasía" | single | but he didn't invent autocracy or bombs |
| 2022-04-08 | 60 | Smash Into Pieces | "A Shot in the Dark" | A Shot in the Dark 5 | or the assignment of fears to boundaries. |
| 2022-04-08 | 61 | Treat | "Jesus from Hollywood" | The Endgame | We can and should be appalled by Trump wondering about the point of having nuclear weapons you aren't allowed to use, |
| 2022-04-08 | 62 | Crashdïet | "Together Whatever" | single | but nothing Trump did while president was even remotely as appalling as the fact that he could get elected. |
| 2022-04-08 | 63 | Kreator | "Strongest Of The Strong" | Strongest Of The Strong +1 | The Ukrainian army seems momentarily heroic, |
| 2022-04-08 | 64 | Rise to the Sky | "It's the End" | single | but having armies is how we get wars, |
| 2022-04-08 | 65 | Mroh | "Wounded Souls" | single | and wars are how armies convince us to tolerate |
| 2022-04-08 | 66 | Heidra | "Retribution's Dawn" | To Hell or Kingdom Come | nihilism among us by uniforming it. |
| 2022-04-08 | 67 | Aara | "Strepitus Mundi" | single | We can see the naked dishonesty of justifying the attacks on Ukraine as de-Nazification, |
| 2022-04-08 | 68 | Marrasmieli | "The Forest of My Soul" | Martaiden Mailta | and the pragmatic irony of Germany rearming to fight against disingenuous Nazi aversion, |
| 2022-04-08 | 69 | Dauþuz | "Bergschmied I: Mein Berg - Bergkgesænge" | Vom schwarzen Schmied: Bergkgesænge | but Putin is right, no matter how hypocritically, that Nazification is still entirely conceivable. |
| 2022-04-08 | 70 | Last Lightning | "Sett Meg Fri" | single | His invasion may as well be a performative exorcism with actual casualties, |
| 2022-04-08 | 71 | Kontinuum | "Hafið Logar" | single | but he is exploiting the real human weakness that we have not consigned Nazis to the mythical domain of demons, |
| 2022-04-08 | 72 | Cosmic Putrefaction | "Sol's Upheaval Debris" | single | and arguably haven't quite confined demons to a consensually unanimous mythicality, either. |
| 2022-04-08 | 115 | Franja Du Plessis | "Gee My ‘n Boerseun" | single | and before we understood that learning to put metal into the air |
| 2022-04-08 | 120 | Eva Under Fire | "Separate Ways" | Blow EP 3 | when we find that our ways are complicated but the same. |
| 2022-04-01 | 14 | Nevaria | "Battle Cry" | single | I mean, it helps, in that it increases my motivation to remember, |
| 2022-04-01 | 15 | Dreamtale | "Last Goodbyes" | Everlasting Flame | but realistically, I long ago gave up on name-memorization as an exploration constraint. |
| 2022-04-01 | 16 | Windrunner | "Cyan" | TAN | I don't have to look up "Dreamtale" or "Windrunner" to remember what words the symbols spell, |
| 2022-04-01 | 17 | Venus 5 | "Because of You" | single | but do I remember, offhand, where either of those two bands are from or how many times I have wondered this in the past? |
| 2022-04-01 | 18 | Synlakross | "Death / Hate" | Ideas Are Bulletproof 3 | No, the answer is no. Dreamtale is a power-metal band from Tampere, Finland, and Everlasting Flame is their 8th album, |
| 2022-04-01 | 19 | Memoremains | "Paralyze" | single | which took me two different searches to figure out, because for some reason their sixth album (but only that one) isn't available to stream in the US. |
| 2022-04-01 | 20 | Halflives | "Dynamite" | single | Windrunner is a progressive metalcore band from Vietnam, and TAN is their second album, |
| 2022-04-01 | 21 | September Mourning | "Mausoleum" | single | which took me three different searches to figure out, because Encyclopedia Metallum, my usual second search for metal info, |
| 2022-04-01 | 22 | Dianthus | "Realms - Radio Edit" | single | maintains an adorably dedicated aversion to anything anybody has ever referred to as metalcore, |
| 2022-04-01 | 23 | April Art | "Sky Is The Limit" | single | no matter how little like Sevendust or Spineshank they sound. |
| 2022-04-01 | 24 | Volturian | "Harley" | single | When I dislike metalcore, which I do frequently enough to mostly support EM's anti-metalcore rigidity, |
| 2022-04-01 | 25 | STELL/\RIS | "Scars" | single | it's usually due to some combination of brutish exaggerated masculinity and gooey groove-metal indiscipline. |
| 2022-04-01 | 28 | LionSoul | "Amber Of Illusion" | single | But now we're thirty songs in, and I'm still reconstructing what I know about 4 artists, |
| 2022-04-01 | 29 | 4Order | "Silence" | single | one of whom isn't even involved in this. |
| 2022-04-01 | 30 | Battlelore | "Firekeeper" | single | That's one way to listen. |
| 2022-04-01 | 31 | Trick or Treat | "Have a Nice Judgment Day" | Creepy Symphonies | It's the way I grew up listening, |
| 2022-04-01 | 32 | Lords of the Trident | "The Blade" | The Offering | and the way I half-implicitly learned that one should listen, |
| 2022-04-01 | 33 | Pure Reason Revolution | "Phantoms" | single | the serious way: |
| 2022-04-01 | 34 | Satan | "Earth We Bequeath" | Earth Infernal | one meticulously scrutinized album at a time, |
| 2022-04-01 | 35 | Dark The Suns | "Kun Aallot Kallioihin Murtuu" | single | each artist ruthlessly contextualized, |
| 2022-04-01 | 36 | Kampfar | "Urkraft" | Urkraft +1 | each step patiently and deliberately taken. |
| 2022-04-01 | 37 | Tombs | "Ex Oblivion" | single | This is a listening practice for a small world |
| 2022-04-01 | 38 | Watain | "We remain" | We remain +2 | you don't plan to see much of, |
| 2022-04-01 | 39 | Batushka | "MARIA (POSLEDNEJE PISMO)" | MARIA | for a canonicalist's statuary and the careful avoidance of surprise. |
| 2022-04-01 | 40 | Extravaganza | "Barocco" | single | It is a depth-first exploratory methodology, |
| 2022-04-01 | 41 | Manntra | "Nightmare" | single | with the accompanying assumption that the most interesting treasures |
| 2022-04-01 | 44 | Frayle | "Skin & Sorrow" | single | Or, more likely, it might be true that you can dig anywhere and find something treasurable at any specified depth. |
| 2022-04-01 | 45 | Andromida | "WRATH OF THE VANGUARD" | Wrath of the Vanguard | I believe that, but no more surely than I believe that you can also find treasurable things scattered on the ground, |
| 2022-04-01 | 46 | Sorbus | "Gokiburi" | single | or hanging from trees, |
| 2022-04-01 | 47 | Disconnected | "Your Way To Kill" | We Are Disconnected | or beckoning to you from the sky. |
| 2022-04-01 | 81 | Minniva | "Fear of the Dark" | single | you're alone. |
| 2022-03-25 | 7 | Deathspell Omega | "Eadem, sed aliter" | The Long Defeat | some kind of molecular beam, let's say, that left the occupants of the former tank |
| 2022-03-25 | 8 | Septicflesh | "Neuromancer" | Neuromancer +1 | sitting in a pool of undignified but nontoxic goo on the ground. |
| 2022-03-25 | 9 | Hyrgal | "Fureur funeste" | single | An anti-tank missile is not quite the same, |
| 2022-03-25 | 10 | Gorod | "Victory" | single | since it can be fired at nontanks, |
| 2022-03-25 | 11 | Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard | "Logic Bomb" | The Harvest | and even when fired at tanks |
| 2022-03-25 | 12 | Mares of Thrace | "The Thread That Will Unravel You" | The Exile | tends to kill the people inside of them, |
| 2022-03-25 | 17 | Deathspell Omega | "Sie sind gerichtet!" | The Long Defeat | is trying to stop a war, not wage it. |
| 2022-03-25 | 18 | Sebastien | "Je to v nás" | single | Moral armament aspires to defense, |
| 2022-03-25 | 19 | Edenbridge | "Somewhere Else But Here" | single | and all defenses aspire to the historical standard |
| 2022-03-25 | 20 | Floor Jansen | "Fire" | single | of a moat filled with clean water and regal koi. |
| 2022-03-25 | 21 | Winter In Eden | "Never Let Go" | Social Fake | Moats aspire to landscaping. |
| 2022-03-25 | 22 | Neperia | "Like A Broken Toy" | single | Drawbridges aspire to their lifting mechanisms rusting into superfluity. |
| 2022-03-25 | 23 | Confidential | "Release My Symphony" | Devil Inside | I don't know what koi aspire to. |
| 2022-03-25 | 24 | Semblant | "Enrage" | single | I aspire to days spent thinking "I wonder what koi want", |
| 2022-03-25 | 25 | Krashkarma | "Blind Faith" | single | not "How do you undo a war?" |
| 2022-03-25 | 26 | April Weeps | "Fundamental Ingressions" | single | or "How do you end a pandemic?" |
| 2022-03-25 | 27 | Graveshadow | "Soldier of 34" | single | or "How do you convince people to stop fearing each other |
| 2022-03-25 | 28 | Poison Garden | "Tin Man" | single | so much that they can't even be united by shared existential threats?" |
| 2022-03-25 | 29 | Evergrey | "Midwinter Calls" | Midwinter Calls +1 | I aspire to days that begin with a run in non-freezing rain |
| 2022-03-25 | 30 | Nite | "Last Scorpion" | Voices of the Kronian Moon | and never seriously threaten to get any worse than that, |
| 2022-03-25 | 31 | Crematory | "Inglorious Darkness" | single | to songs that remind me of good past days |
| 2022-03-25 | 32 | Powerwolf | "Sainted by the Storm" | Sainted by the Storm +2 | that these new ones are better than, |
| 2022-03-25 | 33 | Trick or Treat | "Escape from Reality" | single | to florid triumphs over nothing |
| 2022-03-25 | 34 | Lords of the Trident | "Carry the Weight" | single | instead of grim resistance against pointless offense, |
| 2022-03-25 | 38 | Runa Llena | "Nunca Apagarán Tu Luz" | single | but cultivates it, |
| 2022-03-25 | 39 | Vacío | "Poses" | single | nurtures it, |
| 2022-03-25 | 40 | Drakwald | "Devouring the Living Sun" | single | allows for the grandiloquent disregard of cynical inertia. |
| 2022-03-25 | 41 | Thanateros | "Burn" | On Fragile Wings | I want to talk about double kick-drum pedals, |
| 2022-03-25 | 42 | Bucium | "Zimbrul Alb" | single | not the wives of "originalist" Justices campaigning for government overthrow |
| 2022-03-25 | 43 | Celtibeerian | "Rise" | single | while their husbands ask no questions because they seek no new knowledge. |
| 2022-03-25 | 107 | Shameless | "Hiding From Love" | single | And they turn back to look at us again, because fear seeks misery against which to justify itself. And we're smiling. But we're smiling. And they look down, because the smile is terrifyingly unterrified, and it makes them want to hide from it in a tank. And that's when they notice that they're standing in goo. |
| 2022-03-18 | 3 | Blut Aus Nord | "That Cannot Be Dreamed" | single | Yes to the sound of the universe bending sinuously under pressure |
| 2022-03-18 | 4 | Mroh | "Truth" | single | and us dancing on its surfaces as if it moves at our whim. |
| 2022-03-18 | 5 | Agathodaimon | "La Haine" | The Seven | We can't prove that it doesn't, |
| 2022-03-18 | 6 | Night Crowned | "Born of the Flickering" | Rebirth of the Old 4 | which is the worst possible reason to believe anything. |
| 2022-03-18 | 7 | Aara | "Das Dunkel der Welt" | single | We are made of darkness, |
| 2022-03-18 | 8 | Rise to the Sky | "Every Day, A Funeral" | single | molded into brief forms |
| 2022-03-18 | 10 | Vansind | "Håbet Er Sort" | single | Yes to old legends as gifts to new lexicons |
| 2022-03-18 | 11 | Darkher | "Love's Sudden Death - Single Version" | single | and wisdom wrung from loss. |
| 2022-03-18 | 12 | Annicke Shireen | "Insatiable" | Demonette 3 | Yes to confessions that defy schematization |
| 2022-03-18 | 13 | Moonlight Haze | "The Nothing" | Animus | and covenants that define their fond fields. |
| 2022-03-18 | 14 | Metalite | "Full Moon" | single | Yes to viridian tendrils |
| 2022-03-18 | 15 | Battle Beast | "The Lightbringer" | single | reaching between glittering nightskies and fragments of dawn. |
| 2022-03-18 | 16 | Brothers of Metal | "The Other Son of Odin" | single | The heavy crown of awesomeness |
| 2022-03-18 | 17 | SheWolf | "The One You Feed" | Shewolf | has rolled into a dusty space we cannot retrieve it from |
| 2022-03-18 | 18 | Without Warning | "Insanity" | single | without moving the throne |
| 2022-03-18 | 19 | Imperial Age | "The Way is The Aim" | single | temporarily aside. |
| 2022-03-18 | 20 | Anchor Thought | "In The Earth" | single | We are precluded from some necessary practical steps |
| 2022-03-18 | 21 | Dreamtale | "The Glory" | single | by the reasonable suspicion that unearned dignity set even momentarily aside |
| 2022-03-18 | 22 | Moonlight Haze | "Midnight Haze" | Animus | cannot merely be reclaimed. |
| 2022-03-18 | 23 | Sündenrausch | "Red Sun" | Original Sin | Real-word jeopardy, unlike the symbolic unrepeatable versions, |
| 2022-03-18 | 24 | Manigance | "Sang froid" | Le bal des ombres | resets majestically overnight. |
| 2022-03-18 | 25 | Dynazty | "Yours" | single | The morning gives you back the possibility of losing the lost again, |
| 2022-03-18 | 26 | Shining Black | "Time Heals, They Say" | Postcards from the End of the World | with or without the formality of restoration. |
| 2022-03-18 | 27 | Blind Guardian | "Secrets Of The American Gods - Single Edit" | single | We choose obscure sigils |
| 2022-03-18 | 28 | ARLEQUIN | "Libra" | single | as if they will escape the notice of fate, |
| 2022-03-18 | 29 | CROSS VEIN | "Silver lining" | single | but fate is not a lookout archer |
| 2022-03-18 | 97 | Vega | "Animal - Bonus Track" | Anarchy and Unity | it's that they're glorious even when they're stupid, especially when they're consciously and unselfconsciously stupid, |
| 2022-03-11 | 1 | Ghost | "Spillways" | IMPERA | My life with heavy metal began with Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath. |
| 2022-03-11 | 2 | Satan | "From Second Sight" | single | The two bands toured North America together in 1981, but I was just a little too young for that, |
| 2022-03-11 | 3 | Visions of Atlantis | "Legion of the Seas" | single | and so didn't see BÖC until 1984 (my first concert, in fact), and not Sabbath until 1992. |
| 2022-03-11 | 4 | Threads of Fate | "Moonrise" | The Cold Embrace Of The Light | They continue to exist together in my sentimental mind, but realistically, where Black Sabbath was definitively formational for pretty much all early aspects of metal, |
| 2022-03-11 | 5 | Symphonity | "Marco Polo, Pt. 3: The Plague" | single | BÖC was mostly just a pretty good hard-rock band with a cheerfully coy fondness for the quasi-occult. |
| 2022-03-11 | 6 | Ikirouta | "Aika" | single | There is little identifiable metal, in a retroactive historical sense, in early BÖC records, |
| 2022-03-11 | 7 | Schandmaul | "Knüppel aus dem Sack" | single | in much the same way that it is now hard to explain on strictly musical grounds how The Stranglers were considered a punk band, |
| 2022-03-11 | 8 | Medjay | "Warrior People" | Cleopatra VII | or the Stray Cats part of New Wave. |
| 2022-03-11 | 9 | Mares of Thrace | "In All Her Glory" | single | But emotional voids are often filled by art, and so now we have the Swedish band Ghost, |
| 2022-03-11 | 10 | IATT | "Elixir of Immortality" | single | who are basically the more-metal Blue Öyster Cult I feel like I remember, |
| 2022-03-11 | 11 | Seas on the Moon | "Bad Omens" | single | a giddy Roxette to BÖC's ABBA. |
| 2022-03-11 | 12 | The Big Deal | "Sensational" | single | They are hard to take seriously, but easy to take gloriously, |
| 2022-03-11 | 13 | Snow White Blood | "Emperor's New Clothes" | single | which is arguably the essence of most good music, |
| 2022-03-11 | 14 | Magica | "How can I live without you" | single | or indeed most good humanity. |
| 2022-03-11 | 15 | Belle Morte | "Fallen Idol" | Fallen Idol +1 | Evil, conversely, is our word for things that impose unglorious seriousness |
| 2022-03-11 | 16 | Thy Shade | "Turn the Tide" | single | on the helpless: |
| 2022-03-11 | 49 | E-L-R | "Three Winds" | Vexier | but you only do this if you don't love your own battalions, either, |
| 2022-03-11 | 50 | Haunted Shores | "When In Oslo" | Void | and you are thus sending them from an unloving place to a loving one, |
| 2022-03-11 | 52 | Zero Hour | "Technocracy" | single | into a fear that exists only as long as they sustain it themselves. |
| 2022-03-11 | 53 | Cosmophobe | "Desolate" | single | But only the most broken will follow these orders |
| 2022-03-11 | 54 | Third Realm | "Fuck Your Warship" | single | against the overwhelming evidence of their own witness. |
| 2022-03-11 | 66 | Violet Orlandi | "(Don’t Fear) The Reaper" | single | You sent tanks after your own loss, and the only possible result is more loss. You opened a door and the wind appears, |
| 2022-03-11 | 67 | Ghost | "Kaisarion" | IMPERA | and sells you a glorious tongue of adulation that licks to no serious avail. |
| 2022-03-04 | 1 | Violet Orlandi | "Wonderwall" | single | I hate a lot of songs, |
| 2022-03-04 | 2 | Charlotte Wessels | "May It Be" | May It Be +1 | no matter what contrary impression of my positivity you might have garnered |
| 2022-03-04 | 3 | Moonlight Haze | "Never Say Never" | single | from the fact that I usually write about (for some loose sense of "about") songs I like. |
| 2022-03-04 | 4 | Eye of Melian | "Doorway of Night" | Doorway of Night +2 | Deep, enduring, identity-building hatred tends to only develop for popular songs, |
| 2022-03-04 | 5 | Divided Island | "Oxygen" | Oxygen +3 | because without morbid environmental repetition I would just forget them. |
| 2022-03-04 | 6 | Confidential | "Salvation" | single | I am a 54-year-old human who lives in a country bordering the North Atlantic, |
| 2022-03-04 | 7 | Trick or Treat | "Creepy Symphony" | single | and thus I am doomed to hear The Killers' "Mr. Brightside" and Oasis' "Wonderwall" without any explicit consent, |
| 2022-03-04 | 8 | Ghost | "Twenties" | Twenties +2 | frequently and with no apparent hope for respite. |
| 2022-03-04 | 9 | The Lightbringer of Sweden | "Strike Back" | single | I like "Mr. Brightside". Sometimes, when it wafts into my air, I hum along. |
| 2022-03-04 | 10 | Jani Liimatainen | "All Dreams Are Born to Die" | single | If I suddenly never heard it again, I suspect I might eventually choose to play it for myself. |
| 2022-03-04 | 11 | Manigance | "Huis clos" | single | This is not true of "Wonderwall". |
| 2022-03-04 | 12 | IKINÄ | "Tietäjät tietää" | single | If forgetting were a muscle, I would want to know if there were steroids that could give me super-human power |
| 2022-03-04 | 13 | Answer from Cygnus | "Les échos endolorants" | Cygnus | for the sole forgetting power of forgetting "Wonderwall". |
| 2022-03-04 | 14 | Voutsa | "Paperinuket" | single | I would flex it by forgetting every individual element of this miserable song: |
| 2022-03-04 | 15 | AINA | "Rauhanrikkoja" | single | The plodding rhythm, |
| 2022-03-04 | 16 | Where's My Bible | "Chapter II: Void" | single | the gracelessly uninventive vocal melodies, |
| 2022-03-04 | 17 | Septicflesh | "Hierophant" | single | Liam's terrible bleating delivery of the terrible melodies, |
| 2022-03-04 | 18 | Answer from Cygnus | "L'instant" | Cygnus | the dreary cliches he delivers with such terrible bleating, |
| 2022-03-04 | 19 | Lucifer's Child | "Nova Tenebris" | single | the unbearably smugly lazy playing of all the conventional rock instruments, |
| 2022-03-04 | 20 | Watain | "Serimosa" | Serimosa +1 | the sighing faux-dramatic strings like a cartoon of an orchestra |
| 2022-03-04 | 21 | Lord Belial | "On a Throne of Souls" | single | was shoddily silkscreened on the outside of a balloon that was then desultorily inflated |
| 2022-03-04 | 22 | Brundarkh | "The Dark Tree" | single | and almost sealed so that it deflates with a pathetic exhalatory whimper over the course of 4 interminable minutes. |
| 2022-03-04 | 23 | Abbath | "The Book of Breath" | single | If there is such a thing as an irredeemably dull rock song, |
| 2022-03-04 | 24 | Drudkh | "The Nocturnal One" | single | this must be surely be it. |
| 2022-03-04 | 25 | Unru | "Der Hauch einer Freiheit" | Die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten | If there is a song that represents eating a steak covered with cheap ketchup |
| 2022-03-04 | 27 | Answer from Cygnus | "Afflictions" | Cygnus | If there is a song that over-simplistically represents Rock Songs like a square with a triangle on top of it |
| 2022-03-04 | 28 | Sylvaine | "I Close My Eyes so I Can See" | Nova | filled with asbestos and bedbugs represents Houses, this is it. |
| 2022-03-04 | 31 | Annicke Shireen | "Prey" | single | Meanwhile, Violet Orlandi makes metal covers of, usually, non-metal songs. |
| 2022-02-25 | 34 | Emetropia | "Fall's First Storm" | Equinox | The border wars, when they come, |
| 2022-02-25 | 35 | Dark Princess | "Falling to Fly" | single | magnify and clarify errors |
| 2022-02-25 | 36 | Magica | "Daca vrei" | single | that we already drew on the ground, |
| 2022-02-25 | 37 | Oknos | "Rotten to the Core" | single | mistakes that we already assigned misleading names |
| 2022-02-25 | 38 | SheWolf | "Home" | single | under waving flags. |
| 2022-02-25 | 39 | Sicksense | "Kings Today" | single | Today we mistake ourselves for untouchable kings, |
| 2022-02-25 | 40 | Apolinara | "Wonderful" | Shadows and Signs | and are correct about grandeur |
| 2022-02-25 | 41 | Aevum | "7" | single | but wrong to think it in limited supply. |
| 2022-02-25 | 42 | Carmilla | "Kings of Religion" | single | We are our own gods. |
| 2022-02-25 | 43 | Icarus Lives | "Secret Keeper" | single | This is the world we have earned, |
| 2022-02-25 | 44 | Giant Walker | "Left To Wreck" | single | and now must maintain. |
| 2022-02-25 | 45 | Oceans of Slumber | "The Waters Rising" | single | The mountains shrug at the changes in sea levels. |
| 2022-02-25 | 46 | Emetropia | "His Final Endeavor" | Equinox | There is only one rock here. |
| 2022-02-25 | 47 | Evergrey | "Save Us" | single | Its number does not vary. |
| 2022-02-25 | 48 | Chronosfear | "Under This Bleeding Sky" | The Astral Gates, Pt.1: A Secret Revealed | Ours do. |
| 2022-02-25 | 49 | Shining Black | "A Hundred Thousand Shades of Black" | single | Today we lose friends to ignorant hatred, |
| 2022-02-25 | 50 | Assignment | "Shadow of a Doubt" | single | to superfluous and involuntary glory, |
| 2022-02-25 | 51 | Wings of Destiny | "Rise Above Them All" | single | to the cynical conflation of inertia and justice. |
| 2022-02-25 | 52 | Allegaeon | "Only Loss" | DAMNUM | Suck the significance out of metaphors |
| 2022-02-25 | 53 | Nordjevel | "Within the Eyes" | single | until only a husk of meaninglessness remains, |
| 2022-02-25 | 54 | Hebosagil | "Mitä jos" | Yössä | lined with the toothmarks of wolves |
| 2022-02-25 | 55 | Svrm | "Червів майбутня здобич" | Червів майбутня здобич +3 | and surrounded by a circle of their teeth |
| 2022-02-25 | 56 | Walg | "Misgeboorte" | II | and then, outside of that, |
| 2022-02-25 | 57 | Lichtblick | "I Feel Nothing" | Abkehr | a circle of their bodies, |
| 2022-02-25 | 58 | Falls of Rauros | "Poverty Hymn" | single | positioned as if to dance. |
| 2022-02-25 | 59 | Felperc | "grief (part2)" | 2021 | This is the choreography of war: |
| 2022-02-25 | 60 | Déhà | "The Devil's Science" | single | instructions for the paths to your death |
| 2022-02-25 | 61 | Shape Of Despair | "Return to the Void" | Return to the Void | given as if they are heroically reversible, |
| 2022-02-25 | 62 | Allegaeon | "To Carry My Grief Through Torpor and Silence" | DAMNUM | as if, when you reach your objective, |
| 2022-02-25 | 63 | Kuggur | "إِحْتِفَاَلْ بِإلَهِ ألْشّمْسِ فِي سَهْلِ أَلْبِقَاَعْ (single edit)" | single | you will call home to say that now, victorious, you will return. |
| 2022-02-25 | 64 | Mercenary | "Where Darkened Souls Belong" | single | This is the inverted pyramid-scheme of the abyss. |
| 2022-02-25 | 65 | Earthists. | "Yours" | single | Chaos songs are love songs |
| 2022-02-18 | 18 | The Neptune Power Federation | "Weeping on the Morn" | Le Demon de L'amour | but that isn't the nation under current command. |
| 2022-02-18 | 19 | Glasya | "Way to Victory" | Attarghan | We say that power corrupts, |
| 2022-02-18 | 20 | Crusade Of Bards | "Vento Aureo" | Tales Of The Seven Seas | but this is dangerously misleading, because it implies that power tends to corrupt, |
| 2022-02-18 | 21 | The Great Discord | "No Light" | Deam Morte | and thus that this tendency can be resisted, |
| 2022-02-18 | 22 | Walk in Darkness | "Walk Close to Me" | single | and admits exceptions. |
| 2022-02-18 | 23 | Synlakross | "Last [Tour] Requiem" | single | But the unequal distribution of power isn't a risk factor for corruption, |
| 2022-02-18 | 24 | Empire of Giants | "Heat" | Heat +1 | it's the manifestation and result of it. |
| 2022-02-18 | 25 | Semblant | "Purified" | single | I trust Joe Biden a little more than I trusted Donald Trump, |
| 2022-02-18 | 26 | Memoira | "Phantom Insomnium" | single | but once you're collectively forced to "trust" an individual guy or two, |
| 2022-02-18 | 27 | South Haven | "Delirious" | single | you're fucked. |
| 2022-02-18 | 28 | Glasya | "A New Era Has Come" | Attarghan | Same for nine guys on the Supreme Court, whether one of them is a Black woman or not. |
| 2022-02-18 | 43 | Veonity | "Beyond the Realm of Reality" | Elements of Power | but as should be obvious beyond the realm of imaginary debate, |
| 2022-02-18 | 44 | Boguslaw Balcerak's Crylord | "It's just a wind" | Human Heredity | it can't be accomplished with tanks. |
| 2022-02-18 | 45 | Opera Magna | "In Nomine" | single | It's true in a practical sense that the current abject absues in Ukraine |
| 2022-02-18 | 46 | Medjay | "Return of the Medjay" | single | are partly the result of merely containing the same unresolved conceptual errors in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, |
| 2022-02-18 | 48 | The Neptune Power Federation | "Stay with Thee" | Le Demon de L'amour | and mostly true about pretty much everywhere else that pretends at uncontentious existence, too. |
| 2022-02-18 | 55 | Nite | "Edge of the Night" | single | Get out. Stand back. |
| 2022-02-18 | 56 | Kampfar | "Lausdans Under Stjernene" | single | Maybe farther; it may spark a little as it melts. |
| 2022-02-18 | 57 | Immolation | "The Age Of No Light" | Acts Of God | The next age will be an age of shared and abundant light, |
| 2022-02-18 | 58 | Foscor | "Traces Mòrbides" | single | in which we are all entitled to die in only our own self-contained ways, |
| 2022-02-18 | 59 | Bâ'a | "Urbi et Orbi Clamant" | single | and also to live at no other soul's expense. |
| 2022-02-18 | 60 | Faun | "Neun Welten" | single | Good historians make bad autocrats, but excellent bureaucrats, |
| 2022-02-18 | 61 | Glasya | "Battle for Trust" | Attarghan | and good bureaucrats are formal stewards of order. |
| 2022-02-18 | 76 | Animals As Leaders | "Gordian Naught" | Gordian Naught +2 | they move you. |
| 2022-02-18 | 77 | Andromida | "You See Big Girl / T:T" | single | The melting tanks will make rivers of metal, |
| 2022-02-18 | 78 | Acadence | "Internal Exile" | single | racing towards forgiving shores. |
| 2022-02-18 | 79 | Gregorio Franco | "Born to Expire" | Lamentations | Ukraine and Belarus and Russia are names we have stipulated |
| 2022-02-18 | 82 | Lauren Babic | "Bad Romance" | single | or the nihilistic desire for revenge. |
| 2022-02-18 | 85 | Violet Orlandi | "How You Remind Me" | single | All of these songs are just trying to remind us of who we can be, one day, |
| 2022-02-18 | 86 | K Enagonio | "Light Switch - Metal Version" | single | who we can stop being at any moment, |
| 2022-02-18 | 87 | Dialith | "Hair" | single | and how eagerly those days and moments await us. |
| 2022-02-11 | 1 | The Neptune Power Federation | "We Beasts of the Night" | single | When the moment comes, will you be ready to become magnificent? |
| 2022-02-11 | 2 | Cult Of Luna | "The Silver Arc" | The Long Road North | What if it's now? |
| 2022-02-11 | 3 | Mares of Thrace | "Mortal Quarry" | single | It is, of course. It's always now. |
| 2022-02-11 | 4 | Medjay | "Magic Of Isis" | single | This is what every song has been trying to tell you. |
| 2022-02-11 | 5 | Sylvaine | "Nova" | single | This moment, when you are not yet dead and we are not all yet silent, |
| 2022-02-11 | 6 | The Gathering | "We Rise - Single Edit" | single | is broken and restless and terrified and lost, |
| 2022-02-11 | 7 | Shield Of Wings | "The Scarred Clay Reshaping" | Unfinished | and yet transcendent. |
| 2022-02-11 | 8 | Onyria | "Living The Lie" | single | The volition to sing |
| 2022-02-11 | 27 | Saltatio Mortis | "The Dragonborn Comes" | single | singing a song to yourself about your waiting kingdoms on terrifyingly dry land. |
| 2022-02-11 | 29 | Amorphis | "Halo" | Halo | We do not travel to reach an elusive peace, |
| 2022-02-11 | 30 | Vanum | "Adversary" | single | we move to weave our destinies into a fabric |
| 2022-02-11 | 60 | Violet Orlandi | "I Will Follow You into the Dark" | single | the hint of a spark. |
| 2022-02-11 | 66 | The Iron Cross | "Rainbow In The Dark" | single | When the moment comes, what will you do with your magnificence |
| 2022-02-11 | 67 | Violet Orlandi | "Hallelujah" | single | as it lifts you up? |
| 2022-02-04 | 1 | Nevaria | "Reckless" | single | What if we believe that nations move from oligarchy towards democracy? |
| 2022-02-04 | 2 | Moonlight Haze | "It's Insane" | single | Some days I think they are propelled in this direction by irrepressible human decency, |
| 2022-02-04 | 3 | Magica | "A New Redemption" | single | some days I wonder if they're dragged in it against all cynical traction by pure stubbornness, |
| 2022-02-04 | 4 | Shaylon | "The House in the Sky" | The Initiation of a Timeless Voyager | some days I fear that the heart and skin have faith but the other organs would just as soon choose dismemberment. |
| 2022-02-04 | 5 | Memoremains | "Back Off" | single | More likely, I guess, is that the damp volumes of subjugation are only readable at the lowest levels of comprehension, |
| 2022-02-04 | 6 | Windrunner | "Lavender" | single | and thus the more people know, the less you can convince them to suffer. |
| 2022-02-04 | 7 | Mortemia | "Here Comes Winter" | single | You can't fix everything with math, |
| 2022-02-04 | 8 | Averlanche | "Diamantene Höhen" | single | but nor can you invent more-malleable numbers with disingenuity. |
| 2022-02-04 | 9 | Shield Of Wings | "Crushing Hail" | single | Our power, therefore, however it temporarily pools, |
| 2022-02-04 | 10 | Girugamesh | "engrave" | single | eventually flows towards an equilibrium of equality. |
| 2022-02-04 | 11 | ARLEQUIN | "MONSTER" | single | Sentience is the tendency to seek mutuality over entropy, |
| 2022-02-04 | 12 | MAD JAMIE | "JAMIE's FLAG" | JAMIE's FLAG +2 | or in the darker ages, at least the ability to recognize mutuality in admittedly self-negating and limited forms. |
| 2022-02-04 | 13 | Avilis | "Adabana" | Adabana +3 | Life is a resistance against decay, whether instinctive or willful. |
| 2022-02-04 | 14 | Symphony Of Sweden | "Champions" | Saints Of Yesterday | We are the improvable creatures. |
| 2022-02-04 | 15 | Spirits Of Fire | "Embrace the Unknown" | single | What if we believe this? |
| 2022-02-04 | 16 | Withering Season | "Out of Darkness" | single | Of course it implies globalism, |
| 2022-02-04 | 17 | Saxon | "Age of Steam" | Carpe Diem | but then probably the arcs of the earth are the courses I mean by "of course". |
| 2022-02-04 | 18 | Kreator | "Hate Über Alles" | single | Any other geometry is terminal, |
| 2022-02-04 | 19 | Induction | "Sacrifice" | single | usable only for diversion and death maps. |
| 2022-02-04 | 20 | Persefone | "Architecture of the I" | metanoia | Globalism celebrates nations in their multifarity |
| 2022-02-04 | 21 | Conception | "Monument in Time" | single | or tolerates them within careful constraints, |
| 2022-02-04 | 22 | Glasya | "Journey to Akhbar" | single | not out of antagonism towards culture, |
| 2022-02-04 | 23 | Violet Cold | "Immersive Collapse" | Səni Uzaq Kainatlarda Axtarıram | but because have learned through long and abject history |
| 2022-02-04 | 24 | Krvvla | "XII" | X | that "culture" is richest when it arises from energy exceeding survival, |
| 2022-02-04 | 25 | Månegarm | "Ulvhjärtat" | single | and poorest when it attempts to mischaracterize the artless hoarding of wealth as interior decoration. |
| 2022-02-04 | 83 | Money Hammer | "Two Considerations About Dividends: A Response to Passive Income Advocates" | single | and not-composed of the same humans. There's only us. |
| 2022-02-04 | 85 | FalKKonE | "Itsumo Nando Demo - Always With Me (From "Spirited Away")" | single | We move between worlds that we create, that we write with our songs and SQL queries and refusals and insistences. |
| 2022-01-28 | 4 | Eramaa | "Scion" | Pohjan Nainen | I do not choose songs in order to produce a pre-chosen effect on myself, |
| 2022-01-28 | 5 | Dawn Of Solace | "Erase" | Flames of Perdition | and in some sense "choose" is not even the right word. |
| 2022-01-28 | 6 | The Neptune Power Federation | "Emmaline" | single | I walk into the current. |
| 2022-01-28 | 7 | Diablo | "The Stranger" | single | Later, I climb out and see what I have become. |
| 2022-01-28 | 8 | Marius Danielsen | "Twilight of the Thunder God" | single | The particular river is a construct, of course, |
| 2022-01-28 | 9 | Murder in Greenvale | "Start Again" | single | fed by an Escherian and gleefully solipsistic topology of runoffs. |
| 2022-01-28 | 12 | Future Palace | "A World in Tears" | A World in Tears +2 | but you notice first what you are prepared to feel. |
| 2022-01-28 | 13 | The Great Discord | "Avarice" | single | This week I feel buffeted by chaos engines, |
| 2022-01-28 | 14 | Anchor Thought | "Remember This" | single | and thus my semi-organized status-report non-coincidentally leads with chaos and related engines, |
| 2022-01-28 | 15 | Dianthus | "My First Breath" | Realms | but awareness of chaos is what self-awareness inherently becomes as it expands outside your own event-horizon. |
| 2022-01-28 | 16 | Red Handed Denial | "Father Said" | single | Even the most ostensibly chaotic music is an order: |
| 2022-01-28 | 18 | Nekonomicon | "KING" | KING +1 | or fixed by our observation whether originally reduced or not. |
| 2022-01-28 | 40 | Knight Area | "The Dream" | single | Morality is the difference between seeking the unique utility of your power, |
| 2022-01-28 | 41 | Tungsten | "Come This Way" | single | as that power's end, |
| 2022-01-28 | 42 | Chronosfear | "The Astral Gates" | single | and trying to minimize exertion relative to reward. |
| 2022-01-28 | 43 | Nivh | "Sivy Zmrok" | Sivy Zmrok +1 | A company makes this choice when they encounter the possibility to optimize an internal loss-function or a financial metric instead of a social goal |
| 2022-01-28 | 44 | Déhà | "I Am The Dead" | single | and steer instead of navigating. |
| 2022-01-28 | 45 | Sanatana | "Bhishma" | VAIRAGYA | A project discovers its own limitations, and has to avoid becoming the meticulous repository of them. |
| 2022-01-28 | 46 | CELESTE | "Nonchalantes de beauté" | Assassine(s) | A song resounds. |
| 2022-01-28 | 47 | Shape Of Despair | "Forfeit" | single | It's not that any of these mortal dangers do not apply to creativity, |
| 2022-01-28 | 48 | Nebula Orionis | "Ephemeral" | Ephemeral | it's that they are already inside of us, |
| 2022-01-28 | 49 | Harpyie | "Die Geister die ich rief" | Blutbann | and still we sing. |
| 2022-01-28 | 50 | Versengold | "Sternensee" | Was kost die Welt | The song does not, on the way up our throats, |
| 2022-01-28 | 51 | Bjarla | "Kulning Ett" | Kulning 5 | write an obfuscatory mission statement |
| 2022-01-28 | 52 | Einvigi | "Meren otteessa" | single | designed to justify the disassembly of the temples that were here when we arrived, |
| 2022-01-28 | 125 | Vandroya | "The Rover" | single | and I haven't forgotten why, |
| 2022-01-21 | 1 | Nocturna | "New Evil" | Daughters of the Night | I grew up as an atheist in a town of churches, and started paying attention to grown-up issues just in time to see Carter lose to Reagan, |
| 2022-01-21 | 2 | Battle Beast | "Wings of Light" | Circus of Doom | so I guess I have always basically assumed that hard questions will have popular wrong answers. |
| 2022-01-21 | 3 | Eye of Melian | "Vita Nova" | Vita Nova +1 | Encouraging people to not get vaccinated prolongs a global pandemic and thus literally kills people, |
| 2022-01-21 | 4 | Emetropia | "The First Leaf Falls" | single | but only if those people were actually swayed from making a better decision. |
| 2022-01-21 | 5 | Beriedir | "At Candle Light" | AQVA | Joe Rogan is a dolt, but his popularity is a function of popular doltishness, not the cause of it. |
| 2022-01-21 | 6 | Faun | "Baldur" | single | He speaks a language of doltishness that his listeners understand, |
| 2022-01-21 | 7 | Ephyra | "Leave My Place" | single | and seek, |
| 2022-01-21 | 8 | Kandia | "Murderers" | Quaternary | but he is not its academy or its neologist. |
| 2022-01-21 | 9 | Fallcie | "My Last Desire" | single | The smug "do your own research" sociopathy on which he capitalizes is a product of flawed education |
| 2022-01-21 | 10 | ODC | "De la Place pour Deux" | single | exacerbated by culture-war politics, |
| 2022-01-21 | 11 | Blame Me! | "Fears Don't Matter" | single | but it's bad in a way that almost everything that came before it was worse. |
| 2022-01-21 | 12 | Nocturna | "Darkest Days" | Daughters of the Night | "Do your own research" usually misunderstands research, |
| 2022-01-21 | 13 | EXiNA | "ENDiNG MiRAGE" | single | but at least acknowledges it as an idea. |
| 2022-01-21 | 14 | Rie a.k.a. Suzaku | "Ice World" | World Journey 2 | We are the creatures, remember, who branded Galileo a heretic for looking through a telescope and taking thoughtful notes, |
| 2022-01-21 | 52 | yung axstn | "Heaven Meets Hell" | single | That's not really the question. |
| 2022-01-21 | 53 | Ghost | "Call Me Little Sunshine" | Call Me Little Sunshine +1 | Joe Rogan amplifies misjudgment by reiterating a systemic solipsistic myopia: |
| 2022-01-21 | 54 | Kissin' Dynamite | "Only the Dead" | Not the End of the Road | the world is small, |
| 2022-01-21 | 55 | Power Quest | "Now Is the Time" | single | and made for people like you, |
| 2022-01-21 | 56 | The Ferrymen | "Shut It Out" | One More River to Cross | and other people are a nebulous and inconsequential corona formed around it by their own jealous timidity. |
| 2022-01-21 | 57 | GIANT | "Don't Say a Word" | Shifting Time | This has been the premise of every kind of exceptionalism ever, |
| 2022-01-21 | 58 | Edge Of Forever | "The Other Side of Pain" | Seminole | and exceptionalism in turn is the root of every evil, |
| 2022-01-21 | 59 | Shining Black | "Postcard from the End of the World" | single | or maybe even its ultimate secular definition. |
| 2022-01-21 | 60 | The Halo Effect | "Feel What I Believe" | single | The forces that oppose it are curious, |
| 2022-01-21 | 61 | Allegaeon | "Of Beasts and Worms" | single | and global. |
| 2022-01-21 | 62 | Immolation | "The Age Of No Light" | The Age Of No Light +1 | I'd rather people were listening to Joe Rogan than watching Tucker Carlson, |
| 2022-01-21 | 63 | Hanging Garden | "On the Shore of Eternity" | Neither Moth nor Rust | which is kind of like saying I'd rather be hit by a leased hypercar with a stupid engine than a tellingly spotless pickup with stupid suspension. |
| 2022-01-21 | 64 | Morketsvind | "Advent of Dark Lord" | Age of Lord | I would rather they were reading a little bit of actually-reported news while listening to music, |
| 2022-01-21 | 101 | Nocturna | "The Trickster" | Daughters of the Night | You don't have to wait to see if Joe Rogan asks questions about Inuit throat singing or Italian power metal or Zulu drumming or whatever you find when you try to walk away from where you've been. |
| 2022-01-21 | 103 | UMC | "Genie In A Bottle (Metal Version)" | single | All these towns have churches, none of them designed to eject you upon a journey, |
| 2022-01-14 | 1 | Moonlight Haze | "We'll Be Free" | single | Ah, those giddy moments between when you discover a new band you've never heard that plays the music you hear in your heart, and when you discover they have two whole albums already and this is an advance single from the third, and when you realize that you love them so immediately because, in fact, you already loved both of those albums, and the previous single only a month ago. |
| 2022-01-14 | 2 | Nocturna | "Blood of Heaven" | single | I do not pretend to hold all this music, all these indexes of this music, in the active registers of my memory at once. |
| 2022-01-14 | 3 | Seas on the Moon | "Over You" | single | Ask me who I'm listening to now, but hold me away from my devices while I try to answer, and you'll get some weird arbitrary study of what bands I've mentioned in texts to the like-minded, |
| 2022-01-14 | 4 | Magica | "Endless" | single | or had to look up to make or disassemble some point about psychogeography |
| 2022-01-14 | 5 | Bleeding Zero | "Terra Nova" | Pain & Fiction | or apocalyptic lineage. |
| 2022-01-14 | 6 | Torn Between Two Worlds | "Transparent" | single | Did I already love Torn Between Two Worlds? Confidential? Despised Favicon? |
| 2022-01-14 | 7 | Confidential | "Black Angel" | single | I do not remember. |
| 2022-01-14 | 11 | MindaRyn | "Daylight" | single | a recounting of the insufficient ritually undertaken to stave off hunger or panic. |
| 2022-01-14 | 32 | Shiva | "Senkö" | single | The ravens nod, and fly off to report. |
| 2022-01-14 | 33 | Teramaze | "Ticket To The Next Apocalypse" | single | Five minutes into the meeting, Luna ghosts between the monitors |
| 2022-01-14 | 34 | Persefone | "Katabasis" | Katabasis +1 | and comes to sit just out of the camera's frame, |
| 2022-01-14 | 35 | Manigance | "Le bal des ombres" | single | whispering to me about the other imaginary rooms where me and these people have been, |
| 2022-01-14 | 36 | Amadeüs | "Hijos de Medea (BJ II)" | single | and about the impermanence of death and distance. |
| 2022-01-14 | 37 | Veonity | "Dive into the Light" | single | We didn't used to walk around with voracious cameras, |
| 2022-01-14 | 38 | Serious Black | "Out of the Ashes" | Out of the Ashes +3 | never mind ambivalent panopticons |
| 2022-01-14 | 43 | Autumn's Child | "Emergency" | Zenith | like I remember middle-school crushes: |
| 2022-01-14 | 44 | Lionville | "True Believer" | single | sheepishly, proudly, from a merciful remove. |
| 2022-01-14 | 45 | Spirits Of Fire | "Into the Mirror" | single | I remember the first time I heard "Holy Diver" or "Operation: Mindcrime", |
| 2022-01-14 | 46 | Crusade Of Bards | "Lies & Ashes" | single | Savatage or Thin White Rope, |
| 2022-01-14 | 48 | Heidra | "Dusk" | single | We do not live where we grew up, |
| 2022-01-14 | 49 | Harpyie | "Liebe auf den ersten Biss" | single | even if we do not move, |
| 2022-01-14 | 50 | E-An-Na | "Amprentă" | single | and whether it felt like claustrophobic paradise or gothic escape. |
| 2022-01-14 | 51 | Medjay | "Shemagh in Blood" | single | All of these cathartic anthems of extraction |
| 2022-01-14 | 52 | Blade of Surtr | "The Berserker" | single | are ways to feel like time is retreating from our resolve, |
| 2022-01-14 | 53 | Fake British Nihilist | "Label Me Insane" | single | instead of obviously the exact inverse. |
| 2022-01-14 | 54 | Wintaar | "You Require Me To Pray" | Deathentrance | Every song that tears off a little piece of my armor as it passes, |
| 2022-01-14 | 55 | Agathodaimon | "Ain't Death Grand" | single | and then pauses after slowing to turn at the other end of the pitch, |
| 2022-01-14 | 56 | Ereb Altor | "Rise of the Destroyer" | Vargtimman | waiting for the crowd to grow impatient for a wound, |
| 2022-01-14 | 57 | Spartan | "A Siren Song (Odysseus, Pt. 2)" | Of Kings and Gods | sings a quiet hymn of invitation under the bellowing chorus of intent. |
| 2022-01-14 | 58 | Awakening Sun | "No Time To Suffer" | single | The next ten seconds exist out of time. |
| 2022-01-14 | 59 | Wiegedood | "And in Old Salamano's Room, The Dog Whimpered Softly" | There's Always Blood At The End Of The Road | The next desperate minute; |
| 2022-01-14 | 60 | Karg | "Einen Traum weiter dort fangen wir das Licht" | single | the next unbearable, interminable, exquisite miniature hour; |
| 2022-01-14 | 61 | CELESTE | "Le cœur noir charbon" | Le cœur noir charbon +2 | the next rueful concussive implosion of the universe. |
| 2022-01-14 | 62 | Sylvaine | "Mono No Aware" | single | How do I explain to these people where they know me from? |
| 2022-01-14 | 65 | Wounds of Recollection | "A Constant Spiral" | single | I will tell the juries of the afterlife that I was eternal. |
| 2022-01-14 | 66 | Abbath | "Dream Cull" | single | I will tell myself that I am all of my dreams. |
| 2022-01-14 | 120 | SOM | "Center" | Center +2 | something that will the heart of the earth a story about the skin of it. |
| 2022-01-14 | 121 | Magnum | "The Day After the Night Before" | The Monster Roars | And then the world doesn't end, and you realize this isn't the end, it's just halfway. |
| 2022-01-14 | 126 | Against Myself | "The Phantom of the Opera" | single | That much of the mythology is descriptive, at least: You are sustained by your helpless, inevitably overcomplicatd belief in yourself. We are sustained together by our uncontainable, inexplicable, irreconcilable belief in ourselves. |
| 2022-01-14 | 127 | Skar | "Let It Go" | single | Whatever happens next, we could never have prevented or lived without. |
| 2022-01-07 | 4 | DiAmorte | "Where the Light Grows Cold" | single | just in your heart, |
| 2022-01-07 | 5 | Krayenzeit | "Kriegerin" | single | just by the way you incorporate them into yourself, |
| 2022-01-07 | 6 | Forgotten North | "Pull" | single | just to the extent you are willing to love them |
| 2022-01-07 | 7 | Hadadanza | "¡Que Empiece la Función!" | single | more than they think themselves worth. |
| 2022-01-07 | 8 | Battle Beast | "Where Angels Fear to Fly" | Where Angels Fear to Fly +2 | This is how we are sometimes able to make better things or better days |
| 2022-01-07 | 9 | Beneath The Silence | "In the Shadow of Your Eyes" | single | than the implications we have demonstrated. |
| 2022-01-07 | 10 | Windrunner | "Sardonyx" | single | We come from creatures that crawled ashore, |
| 2022-01-07 | 22 | Wilderun | "Distraction II" | Epigone | but not their bearer. |
| 2022-01-07 | 23 | A Pregnant Light | "Beast About" | Beast About +1 | Your fortune is not an accumulation of desperations, |
| 2022-01-07 | 24 | Riverwood | "Dying Light" | Shadows And Flames | inscribed on exotic blockchains |
| 2022-01-07 | 25 | Temple of Evil | "Apognosis" | Apolytrosis | in unconvincingly fake blood, |
| 2022-01-07 | 26 | TattvA | "Liberated - Prani" | single | and this is either the rationale or reason for your freedom. |
| 2022-01-07 | 27 | Succumb | "Plague Rages" | single | We close our eyes, and then open them, and there's still a plague; |
| 2022-01-07 | 42 | Lauren Babic | "A Million Dreams" | single | "Until you make a world with a million more moments and at least one less pain." |
| 2021-12-31 | 6 | Cinnamun Beloved | "The Crow" | single | and labyrinthine fanfics or marshaled armies, |
| 2021-12-31 | 7 | Magica | "Show Me a Sign" | single | as readily as any other magic. |
| 2021-12-31 | 8 | Nekonomicon | "Song of Warmth" | single | Whatever connects you |
| 2021-12-31 | 9 | Machinae Supremacy | "We Are The Ones Who Will Change The World" | single | makes you more human. |
| 2021-12-31 | 12 | MELiSSA | "Dances with Wolves" | single | but sacral architecture first into architecture, |
| 2021-12-31 | 18 | THE ORCHESTRA TOKYO | "Checkmate" | THE ORCHESTRA TOKYO III 5 | Maybe we have only really mastered this one craft: |
| 2021-12-31 | 19 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "Next Stage" | 夢幻パラレルコード | of lost-wax casting in which the wax is belief, |
| 2021-12-31 | 23 | Delacroix | "OBSESSED" | OBSESSED +1 | We make mistakes, |
| 2021-12-31 | 24 | ヒッチコック | "『鰐』" | single | trivially forgivable when they are new, |
| 2021-12-31 | 25 | Sleepers' Guilt | "One Last Shiver" | single | and then age them to impervious imperfection, |
| 2021-12-31 | 26 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "Styx" | single | set them backlit on inaccessible horizons, |
| 2021-12-31 | 28 | Moongazer | "The pain that never leaves...(Pt. 1)" | The pain that never leaves... 2 | But every legend of seeking is inherently and equally epic; |
| 2021-12-31 | 29 | Ancalagon | "Gyges from River North (Sem Sombra)" | Black Samba, Part II: Songs from the Notochord 3 | every map tells a story in which distance has purpose; |
| 2021-12-31 | 30 | Hadal Maw | "Fetishize Consumption" | Oblique Order 4 | every disillusionment dissolves a piece of foundational infrastructure |
| 2021-12-31 | 31 | Primalfrost | "Bringer Of Immensity" | Lost Elegies | and thus exposes its internal mechanism. |
| 2021-12-31 | 32 | Distress of Ruin | "Searching the Architect" | single | We fear discovering the ways in which our clothes are costumes, |
| 2021-12-31 | 33 | Feuerschwanz | "Ultima Nocte" | Memento Mori | but so too already are our skins, |
| 2021-12-31 | 34 | Horn | "Alpenrekorder" | Alpenrekorder +1 | our paths, |
| 2021-12-31 | 35 | Aythis | "When Your Ghost Wanders - Winter Edit" | single | their defiant margins, |
| 2021-12-31 | 36 | Earth7 | "On the Sea and In the Sky" | single | the lines between the layers of earth |
| 2021-12-31 | 44 | Hereafter | "Resolution" | single | Do not be afraid to stop at the end, |
| 2021-12-31 | 50 | Escape The Day | "2 B With U - Demo Version" | Demo Collection #2 6 | for disentangling accreted necessity from orignal joy; |
| 2021-12-31 | 51 | Sorrowful Knight | "Son's of Odin - Remastered" | Through Pain and Glory | for looking back on perilous surfaces after heroic transit; |
| 2021-12-31 | 52 | Halocene | "We Will Rock You" | single | for finding someone who can accept your unachievable peace as stipulated context; |
| 2021-12-24 | 1 | Nocturna | "Daughters of the Night" | single | It will be years before we understand everything that we lost to these slow-motion plague times, |
| 2021-12-24 | 2 | Solarus | "Waking Mind" | A Dance With Tragedy | but those years, like the plague years themselves, |
| 2021-12-24 | 3 | The Artificials | "Carrier" | single | will be filled with undaunted and unsilenced music. |
| 2021-12-24 | 4 | Oligarkh | "Я вернусь" | single | This can sound like defiance |
| 2021-12-24 | 5 | Bagira | "Амнезия X" | single | or divinity, |
| 2021-12-24 | 24 | IBUKI | "See You Again" | Storm of Emotion | of the long inevitability of some comet's approach, |
| 2021-12-24 | 26 | ELFENSJóN | "WIEGENLIED" | EPHEMERA | of love in an age of raining comets |
| 2021-12-24 | 37 | Cyan Kicks | "Died Enough For You" | single | awaiting word from the committee deliberating over the proposed |
| 2021-12-24 | 38 | Carmilla | "Lightbringer" | single | continuance of time. |
| 2021-12-24 | 39 | The Neptune Power Federation | "My Precious One" | single | If you imagine that the future is paid for by our faith, |
| 2021-12-24 | 40 | Parasyche | "Rebelión" | Hijos De La Violencia | then it makes sense that inertia can incur debt, |
| 2021-12-24 | 41 | Project Renegade | "The Fix Is In" | single | and that we can fight over whether we will or will not default on revolutions |
| 2021-12-24 | 42 | Fólkvangr | "Winter Nights" | single | long since spun. |
| 2021-12-24 | 43 | Harpyie | "Angst im Wald" | single | Power fantasies aspire to cruelty |
| 2021-12-24 | 44 | Walg | "Verlossing" | single | as a desperate and futile attempt to distract from ridiculousness. |
| 2021-12-24 | 45 | Wolftopia | "The Last Embrace of the Mother" | Ways of the Pack | We imagine ourselves wolves: |
| 2021-12-24 | 46 | Asarhaddon | "Haginthorn I" | Haginthorn 2 | dead or ancient by our teens |
| 2021-12-24 | 47 | CELESTE | "De tes yeux bleus perlés" | De tes yeux bleus perlés +1 | if lucky enough to not have been eaten by bears. |
| 2021-12-24 | 48 | Shape Of Despair | "Dissolution" | single | All of our dancing is done with tears in our eyes: |
| 2021-12-24 | 49 | Funeral Mist | "Twilight of the Flesh" | Deiform | liquid glimmers of darkness |
| 2021-12-24 | 50 | Bjarm | "In the Deepest Abyss" | Carved from Dust | attributing depth to our thin surfaces |
| 2021-12-24 | 51 | Teramaze | "Battle" | single | as if balrogs can be flung into endless plummet |
| 2021-12-24 | 52 | Memory Garden | "Shallow Waters" | 1349 | instead of landing, indignantly, in our neighbor's pool. |
| 2021-12-24 | 53 | Chronosfear | "Beyond" | single | We inhale to shout, |
| 2021-12-24 | 54 | eon | "La Bala Que Grabé en Tu Nombre" | single | and the world flows effortlessly through us, |
| 2021-12-24 | 55 | Lee McKinney | "Crystal Song" | Crystal Song +1 | its atmospheric joys equally undiminished by our bodies |
| 2021-12-24 | 93 | Funeral Mist | "Deiform" | Deiform | not in some eventual abtract reckoning |
| 2021-12-24 | 97 | First to Eleven | "Hail to the King" | single | in the genuflections you implicitly catalog. |
| 2021-12-24 | 98 | Lauren Babic | "Erase Me" | single | It will take us years to recover from this, |
| 2021-12-24 | 100 | RIVETHEAD | "Dancing Queen" | single | conclusively chastened by pedagogical comets, |
| 2021-12-24 | 101 | The Big Deal | "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" | single | celestially shadowless. |
| 2021-12-24 | 102 | Bagira | "Paranoid (Буря мглою небо кроет)" | Covered in Metal | The years and comets don't change. They don't bring us deliverance. Until one day they do, and we watch it burn up in the atmosphere as it descends, and if there's little enough of it left by the time it hits us, we get to sing some more. |
| 2021-12-17 | 1 | Pene Corrida | "Last Christmas" | single | I don't seek out Christmas music. |
| 2021-12-17 | 2 | Majestica | "Glory of Christmas" | single | I don't want Christmas music. |
| 2021-12-17 | 3 | Sabaton | "Christmas Truce" | single | I would be perfectly content if no bands I like ever recorded Christmas songs. |
| 2021-12-17 | 4 | UMC | "Last Christmas (Metal Version)" | single | If nobody else ever covers "Last Christmas" again, that would be fine with me. |
| 2021-12-17 | 5 | Binary Creed | "O Holy Night" | single | The old songs have been played far too many times, |
| 2021-12-17 | 6 | Then It Ends | "O Come Emmanuel" | single | and attempts to make them tell different stories |
| 2021-12-17 | 8 | Todsünde | "Last Christmas" | Rookies & Friends Sampler, Vol. 3 | You can't really make entrenched power speak with the voice of freedom, |
| 2021-12-17 | 9 | The Animal In Me | "You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch" | We Wish You A Metal Christmas | and when you lead doomed rebellions against opression |
| 2021-12-17 | 11 | The Last Bear Ender | "Djenty Claws" | single | I don't want to validate ubiquity, |
| 2021-12-17 | 12 | Patient Sixty-Seven | "All I Want For Christmas Is You" | single | furiously or coyly. |
| 2021-12-17 | 13 | Nova | "Last Christmas" | single | I don't want every Christmas to be the same, |
| 2021-12-10 | 1 | My Own Ghost | "Your Turn" | single | Two years and counting to defeat an invisible menace; three minutes to recapitulate transformational wonder. |
| 2021-12-10 | 2 | The Murder of My Sweet | "Father's Eyes" | A Gentleman's Legacy | We have all of our ancestors' gifts for music but still too much of their miserable inadequacy in medicine and general control of our own mundane fates. |
| 2021-12-10 | 3 | Rage Of Light | "Aspiration" | Redemption | We wonder, unreflectively, how an ant can go about its industrious days not paralyzed by awareness of their fewness. |
| 2021-12-10 | 4 | Eye of Melian | "The Bell" | single | The ant hums to itself. |
| 2021-12-10 | 5 | Blackbriar | "Fairy of the Bog" | single | So at least we lead by example, |
| 2021-12-10 | 6 | Moonlight Haze | "Animus" | single | even when we wander, |
| 2021-12-10 | 7 | Lacey Sturm | "Awaken Love" | single | as long as you agree that leadership is the act of attributing cause for the movements you perceive to the movements you think you made. |
| 2021-12-10 | 8 | The Last Martyr | "Out Of Time" | Purgatory 5 | Exploration and discovery are not acts of leadership |
| 2021-12-10 | 9 | Gone Til Winter | "Truth In You" | single | unless you misunderstand them as dominance, |
| 2021-12-10 | 10 | Frantic Amber | "Angel Maker" | single | which is of course exactly how we usually portray them, |
| 2021-12-10 | 11 | Fear Of Domination | "Exitus" | VI Revelation | because conclusive epics of irrational power are easier to stage |
| 2021-12-10 | 12 | Balance Breach | "Overthrown" | Overthrown +1 | than endless cycles of irresolvable curiosity and serene dismay. |
| 2021-12-10 | 13 | Sebastien | "Lví stopou" | single | This is why, too, we keep inventing more ways to treat art as reductive competition than ways to rethink competition as shared art, |
| 2021-12-10 | 14 | Atlas | "Taivaanranta" | UKKO | and in turn how we keep thinking that the people just beyond our immediate gaze |
| 2021-12-10 | 15 | Kaamos Warriors | "Vapaus" | single | are engaged in irrelevant rituals, |
| 2021-12-10 | 16 | Lucifer's Child | "Satan's Wrath" | single | and thus the proper subjects of the laws we write |
| 2021-12-10 | 17 | Maladie | "Nekrolife" | The Sick Is Dead - Long Live the Sick | with no intention of applying them to ourselves. |
| 2021-12-10 | 18 | Saħħar | "Kożmu Mitluf" | Mexxej ta' Laħam Mejjet 5 | The truths you believe yourself above |
| 2021-12-10 | 19 | TattvA | "Naraka-Hell's Path" | single | tell the merciless anticipatory story of your failures: |
| 2021-12-10 | 20 | Immolation | "Apostle" | single | each doom assigned a hero's name, |
| 2021-12-10 | 21 | No Point in Living | "Chapter 1" | Possessed | each inevitability reformulated as reverence, |
| 2021-12-10 | 22 | Sylvaine | "Nowhere, Still Somewhere" | single | each dead-end granted a throne. |
| 2021-12-10 | 23 | Ethereal Shroud | "Chasmal Fires" | Trisagion | Two thousand years and counting to accept definitional moral responsibility for our existence; 28 minutes to suggest the divine scope of our own power. |
| 2021-12-10 | 24 | Death Verified | "Diamond Dust" | Fuck Winter EP 4 | We thought the summer was going to be glorious. |
| 2021-12-10 | 25 | Breath Of Wind | "Coast I" | Coast | Now we think the winter is going to be horrible. |
| 2021-12-10 | 26 | Berserkyd | "Fighting for Yourself" | single | Both of these are stories of how immune we think we are |
| 2021-12-10 | 27 | Sgàile | "The Summit" | Ideals & Morality | to the consequences of our own relativism, |
| 2021-12-10 | 28 | Symphony Of Sweden | "Will She Fight" | single | and how intent on believing that arbitrarily interrupted arcs |
| 2021-12-10 | 29 | Degreed | "Into the Fire" | single | constitute radience. |
| 2021-12-10 | 87 | Edge Of Paradise | "Love Reign O'er Me" | single | But we also can't stop yearning. |
| 2021-12-10 | 89 | Shaft of Steel | "Torn" | single | even when the characters are us, |
| 2021-12-03 | 2 | Jyrki 69 | "Don't You Want Me" | single | infused with self-awareness that we probably only recognize |
| 2021-12-03 | 5 | Lion's Share | "Knock on Wood" | single | glitter scattering, |
| 2021-12-03 | 6 | False Memories | "December" | Echoes of a Reflection | remembering every other holiday and gift at once, |
| 2021-12-03 | 27 | Cult Of Luna | "Cold Burn" | single | The night, as it receives you, says "You smell of light. |
| 2021-12-03 | 28 | Eramaa | "One Hell" | single | We have only these moments together |
| 2021-12-03 | 29 | Smyčka | "Племя" | single | in which to pretend an illusory kinship of fear |
| 2021-12-03 | 30 | Kalevala | "Fly Away On Wings Of The Wind" | single | that ultimately we believe even less than you." |
| 2021-12-03 | 31 | Magica | "Mortal Attraction" | single | And all you do is wake away, |
| 2021-12-03 | 32 | Revolution Eve | "Babylon" | Life | singing one of our uncountable songs of uncontainable memory. |
| 2021-12-03 | 33 | Eyes Set To Kill | "Room 102 (Fading Light)" | DAMNA 6 | We have been in these rooms before. |
| 2021-12-03 | 34 | The Gathering | "Stronger - Radio Edit" | single | That's what rooms are, even when they are new: |
| 2021-12-03 | 35 | Within Temptation | "Forsaken - The Aftermath" | single | summaries of obsolete finities |
| 2021-12-03 | 36 | Coronatus | "To The Gods Of Wind & Sun" | Atmosphere | prepared for ceremonies of dispensation, |
| 2021-12-03 | 37 | Orkhys | "Annwvyn" | A Way | effigies of conclusiveness |
| 2021-12-03 | 52 | Asunojokei | "Chimera" | single | If only we had an extra head, we think, |
| 2021-12-03 | 53 | Boris | "Drowning by Numbers" | single | or two. |
| 2021-12-03 | 54 | WagakkiBand | "名作ジャーニー" | single | As if heads aren't mostly the problem, to begin with. |
| 2021-12-03 | 55 | Manimal | "Slaves of Babylon" | Armageddon | Brains the shape of planets, and we use them to try to figure out how to get other people |
| 2021-12-03 | 56 | Dynazty | "Power of Will" | single | to make the things we shouldn't want, |
| 2021-12-03 | 57 | Serious Black | "Senso Della Vita" | Senso Della Vita +2 | but don't want to admit we don't know how to build. |
| 2021-12-03 | 58 | Volbeat | "Temple Of Ekur" | Servant Of The Mind | The gods we invoke, tolerating this brief distraction from their own hobbies, |
| 2021-12-03 | 59 | Beriedir | "Stormbound" | single | say "We gave you chaos, |
| 2021-12-03 | 60 | Harpyie | "Blutadler" | single | and tiny spinning particles that conspire to form both bricks and skin, |
| 2021-12-03 | 62 | Ereb Altor | "I Have the Sky" | single | All you had to do was pour the chaos into the shapes of yourselves |
| 2021-12-03 | 63 | Svartsot | "Liden Kirsten" | single | and not let it immediately drain or fountain out again. |
| 2021-12-03 | 64 | Amorphis | "The Moon" | single | All you had to do was notice that the most darkness we ever gave you was a context for radiance. |
| 2021-12-03 | 65 | Cepheide | "Les Larmes" | Les Echappées | All you had to do was fall in love with each other, |
| 2021-12-03 | 66 | Worship | "Mercy" | Mercy +2 | and we made you more beautiful than terrifying to make that easy. |
| 2021-12-03 | 67 | Aquilus | "Eternal Unrest" | Bellum I | And yet, somehow, you devised artificial scarcities for the definitionally omnipresent, |
| 2021-12-03 | 68 | So Hideous | "Motorik Visage" | None But a Pure Heart Can Sing | and a taxonomy of irrefutably humane movements you make to assert their impossibility. |
| 2021-12-03 | 69 | Cosmophobe | "Alien Atmosphere" | Transcendence | We gave you math, |
| 2021-12-03 | 70 | The Algorithm | "Cryptographic Memory" | Cryptographic Memory 5 | and you use it to put ruthlessly ascending page-numbers |
| 2021-11-26 | 1 | Orkhys | "Home" | single | I went to look up Orkhys, because I didn't recognize the name. They are French. As I write this, they have 113 monthly listeners on Spotify, and the #4 playlist from which people have discovered them is this one, before I have even published it. |
| 2021-11-26 | 2 | Solarus | "A Dance With Tragedy" | single | If I had the power to generate beautiful power-metal bands by my own solipsistic will, |
| 2021-11-26 | 3 | Battle Beast | "Eye of the Storm" | Eye of the Storm +1 | presumably I would also have the ability to keep the New England Revolution from losing their first-round playoff game after the best regular season in MLS history. |
| 2021-11-26 | 4 | We Are the Catalyst | "I Will Follow" | Perseverance | Or maybe not. In music, our solipsisms do not have to compete. |
| 2021-11-26 | 6 | Secret Rule | "Welcome to Hell" | single | but I've felt more elated after, and in the middle of, thousands of songs |
| 2021-11-26 | 7 | False Memories | "Our Truth" | single | than I have after any sports outcome. |
| 2021-11-26 | 8 | Fallcie | "Hollow" | single | This is either a reason to quit following soccer for mental health, |
| 2021-11-26 | 9 | Reliqa | "The Bearer of Bad News" | single | or a reason to keep following it for emotional strength, |
| 2021-11-26 | 10 | Depressed Mode | "Endless November" | single | but I am suspicious of circular justifications for pain, |
| 2021-11-26 | 11 | Tarja | "Closer to the Sky" | single | of symbolic sacrifice used to sell you more emotional investment in things you can't control. |
| 2021-11-26 | 12 | NEO JAPONISM | "BLACK and WHITE" | single | The next soccer season doesn't begin until February. |
| 2021-11-26 | 13 | Fiore | "Sing it" | single | The next song begins right now. |
| 2021-11-26 | 14 | GRAND FINALE | "Everything Has An End" | Everything Has An End 5 | Maybe we don't actually need pretend gladiators telling us that joy must be redistributed from the many to the few through a process of elimination, |
| 2021-11-26 | 43 | The Florist | "Enemy" | IN CVLT | You sync it to your message, and we learn to play it slower, |
| 2021-11-26 | 44 | Esprit D'Air | "出逢い - オーケストラ・ミックス" | single | until you are suspended helplessly among your groundless words. |
| 2021-11-26 | 45 | DRASTIC BOYS | "Intro" | Kyoumei 3 | You call it a soundtrack, and we turn away from the screen. |
| 2021-11-26 | 47 | Tony Iommi | "Scent of Dark" | single | and we cheer and then live the rest of it. |
| 2021-11-26 | 48 | Rhapsody Of Fire | "The Kingdom of Ice" | Glory for Salvation | In any single given game, Gibraltar might beat Belgium, |
| 2021-11-26 | 49 | Neverland | "Megkapod" | A holnap markában | but afterwards it will still be a disputed rock at the edge of an ocean, |
| 2021-11-26 | 50 | Corvus Corax | "Sverker - Era Metallum - Single Edit" | single | with its own legends. |
| 2021-11-26 | 51 | Faun | "Galdra" | single | So are we all. |
| 2021-11-26 | 52 | Tdw | "Fountains" | Fountains | This was the #5 playlist from which listeners discovered Tdw before I published it. It's really TDW, a Dutch progressive-rock project by a guy named Tom de Wit, |
| 2021-11-26 | 53 | Cynic | "The Winged Ones" | Ascension Codes | who I'm only 40% sure isn't also a Belgian gum-implant specialist. |
| 2021-11-26 | 54 | World Without | "Walls" | single | All legends are stories of specificity triumphing over, or within, generality. |
| 2021-11-26 | 55 | Hypocrisy | "Worship" | Worship | Corporatism distorts this by portraying corporations as individuals, |
| 2021-11-26 | 56 | Abiotic | "Mutation" | single | and thus distorts collective action by misrepresenting it as soulless, |
| 2021-11-26 | 57 | In Mourning | "Sovereign" | The Bleeding Veil | and thus condones corporate soullessness by making it seem inevitable. |
| 2021-11-26 | 58 | Dwell in Doom | "Eternal Storm" | Eternal Storm +3 | But the communities in which we gather are only us. |
| 2021-11-26 | 59 | Anomalie | "Trance IV: Nemesis" | Tranceformation | The enemies we imagine are only us. |
| 2021-11-26 | 60 | Negură Bunget | "Iarba Fiarelor" | Zău | You put your heart into hating the players on the team that beat yours, |
| 2021-11-26 | 91 | No Resolve | "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" | We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together +2 | machines of delirious destruction |
| 2021-11-26 | 92 | Sershen&Zaritskaya | "Rock You Like A Hurricane" | single | now available in new chrome |
| 2021-11-26 | 93 | Mantra of Morta | "Master Of Puppets" | single | or new matte. |
| 2021-11-26 | 94 | Lauren Babic | "Easy On Me" | single | We give away hope until we run out of it, and then we take a breath and make more. |
| 2021-11-19 | 1 | Temperance | "Diamanti" | Diamanti | The best rock band in the world, at the moment, is a melodic power-metal quintet from Milan, Italy. |
| 2021-11-19 | 2 | Aephanemer | "Le Radeau de La Méduse - French Version" | A Dream of Wilderness | It must be exciting to be them, but then it's exciting to be anybody, |
| 2021-11-19 | 3 | The Last Martyr | "Freaking Out" | single | alive to hear the sound of your own voice |
| 2021-11-19 | 4 | Roses Unread | "Creatures" | single | among the vibrations that encase your head. |
| 2021-11-19 | 5 | Theatres Des Vampires | "Lady Bathory" | In Nomine Sanguinis | We are the descendants of demons |
| 2021-11-19 | 6 | Rage Of Light | "Breaking Infinity" | single | and illusions, |
| 2021-11-19 | 7 | Beneath The Silence | "Fear" | single | shaped into resonant vessels |
| 2021-11-19 | 8 | Dust in Mind | "Speak For the Voiceless" | Ctrl | by our own yearning, |
| 2021-11-19 | 9 | MIST | "SHADOW GAME" | single | and then flung into the first available maelstrom |
| 2021-11-19 | 10 | Converge | "Lord of Liars" | Bloodmoon: I | or the next. |
| 2021-11-19 | 11 | Temperance | "The Night Before the End" | Diamanti | Master one second of the day and you establish recurring joy. |
| 2021-11-19 | 12 | LOVEBITES | "Nameless Warrior" | single | Take a single breath |
| 2021-11-19 | 30 | Nergard | "Blood Red Skies" | Blood Red Skies +1 | and its margin of error is how moral systems become calculus instead of algebra. |
| 2021-11-19 | 31 | GIANT | "Let Our Love Win" | single | You might imagine that all the chords have been played in all the relevant orders by now, |
| 2021-11-19 | 32 | Crashdïet | "No Man's Land" | single | leaving innovation to heresy, |
| 2021-11-19 | 33 | The Ferrymen | "One Word" | single | and this is as wrong as any scriptural conviction |
| 2021-11-19 | 34 | Fugatta | "The Dark Land We Belong" | The Darkest Planet | about what must be true |
| 2021-11-19 | 35 | Arjen Anthony Lucassen's Star One | "Fate of Man" | single | written in the belief that we can arrive at a silent point in the universe |
| 2021-11-19 | 36 | Temperance | "Fairy Tales for the Stars" | Diamanti | and then stop. |
| 2021-11-19 | 37 | Cynic | "In a Multiverse Where Atoms Sing" | single | But there is no silence. |
| 2021-11-19 | 38 | Cosmophobe | "Distant Discovery" | single | All moral and aesthetic reasoning depends on this reality, |
| 2021-11-19 | 39 | Persefone | "Merkabah" | single | either directly, in grotesque appeals to beauty, |
| 2021-11-19 | 40 | Obscura | "Forsaken" | A Valediction | or implicitly, by constructing elaborately failed attempts |
| 2021-11-19 | 41 | Nightrage | "Nauseating Oblivion" | single | to infer its negation. |
| 2021-11-19 | 44 | CELESTE | "Des torrents de coups" | single | but also the one that tastes the most like figs and aplomb. |
| 2021-11-19 | 45 | Messa | "Pilgrim" | single | Journeys towards the intangible |
| 2021-11-19 | 46 | Converge | "Viscera of Men" | Bloodmoon: I | navigate inhabited lands. |
| 2021-11-19 | 47 | Swallow The Sun | "This House Has No Home" | Moonflowers | The sentries who ask your destination |
| 2021-11-19 | 48 | Dakhma | "The Rite of Dominion (Shehrevar)" | Blessings of Amurdad | are plaintively admitting to you that they don't know |
| 2021-11-19 | 49 | Ars Magna Umbrae | "Metempsychosis (Transmigration of the Soul)" | Throne Between Worlds | whether to guard or desert their own. |
| 2021-11-19 | 50 | Frostnatt | "Om Vinteren" | Vinterens Kaldeste Natt | Those cities are waystations, |
| 2021-11-19 | 51 | Thy Worshiper | "Straszno Tu" | Bajki o Staruchu | occupying interstitial spaces between assembly and disintegration. |
| 2021-11-19 | 52 | HÖST | "Concrete of Mankind" | 1994 5 | Of course most of what we build is exactly like this, |
| 2021-11-19 | 53 | Proscriptor McGovern’s Apsû | "Prana Therion Akasha" | single | hope cantilevered artfully over inevitability. |
| 2021-11-19 | 54 | Violet Cold | "Sahasrara Destruction" | single | This is why new cities always smell initially unconvincing, |
| 2021-11-19 | 88 | Converge | "Daimon" | Bloodmoon: I | populated by demons, |
| 2021-11-19 | 89 | Temperance | "Follow Me" | Diamanti | and they had this same conversation in the middle of a illusory demonic night, |
| 2021-11-19 | 91 | Rioghan | "Chandelier" | Covers II 3 | It matters whether they actually were, but not to us, here at the edge of their city. |
| 2021-11-19 | 92 | Violet Orlandi | "In The Air Tonight - Metal Version" | single | We have waited for this moment all our lives, |
| 2021-11-19 | 93 | Saint Asonia | "Blinding Lights" | single | or since the last city turned out to be cold and empty. |
| 2021-11-19 | 94 | Conquer Divide | "Bad Habits" | single | This city full of flames will at least be neither of those things. |
| 2021-11-19 | 95 | The Haxans | "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" | single | Opening the gates allows the city and the world to seek a new equilibrium between curiosity and fear. |
| 2021-11-12 | 26 | Loveless | "meet me at our spot" | single | so the thing we hold between us, both of our hands on the metal and stone and air of it, |
| 2021-11-12 | 38 | We Are the Catalyst | "More" | single | only to be daunted and embraced by our expanding auras. |
| 2021-11-12 | 39 | Daedric | "Sepulchre" | Sepulchre +3 | In fables are we contained, |
| 2021-11-12 | 40 | The Murder of My Sweet | "Kill Your Darlings" | single | but those characters live at our whim, |
| 2021-11-12 | 41 | Amaranthe | "PvP" | single | infinities impersonated |
| 2021-11-12 | 42 | Aevum | "Black Swan Theory" | single | and ultimately indistinguishable. |
| 2021-11-12 | 43 | Vengeant | "Curse of the Sands" | single | We could pick a loss and grind a desert around it, |
| 2021-11-12 | 44 | Magica | "Lună nebună" | single | as if there weren't enough dust-covered rocks waiting for us in the sky, |
| 2021-11-12 | 45 | Theatres Des Vampires | "Christina" | single | entertaining each other by exchanging fanciful claims of divinity |
| 2021-11-12 | 46 | Damian Hamada's Creatures | "謝肉祭" | 魔界美術館 | while they await our decisive adoration. |
| 2021-11-12 | 47 | PassCode | "FLAVOR OF BLUE" | Freely / FLAVOR OF BLUE 4 | Long ago they realized that we have our own gods, |
| 2021-11-12 | 48 | GRAND FINALE | "Never Be Alone" | single | but knowledge is what distinguishes yearning from dehydration, |
| 2021-11-12 | 49 | KAQRIYOTERROR | "Not Killed" | Not Killed +1 | and the dust merely covers more dust, |
| 2021-11-12 | 55 | 戮-Riku- | "鱗粉" | 鱗粉 +1 | It takes so much energy to maintain such superficial distinctions, |
| 2021-11-12 | 70 | Edge Of Forever | "Shift the Paradigm" | single | We jump in the idiot hope that the finite world will move away underneath us, |
| 2021-11-12 | 72 | Emigrate | "RAGE" | THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY | Travel is flight, but so is standing still. |
| 2021-11-12 | 73 | Manntra | "Nightcall" | Nightcall +2 | So is falling. |
| 2021-11-12 | 74 | NorthTale | "Wings of Salvation" | Eternal Flame | So is standing up again. |
| 2021-11-12 | 75 | Dawn Of Solace | "Event Horizon" | Event Horizon +2 | Our fantasies always seem to be draped alluringly over imaginary edges, |
| 2021-11-12 | 76 | Digimortal | "Перемирие завершено" | Создатель (альбомная версия) | but we pick them up and something small and chitinous scuttles away across inevitably flat sand. |
| 2021-11-12 | 77 | The Halo Effect | "Shadowminds" | single | We are the creatures writing cursory poems to our shadows |
| 2021-11-12 | 78 | Wolftopia | "The Alpha" | The Alpha +2 | before turning around to feel the light on our faces |
| 2021-11-12 | 79 | A Tergo Lupi | "Fade Under" | single | and our shadows' reproach on our heels. |
| 2021-11-12 | 80 | Cân Bardd | "Echoes of the Moss" | Devoured by the Oak | Space is both dark and silent, |
| 2021-11-12 | 81 | Negură Bunget | "Toacă Din Cer - Single Edit" | single | but filled with light and empty of songs. |
| 2021-11-12 | 82 | Wiegedood | "Now Will Always Be" | single | Time is like a new kind of space made by creatures cursed to destroy what they encounter, |
| 2021-11-12 | 83 | Anomalie | "Trance I: The Tree" | single | who have found a way to make their guilt into an inertia. |
| 2021-11-12 | 84 | Second To Sun | "Veter" | Veter +1 | There didn't use to be this many planets, |
| 2021-11-12 | 85 | Funeral | "Erindring I - Hovmod" | single | but be nice about it, we will outlive |
| 2021-11-12 | 86 | Otargos | "Fleshborer Soulflayer" | single | and outdie them. |
| 2021-11-12 | 87 | Dauþuz | "Der Bergschmied I - Mein Berg" | Vom schwarzen Schmied | Instead of putting a single bright forge at the origin, |
| 2021-11-12 | 88 | Sanguinum | "A White Light Over The Forest" | Manifestation Of The Essence | we have spun dizzying glows into all our own myraid paths, |
| 2021-11-12 | 89 | Natura Aeternum | "Creature of the Night" | Nightcrawler | and then stepped into them as if emerging from myth |
| 2021-11-12 | 90 | Maladie | "My Soul, Old" | single | rather than, inherently and gravely, entering into it. |
| 2021-11-12 | 91 | Bala | "Una Selva" | Maleza | We could reach into any wound and feel our hearts, |
| 2021-11-12 | 92 | Hadal Maw | "Vile Veneration" | single | and afterwards drip the blood onto a new determinist altar, |
| 2021-11-12 | 93 | 616 | "Goddamn Liar" | single | or we could heal without forgetting that we are the tension between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of our circulation. |
| 2021-11-12 | 98 | Sarah Jezebel Deva | "A Sign Of Sublime Redux" | single | and that they trace the insignia of us and our gods across the sky, |
| 2021-11-05 | 1 | My Own Ghost | "Believe" | single | Yes to more grandiose metal songs about allowing yourself to appreciate a held hand. |
| 2021-11-05 | 2 | Shereign | "Dark Waters" | single | Yes always to guitars like engines, and English choruses in Finnish accents. |
| 2021-11-05 | 3 | Future Palace | "Paradise" | single | Yes to dreaming of futures without problems as a tactic for forcing the problems to confront their own precarity, |
| 2021-11-05 | 4 | Kandia | "Fight or Flight" | single | and then screaming back into the contested now. |
| 2021-11-05 | 5 | Divided Island | "Radiating Light" | Radiating Light +2 | We produce no light, but see everything in it. |
| 2021-11-05 | 6 | Starkill | "Walk Through Fire" | single | Our ridiculous ideas are tremendous, |
| 2021-11-05 | 7 | Evereal | "Fear" | single | which makes up a little for how our tremendous ideas sometimes prove to be loathsome. |
| 2021-11-05 | 8 | Aeternitas | "Shadows" | single | Courage is the ability to sing a song like you believe it, |
| 2021-11-05 | 9 | Kissin' Dynamite | "Good Life (feat. Saltatio Mortis, Charlotte Wessels & Guernica Mancini)" | Good Life (feat. Saltatio Mortis, Charlotte Wessels & Guernica Mancini) +2 | knowing that you can't possibly be sure. |
| 2021-11-05 | 10 | Evol Walks | "Gun & a Crucifix" | single | Faith is like this, too, |
| 2021-11-05 | 11 | Jim Peterik And World Stage | "Taller" | Tigress - Women Who Rock the World | in the way that cages are like stages. |
| 2021-11-05 | 12 | Saxon | "Carpe Diem (Seize the Day)" | single | Today slips away from a trillion grasping hands, but if you can seize an autumn afternoon from 122 C.E. |
| 2021-11-05 | 13 | Opera Diabolicus | "Bring out Your Dead" | Bring out Your Dead +2 | you will have a loaned treasure you don't have to immediately return. |
| 2021-11-05 | 14 | Xiphea | "Witchcraft" | Witchcraft | This is how there is still new power to be found in old spells, |
| 2021-11-05 | 15 | Theatres Des Vampires | "Death in Venice" | single | and doomed immortality in drowning cities. |
| 2021-11-05 | 16 | Hanging Garden | "Neither Moth nor Rust" | single | The prize of the Ancient Wonders isn't the one that survived, it's the one that we're not certain ever existed. |
| 2021-11-05 | 17 | AfterTime | "Forge Your Destiny" | Infinite Legacy | The purest legends originate somewhere outside of time, |
| 2021-11-05 | 18 | Haast | "Antipodean" | Made of Light | thus exempt from our expectations and limits. |
| 2021-11-05 | 19 | Sarke | "Funeral Fire" | Allsighr | We conjure pyres and apocalypses to justify beginning again, |
| 2021-11-05 | 20 | Dwell in Doom | "Gallows Hill" | single | or to imagine rebirth as a triumphant return, |
| 2021-11-05 | 21 | Omnium Gatherum | "Prime" | Origin | instead of a tattered Elven ship limping back to New Mithlond. |
| 2021-11-05 | 22 | Frozen Shield | "Canvas of Snow" | Ínia | The harbormaster takes his pipe out of his mouth, and squints with one eye. |
| 2021-11-05 | 23 | Erdling | "Fimbulwinter" | Leuchtfeuer 4 | "What did you forget?" |
| 2021-11-05 | 24 | Hypocrisy | "Children of the Gray" | Children of the Gray +2 | The answer, of course, is that what they forgot to take away with them, |
| 2021-11-05 | 25 | Merta | "Palanut maa" | Minä | into the blessed realms, is us, |
| 2021-11-05 | 26 | MØL | "Fraktur" | Diorama | and they didn't exactly forget. |
| 2021-11-05 | 27 | Bornholm | "My Evangelium" | Apotheosis | Half-honest legends pause to wonder why the gods |
| 2021-11-05 | 28 | Aquilus | "Lucille's Gate" | single | would strand us on this hopeless, distant rock. |
| 2021-11-05 | 29 | Mroh | "Whispers from Nowhere" | XII | Fully-honest legends probably go no further, |
| 2021-11-05 | 30 | Ars Magna Umbrae | "Beyond the Stellar Gates" | single | which is why only the ridiculous legends have any analogic power. |
| 2021-11-05 | 31 | MUCC | "GONER" | GONER/WORLD 3 | The Elves, of course, never actually left. |
| 2021-11-05 | 32 | D | "Zmei ~Fumetsu ryuu~" | single | They stayed, and formed visual kei bands. |
| 2021-11-05 | 69 | Boris | "Reincarnation Rose" | single | Also, how do you get the job as the harbormaster of a decomissioned port? |
| 2021-11-05 | 70 | Zetra | "The Raven's Game" | single | Easier, I guess, to see why you might want it. |
| 2021-11-05 | 71 | A Pregnant Light | "The Ghost of Sab Grey" | All Saints' Day 2 4 | Either you get to do nothing but chew on a pipe and think, |
| 2021-11-05 | 72 | Portrayal of Guilt | "The Sixth Circle" | CHRISTFUCKER | or you get to be there when the Elves return. |
| 2021-11-05 | 75 | Converge | "Coil" | single | The stories that sustain us do so by carrying us from any sudden moment to another. |
| 2021-11-05 | 82 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "Body" | Engine of Hell | coiled inside of us in exactly the shapes of our veins and gestures, |
| 2021-11-05 | 83 | El Cuervo de Poe | "Berenice" | single | waiting to be our hideous strength. |
| 2021-11-05 | 100 | VK Lynne | "It Hurts" | single | that the pain closed its grip around something that we don't even have any more, |
| 2021-11-05 | 101 | Virus of Ideals | "Nymphetamine Fix" | single | more sugar trails than pillars of salt. |
| 2021-11-05 | 102 | Crimson Day | "Immigrant Song" | single | We drive our ships to the other side of the same lands, and come back to our homes from the other direction, holding out hands that have been away. |
| 2021-10-29 | 9 | Nocean | "The Fall" | Aurora: The Weight of a Shadow | We are all more human than anything else, |
| 2021-10-29 | 10 | Ad Infinitum | "Animals" | Chapter II - Legacy | grandly and inescapably, |
| 2021-10-29 | 11 | Persona | "Animals" | Animal | viscerally and helpless. |
| 2021-10-29 | 12 | Nekonomicon | "Cursed Kurbee" | single | We look up at the sky, or down at our own hands, |
| 2021-10-29 | 13 | Aexylium | "Mountains" | The Fifth Season | or past them to the ground, |
| 2021-10-29 | 14 | Coronatus | "Time Of The Raven" | single | and thus there may be only two stories, |
| 2021-10-29 | 15 | Beast In Black | "Dark New World" | Dark Connection | but they have three different morals: |
| 2021-10-29 | 16 | Aephanemer | "Antigone" | Antigone +1 | everything is possible, |
| 2021-10-29 | 17 | Mister Misery | "Strangeland II - The Return" | single | we are mortal, |
| 2021-10-29 | 18 | Power Quest | "Bound for Glory" | single | or we are here. |
| 2021-10-29 | 19 | Dynazty | "Advent" | single | Or, more likely, all morals are compounded out of these three elements, |
| 2021-10-29 | 20 | Equilibrium | "XX" | single | and most contain them all. |
| 2021-10-29 | 21 | Allegaeon | "Into Embers" | single | Or, teleologically, our morality is whatever these three things produce. |
| 2021-10-29 | 22 | Be'lakor | "Locus" | Coherence | We are precisely and inherently the creatures of these bodies on this surface, |
| 2021-10-29 | 23 | Mastodon | "Gigantium" | Hushed and Grim | and thus ourselves the calibrations of all our conceptions of extents. |
| 2021-10-29 | 24 | Volbeat | "Becoming" | Becoming +3 | I'll have to take this all back if we make it to Venus and the sentient semi-corporeal plasma-slugs have pop-metal bands that sound just like this, |
| 2021-10-29 | 25 | Raizer | "Invisible" | Resurrection | but it's wonderful either way. |
| 2021-10-29 | 28 | PassCode | "Freely" | single | I was right, but it has also just as dreamily prepared me for Japanese kawaii cyber-metalcore. |
| 2021-10-29 | 29 | BAND-MAID | "Sense" | Sense +2 | We see ourselves in the shiny surfaces of all of these machines, and find homes in all of these wonderlands, |
| 2021-10-29 | 47 | Archspire | "Abandon the Linear" | Bleed the Future | We brandish heraldry of sides taken against time, |
| 2021-10-29 | 48 | Doedsvangr | "Flagelist" | Serpents Ov Old | not because we have discovered an immunity to it, |
| 2021-10-29 | 49 | Sol Sistere | "The Narrow Path" | Sol Sistere | but because we have become so reliant on a temporary misconception of history as short |
| 2021-10-29 | 50 | Häxkapell | "Eldskapt" | Eldhymner | that we think we can return to the beginning of it with a short fall |
| 2021-10-29 | 51 | Grafnár | "Ómennsk" | single | and a soft landing, |
| 2021-10-29 | 52 | Cronómetrobudú | "Guerra Serena" | Verne | with a serene war |
| 2021-10-29 | 80 | Beast In Black | "My Dystopia" | Dark Connection | You can't rewind time a few convenient minutes and then leave it motionless, |
| 2021-10-29 | 81 | Ad Infinitum | "Inferno" | Chapter II - Legacy | any more than you can light a final fire and walk away. |
| 2021-10-29 | 82 | Nocean | "The Farewell" | Aurora: The Weight of a Shadow | This doesn't mean that you are trapped, that you can't walk away, that there is no away. |
| 2021-10-22 | 1 | Nocean | "The Rise" | single | The first power streaming music offers is access to the world. |
| 2021-10-22 | 2 | Battle Beast | "Master of Illusion" | single | You can find songs from places you have never been, |
| 2021-10-22 | 3 | Supernova Plasmajets | "Beggin'" | Now or Never | or places you have visited dozens of times but come home from. |
| 2021-10-22 | 4 | MoonSun | "Slain by Silence" | single | But listening has inertia, like anything else that displaces air, |
| 2021-10-22 | 5 | Ignea | "Magura's Last Kiss" | Bestia 5 | and the second power streaming offers is release from its necessity. |
| 2021-10-22 | 6 | Ersedu | "Black Garden" | Bestia 5 | If the song you are listening to is not carrying you into awe, |
| 2021-10-22 | 7 | Septem Voices | "Смерть историй" | single | other songs are waiting eagerly to try. |
| 2021-10-22 | 8 | Hand of Kalliach | "Òran na Tein'-éigin" | Samhainn | You are no longer constrained by your records, |
| 2021-10-22 | 9 | Neopera | "Verge of War" | single | and thus have to answer for your hypothetical soul: |
| 2021-10-22 | 10 | Carmilla | "People of the Eagle" | single | will it wander eternally tormented by the idea that there are better songs you haven't heard yet, |
| 2021-10-22 | 11 | Secret Rule | "A New War" | single | or will it converge on a point of at once static and ecstatic familiarity? |
| 2021-10-22 | 12 | Catalyst Crime | "Projection of My Mind" | Catalyst Crime | Is your favorite song an unreachable ideal, |
| 2021-10-22 | 13 | Rage Of Light | "Lead The Riot" | single | or an inescapable one? |
| 2021-10-22 | 42 | Indigo Raven | "Our Sacred Soil" | Looking for Transcendence | without change to its helical structure. |
| 2021-10-22 | 43 | Blackwater Holylight | "Who The Hell" | Silence/Motion | Funerals differ from other rituals |
| 2021-10-22 | 47 | Runa Llena | "Keltoi" | single | but this doesn't establish their irrelevance, |
| 2021-10-22 | 48 | Hulkoff | "Vápnum - Svitjod Edition" | Ragnarök | it confirms your instrinsic responsibility for how they are re-applied. |
| 2021-10-22 | 49 | Obscura | "When Stars Collide" | When Stars Collide +3 | All cataclysmic cosmology is metaphor to the unincinerated: |
| 2021-10-22 | 50 | Arch Enemy | "Deceiver, Deceiver" | single | fireworks in the image of perdition. |
| 2021-10-22 | 51 | Bloodred Hourglass | "Leaves" | Your Highness | It isn't that no real things burn, |
| 2021-10-22 | 52 | Voutsa | "11th Hour" | single | it's that they are never consumed by transient and illusory claims about fire, |
| 2021-10-22 | 53 | Sarke | "Grim Awakening" | single | and however starkly divided we are by arguments over the morality or significance of flames, |
| 2021-10-22 | 54 | Swallow The Sun | "Enemy" | Enemy +1 | we are still united against their heat |
| 2021-10-22 | 55 | Raat | "Eternity" | Eternity +3 | and in their light. |
| 2021-10-22 | 56 | 1914 | "FN .380 ACP#19074" | Where Fear and Weapons Meet | War is how you get from bad planning to gruesome history |
| 2021-10-22 | 57 | Gravpel | "Tribute to Tiqqun | Identity" | Power to the filthy Masses | and back again. |
| 2021-10-22 | 58 | Archgoat | "Black Womb Gnosis" | single | But all any side wins is the chance for all of them to start over from that same lost place, |
| 2021-10-22 | 59 | Cradle Of Filth | "Existential Terror" | Existence Is Futile | no less scared |
| 2021-10-22 | 60 | Dream Theater | "Transcending Time" | A View From The Top Of The World | but hopefully a little more certain that you can't become unlost by declarational sovereignty. |
| 2021-10-22 | 62 | Manimal | "Chains of Fury" | Chains of Fury 5 | amidst the ruins of anger |
| 2021-10-22 | 63 | Burning Point | "Rules the Universe" | Arsonist of the Soul | and the retrospective bureaucracy of the burned. |
| 2021-10-22 | 64 | Serious Black | "Rock with Us Tonight" | Rock with Us Tonight +1 | This song, ludicent and grandiculous, |
| 2021-10-22 | 65 | Symphony Of Sweden | "Angels" | single | can carry us out of here, |
| 2021-10-22 | 66 | Groundbreaker | "There's No Tomorrow" | single | out of this relentless year. |
| 2021-10-15 | 15 | NEMOPHILA | "REVIVE" | single | All games are constructed so that the game-pieces may leave the game, |
| 2021-10-15 | 16 | FEST VAINQUEUR | "Gerbera" | BOUQUET | and the players may not. |
| 2021-10-15 | 17 | Esprit D'Air | "双方ライアー" | 双方ライアー 6 | The best games disguise this as inevitability |
| 2021-10-15 | 18 | SHOW-YA | "EYE to EYE" | single | in the hopes that you will forget |
| 2021-10-15 | 19 | Temperance | "Breaking the Rules of Heavy Metal" | Breaking the Rules of Heavy Metal +1 | you are playing. |
| 2021-10-15 | 20 | Last Days of Eden | "Abracadabra" | Butterflies | Thus the best magic is violational, |
| 2021-10-15 | 21 | The Murder of My Sweet | "A Ghost of a Chance" | single | not disregarding the rules but regarding them |
| 2021-10-15 | 22 | Embersland | "Harbouring Me" | The Harbour In Me | until they flinch, |
| 2021-10-15 | 23 | Elisaday | "Fire or Ice" | Auftakt 4 | and then reaching into this momentary weakness |
| 2021-10-15 | 24 | Fleesh | "Let It Burn" | Eclipsed | with swords and fire and amendments and mercilessness. |
| 2021-10-15 | 25 | Manora | "System Shutdown" | Brave The Storm | You will have chances to inherit other idealists' conceptual mistakes, |
| 2021-10-15 | 26 | Manora | "Endgame" | Brave The Storm | and what you gather you can disassemble. |
| 2021-10-15 | 27 | Blind Summit | "Pontos" | Hell 3 | Measure your reach by swinging hammers |
| 2021-10-15 | 28 | Jim Peterik And World Stage | "A Cappella" | single | and listening to how they pass through the air, first, on their way anywhere. |
| 2021-10-15 | 29 | Mhelyssa | "Si Una Vez" | single | The dead have one day, |
| 2021-10-15 | 30 | Dead Venus | "Plaything Doll - Single Cut" | single | the rest are ours; |
| 2021-10-15 | 31 | Lutharo | "What Sleeps in Your Mind" | Hiraeth | the nights are contested, |
| 2021-10-15 | 32 | Lords of Black | "Maker of Nothingness" | Alchemy of Souls, Pt. II | but uncertain only by our tiered and tired grace. |
| 2021-10-15 | 33 | Brundarkh | "Tower of Blood" | Haunted Worlds 6 | Measure your enemies by the view from their fortifications, |
| 2021-10-15 | 34 | Skeletoon | "Outatime" | The 1.21 Gigawatts Club | as you pass beyond it. |
| 2021-10-15 | 35 | Rhapsody Of Fire | "Terial the Hawk" | single | We do not invest in standing still, |
| 2021-10-15 | 36 | Leverage | "Falling out of Grace" | Above the Beyond | we sink under the weight of our treasure. |
| 2021-10-15 | 37 | Astray Valley | "The Architect" | Tales of Lun 6 | Dragons are our cautionary tales, |
| 2021-10-15 | 39 | Omnium Gatherum | "Fortitude" | single | despite the balance of their scales. |
| 2021-10-15 | 40 | Anomalie | "Trance V: Cerulean Sun" | single | The coiled have a catacomb apiece; |
| 2021-10-15 | 41 | Detset | "The Mechanic" | single | the scorched and splintered new towns are ours. |
| 2021-10-15 | 70 | A.A. Williams | "Cold" | arco 4 | and see how it has furiously recapitulated mercy within its void. |
| 2021-10-15 | 71 | Illudium | "Where Death and Dreams Do Manifest" | Ash of the Womb | The further north or south you go, the slower you have to run to stand still, |
| 2021-10-15 | 72 | Ethereal Shroud | "Discarnate" | single | until you reach the point in the game where the rules are all obviated. |
| 2021-10-15 | 73 | Vildhjarta | "lavender haze" | måsstaden under vatten | The rocks that spin above us have endless hours, and dream of declining; |
| 2021-10-15 | 74 | Outrun The Sunlight | "Emerald Joy" | Emerald Joy +1 | below them we elegantly disintegrate in too-brief moments |
| 2021-10-15 | 75 | Mickosis | "Aiur" | single | of heroic aspiration, |
| 2021-10-08 | 33 | The Warning | "DISCIPLE" | MAYDAY 6 | or any other armageddon-cult stipulations. |
| 2021-10-08 | 35 | Helion Prime | "Wash Away" | Question Everything: Special Edition | to have a path to follow, |
| 2021-10-08 | 36 | We Are the Catalyst | "Tro" | Tro 6 | and you don't need that path to lead back to where you started. |
| 2021-10-08 | 37 | Naraka | "Mother of Shadows" | In Tenebris | I would like to hear your song about pixels, |
| 2021-10-08 | 38 | Кипелов | "Часы Судного дня" | Часы Судного дня +3 | not because I care more about pixels than books, |
| 2021-10-08 | 39 | Wildways | "Ветивер (feat. polnalyubvi)" | single | or more about vetiver than amaranth, |
| 2021-10-08 | 40 | Frozen Shield | "The Greatest Journey" | single | but because any reason is enough reason for another song. |
| 2021-10-08 | 41 | Anaria | "Golden Crown" | single | A guy who sketched ornithopters |
| 2021-10-08 | 42 | Beneath The Silence | "Nowhere to Go" | single | would have been in line at the Apple Store for every new iPad, |
| 2021-10-08 | 43 | Kandia | "The Flood" | single | glancing nervously at his watch, wondering how long until this elevation is submerged. |
| 2021-10-08 | 44 | Catalyst Crime | "Cognitive Dissonance" | single | Time for how many more ideas? |
| 2021-10-08 | 47 | CROSS VEIN | "Black Fairytale" | single | You will always fear the version of yourself you saw in whatever antihero |
| 2021-10-08 | 48 | Blinding Sunrise | "Dreamin' on" | single | you first discovered when you were 10: |
| 2021-10-08 | 68 | CrowsAlive | "Smoke Signal" | Twilight World | Let it begin now, |
| 2021-10-08 | 69 | Sara | "Irtoavat leuat" | single | with apologies and divestiture |
| 2021-10-08 | 70 | Voidfallen | "Remnants of the Heart" | The Atlas of Spiritual Apocalypse | and new bakeries opened by people willing to start a business during a pandemic |
| 2021-10-08 | 71 | Kallomäki | "Tyrty veri, seiso!" | single | or a fraught era of decline. |
| 2021-10-08 | 72 | Teramaze | "Blood of Fools" | And the Beauty They Perceive | We will be nostalgic for some of even these days, eventually, |
| 2021-10-08 | 73 | Skeletoon | "Holding On" | single | for how it felt to think, episodically, |
| 2021-10-08 | 74 | 616 | "Code & Key" | single | that we knew which errands were dangerous or unprotected, |
| 2021-10-08 | 75 | Edge Of Haze | "The Other Side" | single | which skepticisms were grounded or performative. |
| 2021-10-08 | 76 | Hegemon | "Mellonta Tauta" | Sidereus Nuncius | We will tell a version of this in which the nights were darker than nights had ever been, |
| 2021-10-08 | 77 | Dead by April | "Anything at All" | single | not because the nights were darker, or even notable for their darkness, |
| 2021-10-08 | 78 | Morbid Mechanics | "Nanotechno" | Between the Tomb and the Womb | but because a scary story needs a cue for the listeners to draw in, |
| 2021-10-08 | 79 | Skar | "Torn from the Heavens" | single | closer to the warmths of the narrative fire |
| 2021-10-08 | 80 | The Algorithm | "Readonly" | Readonly +3 | and each other's laptops, |
| 2021-10-08 | 81 | Olympus Lenticular | "Infinite Genesis" | Artificial Apex | ready for something new to be created or revealed, |
| 2021-10-08 | 82 | Malrun | "The Mask of Joy" | Pandemonium | or protected by alluringly nominal concealment. |
| 2021-10-08 | 83 | Veil Of Maya | "Outrun" | single | You can try to write rock songs about something other than the feeling of air against your skin |
| 2021-10-08 | 84 | Houston | "I Will Not Give in to Despair" | IV | as you run, |
| 2021-10-08 | 85 | Eclipse | "Roses on Your Grave" | Wired | as long as you don't mind hearing people sing them wrong |
| 2021-10-08 | 86 | Akasha | "Mejor Que Ayer" | single | as they explain why they love them. |
| 2021-10-08 | 102 | Norse | "Zero Insight" | Ascetic | and "shut up and I'll tell you" |
| 2021-10-08 | 103 | Metsatöll | "Mees Kes Teadis Ussisõnu" | single | and "measure a distant country's airport by whether its bookstore has one secret shelf of books that could have been written nowhere else". |
| 2021-10-08 | 124 | Aryem | "La Asamblea de las Aves" | The Bird's Assembly | Stand up, and look down, and they are the lines of a picture we drew of what we imagined we looked like when we thought there was a forever in the sky and that's what we built the wall to reach. |
| 2021-10-01 | 21 | Mary's Blood | "Be Myself" | Mary's Blood | that conceals the way the giving hand |
| 2021-10-01 | 22 | Beast In Black | "One Night In Tokyo" | One Night in Tokyo 2 | as it pulls lingeringly away |
| 2021-10-01 | 23 | The Spider Accomplice | "Clinging to Your Skin" | single | along the curve of our hip |
| 2021-10-01 | 24 | AfterTime | "Infinite Legacy" | single | steals context from an unguarded pocket. |
| 2021-10-01 | 25 | Rubén Kelsen | "Tierras del Sur" | single | False agency is the power to make decisions |
| 2021-10-01 | 26 | Supernova Plasmajets | "Take Me to the Underground" | single | without the information required to make them properly. |
| 2021-10-01 | 27 | Lords of the Trident | "The Touch" | single | Once you can sell someone this pointless notion of freedom, |
| 2021-10-01 | 28 | Ghost | "Hunter’s Moon" | single | it is a trivial optimization to also detach the decisions from consequence. |
| 2021-10-01 | 29 | Within Progress | "Absolute Circle" | single | Real evil is encoded into corroded infrastructure |
| 2021-10-01 | 30 | Feuerschwanz | "Untot im Drachenboot" | single | that perpetuates convenient inequity |
| 2021-10-01 | 31 | Sorbus | "Glapp" | single | through the bombastic application of simultaneously immaterial and underinformed whim |
| 2021-10-01 | 32 | Teramaze | "Untide" | single | disguised as diligent judgment. |
| 2021-10-01 | 33 | Windom End | "Equality" | For Better Times | Facebook didn't set out to intentionally amplify apocalyptic disinformation. |
| 2021-10-01 | 34 | MØL | "Vestige" | Vestige +2 | It just built a teeming seemingly-walled city guarded by nominal sentries equiped only to recognize slavering wolves, |
| 2021-10-01 | 35 | Lucifer Ascending | "Jovian People's Liberation Front" | single | and armed only to repel lost pets. |
| 2021-10-01 | 36 | The Moor | "Emissaries" | single | Modern media aspire to the form of a victrola |
| 2021-10-01 | 37 | Exist Immortal | "Epiphany" | Act Three - Water 3 | whose horn clamps sphincterially around your head, |
| 2021-10-01 | 38 | Lords of Black | "Bound to You" | single | and nudges into your limp hand a stiff button |
| 2021-10-01 | 39 | Demigod Unleashed | "Silence" | single | that does only Pause and Play, |
| 2021-10-01 | 40 | Hypocrisy | "Dead World" | Dead World +1 | where Pause means "now admit that you're trying to sell me something", |
| 2021-10-01 | 41 | Atlas | "Uhri" | Uhri +3 | and Play means "now put your hand over the price tag", |
| 2021-10-01 | 42 | Schavot | "Tussen muren" | Galgenbrok | and both states play music |
| 2021-10-01 | 43 | Converge | "Blood Moon" | single | for every reason other than its inherent and essential avenging majesty. |
| 2021-10-01 | 44 | Full Of Hell | "Celestial Hierarch" | Garden of Burning Apparitions | Restorative moral reasoning begins with the realization that music sounds better |
| 2021-10-01 | 45 | The Sound That Ends Creation | "I Hate ICE, I Don't Even Put It In My Water" | single | with air to vibrate, |
| 2021-10-01 | 46 | Archspire | "Drone Corpse Aviator" | single | not with shrieking metal pressed against your skull. |
| 2021-09-24 | 1 | The Warning | "MARTIRIO" | MARTIRIO +2 | I like singing more than I like the absence of singing, |
| 2021-09-24 | 2 | Madame Mayhem | "I Am More" | single | and I probably don't literally prefer that it be done in languages I can't easily follow, |
| 2021-09-24 | 3 | RedHook | "Sentimental Surgery" | single | but I never hear a song that isn't in English and think "I wish this were in English". |
| 2021-09-24 | 4 | Memoremains | "Sympathy" | single | Whereas with songs in English, which is the only language where I can often tell what singers are saying, |
| 2021-09-24 | 5 | Aryem | "Forbidden Love" | Forbidden Love +2 | I often think "I wish this had better lyrics". |
| 2021-09-24 | 6 | Dream Ocean | "Dark Miracles" | The Missing Stone | I do sometimes look up translations of songs in other languages, |
| 2021-09-24 | 7 | Sertraline | "Vivid" | single | and am sometimes disappointed, |
| 2021-09-24 | 8 | Machinae Supremacy | "Pendulum" | single | but I just shrug and forget, |
| 2021-09-24 | 17 | Dream Theater | "Invisible Monster" | single | or construct this moment |
| 2021-09-24 | 18 | Rivers of Nihil | "Maybe One Day" | The Work | and set it free. |
| 2021-09-24 | 19 | Teramaze | "And the Beauty They Perceive" | single | We can learn to speak the truth, |
| 2021-09-24 | 20 | ShadowStrike | "Fables and Folklore" | Fables & Folklore | but we can choose to lie. |
| 2021-09-24 | 21 | Volbeat | "Shotgun Blues" | Shotgun Blues +2 | Songs pass serenely through both our abilities and our weaknesses, |
| 2021-09-24 | 22 | World Without | "Divided" | Light 4 | and suggest that so could we. |
| 2021-09-24 | 23 | As the Sun Falls | "Last Days of Light" | Last Days of Light | The underrated corrolary to humanism's acceptance of others, |
| 2021-09-24 | 24 | Cosmophobe | "Delusions of Grandeur" | The Tragedy of Being | and the reason I prefer not to imagine transcendence as an ascetic reduction, |
| 2021-09-24 | 25 | Omnium Gatherum | "Reckoning" | single | is that your past and potential selves are also equal. |
| 2021-09-24 | 26 | Swallow The Sun | "Woven into Sorrow" | Woven into Sorrow +1 | We are creatures of potential, |
| 2021-09-24 | 27 | Surturs Lohe | "Mimes Reigen" | Wielandstahl | not in the way that arctic wolves are creatures of the snow, |
| 2021-09-24 | 28 | Succumb | "Maenad" | XXI | but in the way that angels are creatures of vengeance, |
| 2021-09-24 | 29 | Skepticism | "Passage" | Companion | visible only in transit between motivation and dispensation. |
| 2021-09-24 | 30 | Doedsvangr | "Black Dragon Phoenix" | single | You can end a song; |
| 2021-09-24 | 31 | LLNN | "Imperial" | Unmaker | it can just start again. |
| 2021-09-24 | 32 | Ereb Altor | "Vargtimman" | single | There is no destructive version of hearing. |
| 2021-09-24 | 33 | Guadaña | "Guerreros de la Tempestad" | single | If you want to avoid hearing your enemy, you have to learn to sing their song |
| 2021-09-17 | 2 | Tulip | "Bird Set Free" | The Witch | to catalogue the sounds of breath drawn in and then blasted back out, |
| 2021-09-17 | 3 | Edge Of Paradise | "Tidal Wave" | The Unknown | to compensate for their scarcity with ranks and lists. |
| 2021-09-17 | 4 | Whyzdom | "Wanderers and Dreamers" | Of Wonders and Wars | If you have 100 records, making top-10s is a way of suggesting that 100 is profligate abundance, |
| 2021-09-17 | 5 | We Are the Catalyst | "Drowning" | single | that you know enough, |
| 2021-09-17 | 7 | Synthwailer | "Concrete Roses" | single | with expensive speakers and even-more-expensive speaker-cables. |
| 2021-09-17 | 8 | Feelament | "Dig" | single | Small worlds, only ever reluctantly expanded: |
| 2021-09-17 | 9 | Illudium | "Aster" | single | what could distant suns offer that we don't already have in Pretzel Logic or Purple Rain? |
| 2021-09-17 | 10 | Fate DeStroyed | "Death Signs" | single | There's nothing up there to see, nothing that's cool. |
| 2021-09-17 | 11 | Paralandra | "Only Human" | single | Of course I'm still the same organism, with the same taxonomical urges, |
| 2021-09-17 | 15 | Thulcandra | "Funeral Pyre" | single | It's less that pieces of us die |
| 2021-09-17 | 16 | Aephanemer | "Panta Rhei" | single | than that we finally realize they are stuck on with preconceptions, |
| 2021-09-17 | 17 | Cynic | "Mythical Serpents" | single | or with legend and fear, |
| 2021-09-17 | 18 | Amarok | "Surreal" | single | and with the right solvent can be removed. |
| 2021-09-17 | 19 | Imperialist | "Terminal Odyssey" | single | The divestiture of armor is not a deathwish, |
| 2021-09-17 | 20 | ATRÆ BILIS | "To Entomb the Aetherworld" | single | but the shortest and most difficult journey |
| 2021-09-17 | 21 | Havukruunu | "Kuu Erkylän Yllä" | single | to an inconceivable destination an inch away. |
| 2021-09-17 | 22 | Shadecrown | "Dark Heart Replica" | Solitarian | Civilization is a factory for distracting metaphors |
| 2021-09-17 | 23 | Saturnian Mist | "Chaos is the Law" | Shamatanic | of difference and distance |
| 2021-09-17 | 24 | Cradle Of Filth | "Necromantic Fantasies" | Necromantic Fantasies +1 | delivered to the air around our heads, |
| 2021-09-17 | 25 | coldrain | "PARADISE (Kill The Silence)" | PARADISE (Kill The Silence) 6 | already filled with whizzing debris in forgotten orbits, |
| 2021-09-17 | 26 | Unlucky Morpheus | ""M" Revolution" | "M" Revolution +1 | but the opposite of civilization is not clarity, |
| 2021-09-17 | 70 | Ghostheart Nebula | "Ascension, Pt. III Nebula" | Ascension | from your nameless limbo. |
| 2021-09-10 | 1 | Temperance | "Pure Life Unfolds" | single | I have been waiting, since the invention of death metal, for life metal. |
| 2021-09-10 | 2 | Ignea | "Mermaids" | single | Rebellions always clarify the powers they resist, |
| 2021-09-10 | 3 | The Dead Deads | "Sea Beast" | Tell Your Girls It's Alright | whether this ends decisively or digressively. |
| 2021-09-10 | 4 | Anette Olzon | "Bye Bye Bye" | Strong | But I mean more by "life" than gothic-symphonic- or pop-melodic-: |
| 2021-09-10 | 5 | Seven Spires | "Ghost of Yesterday" | Gods of Debauchery | something intrinsically viridian, |
| 2021-09-10 | 6 | Averlanche | "Archiv der Liebe" | single | inflected by vitality in exactly the way gothic is limned in melancholy; |
| 2021-09-10 | 7 | The Number Zero | "Reverse Magic" | single | something that takes the reversal of doomed grimness into epic magnificence |
| 2021-09-10 | 8 | Eva Under Fire | "Comatose (feat. Jonathan Dörr of Ego Kill Talent)" | single | and completes the transition by also reversing the fall of angels |
| 2021-09-10 | 9 | Fallcie | "Alone with the Beast" | single | so that they rise, |
| 2021-09-10 | 10 | The Agonist | "Remnants in Time" | single | and that they are us. |
| 2021-09-10 | 11 | Tali Dennerstein | "Apathy" | single | We have had anthems of reconciliation, |
| 2021-09-10 | 14 | BAND-MAID | "Sense(TV Size Ver.)" | single | we have inlayed superflat ribbon-engines |
| 2021-09-10 | 17 | Gacharic Spin | "Dear_____" | Gacharic Spin | out of moments of irresolution. |
| 2021-09-10 | 18 | a crowd of rebellion | "DISTRESS" | single | We have made bright swords out of melting ice. |
| 2021-09-10 | 28 | The Body | "Blackest Crow" | single | We have walked up to the gates of the abyss |
| 2021-09-10 | 29 | Pentakill | "Lost Chapter" | III: Lost Chapter | with ambivalent legions at our back, |
| 2021-09-10 | 30 | Bloodred Hourglass | "Kings & Queens" | Kings & Queens +3 | and itemized our usurpational claims. |
| 2021-09-10 | 31 | Exist Immortal | "Dive" | single | You can be forgiven for taking this as validation of the structures of rule. |
| 2021-09-10 | 32 | Teramaze | "Modern Living Space" | single | Most of our social innovations have been ways to ship these structures around |
| 2021-09-10 | 33 | Cosmophobe | "To Mourn Forever" | single | in flat packs, requiring only cartoon instructions for self-assembly; |
| 2021-09-10 | 34 | Scarlet Aura | "The Book of Scarlet" | Genesis of Time | ways to reconceive your own viable luxuries as entitlements |
| 2021-09-10 | 35 | Asuryan | "Eternal Crusade" | single | in order to forgive the systemically entitled for the system; |
| 2021-09-10 | 36 | Majestica | "Metal United" | single | ways to unite around aesthetic flags |
| 2021-09-10 | 37 | The Lightbringer of Sweden | "Free the Angels" | single | and freedom as an assertional vibe instead of an aspirational hypothetical; |
| 2021-09-10 | 38 | Mägo de Oz | "Al Abordaje" | Bandera Negra | ways to join inertiae in progress. |
| 2021-09-10 | 39 | 616 | "Lidwin" | single | We have long had the technology to romanticize despair, |
| 2021-09-10 | 40 | Seraphim Shock | "Angel Grey" | single | to diminish suffering by sharing it, |
| 2021-09-10 | 41 | Zeolite | "Sculpture of Torment" | Sculpture of Torment +2 | but in the process reifying it, |
| 2021-09-10 | 42 | Hypocrisy | "Chemical Whore" | single | or at least encouraging it to think of itself as real, |
| 2021-09-10 | 43 | Inferi | "No Gods but Our Flesh" | Vile Genesis | and thus to have claim to all of our privileges. |
| 2021-09-10 | 44 | Calugarul | "Drag the Storms Along" | single | Claims, privileges, limited resources, impending storms: |
| 2021-09-10 | 45 | Anomalie | "Trance II: Relics" | single | this is the cosmology of the demonic, |
| 2021-09-10 | 46 | Ghostheart Nebula | "Mira" | single | the perverse canonization of grandeur as funereal, |
| 2021-09-10 | 47 | La Mer | "Man Has A Hole In His Heart" | Everything Is Falling Apart | the divination of flaws. |
| 2021-09-10 | 48 | LLNN | "Desecrator" | single | Enter into no scam elysium scored by endless peaceful pianos. |
| 2021-09-10 | 95 | The HU | "Through the Never" | single | All these misleading perspectives are ways of retrieving problematic histories and trying to do them over. |
| 2021-09-03 | 1 | Archspire | "Bleed the Future" | single | Talking about music as background or foreground |
| 2021-09-03 | 2 | The Sound That Ends Creation | "You're A Loose Cannon, But You Get Results" | single | risks an inverse synesthesia, |
| 2021-09-03 | 3 | ONI INC. | "Always Wishing, Always Waiting" | Always Wishing, Always Waiting +1 | notionally transposing aural integrativity into visual occlusion. |
| 2021-09-03 | 4 | Sarke | "Bleak Reflections" | single | Sound, like love, does not stop at objects, |
| 2021-09-03 | 5 | Negură Bunget | "Brad - Single Edit" | single | but surrounds and suffuses them, |
| 2021-09-03 | 6 | Rise to the Sky | "The Loss of Hope" | Per Aspera Ad Astra | and thus recruits them into its own joys. |
| 2021-09-03 | 7 | Alkonost | "Solntse" | single | You can sit with your back to a revolutionary mural |
| 2021-09-03 | 8 | Galwem | "Ouça Minha Voz" | Ouça Minha Voz +1 | and it will offer no comment on your complacencies. |
| 2021-09-03 | 9 | Hadadanza | "El Brebaje" | single | But put rebel anthems in your headphones, |
| 2021-09-03 | 12 | Beast In Black | "Moonlight Rendezvous" | single | Of course it can be done, |
| 2021-09-03 | 13 | Lords of Black | "What's Become of Us" | single | you can cultivate evil to a reverent soundtrack, |
| 2021-09-03 | 14 | Vega | "Beautiful Lie" | single | or string diaphonous lattices of sugar to the accompaniment of corrosive cacophonies, |
| 2021-09-03 | 15 | Adamantia | "Nuestro Primer Día Aquí" | Anhelos del Alma | but not in the same trivial way that you can think darkly in a white-walled room. |
| 2021-09-03 | 16 | Last Days of Eden | "The Garden" | single | This is also true of the scents of viridian potential |
| 2021-09-03 | 17 | Elisaday | "Inner War" | single | or narcissistic decay. |
| 2021-09-03 | 18 | Whyzdom | "Notre Dame" | single | I feel no less atheistic in the grandest cathedrals, |
| 2021-09-03 | 19 | Tezaura | "Scarecrows" | single | but less isolationist in even the smallest unfamiliar towns. |
| 2021-09-03 | 20 | RinRin | "Shadows" | Episode 1 5 | Community is harmonic |
| 2021-09-03 | 22 | Esprit D'Air | "津波" | 津波 5 | Sightseeing is literal, and thus inherently virtualizable, |
| 2021-09-03 | 58 | Mashudu Nematoka | "Sila Li Funwa Nga Muambari" | single | that already has the metal in a glass case, |
| 2021-09-03 | 65 | Korpiklaani | "Ennen" | single | gradually and incrementally become recognizable as them, |
| 2021-08-27 | 11 | Matenrou Opera | "Owaranunamidanoumide" | Owaranu namidano umide 3 | And then you have to decide what to say |
| 2021-08-27 | 12 | Murder in Greenvale | "STAY" | single | about everything. |
| 2021-08-27 | 13 | Edge Of Paradise | "False Idols" | single | We are so close to our better selves: |
| 2021-08-27 | 14 | Ad Infinitum | "Unstoppable" | single | their skin warm against our knives, |
| 2021-08-27 | 15 | Windrunner | "Mahogany" | single | their blood sinuous and coiled, |
| 2021-08-27 | 16 | VENUES | "Razorblade Teeth" | Solace | our yearnings folded into steel. |
| 2021-08-27 | 17 | The Great Discord | "Dies Irae" | single | We can start to speak intelligibly, |
| 2021-08-27 | 18 | Omnium Gatherum | "Paragon" | single | however tragically speculatively, |
| 2021-08-27 | 19 | Dawn Of Solace | "White Noise" | single | about peace, |
| 2021-08-27 | 20 | MØL | "Serf" | Serf +1 | but still end up screaming. |
| 2021-08-27 | 21 | Thyrfing | "Håg och minne" | Vanagandr | The things all stories share are the illusion that the past has a boundary, |
| 2021-08-27 | 22 | Doedsvangr | "As the Rivers Bleed Their Blessings" | single | and the conceit that we can look over it from beyond. |
| 2021-08-27 | 23 | Obscurity | "Wodanaz Kriger" | SKOGARMAORS | True advances in weaponry |
| 2021-08-27 | 24 | Banshee | "Let the Light Decay" | single | are methods for stretching larger canvases |
| 2021-08-27 | 25 | Wormwitch | "Canadian Denim Mountain Attack" | Wolf Hex | for war painting, |
| 2021-08-27 | 26 | Windfaerer | "Oxalá" | Breaths of Elder Dawns | not better logistics for shipping cases of guns |
| 2021-08-27 | 27 | Fluisteraars | "Het overvleugelen der meute" | Gegrepen Door de Geest der Zielsontluiking | to a knife fight |
| 2021-08-27 | 29 | Boris | "Fundamental Erorr" | No | "Didn't you already write a loud song about noise?" |
| 2021-08-27 | 30 | Rivers of Nihil | "Focus" | single | Yes! Do you like those? We have more! |
| 2021-08-27 | 31 | Leprous | "Out of Here" | Aphelion | Didn't we already fight this war? |
| 2021-08-27 | 32 | TesseracT | "Concealing Fate Parts 1, 2 & 3 - P O R T A L S" | PORTALS | Yes, and it didn't help. How long would a song have to be |
| 2021-08-27 | 33 | Aisles | "Megalomania" | single | for you to accept it in place of violence? |
| 2021-08-27 | 75 | Boris | "Genesis" | No | Divinity and mortality start the same way: |
| 2021-08-27 | 79 | Megaraptor | "Jolene" | single | but so will the things you disclaim or disown, |
| 2021-08-20 | 14 | Anette Olzon | "Fantastic Fanatic" | single | All of these mythologies obtain because we cope in metaphor and choruses, |
| 2021-08-20 | 15 | Slania | "Limbo" | single | and maybe are not really good at anything else. |
| 2021-08-20 | 16 | Viana | "Kukkuvutit" | Sinnattuinnarusukkaluarpunga | The vastness of the ice is not the canvas for our love, |
| 2021-08-20 | 18 | Kyros | "Behind the Lines" | RECOVER | and so is every complex evasion, |
| 2021-08-20 | 19 | Divided Island | "Error 404" | single | compound failure, |
| 2021-08-20 | 20 | The Last Martyr | "Afterglow" | single | cathartic survival |
| 2021-08-20 | 21 | Oceanhoarse | "Betrayed by Light" | Dead Reckoning | or cathartic irresolution that might still be survival |
| 2021-08-20 | 22 | Skagarack | "Reclaim Your Life" | single | if we wait for the right declarative moment. |
| 2021-08-20 | 23 | Second Reign | "Fire" | single | The sky is our limitlessness, |
| 2021-08-20 | 24 | Iron Maiden | "Stratego" | Stratego +1 | our most literal deism, |
| 2021-08-20 | 25 | Mentalist | "Evil Eye" | A Journey into the Unknown | our most inescapable fear. |
| 2021-08-20 | 26 | Stormhunter | "Last Words" | Crime and Punishment | Beneath, we are indistinguishable |
| 2021-08-20 | 27 | Soen | "Virtue" | Lotus | from each other, from weather, |
| 2021-08-20 | 28 | I124Q | "Eqqissivoq" | Saperavit | from climate or geology, |
| 2021-08-20 | 29 | A Pregnant Light | "Mr. Natural" | single | from contour or apocalypse, |
| 2021-08-20 | 30 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Masters of Rain and Storm" | Primordial Arcana | from cause or consequence. |
| 2021-08-20 | 31 | Deafheaven | "Lament for Wasps" | Infinite Granite | Our ambassadors will not be sent to explain our destiny to aliens, |
| 2021-08-20 | 33 | Mroh | "Revelation" | single | and futile scripture |
| 2021-08-20 | 34 | Profeci | "Bojaźń i drżenie" | single | and cryptic rage. |
| 2021-08-20 | 77 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Skyclad Passage - Bonus Track" | Primordial Arcana | didn't carry you alone, manifestly, out of the storm into something above storms. |
| 2021-08-13 | 20 | DAIDA LAIDA | "Liar" | Evolution second shot 3 | that they have internalized inhumanity |
| 2021-08-13 | 21 | Equilibrium | "Revolution" | single | inside armor that makes them feel superhuman, |
| 2021-08-13 | 22 | Dream Theater | "The Alien" | single | any more than I know how to separate a zealot |
| 2021-08-13 | 23 | Aryem | "You Are Insane" | You Are Insane +2 | from the doctrines that allow them to believe |
| 2021-08-13 | 24 | Tulip | "Clone" | single | that they need to listen to nothing else. |
| 2021-08-13 | 28 | Sugar Horse | "Shouting Judas At Bob Dylan" | single | forgive themselves |
| 2021-08-13 | 29 | Unreqvited | "All is Lost" | Beautiful Ghosts | amidst the clattering swords forged uselessly for |
| 2021-08-13 | 30 | Kalmhain | "March of Destruction" | Thanatos I | never forgiving other people |
| 2021-08-13 | 31 | Obscurity | "Ethnogenese" | single | by never looking them anywhere but in their necks. |
| 2021-08-13 | 32 | The Zenith Passage | "Algorithmic Salvation" | single | No amount of math will measure away our definitional flaws. |
| 2021-08-13 | 33 | Bellwethr | "In Forests We'll Lie (Redux)" | single | We have lain in these random forests before, |
| 2021-08-13 | 34 | Fluisteraars | "Brand woedt in mijn graf" | single | have left our fallen in these fields |
| 2021-08-13 | 35 | Corpus Vitreum | "Old Wars" | Old Wars +1 | after wars we talk about as distant lights |
| 2021-08-13 | 36 | Monarch | "Northern Star" | Monarch | during nights lit by nothing else. |
| 2021-08-13 | 37 | Skepticism | "The Swan and the Raven" | single | We are the creatures who fight, |
| 2021-08-13 | 64 | From the Depth | "What Is Love" | single | than falling in love so grandly that for a moment we forget. |
| 2021-08-06 | 30 | Leecher | "Blind and Frozen" | single | in an acknowledged universe. |
| 2021-08-06 | 53 | Shiva | "Hu ka" | Hu ka +1 | endlessly and goallessly, |
| 2021-08-06 | 54 | Delacroix | "JYOUHUTOICE -UNREAL CONTROL-" | single | cheerfully obliterating unseen bedrock |
| 2021-08-06 | 55 | Enslaved | "Caravans to the Outer Worlds" | single | we will probably eventually need, |
| 2021-08-06 | 56 | Soen | "Thurifer" | Thurifer +1 | in order to make a tunnel |
| 2021-08-06 | 57 | TesseracT | "Tourniquet - P O R T A L S" | single | that can take us to one distant dream-point |
| 2021-08-06 | 59 | Cruzh | "Paralyzed" | Tropical Thunder | as if nowhere else matters |
| 2021-08-06 | 60 | Leverage | "Emperor" | single | and we aspire to relocate ourselves without actually traveling. |
| 2021-08-06 | 61 | Vega | "Ain't Who I Am" | single | "The hero takes a journey", we say, |
| 2021-08-06 | 62 | Mayank | "Billy is on the Run" | Mayank | closing the book and putting it back on a shelf, |
| 2021-08-06 | 63 | Porta Inferi CZ | "Vrať se nám - Radio Edit" | single | but this is extreme survivor bias: |
| 2021-08-06 | 64 | HJELVIK | "Synkverving" | single | most heroes become heroic by walking through unfamiliar lands |
| 2021-08-06 | 65 | Blood Red Throne | "Conquered Malevolence" | Conquered Malevolence +1 | and then returning to familiar ones. |
| 2021-08-06 | 66 | Agrypnie | "Am Ende der Welt - Teil 1" | Metamorphosis | The hairy-footed people who come to your country |
| 2021-08-06 | 67 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)" | Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire) +2 | in order to throw their problematic thrash into your mountain |
| 2021-08-06 | 68 | Ghostheart Nebula | "Ascension, Pt. II My Burial Dream" | single | are not your heroes, |
| 2021-08-06 | 69 | Rise to the Sky | "Life in Suspense" | single | and their memoirs of their homecomings |
| 2021-08-06 | 70 | Helheim | "WoduridaR" | single | share characters with your creation myths, |
| 2021-08-06 | 71 | Deafheaven | "In Blur" | In Blur +2 | but are not their sequels. |
| 2021-08-06 | 72 | Waldgeflüster | "Im Ebersberger Forst" | single | Under gray moon I saw you, |
| 2021-08-06 | 73 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "Not here" | Not Here | and then the moon exploded, |
| 2021-08-06 | 74 | Vessel of Iniquity | "A Glimpse of the Pattern" | The Doorway | its dust meteoring down at us in atmospheric sigils of fire, |
| 2021-08-06 | 75 | Archspire | "Golden Mouth of Ruin" | single | like the teeth of a void made of |
| 2021-08-06 | 76 | The Sound That Ends Creation | "Get Your Shirt Off... It's Pervert Time" | single | mouths, |
| 2021-08-06 | 77 | Full Of Hell | "Industrial Messiah Complex" | single | like descending saviors |
| 2021-08-06 | 79 | Alkonost | "Птица" | single | on the way to landing as smouldering lumps |
| 2021-08-06 | 80 | Bucovina | "Tăriile Văzduhului" | single | in horizonal fields. |
| 2021-08-06 | 95 | The Longing | "White Rabbit" | single | logic and proportion, |
| 2021-07-30 | 25 | King Woman | "Celestial Blues" | Celestial Blues | is not that each of us in our matte albedos |
| 2021-07-30 | 26 | The Body | "Polly Gosford" | single | will have constellations strung around us. |
| 2021-07-30 | 27 | Leprous | "The Silent Revelation" | single | It is not the inane assurance that universal fame will be bestowed on us all at once, |
| 2021-07-30 | 28 | Soen | "Thurifer" | Thurifer +1 | and thus cannot be faulted for whatever infinitesimal fraction it obliquely permits to exist on existence. |
| 2021-07-30 | 29 | Loch Vostok | "The Freedom Paradox" | Opus Ferox - The Great Escape | The internet is not an integrally economic device, |
| 2021-07-30 | 30 | Cosmophobe | "Presence" | Presence +3 | but an empathic one. |
| 2021-07-30 | 31 | Rivers of Nihil | "Clean" | single | It does not seek to free us, |
| 2021-07-30 | 32 | Lantlôs | "Cocoon Tree House" | Wildhund | but rather exactly to bind us |
| 2021-07-30 | 33 | Netherbird | "Atrium of the Storm" | Arete | together. |
| 2021-07-30 | 34 | Succumb | "Okeanos" | single | Behave as if you will be famous for your next trivial action or gesture, |
| 2021-07-30 | 35 | Ghostheart Nebula | "Ascension, Pt. I Cosmic River" | single | for the way bits of expensive cheese fall out of a sandwich listing neglectedly in your left hand |
| 2021-07-30 | 36 | Teeth | "Dreamless Hieroglyphs" | Dreamless Hieroglyphs +1 | as you struggle to collate misdispensed napkins with your right, |
| 2021-07-30 | 37 | Necrofier | "The Black Flame Burns" | single | for how you flinch when attacked by mistake, |
| 2021-07-30 | 38 | Cradle Of Filth | "Crawling King Chaos" | single | for the unexpected grace with which you deflect an unwanted fate |
| 2021-07-30 | 39 | Loch Vostok | "Seize the Night" | Opus Ferox - The Great Escape | or heron. |
| 2021-07-30 | 44 | Jinjer | "Mediator" | Mediator +1 | that are irrelevant to projection, |
| 2021-07-30 | 45 | Edge Of Paradise | "The Unknown" | single | but physics to the grounded. |
| 2021-07-30 | 46 | Last Days of Eden | "Silence" | single | Have you noticed the common qualities of all promised lands: |
| 2021-07-30 | 47 | Dream Ocean | "Eterna Espera" | single | they subsist on hope stolen from our lives, |
| 2021-07-30 | 48 | Bagira | "И Грянет Гром" | И Грянет Гром | on breath sucked out of our own lungs, |
| 2021-07-30 | 82 | Melodicka Bros | "Somebody That I Used to Know (Gothic Metal)" | single | You can get addicted to collecting every variation of a certain kind of sadness, |
| 2021-07-30 | 83 | Volbeat | "Don't Tread on Me" | single | which is one of a million ways to turn sadness in upon itself. |
| 2021-07-30 | 84 | SebastiAn | "Don't Tread on Else Matters" | single | Sadness and joy are not inverses, but reversible reinterpretations of each other, |
| 2021-07-23 | 12 | Seas on the Moon | "Enough Is Enough" | single | or for just dropping trash on the sidewalk |
| 2021-07-23 | 13 | Anette Olzon | "Sick of You" | single | with a trash can directly ahead of them in their path. |
| 2021-07-23 | 14 | VENUES | "Whydah Gally" | Whydah Gally 5 | I'm tired of the assiduous reduction of meaning into meme, |
| 2021-07-23 | 15 | Ignea | "Bosorkun" | single | and the cynical replacement of conscious stewardship with automated pandering, |
| 2021-07-23 | 16 | Maleficium Arungquilta | "На краю" | На краю 6 | and the mordantly reasonable misconception that pandering is the only automatable impulse. |
| 2021-07-23 | 17 | Lutharo | "Lost in a Soul" | single | I want an olympics of routine decency, |
| 2021-07-23 | 18 | Shereign | "Hold On" | single | a decathlon of believing ten useful untrendy human truths |
| 2021-07-23 | 32 | Mayank | "We Are One" | single | I want more-thoughtful adherence to better-devised rules |
| 2021-07-23 | 33 | Soen | "EMDR" | single | to obviate the need for so many of them, |
| 2021-07-23 | 34 | Agrypnie | "Am Ende der Welt - Teil 2" | single | and cauterize more of our oozing social exceptionalist wounds. |
| 2021-07-23 | 35 | Boris | "Loveless" | single | I want to wear the parachute all the way to the ground, |
| 2021-07-23 | 36 | Erdve | "Smala" | Savigaila | and then, standing in a field under clear skies, |
| 2021-07-16 | 43 | Brainstorm | "Glory Disappears" | Glory Disappears +2 | and the ones in which they can discover new universalities inside of themselves |
| 2021-07-16 | 44 | Iron Maiden | "The Writing on the Wall" | single | and new resonances among strangers. |
| 2021-07-16 | 45 | Powerwolf | "Blood for Blood (Faoladh)" | Call Of The Wild | Our online music cities, so far, |
| 2021-07-16 | 46 | Powerwolf | "Where the Wild Wolves Have Gone (feat. Doro Pesch)" | Call Of The Wild | are like suburbs designed by autocrats, |
| 2021-07-16 | 47 | Sabaton | "Kingdom Come" | Kingdom Come +1 | navigable mainly to their centers, |
| 2021-07-16 | 48 | Okkultokrati | "Wolfssegen" | single | and radially anonymous and undifferentiated therefrom. |
| 2021-07-16 | 49 | Woe Betide | "Guardians of the Abyss" | single | They need neighborhoods, and squares, |
| 2021-07-16 | 50 | Deviant Process | "Asynchronous" | single | and intransigent rivers that force them to bend |
| 2021-07-16 | 51 | Cosmophobe | "Visions" | single | and negotiate with arbitrary geometry. |
| 2021-07-16 | 52 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Dead is Dead" | Painful Reminder / Dead is Dead 2 | They need zoning that allows them to adapt and accommodate |
| 2021-07-16 | 53 | Deathsomnia | "Katabasis (Ft. Kyle Kimball)" | single | and nurture and multiply peculiarities. |
| 2021-07-09 | 20 | Laurenne / Louhimo | "Time to Kill the Night" | The Reckoning | We need collaborations, and get rematches. |
| 2021-07-09 | 21 | Dialith | "Ignite the Sky" | Atrophy 4 | We need to be watched over by starlight, |
| 2021-07-09 | 22 | Infinitum | "Caught in a Trap" | single | not grazed by sunset. |
| 2021-07-09 | 34 | Dola | "Wszystko odrośnie" | Czasy | We do not need to recuit adversity agents from within ourselves. |
| 2021-07-09 | 35 | Dom Zły | "Burza" | Śnisz bory tak gęste | We are precariously adrift |
| 2021-07-09 | 36 | Lantlôs | "Lich" | single | in the seemingly limitless unknown, |
| 2021-07-09 | 37 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Spirit of Lightning" | Spirit of Lightning +1 | torn between defying it |
| 2021-07-09 | 38 | Deafheaven | "The Gnashing" | The Gnashing +1 | and seeing it as the unfolded manifestation of our own infinity. |
| 2021-07-09 | 39 | Wormwitch | "The Wolves of Ossory" | single | Even more mercifully, music is a team sport that doesn't require winners. |
| 2021-07-09 | 40 | Rise to the Sky | "End My Night" | single | We don't get two and a half minutes into a song and then say |
| 2021-07-09 | 80 | Dream Ocean | "The Phantom of the Opera" | single | and repeatedly majestic. |
| 2021-07-02 | 19 | Carpathia | "Artillery" | single | our formulations gain the potential, however seldom fulfilled, to assume transformational power. |
| 2021-07-02 | 20 | Dark Princess | "За предел" | single | Our empires are constituted from performative faith and structural evasion, |
| 2021-07-02 | 21 | Antillia | "Напряжение" | Источник | and thus govern by eliciting voluntary alignments of delusion, |
| 2021-07-02 | 22 | Lost In Grey | "Disobedience" | Under the Surface | and fall at the softest reluctant touch. |
| 2021-07-02 | 47 | NanowaR of Steel | "L'assedio di porto cervo (feat. Francesco Paoli)" | Italian Folk Metal | and thus resolve indeterminacy by self-exemption. |
| 2021-07-02 | 49 | Powerwolf | "Bête du Gévaudan" | Bête du Gévaudan +1 | until we are able to discharge their intents |
| 2021-07-02 | 50 | Lord Of The Lost | "Your Star Has Led You Astray" | Judas | into some form of betrayal |
| 2021-07-02 | 51 | Dwell in Doom | "Army of the Underworld" | Shadows Deepen, Day is Done | with the same extent as law. |
| 2021-07-02 | 52 | Doomcave | "Genesis" | Genesis +3 | Distrust any fantasy of selective rebirth. |
| 2021-07-02 | 53 | Die Apokalyptischen Reiter | "Uelewa" | The Divine Horsemen | The only efficacy of doom is its looming power to triangulate everything else closer. |
| 2021-07-02 | 54 | Year Of No Light | "Interdit aux Vivants, aux Morts et aux Chiens" | Consolamentum | Letting go of history requires muscles operated only by collective will. |
| 2021-07-02 | 55 | Taake | "Ein Baat i Foss" | Avvik | Art is like an IKEA instruction manual for disassembling pain, |
| 2021-07-02 | 56 | Obscura | "Solaris" | single | but sold separately, to be applied to whatever parts you manage to photosynthesize |
| 2021-07-02 | 57 | Shining | "IDGAF" | single | or scavenge. |
| 2021-07-02 | 75 | The Silent Wedding | "Diamonds and Rust" | single | as if, absurdly, we are the first to arrive in these obviously constructed spaces. |
| 2021-07-02 | 76 | Chester Lockhart | "Firework" | single | But today, we are. |
| 2021-06-25 | 85 | Thy Catafalque | "Gömböc" | Vadak | The universally inconsequential can be locally complex, |
| 2021-06-25 | 86 | Agrypnie | "Verwüstung" | single | the doomed self-elegiac, |
| 2021-06-25 | 87 | Hiraes | "Shadows Break" | Solitary | the darkness illuminating. |
| 2021-06-25 | 88 | Duskmourn | "Fallen Kings and Rusted Crowns" | Fallen Kings and Rusted Crowns | Our obtuse dysfunctions are not justified as morality plays, |
| 2021-06-25 | 89 | Leprous | "Running Low" | single | but we who survive them earn the chance to be defined by our empathy |
| 2021-06-25 | 90 | Manimal | "The Inevitable End" | The Inevitable End +1 | for the people we have so narrowly not become. |
| 2021-06-25 | 91 | SuidAkrA | "A Shrine for the Ages" | Wolfbite | Reverence beckons us towards self-awareness |
| 2021-06-25 | 92 | Powerwolf | "Dancing with the Dead" | Dancing with the Dead +2 | coyly, in elaborately costumed poses, |
| 2021-06-25 | 93 | Anette Olzon | "Parasite" | single | daring us to mistake grandeur for significance |
| 2021-06-25 | 94 | Celtian | "Nueva Era" | Sendas de Leyenda | and thus underestimate the power of ceremony. |
| 2021-06-25 | 95 | Within Temptation | "Shed My Skin" | Shed My Skin 6 | We take off these clothes in layers, |
| 2021-06-25 | 96 | September Mourning | "Falling Awake" | single | each one as revealing for the illusion it removes |
| 2021-06-25 | 97 | Roses Unread | "Leave a Light On" | single | as for the incremental semblance of nakedness that remains. |
| 2021-06-25 | 98 | Seven Spires | "Gods of Debauchery" | single | Will you be lead by the exemplary, or the exempt? |
| 2021-06-25 | 99 | Oryad | "Sacrifice" | Hymns Of Exile & Decay | Or, to ask this question the other way, |
| 2021-06-25 | 100 | Cran Arcanaria | "...with me" | single | do you assign yourself quests for direction, or vice versa? |
| 2021-06-25 | 117 | Cloud Rat | "Mother Tongue / Glitter Belly" | single | but the tasks for your body are not necessarily simpler than the ones for your worldviews, |
| 2021-06-25 | 118 | Grale | "Seeing Red" | single | and outrage may turn out to not quite be the ore of insight. |
| 2021-06-25 | 119 | Take Over And Destroy | "Anything Else" | Fade Out | None of these rocks are trivial, |
| 2021-06-25 | 120 | The Sound That Ends Creation | "Curtain Dropped, New Stage Unlocked!" | Intercontinental Split 2 | nor the stories of how they accumulated in this orbit, |
| 2021-06-25 | 121 | Dok Wol | "Morii" | Avenoir | but our transcriptions of them as interior design |
| 2021-06-25 | 137 | Aiolin | "Voyage" | AIOLIN BEST ~Revolutional Violinism~ | Even our most mundane preoccupations are inherently revolutionary, |
| 2021-06-25 | 138 | Celtian | "Al Otro Lado del Camino" | Sendas de Leyenda | but all revolutions move you to somewhere you could see before. |
| 2021-06-25 | 142 | Thy Catafalque | "Vadak (Az átváltozás rítusai)" | Vadak | Rituals of transformation are cargo-cult simulations of becoming, |
| 2021-06-25 | 143 | Darkestrah | "The Gift of Mud and Venom" | single | but as with many apparently ineffectual systems, |
| 2021-06-25 | 144 | Perilaxe Occlusion | "Fracturing the Voronoi" | Raytraces of Death 3 | they perserve our memory of interludes of indetermination |
| 2021-06-25 | 145 | Bloody Falls | "Soul Ripper" | single | during the dark ages of certainty. |
| 2021-06-25 | 146 | Saturnian Mist | "Ill-Mystic" | single | "Priest" is our word for guardians of the future |
| 2021-06-25 | 147 | De Arma | "Days of Judgment" | Strayed in Shadows | who misunderstand their domain as the present. |
| 2021-06-18 | 169 | Jinjer | "Vortex" | single | and lined with symbolic invocations against inexorable descent, |
| 2021-06-18 | 171 | Duma | "Cannis" | Cannis +1 | It is telling that our afterlives of torment |
| 2021-06-18 | 183 | m!sa | "Death Before Dishonor" | single | We do not become whole. |
| 2021-06-18 | 184 | Dragon Ash | "New Era" | single | We do not seek completion, |
| 2021-06-18 | 185 | GALNERYUS | "HOLD ON" | UNION GIVES STRENGTH | but the power to sustain defiant inconclusiveness |
| 2021-06-18 | 186 | 戮-Riku- | "彩色世界" | 待ち侘びて、残された結末 2 | amidst the battering resolute. |
| 2021-06-18 | 187 | EviLA | "カレイドスコープ" | カレイドスコープ +1 | Our memorial volumes will be written in irridescent ink |
| 2021-06-18 | 218 | Salduie | "Tagus" | Ambaxtos | the sediment of their anthems, |
| 2021-06-18 | 219 | 616 | "Witch" | single | the wings of their butterflies. |
| 2021-06-18 | 220 | Sôber | "El día de la liberación" | ELEGÍA | You could leave today, |
| 2021-06-18 | 222 | Season Of Dreams | "Light Comes From the Darkness" | Heroes | but at the other end of "where did they go?" is mainly "where did they come from?" |
| 2021-06-18 | 223 | Helloween | "Save My Hide" | Helloween | Are you going to just stand here, |
| 2021-06-18 | 224 | Crowne | "Kings in the North" | Kings in the North | or are you going to let the compass point you somewhere? |
| 2021-06-18 | 225 | Edge Of Paradise | "Digital Paradise" | single | It's not a test, I just want to know |
| 2021-06-18 | 226 | VENUES | "Mountains" | Mountains +3 | where to look to find you later. |
| 2021-06-18 | 227 | Angelwings | "Changes" | Primordium | To leave, yourself, you have to be prepared for everybody to leave, |
| 2021-06-18 | 228 | Poetica | "Hollow Eyes" | single | which is all that we mean by cities: |
| 2021-06-18 | 229 | Kingfisher Sky | "Rise Up" | Rise 4 | somewhere to gather in parades |
| 2021-06-18 | 232 | Voidfallen | "Sui Generis" | single | If you don't plan to come back, |
| 2021-06-18 | 233 | A Pregnant Light | "My Affections Can Be Bought" | I Licked It, Now It's Mine 4 | it doesn't matter what you do, |
| 2021-06-18 | 234 | Eisregen | "Nur eine weitere Leiche im Wald" | bitterböse | or where the streetlights give way to darkness. |
| 2021-06-18 | 235 | Unendlich | "Into Abandonment" | single | Our apologies are not recorded in ink, |
| 2021-06-18 | 236 | Templum Anima Morti | "illyun" | single | but air, |
| 2021-06-18 | 237 | The Human Tragedy | "Last Gasp of Humanity" | single | conserved despite our best self-destructive efforts to bleed it off into space. |
| 2021-06-18 | 238 | Unreqvited | "Funeral Pyre" | single | Our afterlives are outlined in rueful doubt. |
| 2021-06-18 | 239 | The Last Bear Ender | "Rip and Bear" | single | The earth moves slowly, our feet quickly, |
| 2021-06-18 | 240 | TesseracT | "Nocturne - P O R T A L S" | single | and we are foolish if we think that moves us ahead. |
| 2021-06-18 | 241 | Hacktivist | "Currency" | Hyperdialect | We pay for our positions, |
| 2021-06-11 | 24 | Blame Me! | "To Ashes" | The Invisible You | is that other people pick up your inventory while you re-spawn, |
| 2021-06-11 | 25 | Crashing Atlas | "Wake Up" | Wake Up 6 | or continue obliviously onwards in all the directions you secretly pointed them. |
| 2021-06-11 | 26 | We Are the Catalyst | "Shallow Ground" | Shallow Ground +1 | You die a little every day, |
| 2021-06-11 | 27 | Nekonomicon | "Heroes out of Time" | single | which gives you thousands of chances to partly die with some spark of purpose, |
| 2021-06-11 | 28 | Celtian | "El Hijo del Ayer" | single | and be reborn as your own hero, |
| 2021-06-11 | 29 | Война Осколков | "Пламя Гнева" | single | or, if you'd rather, to be immolated by your own frustrated anger. |
| 2021-06-11 | 30 | Laurenne / Louhimo | "The Reckoning" | single | What have we become? |
| 2021-06-11 | 31 | Powerwolf | "Demons Are A Girl's Best Friend (feat. Alissa White-Gluz)" | Demons Are A Girl's Best Friend (feat. Alissa White-Gluz) +1 | Creatures crawling out of oceans and back into the magma mouths of hell, |
| 2021-06-11 | 32 | Metalwings | "Wonders of Life" | A Whole New Land | or jubillant fugitives from tidal despair? |
| 2021-06-11 | 33 | Gacharic Spin | "MindSet" | single | We didn't know, when we started singing, that the rocks were listening for things they could remind us of later. |
| 2021-06-11 | 34 | Warrel Dane | "Everything Is Fading" | Praises To The War Machine (2021 Extended Edition) | What happens when you're dead, if you sing with your soul while you have it, |
| 2021-06-11 | 35 | Thyrfing | "Järnhand" | single | is that the world you leave behind |
| 2021-06-11 | 36 | Mother of All | "Age of the Solipsist" | Age of the Solipsist | spins forward. |
| 2021-06-11 | 37 | Die Apokalyptischen Reiter | "Ymir" | Ymir +2 | Dizzy, our arms full of each other's tenuous bodies |
| 2021-06-11 | 38 | Love // Paranoia | "Fluorescent Shade of Gloom" | single | and adamantine dreams, |
| 2021-06-11 | 39 | Dom Zły | "Gorycz" | single | we turn until our most recent loss is behind us, |
| 2021-06-11 | 40 | Rise to the Sky | "Per Aspera Ad Astra" | single | and then we look up. |
| 2021-06-11 | 41 | Second To Sun | "Nachtgast" | Nachtgast +1 | And then we take a breath, and look down again. |
| 2021-06-11 | 42 | Mastiff | "Endless" | single | The sky is endless, |
| 2021-06-11 | 43 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Mountain Magick" | single | the ground is close enough to touch; |
| 2021-06-11 | 44 | Withered | "Dissolve" | single | which one is a more apt metaphor for oblivion? |
| 2021-06-11 | 45 | Lantlôs | "Magnolia" | single | Maybe we have never been as good at growing flowers |
| 2021-06-11 | 46 | Botanist | "Antirrhinum" | single | as we have been at naming them with hopeful reassignments of our fears as dragons, |
| 2021-06-11 | 47 | Dornenreich | "Sie machen Mangel zum Geschenk" | Du wilde Liebe sei | or misconstruing their significance as glorifying mortality. |
| 2021-06-11 | 48 | Versengold | "Die wilde Jagd" | single | We have searched, spear in hand, for fountains of youth or peace, |
| 2021-06-11 | 49 | Trna | "Shining" | single | and then, lakeside, perplexed, dipped the sharp point into oat milk, |
| 2021-06-11 | 50 | Terra Odium | "Crawling" | Ne Plus Ultra | and thought "Wait, when we started crawling, where did we think we were trying to go?" |
| 2021-06-11 | 56 | Structures | "Planet of Garbage" | single | if that other people gather up the trash the spectators strewed, |
| 2021-06-11 | 57 | Hacktivist | "Hyperdialect" | single | and light it on fire in the streets. |
| 2021-06-04 | 11 | GALNERYUS | "WHATEVER IT TAKES (Raise Our Hands!)" | single | the plazas filled with telepresence drones and curious birds |
| 2021-06-04 | 12 | L'Arc-en-Ciel | "ミライ" | single | but surrounded by half-filling terraces |
| 2021-06-04 | 13 | Sacred Groove | "Times of Temptation" | MSTRPLN | as immunity embraces us. |
| 2021-06-04 | 14 | Nocean | "The Hope" | single | Let us sign new charters |
| 2021-06-04 | 15 | Cadaveria | "The Woman Who Fell to Earth" | single | with freshly cleaned pens and presumably bioluminescent ink, |
| 2021-06-04 | 16 | Glasgow Kiss | "Demons" | single | and some kind of governance not based on the promise of unfathomable wealth, |
| 2021-06-04 | 52 | Përl | "Le jour des corneilles" | Les maîtres du silence | if we were ghosts, |
| 2021-06-04 | 53 | Bloodred Hourglass | "Nightmares Are Dreams Too" | Nightmares Are Dreams Too +2 | haunting statuary of ourselves. |
| 2021-06-04 | 54 | Seven Spires | "This God is Dead" | single | We have trials, |
| 2021-06-04 | 55 | Night Crowned | "Fjättrad" | single | they have courts. |
| 2021-06-04 | 56 | Dantalion | "Time to Close the Circle" | single | Time to start over |
| 2021-06-04 | 57 | Cloak of Altering | "I slip into a coma" | Sheathed swords drip with poisonous honey | or give up, |
| 2021-06-04 | 58 | Mayhem | "Voces Ab Alta" | single | these are ashes of the same incinerated resolve. |
| 2021-06-04 | 59 | Dom Zły | "Jad" | single | I don't want to stop, |
| 2021-06-04 | 60 | URNE | "THE PALACE OF DEVILS & WOLVES" | single | I want everything else to have been thrown forward by the impact, |
| 2021-06-04 | 61 | Atomic Symphony | "Nightfall" | Enslaved 2 | so that for a second I am not required to steer or lead. |
| 2021-06-04 | 62 | BASEMENT PROPHECY | "Beyond Awareness" | single | Let the idealized people these clothes were measured for |
| 2021-06-04 | 63 | She Said Destroy | "Not Only Bridges" | single | be the first ones naked outside the wall. |
| 2021-06-04 | 64 | The Dark Atom | "Clarity" | Clarity +1 | I was already too careful before this, |
| 2021-06-04 | 65 | Chimp Spanner | "Korruptor" | single | too attent to the statistics of doubt. |
| 2021-06-04 | 66 | Absently | "Frozen" | single | It's funny how some time makes everything seem momentary. |
| 2021-06-04 | 87 | Anaria | "Alone" | single | At night it's easier to perceive our movement through space, |
| 2021-06-04 | 88 | Silent Knight | "Dreams" | single | but no easier to find our place. |
| 2021-05-28 | 96 | Spiritbox | "Secret Garden" | single | What powers have you invested in anonymity, |
| 2021-05-28 | 97 | Lost Division | "In Memoriam 2.0" | Cuts and Scars | and how can they be applied to accountability? |
| 2021-05-28 | 98 | Drown This City | "New Burn Order" | Colours We Won't Know 6 | What impossible new orders did you imagine in limbo, |
| 2021-05-28 | 99 | Fate DeStroyed | "Rather See You Dead" | Within These Walls | and how will you decide if they are possible now |
| 2021-05-28 | 100 | Lost In Grey | "Waves" | Waves +1 | that it seems like something will survive, |
| 2021-05-28 | 101 | The Great Discord | "Blood and Envy" | single | if that's even your now? |
| 2021-05-28 | 102 | The End of Melancholy | "Black Horse" | Nature Unleashed | Our sadnesses never all end at once, |
| 2021-05-28 | 103 | Astray Valley | "Erased (feat. Lena Scissorhands)" | single | so of course nor do our pandemics. |
| 2021-05-28 | 104 | Glassgod | "Luca" | Ancestral Stories | We demonstrate a lot about inequity |
| 2021-05-28 | 105 | Wardrum | "Broken Pieces" | Mavericks | by nominally all experiencing the same thing, |
| 2021-05-28 | 106 | Bloodbound | "Gathering of Souls" | Creatures of the Dark Realm | and then suffering each according to our privileges, |
| 2021-05-28 | 107 | Nightrage | "Falsifying Life" | single | and then choosing how to witness this, |
| 2021-05-28 | 108 | Duskmourn | "Deathless" | single | and what or whether to learn. |
| 2021-05-28 | 109 | Aramaic | "The Oak" | single | You come back from one night under the only tree on an otherwise-bald mountain, |
| 2021-05-28 | 110 | Agrypnie | "Wir Ertrunkenen" | single | full of what you have learned. |
| 2021-05-28 | 111 | Dödsrit | "The Third Door" | Mortal Coil | But there is a city under that tree, |
| 2021-05-28 | 112 | Year Of No Light | "Alètheia" | single | or inside of that mountain, |
| 2021-05-28 | 113 | Massemord | "The Last Lifer's Day" | Contra Legem Naturae 4 | filled with people who don't get to come home to somewhere else, |
| 2021-05-28 | 114 | Dornenreich | "Dein knöchern' Kosen" | single | or else don't have to. |
| 2021-05-28 | 115 | Tanzwut | "Schwarze Löcher" | Die Tanzwut kehrt zurück | Your strange interrupted year is how they always live. |
| 2021-05-28 | 116 | Thy Catafalque | "Köszöntsd a hajnalt" | single | Your new dawn |
| 2021-05-28 | 117 | Silver Lake by Esa Holopainen | "Fading Moon" | Silver Lake by Esa Holopainen | arrives, by definition, at every other hour |
| 2021-05-28 | 118 | the GazettE | "THE PALE" | MASS | for somebody. |
| 2021-05-28 | 119 | 戮-Riku- | "禍禍しさに相対し" | 禍禍しさに相対し +1 | So too, of course, your darkest hour |
| 2021-05-28 | 155 | Burning Witches | "Hall of the Mountain King" | The Witch of the North | There is a city inside the mountain you have climbed alone. They built a city, and you mistook it for a rock, |
| 2021-05-28 | 156 | The End of Melancholy | "Immigrant Song" | Nature Unleashed | and the people inside will look the same as you if you are willing to climb back down off this ridiculous precipice and go inside. |
| 2021-05-21 | 3 | Insomnium | "The Reticent" | The Reticent +1 | or your caverns of longing. |
| 2021-05-21 | 4 | HAVAMAL | "Jormungandr" | The Shadow Chapter | We do not find ourselves by applying schemata to advocacies |
| 2021-05-21 | 5 | Powerwolf | "Beast of Gévaudan" | single | in search of things we already know endorsed by established scions. |
| 2021-05-21 | 8 | Divided Island | "Twice as Bright" | single | and then burning the field to get it back, charred useless. |
| 2021-05-21 | 10 | Awake Again | "Busy Doing Nothing" | single | and the land has other dreams. |
| 2021-05-21 | 11 | Nergard | "God Forgive My Haunted Mind" | Eternal White | We do not need to find ourselves. |
| 2021-05-21 | 12 | Seas on the Moon | "The Regress" | single | We are not lost. |
| 2021-05-21 | 13 | Neperia | "I, Liar" | I, Liar +1 | More than anything, we are not lost enough. |
| 2021-05-21 | 14 | Tulip | "Sidewinder" | single | We find out about ourselves by more extension, |
| 2021-05-21 | 15 | Cydefect | "Muutused" | single | more inversion, |
| 2021-05-21 | 16 | Intra | "Time Has Come to Go" | single | more release of ourselves into uncertainty. |
| 2021-05-21 | 59 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "Of Your Light" | As the Morning Dawns We Close Our Eyes | We do not save ourselves by placing ever-thicker lenses between ourselves |
| 2021-05-21 | 60 | Panopticon | "Dead Loons" | ...And Again Into the Light | and the people who do not see themselves in us. |
| 2021-05-21 | 61 | White Ward | "Debemur Morti" | single | There are better ways to seek forgiveness, |
| 2021-05-21 | 62 | Tvær | "I" | Uvaer | and to let the land absorb our dreams |
| 2021-05-21 | 63 | Borgne | "Even If the Devil Sings into My Ears Again" | Temps morts | where they fall. |
| 2021-05-21 | 64 | Zgard | "Ascension Fog" | Place of Power | You have to be able to walk into the excavated outline of a forgotten king's hall |
| 2021-05-21 | 65 | My Lonely Sea | "Court" | Gloom 3 | and know that this is what all of your city's suburbs look like to the sun |
| 2021-05-21 | 66 | Burial In The Sky | "An Orphaned City" | single | and the moon |
| 2021-05-21 | 67 | Vanvidd | "Under ei Morken Rot" | Under Ei Morken Rot | when they argue over who will get all of this when we're gone. |
| 2021-05-14 | 1 | Flight of Icarus | "Love Will Lead You Home" | Cleo | What did you make more beautiful today? |
| 2021-05-14 | 2 | Angelwings | "Fallen Angel Song" | single | Or witness? What given beauty did you accept? |
| 2021-05-14 | 3 | Regardless Of Me | "This Is Us" | Forms | We walk under arches, |
| 2021-05-14 | 4 | Nekonomicon | "Water Temple in my Dreams" | single | and along boardwalks and named paths, |
| 2021-05-14 | 25 | Kotiteollisuus | "Menestys" | Jumalattomat | What power did you corrupt, today, or compact? |
| 2021-05-14 | 26 | Scarlet Aura | "In the Line of Fire" | single | What warfare did you discover inside yourself? |
| 2021-05-14 | 27 | Wings of Destiny | "Playing with Fire" | single | It all comes from somewhere, |
| 2021-05-14 | 28 | Kitt Wakeley | "Forgive Me" | single | and if you know all the origins other than your own cortices, |
| 2021-05-14 | 29 | Erdve | "Lavondėmės" | single | you are the champion chaos requires. |
| 2021-05-14 | 30 | Dordeduh | "Vraci de nord" | Har | What mythology did you peel off of your skin? |
| 2021-05-14 | 31 | Djevel | "Vinger som tok oss over en brennende himmel, vinger som tok oss hjem" | Tanker Som Rir Natten | If you can transfer your tattoos onto shirts, |
| 2021-05-14 | 32 | Shadecrown | "The Loss" | single | you can take them off in secret, |
| 2021-05-14 | 33 | Fjøsnisse | "Noreg" | single | and find out how much of yourself has survived underneath. |
| 2021-05-14 | 34 | Thyrfing | "Jordafärd" | single | Naked, too, is the collective pural, |
| 2021-05-14 | 35 | The Monolith Deathcult | "They Drew First Blood" | Vernedering - Connect the Goddamn Dots | and beneath that, blood. |
| 2021-05-14 | 39 | Sorrowful Knight | "Escape to Another World" | Lost City 4 | we are liberated by exile. |
| 2021-05-14 | 40 | Teramaze | "Take Your Shot" | Sorella Minore | What familiality did you embrace, |
| 2021-05-14 | 41 | Frost* | "Day and Age" | Day And Age | today, while you were waiting for it to end? |
| 2021-05-14 | 79 | Pain | "Gimme Shelter" | single | to explain to safety that we are the collective plural of noticing it in its absence? |
| 2021-05-07 | 13 | Violet Cold | "Pride" | Empire of Love | We meet during revolutions, and choose by our actions whether the revolution was a last resort or a goal. |
| 2021-05-07 | 14 | The Fall of Eve | "Special Part of Me" | Beyond the Veil | There is no peace between gods, |
| 2021-05-07 | 15 | Skarlett Riot | "Underwater" | Invicta | because "gods" is our word for the part of ourselves that wants the senstation of individual moral superiority |
| 2021-05-07 | 16 | Lost Division | "No God" | single | without the onoing work of collective moral reasoning. |
| 2021-05-07 | 17 | Torn Between Two Worlds | "All Eyes On Me" | single | We are not chosen or cursed. |
| 2021-05-07 | 18 | Drown This City | "Borderline Existence" | single | These fights over stolen land |
| 2021-05-07 | 19 | Война Осколков | "Нечестивый Союз" | Начало | are unwinnable by virtue of their own terms. |
| 2021-05-07 | 20 | Nergard | "Carry Me" | single | We cannot give our cities back to the earth |
| 2021-05-07 | 21 | Lost In Grey | "Souffrir (feat. Emmanuelle Zoldan, Camille André, Andi Kravljaca, Nils Courbaron)" | single | and start over. |
| 2021-05-07 | 22 | False Memories | "Erased" | The Last Night of Fall | Not, at least, to this Earth, |
| 2021-05-07 | 23 | Crowne | "Perceval" | single | but maybe, as we look at Mars and contemplate starting over, |
| 2021-05-07 | 24 | Sabaton | "Defence of Moscow" | single | we can start to see that colonialism is a disease you contract at home, |
| 2021-05-07 | 25 | Cvlt Ov the Svn | "Another Infinity" | We Are The Dragon | not a contagion generated spontaneously by contact. |
| 2021-05-07 | 26 | Sonic Haven | "Nightmares" | Vagabond | Even if this continent had been empty, |
| 2021-05-07 | 27 | Wardrum | "Rise" | single | as its invaders so obdurately attempted to treat it, |
| 2021-05-07 | 28 | Sable Hills | "Messiah" | MESSIAH 2 | they revealed their nature by bringing their own slaves. |
| 2021-05-07 | 29 | Kings Winter | "Edge Of Existence" | Edge Of Existence | Mars is a fantasy destination until somebody proposes using it as a penal colony, |
| 2021-05-07 | 30 | Dawn Ray'd | "Wild Fire, Pt. I" | Wild Fire 2 | and then it's just another desert in which we will build magnificent cities |
| 2021-05-07 | 31 | Non Serviam | "O World, O Work!" | Work | and then fight over how to treat them as nations. |
| 2021-05-07 | 32 | [ówt krì] | "Arcane Fields" | Shards | Look up from Mars and it's mostly the same sky. |
| 2021-05-07 | 33 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "Splendour Unnoticed" | single | You think that would help, if you'd never spent a lifetime hearing about a star over Bethlehem, |
| 2021-05-07 | 34 | Amenra | "De Evenmens" | single | and then realized Bethlehem is an actual Palestinian town, |
| 2021-05-07 | 35 | Kataan | "Vessel" | Kataan 4 | and Jerusalem is a labyrinth of felafel and halva and alternating layers of contradictory theologic certainty. |
| 2021-05-07 | 36 | Lantlôs | "Lake Fantasy" | single | It's too late to just give anything back to anybody, |
| 2021-05-07 | 37 | XAAXAA | "gogatsubyo" | gogatsubyo 6 | but this resignation assumes posession is a solution, |
| 2021-05-07 | 39 | The Guzmania | "Calling" | single | The crusaders built cities with tunnels to the sea, |
| 2021-05-07 | 69 | Hacktivist | "Reprogram" | single | written on borrowed paper, or the buried walls of forgotten caves |
| 2021-05-07 | 70 | Becko | "The Phoenix" | The Phoenix | or only temporarily abandoned subways. |
| 2021-05-07 | 72 | Haggefugg | "Lasterkahn" | single | Our most conciliatory anthems |
| 2021-05-07 | 73 | Braia | "Sabarabuçu" | ... E o mundo de cá | say mainly that the darkness is not new. |
| 2021-04-30 | 1 | Glassgod | "Mankind" | Mankind +1 | You are one voice among many, but so are all the others. This does not necessitate deference. If you want to use your 12 minute album-finale about humanity as your advance single, there are no grooves to stop you. |
| 2021-04-30 | 2 | Temtris | "Race to the End" | Ritual Warfare | All rules are ritual, in the first place, |
| 2021-04-30 | 3 | Burning Witches | "The Witch of the North" | The Witch of the North +1 | storm circles to be defied as readily by escape as incursion, |
| 2021-04-30 | 4 | Soulglass | "At the Edge of the Nightmare" | Odeth | or illusory shapes implied by themselves-notional boundaries. |
| 2021-04-30 | 5 | Carpathia | "Armonica" | single | These songs of ice and fire tease us with teleological seasons, |
| 2021-04-30 | 6 | Celtian | "Magia de Luna" | single | and we tolerate their hubris fondly, |
| 2021-04-30 | 7 | Starkill | "Cloudless" | single | toying with our weather-control spheres in our off hands, |
| 2021-04-30 | 8 | Synlakross | "Oscilloscope" | 0K4M1 | waiting for private signals. |
| 2021-04-30 | 9 | Spiritbox | "Circle With Me" | single | Voices combine. |
| 2021-04-30 | 10 | The Dreamside | "There Is Magic to Be Done" | single | You are never too immortal for a comeback album, |
| 2021-04-30 | 11 | Seven Spires | "The Cursed Muse" | single | or too doomed for a furious idyl of catharsis and forgiveness. |
| 2021-04-30 | 12 | Aryem | "Reborn" | Reborn +1 | Simpler to just stipulate every day as a new beginning, |
| 2021-04-30 | 13 | Sojourner | "Perennial" | single | and embrace the responsibilities this implies: |
| 2021-04-30 | 14 | Cran Arcanaria | "Obsession" | single | to follow trivial leads to their consequential sources |
| 2021-04-30 | 33 | Gojira | "New Found" | Fortitude | Nobody wants your discarded paradise |
| 2021-04-30 | 34 | Bloodbound | "March into War" | March into War +2 | except the person you were |
| 2021-04-30 | 35 | Dwell in Doom | "Tragic Tale" | Tragic Tale +1 | when you had two more tokens of hope than now. |
| 2021-04-30 | 36 | Lord Of The Lost | "Priest" | Priest +1 | But that train? |
| 2021-04-30 | 37 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Painful Reminder" | single | It runs every two hours, except only twice on Sundays, |
| 2021-04-30 | 38 | Metsatöll | "Tarede Vaikuses" | single | and it's never full. |
| 2021-04-30 | 39 | Thy Catafalque | "Szarvas" | single | The most wrong thing about proffered Elysium is that it's a place, |
| 2021-04-30 | 40 | Dödsrit | "Apathetic Tongues" | single | but the most corrosive wrong thing is the idea that, if it were a place, it would be only one. |
| 2021-04-30 | 41 | Borgne | "The Swords of the Headless Angels" | single | When you realize that the tickets are plentiful and cheap, |
| 2021-04-30 | 42 | Dordeduh | "În vieliștea uitării" | single | and your antibodies believe in travel again, |
| 2021-04-30 | 43 | Ciel Nordique | "Kamouraska" | single | and you get on that half-full train, |
| 2021-04-30 | 44 | Fenris Vrede | "Torden" | Viking | you will find it a quarter full of commuters |
| 2021-04-30 | 45 | Akhenaten | "Halls of Amenti" | THE EMERALD TABLETS OF THOTH | who bought condos in paradise back when it was affordable, |
| 2021-04-30 | 46 | DIR EN GREY | "朧 (Oboro)" | 朧 (Oboro) +2 | finally returning in staggered shifts to their jobs in the exactly-half-empty buildings you know as the Pokémon gyms reachable from your house. |
| 2021-04-30 | 47 | Esprit D'Air | "Nebulae" | Nebulae +2 | Out the righthand windows, |
| 2021-04-30 | 48 | FEST VAINQUEUR | "HEAT HAZE" | ELEMENT 6 | graduate students are learning to sail, |
| 2021-04-30 | 49 | Rides In ReVellion | "Keikoku" | single | and the new bridge you dreaded is almost done and already glittering. |
| 2021-04-30 | 50 | the Raid. | "東京酸欠ヒロイン" | 東京酸欠ヒロイン +2 | Out the left, the next and previous trains are going the other way. |
| 2021-04-30 | 51 | RAZOR | "MIRAIRAKUEN" | PARASITE INVISIBLE 6 | Wherever you go, somebody else just left, |
| 2021-04-30 | 52 | DARRELL | "PHANTOM" | single | sick to death of this paradise's corrupt management, |
| 2021-04-30 | 61 | Snowy Shaw | "Tell me, Tell Me" | single | or "come on, come see what we found". |
| 2021-04-30 | 62 | Toby Hitchcock | "Forward" | single | All flight is flight. |
| 2021-04-30 | 88 | Violet Orlandi | "Hellfire" | single | and admonished from the same burned churches. |
| 2021-04-30 | 89 | Broken Peach | "Wake Me Up" | single | We sing for the departed, and they say "there you are". |
| 2021-04-23 | 12 | Louna | "Незабудка" | single | because what else can we do with it? |
| 2021-04-23 | 13 | Blackbriar | "Confess" | The Cause of Shipwreck | We ride out storms by holding still, |
| 2021-04-23 | 14 | Frozen Crown | "Embrace the Night" | Winterbane | and using their strength as our strength. |
| 2021-04-23 | 15 | Lasting Maze | "Thunder" | Thunder | If we had known we'd be inside for this long, we would have bought better microphones, |
| 2021-04-23 | 16 | Red Eleven | "Universe" | Handled with Chaos | a better evolutionary history, |
| 2021-04-23 | 17 | Rouen | "Wreckage" | single | a larger axe, however decorative. |
| 2021-04-23 | 32 | As the Sun Falls | "From Thy Deepest" | single | writing secret letters to defiant monsters |
| 2021-04-23 | 33 | MUCC | "明星 / Myojo" | 明星! / Myojo | in their untouched citadels, |
| 2021-04-23 | 34 | mama. | "Afterpills" | single | seeking their advice on problems they don't have |
| 2021-04-23 | 35 | Djevel | "Maanen skal være mine øine, den skinnende stierne mine ben, og her skal jeg vandre til evig tid" | single | and wouldn't suffer. |
| 2021-04-23 | 36 | Zgard | "Old Ruins" | single | Our prayers are not diagnostic, |
| 2021-04-23 | 37 | Altarage | "Drainage Mechanism" | Succumb | they are stories of what we aren't yet prepared to embrace, |
| 2021-04-23 | 38 | Night Crowned | "Nattkrönt" | single | rising up our throats, deciding whether to be gasps or songs. |
| 2021-04-23 | 39 | Year Of No Light | "Réalgar" | single | For a year, every pillar was a sundial, |
| 2021-04-23 | 40 | Ulvehyrde | "Disippelen" | Englemakersken | the sun's path unmonitored and distrusted, |
| 2021-04-23 | 41 | Bodom After Midnight | "Payback's a Bitch" | Paint the Sky with Blood 3 | but the readings cataloged and searched for formulae. |
| 2021-04-23 | 42 | This Ending | "Eclipse of the Dead" | single | Did we really learn to do anything other than wait? |
| 2021-04-23 | 43 | Vanvidd | "Blodsjord" | single | Maybe not, but maybe we underestimate patience's power. |
| 2021-04-23 | 44 | EviloN | "Walk of the damned" | single | You never know when you might survive |
| 2021-04-23 | 45 | Sylvatica | "Ashes and Snow" | Ashes and Snow | through attention to slow shadows |
| 2021-04-23 | 46 | Morgarten | "Tales of My Lands" | single | and oblique legends. |
| 2021-04-23 | 47 | Dornenreich | "Der Freiheit Verlangen nach goldenen Ketten" | single | We may be entombed, |
| 2021-04-23 | 48 | Aeges | "Colors" | single | but we are buried in the best layer of the earth, |
| 2021-04-23 | 49 | Fleesh | "Holy Land" | Versions II | the one where lost cities are always found, |
| 2021-04-23 | 50 | Teramaze | "Stone" | single | their streets majestic, |
| 2021-04-23 | 51 | Frost* | "Day and Age - Edit" | single | their industries heraldic and elemental, |
| 2021-04-23 | 52 | Benthos | "Back and Forth" | II | their factions rooted in geometry and pendula. |
| 2021-04-23 | 53 | Tangerine Circus | "Spheres" | single | Looking through closets for half-remembered devices or their missing power-cables, |
| 2021-04-23 | 54 | Constancia | "Brave New World" | single | we find the letters Pythagoras sent us in college, |
| 2021-04-23 | 77 | Enbound | "Beat It" | single | It's not the past we're trying to atone for, |
| 2021-04-23 | 78 | Vicky Psarakis | "Panama" | single | it's what we were about to do, what we were ready to resort to |
| 2021-04-23 | 80 | Violet Orlandi | "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" | single | The axe we need, the touch, the salvation mechanism, |
| 2021-04-16 | 16 | BRIDEAR | "Daybreak" | Bloody Bride | or spinning under lights, |
| 2021-04-16 | 22 | miscast | "ANIMUS" | single | How full or empty is the ocean? Your heart? |
| 2021-04-16 | 26 | Dragon Ash | "Endeavour" | single | and from which star. |
| 2021-04-16 | 27 | heidi. | "劫濁" | single | Our helicopters and children wave to us from Mars, |
| 2021-04-16 | 37 | Asuryan | "Abraxis" | single | the inevitable disengenous declarations of war. |
| 2021-04-16 | 38 | Temple Balls | "Long Ways, Long Lies" | Pyromide | How do you explain the principle of acting as if demonstrating universal law |
| 2021-04-16 | 39 | Marty Friedman | "Senbonzakura" | Tokyo Jukebox 3 | to people who think the point of government is the preservation of convenient imbalances of power? |
| 2021-04-16 | 40 | Dream Ocean | "The Great Silence" | single | The red rocks that waved to us from Mars |
| 2021-04-16 | 41 | NANO | "LINE OF FIRE" | ANTHESIS | welcome our landers with apologetic paperwork, |
| 2021-04-16 | 42 | Louna | "Дом-на-крови" | Обратная сторона | and pathways to canal houseboats and the vaults of hidden ice, |
| 2021-04-16 | 43 | Sacred Groove | "Masterplan" | single | and 500 years of reminding us that this is more than we deserve, |
| 2021-04-16 | 44 | Seas on the Moon | "Promise Land" | single | but only the first of plentiful empty rocks. |
| 2021-04-16 | 45 | Liv Kristine | "Serenity" | Have Courage Dear Heart 5 | If you want to make sure the Earth is round, |
| 2021-04-16 | 46 | Left Hand Solution | "The Sleeping Dead" | Dead of Winter | look back from the moon |
| 2021-04-16 | 48 | Mabe Fratti | "Hacia el Vacío" | single | and take the old gods with you, |
| 2021-04-16 | 49 | The Flight of Sleipnir | "Thaw" | single | cryogenic in their scolding regard. |
| 2021-04-16 | 50 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "Melancholia" | single | It is an act of courage to leave your home, |
| 2021-04-16 | 51 | Spectral Wound | "Mausoleal Drift" | A Diabolic Thirst | but also an act of courage to accept your responsibility to it, |
| 2021-04-16 | 52 | Stormruler | "Of Hollowed Souls & Distant Flame" | single | not merely as a vessel for cats, |
| 2021-04-16 | 53 | Agvirre | "The Letting Go" | single | but as an inherited occupation of somewhere they didn't bother to first send careful inquiring drones. |
| 2021-04-16 | 54 | Seth | "Les Océans du Vide" | single | All these songs just start, |
| 2021-04-16 | 55 | A Pregnant Light | "Knots and Crosses" | Knots & Crosses 2 | whether you have processed the difference between art and artist yet or not. |
| 2021-04-16 | 56 | Gojira | "Into The Storm" | Into The Storm +3 | Kant, minecrafting in the corner of our screens, |
| 2021-04-16 | 57 | Bloodred Hourglass | "Veritas" | Veritas +1 | reminds us that moral laws govern noumena, |
| 2021-04-16 | 58 | [AMATORY] | "Снег в Аду 2.021" | single | and what we think |
| 2021-04-16 | 84 | Blame Me! | "All The Things She Said" | single | Isolation is the practice version of freedom. |
| 2021-04-09 | 1 | Flight of Icarus | "Cleo" | single | The wax wings were just a design sketch. The real ones were carbon-fiber, and fully safety-tested long before Daedalus ever let Icarus fly. Give a parent some credit. |
| 2021-04-09 | 3 | Sacrament | "Последний мост" | single | of triumph that should have been emotionally clear in the original. |
| 2021-04-09 | 4 | Memoremains | "I Turn To You" | single | We turn ethereal fairytales into material object lessons |
| 2021-04-09 | 5 | Lost Division | "Trapped" | single | in order to sell objects or materials. |
| 2021-04-09 | 6 | Frozen Crown | "Towards the Sun" | single | It's colder in the air, not warmer. |
| 2021-04-09 | 7 | Primal Fear | "Vote of No Confidence" | I Will Be Gone 5 | Do not trust these witnesses to our supposed falls. |
| 2021-04-09 | 8 | Nergard | "From the Cradle to the Grave" | single | We know we flew. |
| 2021-04-09 | 9 | Blackbriar | "Selkie" | single | We know what we saw in and beyond the sea, |
| 2021-04-09 | 10 | Mysterain小雨樂隊 | "古風鈴" | 破墨山谷 | and what we heard in clearer air. |
| 2021-04-09 | 41 | HYDE | "ON MY OWN" | single | in place of a structural critique of how social power-entrenchment |
| 2021-04-09 | 42 | Aiolin | "ABSOLUTE EGOISM" | Mermaid Aria -Land Side- 4 | literally undermines the foundations that support it. |
| 2021-04-09 | 43 | Kataan | "Abyss" | single | Caging the minotaur would have been both simpler and kinder. |
| 2021-04-09 | 44 | Dark The Suns | "Shadows in the Void" | Suru Raivosi Sydämeni Pimeydessä | Instead, Daedalus imprisoned him in a maze of infinite inconsequential choices, |
| 2021-04-09 | 45 | Cvlt Ov the Svn | "Hellbound" | single | and thus the rest of us by the idea that this is a threat. |
| 2021-04-09 | 46 | Ætheria Conscientia | "Liturgy for the Ekzunreh" | Corrupted Pillars of Vanity | Of course there is no minotaur, |
| 2021-04-09 | 47 | Cloak of Altering | "I have missed the light so much" | single | and the maze is not complicated, only dark. |
| 2021-04-09 | 77 | Violet Orlandi | "Square Hammer" | Ghosts 2 | The air and the wires are full of joys, |
| 2021-04-02 | 1 | Sershen&Zaritskaya | "Come Together" | single | Millions of songs now living will never die, |
| 2021-04-02 | 2 | Sershen&Zaritskaya | "Stayin' Alive" | single | but gradually we will forget, not where they came from, |
| 2021-04-02 | 3 | Perpetual Fate | "Applause" | single | but what it was like to hear them when they were only themselves. |
| 2021-04-02 | 4 | Butcher Babies | "Last Dance" | single | Of course this is always our dilemma: |
| 2021-04-02 | 5 | Dead Venus | "Flowers & Pain - Single Cut" | single | how to live each unconnected moment as it will be seen in its place in history, |
| 2021-04-02 | 6 | Mutum | "Centipede" | single | without forfeiting our desired fate by assuming we are entitled to it. |
| 2021-04-02 | 7 | Cadaveria | "Shamanic Path" | single | The steps we take define and constitute our path: |
| 2021-04-02 | 8 | Pinkshift | "Mars" | Saccharine 5 | into the unknown, |
| 2021-04-02 | 9 | Cran Arcanaria | "Dominator" | single | or in retreat back within our shrinking zone of control; |
| 2021-04-02 | 10 | Aldious | "Show Down" | Show Down +1 | out the door, in adventurers' clothes, |
| 2021-04-02 | 11 | WHISPER OUT LOUD | "invisible" | WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IS INVISIBLE 6 | until the next distance feels small, |
| 2021-04-02 | 16 | TRiDENT | "IMAGINATION" | ADVANCE GENERATION | or letting them fall away as if the sun were a destination. |
| 2021-04-02 | 17 | RONDONRATS。 | "PARASITE" | single | We live, tenuously, on the encrusted skin of a slow fury |
| 2021-04-02 | 18 | zenbukiminoseida. | "WORLD END CRISIS" | Q.E.D.mono | for whom our existential crises are transient molting |
| 2021-04-02 | 21 | ゼラ | "残月" | 月蝕 2 | and when we confuse audience and setting, |
| 2021-04-02 | 23 | Catalysts | "HOME" | single | Paths have to start somewhere, |
| 2021-04-02 | 24 | DESURABBITS | "RAYWORD" | JUMP (Type-A) | but that's pretty much the only real rule. |
| 2021-04-02 | 58 | Glasgow Kiss | "One Step Closer" | single | New steps and new paths await, |
| 2021-04-02 | 68 | Thy Catafalque | "Piros-sárga" | single | We each had a catafalque of our own, and we complimented each others' in customarily arch tones, |
| 2021-04-02 | 69 | Helloween | "Skyfall - Single Edit" | single | learning to humanize absurdity through commitment, |
| 2021-04-02 | 70 | Nicole | "Vihollisteni peilit" | Hävityksen Huoneet | and then to recognize when this is exactly what has been done to us. |
| 2021-04-02 | 72 | Mörkvind | "Liv" | Undergång 4 | or at least so we claimed when we thought we were untraceable |
| 2021-04-02 | 73 | Dödsrit | "Shallow Graves" | single | and immortal. |
| 2021-04-02 | 74 | Bleakwinter Shrine | "Desolation" | The Warrior Cycle | We forget the winter. We forget plagues. |
| 2021-04-02 | 75 | WANDAR | "Raunen" | Landlose Ufer | We forget the things that have killed or doomed us, |
| 2021-04-02 | 76 | Paysage D'Hiver | "Schtampfä" | single | or at least we convince ourselves that they rarely do both. |
| 2021-04-02 | 77 | Mare Cognitum | "Frozen Star Divinization" | Solar Paroxysm | Of course, if we have survived, we are the ones who were right, |
| 2021-04-02 | 78 | 夢遊病者 | "Redemption / Retaliation" | Noč Na Krayu Sveta | which is how insisting that we are right ends up mislabeled as a survival skill, |
| 2021-04-02 | 79 | Julian Lehmann | "Nature Spirit" | single | and wild erroneous surmises misunderstood as performative ritual. |
| 2021-03-26 | 34 | Metalite | "Talisman" | A Virtual World | What got you through this? |
| 2021-03-26 | 35 | Imperia | "Dream Away" | The Last Horizon | What failed? |
| 2021-03-26 | 36 | Hildr Valkyrie | "We Are Heathens" | We Are Heathens +1 | What was lost, and how will you remember it? |
| 2021-03-26 | 37 | The Genotype | "Cybernetic Revolt" | single | What now? |
| 2021-03-26 | 38 | Skies Collide | "Bloodstream" | single | What now? |
| 2021-03-26 | 39 | Regardless Of Me | "All I Remember" | single | All questions are ways of asking |
| 2021-03-26 | 40 | As Everything Unfolds | "I'm Not the Only One" | Within Each Lies the Other | what we will construe the past to have implied. |
| 2021-03-26 | 41 | Juliet Ruin | "Might" | Dark Water 4 | This is why we fight over control of history, |
| 2021-03-26 | 42 | Ringwanderung | "fall into sky" | single | and the endorsements of the long-dead. |
| 2021-03-26 | 43 | Metalite | "Alone" | A Virtual World | Until now, we could pretend that we had to get by on our own. |
| 2021-03-26 | 44 | Neonfly | "The Future, Tonight" | single | Of course this was never true. |
| 2021-03-26 | 45 | Marius Danielsen | "The Sarlinian Bow" | single | Our integral stories are always told by many voices at once, |
| 2021-03-26 | 46 | HAVAMAL | "Nidhoggr" | single | describing different paths to the base of the same waterfall, |
| 2021-03-26 | 47 | Necronomicon | "I Am the Violence" | The Final Chapter | or competing theories for why the water doesn't simply turn back |
| 2021-03-26 | 48 | Manimal | "Forged in Metal" | single | when it reaches the edge. |
| 2021-03-26 | 49 | Nightrage | "Abyss Rising" | single | The water, as it soars towards us, asks us the same thing about ourselves and our myriad inexplicable choices. |
| 2021-03-26 | 50 | Enigmatic Entrance | "Space Drifter" | Space Drifter +1 | Edges are subjective topology, |
| 2021-03-26 | 51 | Gojira | "Amazonia" | Amazonia +2 | none more so than the edge between our accumulated mistakes |
| 2021-03-26 | 52 | Dwell in Doom | "Within Me" | single | and their compounded consequences. |
| 2021-03-26 | 53 | Nevicate | "Dewdrops" | single | It doesn't actually get harder to hold on. |
| 2021-03-26 | 54 | The Anix | "DSPTCH" | DSPTCH +1 | It's just always hard, and always stretches out, |
| 2021-03-26 | 55 | Andromida | "Isolated" | Hellscape | and we feel how it pulls on us |
| 2021-03-26 | 58 | Tännebränne | "Aktas, backas, tuktas" | single | and pull all of us with you. |
| 2021-03-26 | 63 | The Thirteen | "ever gray" | ICY | We wake from brightest-color dreams into gray mornings, |
| 2021-03-26 | 79 | Second To Sun | "A Fortress Clad in Gray Fog" | A Fortress Clad in Gray Fog +1 | and thus learning to see nothing beyond walls |
| 2021-03-26 | 80 | Love // Paranoia | "Native" | single | until we think the huddled spaces inside of the walls are where we're from. |
| 2021-03-26 | 92 | dArtagnan | "Helden" | Feuer & Flamme | We are made of these tiny heroic acts: eating purple pastries or remembering the dead, |
| 2021-03-19 | 38 | Frost* | "Terrestrial" | single | We do not build telescopes to find a better world, |
| 2021-03-19 | 39 | Azure | "Ameotoko I - The Curse" | single | or peer through them to see out of our own well. |
| 2021-03-19 | 40 | Teramaze | "Between These Shadows" | single | We look, like we listen, to see more of what joy will already have revealed. |
| 2021-03-19 | 41 | Super Jump | "Lift" | single | We look up because there's so much up, |
| 2021-03-19 | 42 | Hevilan | "Dark Paradise" | Symphony of Good and Evil | and if we seem haunted, it is because we can imagine ourselves as so many ghosts. |
| 2021-03-19 | 43 | A Pregnant Light | "Kiss Me Thru the Phone (December)" | Kiss Me Thru the Phone | We are the creatures that will restructure the planet to suit our movement, |
| 2021-03-19 | 44 | Nightfall | "Wrath" | single | and then sabotage our own passages in order to fight with each other across them. |
| 2021-03-19 | 45 | Atreides | "Somos Lo Que Somos" | Ordalía | We measure the limits of our control, |
| 2021-03-19 | 46 | Dvne | "Enûma Eliš" | Etemen Ænka | and then build something as wide as we are tall, |
| 2021-03-19 | 47 | Estuarine | "The Audient Void" | Nyarlathotep | as if all dimensions are interchangeable, |
| 2021-03-19 | 48 | Spectral Wound | "Fair Lucifer, Sad Relic" | single | and wisdom were the name for being foolish in only one specific way at a time. |
| 2021-03-19 | 49 | The Ember, The Ash | "Becoming the Eidolon" | single | The soul is elusive, but the oversoul omnipresent. There are worse definitions of wisdom. |
| 2021-03-19 | 50 | Kankar | "Krater in Sarx" | Dunkle Millennia | Love is preparing not for satiated avarice, |
| 2021-03-19 | 72 | heidi. | "Chapter" | single | but another day it may be yours. |
| 2021-03-19 | 73 | Almanac | "Kingdom of the Blind" | single | Another day, you may be required to march for somebody else's freedom, |
| 2021-03-19 | 74 | Nine Treasures | "Black Heart (Re-Recorded)" | Awakening from Dukkha | or to apologetically reconstruct your own. |
| 2021-03-19 | 75 | Sagason | "Niflheim" | Nine worlds within | We are civilized enough to dig channels between oceans, |
| 2021-03-19 | 76 | Morphide | "Panopticon" | single | and primitive enough to be only mostly confident that when we remove the last shovelful of intervening dirt, |
| 2021-03-19 | 77 | Blackbriar | "Deadly Diminuendo" | single | neither ocean will promptly drain into the other. |
| 2021-03-19 | 78 | Underwaves | "Ocean" | single | It's all the same water through which we chart these shortcuts, |
| 2021-03-19 | 79 | MartYriuM | "Starless Opacity" | Lamia Satanica | all the same space under which we array this dread, |
| 2021-03-19 | 80 | Burning Witches | "Flight of the Valkyries" | single | all the same air through which we would fly if we could fly. |
| 2021-03-19 | 81 | Enemy Inside | "Alien" | single | You can tell the truly unfathomable by how they exist only in your self-doubt. |
| 2021-03-19 | 82 | Rivals | "Dead Flowers" | Sad Looks Pretty on Me | Picking flowers is murder. |
| 2021-03-19 | 83 | Gina And The Eastern Block | "The Insanity" | single | What the day gets for escaping you unscathed |
| 2021-03-19 | 84 | Malaя | "Рок" | ЧС 3 | is thankless dawn over the next continent, |
| 2021-03-19 | 89 | Soulspell | "The Wake of Magellan" | single | Tonight the waves are near, |
| 2021-03-19 | 94 | Saxon | "Hold The Line" | Inspirations | ready to breathe back out all this air we have been filtering, and hear how our lives have changed the noises while we guarded them inside of us. |
| 2021-03-12 | 1 | Issa | "The Night It Rained Forever" | Queen of Broken Hearts | The universes are inside of us, |
| 2021-03-12 | 2 | Secret Sphere | "Against All the Odds" | Lifeblood | endless and tireless and restless, |
| 2021-03-12 | 3 | Orden Ogan | "Interstellar" | Final Days | infinite and empty and lit by faint but innumerable sources. |
| 2021-03-12 | 4 | Arion | "I Love to Be Your Enemy" | I Love to Be Your Enemy +3 | Blood careens around, |
| 2021-03-12 | 5 | Bloodbound | "Creatures of the Dark Realm" | Creatures of the Dark Realm +1 | frenetic gyroscopy inclining us out of our planes of rest, |
| 2021-03-12 | 6 | Dark The Suns | "The Secrets of Time" | single | humming in demon whispers. |
| 2021-03-12 | 7 | In Victory | "The Pulse of the Heart" | single | We are the prevalent fauna of rhythm and recurrent vertigo, |
| 2021-03-12 | 8 | Secret Rule | "Black Swan" | single | defined and united by the terrified conviction that we are each unique, |
| 2021-03-12 | 9 | Heart Healer | "Awake" | The Metal Opera by Magnus Karlsson | and thus irreplaceable, |
| 2021-03-12 | 10 | Skarlett Riot | "Stronger" | single | and thus entitled to ludicrous deference. |
| 2021-03-12 | 11 | Against The Current | "weapon" | weapon +1 | And so we fight these silent involute wars |
| 2021-03-12 | 12 | Air Drawn Dagger | "My Murder of Crows" | single | inside the tenuous boundaries of our selves: |
| 2021-03-12 | 13 | LOVEBITES | "NO TIME TO HESITATE" | GLORY, GLORY, TO THE WORLD | against the tendency to measure our own anticipatory fears against other people's accomplished fates; |
| 2021-03-12 | 14 | Vertex in Origin | "rewind" | Side-by-Side | against hesitation on the event horizon; |
| 2021-03-12 | 27 | UNMASK aLIVE | "KARMA" | UNMASK aLIVE II (My mother is "CAT") | and negotiating this teeming semi-civilization without them is tenuous and terrifying. |
| 2021-03-12 | 28 | the GazettE | "BLINDING HOPE" | single | How do we reach someone whose only coping mechanism, |
| 2021-03-12 | 29 | Gyze | "Voyage of the Future" | Voyage of the Future +1 | in every moment of possible contact, |
| 2021-03-12 | 30 | VOLA | "24 Light-Years" | 24 Light-Years +2 | is DON'T TOUCH ME? |
| 2021-03-12 | 31 | Thy Catafalque | "Erdgeist" | single | We know how to write songs about fearing change |
| 2021-03-12 | 32 | Paysage D'Hiver | "Äschä" | single | more than fearing death, |
| 2021-03-12 | 33 | Tales of Dhvaras | "Three Winters Black" | single | but we don't know how to change a mind |
| 2021-03-12 | 34 | Stortregn | "Timeless Splendor" | Impermanence | that thinks change is the worse option. |
| 2021-03-12 | 35 | The Crown | "Beyond the Frail" | Royal Destroyer | And this is how we can be so beautiful, |
| 2021-03-12 | 36 | Rise to the Sky | "See Me Fall Down" | Let Me Drown With You | each and in every combination, |
| 2021-03-12 | 37 | Dust Moth | "Annular Eclipse" | Rising // Sailing | and yet end up with racists and murders and solipsists and nihilists |
| 2021-03-12 | 41 | Ronnie Atkins | "Subjugated" | One Shot | The only weapon we really have is love, |
| 2021-03-12 | 42 | dArtagnan | "Feuer & Flamme" | single | and it has the power to cut through any armor wrapped around an open heart, |
| 2021-03-12 | 43 | Chez Kane | "All of It" | Chez Kane | but nothing more. |
| 2021-03-12 | 44 | Sunstorm | "One Step Closer" | Afterlife | If you love nothing, you are lost, but invulnerable in consolation. |
| 2021-03-12 | 66 | Nina Roz | "Mbikooye" | single | metal against skin, |
| 2021-03-12 | 80 | Left Hand Solution | "Jolene" | single | It is not that we yearn for heartbreak, |
| 2021-03-12 | 84 | Secret Sphere | "Life Survivors" | Lifeblood | and joylessness can be light-swallowingly dull in any amount of pointlessly leaved gold. |
| 2021-03-12 | 85 | Issa | "Queen of Broken Hearts" | Queen of Broken Hearts | Don't walk away. Let me hear you. Let us hear each other. |
| 2021-03-05 | 11 | Flight of Icarus | "Fly Away" | single | We have more than this song, |
| 2021-03-05 | 12 | Lost Division | "The Queen" | single | and are not faceted by only these glittering imperfections, |
| 2021-03-05 | 13 | Seas on the Moon | "Desolated" | single | but we listen better when we forget this |
| 2021-03-05 | 14 | Imperia | "While I Am Still Here" | single | and allow the width of now to fit its duration. |
| 2021-03-05 | 15 | As Everything Unfolds | "On the Inside" | On the Inside 6 | For three minutes of forever, we can furiously despair. |
| 2021-03-05 | 18 | Megara | "Saturno" | Truco o Trato (Capítulo I) 3 | and cautionary idols, |
| 2021-03-05 | 20 | VENUES | "Rite of Passage" | single | are neither inevitable |
| 2021-03-05 | 21 | ALYXX | "The Purge" | single | nor irreplaceable. |
| 2021-03-05 | 22 | Blood Stain Child | "2045" | 2045 +1 | All we acquire by pretending to evade the present |
| 2021-03-05 | 31 | Nightmare | "cry for the moon" | cry for the moon +2 | We want things that are constituted from wanting |
| 2021-03-05 | 32 | ALCYON | "amanojaku" | amanojaku +2 | and a little bit of dust, |
| 2021-03-05 | 33 | mama. | "Bokuranobyoumeihaningendesita" | single | and when we get them we are scared to say their names, |
| 2021-03-05 | 34 | Wolfheart | "Hereditary" | Skull Soldiers 4 | but our own names are more familiar and yet no safer. |
| 2021-03-05 | 35 | Cvlt Ov the Svn | "My Venom" | single | We do not have to go into space |
| 2021-03-05 | 36 | Golgotha | "I Am Lost" | Remembering the Past: Writing the Future | to reduce our field of vision to rock and horizons, |
| 2021-03-05 | 37 | An Autumn for Crippled Children | "Carefully Breathing" | single | or to run out of acceptable air. |
| 2021-03-05 | 38 | Merta | "Usva" | single | We do not have to wait for justice |
| 2021-03-05 | 39 | Nemoreus | "Mountain High" | Arnea | to treat ourselves as timeless, |
| 2021-03-05 | 40 | Crown | "Shades" | single | as divine and mechanical, |
| 2021-03-05 | 41 | Defeatist UK | "Skin Deep" | single | diaphanous and metamorphic, |
| 2021-03-05 | 42 | Fleddy Melculy | "NIKS" | single | absurd and utopian and squandered and promised. |
| 2021-03-05 | 56 | Violet Orlandi | "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend" | single | Anything you sing, you share. |
| 2021-03-05 | 57 | Saxon | "Paperback Writer" | single | Anything you share is the beginning of a story that doesn't yet know how to end, or why. |
| 2021-02-26 | 21 | Evergrey | "Stories" | Escape of the Phoenix | New stories are enough: |
| 2021-02-26 | 22 | Juliet Ruin | "Fake Stigmata" | single | of how you feared the wrong sins, |
| 2021-02-26 | 23 | Doll Skin | "Control Freak" | single | or how you were wrong to fear sins |
| 2021-02-26 | 24 | Eternal Frequency | "What Are We Waiting For" | single | or to fear. |
| 2021-02-26 | 25 | Metalite | "Cloud Connected" | Cloud Connected +2 | There are ways to sit heroically at home, |
| 2021-02-26 | 26 | Epica | "Twilight Reverie - The Hypnagogic State -" | Omega | heroically suspended, |
| 2021-02-26 | 27 | KuuΔelta | "Still" | single | coming up close, |
| 2021-02-26 | 28 | Regardless Of Me | "Hell's Friends" | single | imagining everywhere you aren't going. |
| 2021-02-26 | 34 | The Guzmania | "kotoba no ame" | single | Any new thing you try exercises your tolerance muscles, |
| 2021-02-26 | 35 | ARLEQUIN | "DameNingen" | pieces | tearing them so they heal stronger. |
| 2021-02-26 | 40 | Nawather | "Breath of Jasmin" | Kenz Illusion | constantly lapsing into a solipsism of symbolic technique |
| 2021-02-26 | 41 | Empyrium | "A Lucid Tower Beckons on the Hills Afar" | Über den Sternen | and then back out into a taxonomy of solipsisms. |
| 2021-02-26 | 42 | Moonspell | "Hermitage" | Hermitage | Half of these mythologies are based on blinking selectively while we spin, |
| 2021-02-26 | 43 | Perennial Isolation | "The Silent Solace" | single | but that doesn't mean you can't be raptured |
| 2021-02-26 | 44 | Wolvencrown | "A Shadow of What Once Was Pt. 1" | A Shadow of What Once Was 3 | exactly where you stand, |
| 2021-02-26 | 45 | Myronath | "Effigy of Malediction" | single | it just requires you to believe as a motion, |
| 2021-02-26 | 46 | Einherjer | "Echoes in Blood" | North Star | feel everything that cuts and holds you, |
| 2021-02-26 | 47 | IOTUNN | "Access All Worlds" | Access All Worlds | and then vault anyway into the sky. |
| 2021-02-26 | 48 | Rise to the Sky | "Leaving This World" | single | Nothing ends, |
| 2021-02-26 | 49 | MUR | "Inner Hole" | single | neither outwards nor inwards. |
| 2021-02-26 | 50 | Interiors | "Analepsis" | Conduit Vista | You were born; |
| 2021-02-26 | 51 | Megaraptor | "That`s the Way It Is" | single | you need not be resigned to this, |
| 2021-02-26 | 52 | Epica | "Omega - Sovereign of the Sun Spheres -" | Omega | but it won't help trying to have done it differently. |
| 2021-02-26 | 53 | Starmen | "Kisses of an Enemy" | single | Love, too, is a transitional energy. |
| 2021-02-19 | 8 | Elyose | "Metropolis" | Persona | Sometimes we sing to assert a retrospective order |
| 2021-02-19 | 9 | Heart Healer | "This is Not the End" | single | on places we have collectively come to rest. |
| 2021-02-19 | 10 | MoonSun | "Falling" | single | Sometimes we open our mouths to listen. |
| 2021-02-19 | 11 | Crystallion | "Living on a Lie" | Heads or Tails | The skull is a leaky isolation machine, |
| 2021-02-19 | 12 | Marty Friedman | "The Perfect World (feat. Alfakyun.)" | The Perfect World (feat. Alfakyun.) / Makenaide 2 | like the heart is a poor shield against hope. |
| 2021-02-19 | 13 | Eyes Set To Kill | "Find Our Way" | single | Dusk is both liminal and relentlessly repeated, |
| 2021-02-19 | 14 | Icon For Hire | "Enemies" | Amorphous | so it's tempting to wonder whether anything we haven't yet escaped |
| 2021-02-19 | 52 | 616 | "Cinderella Valentine" | single | wears a pointless cape for the video. |
| 2021-02-19 | 53 | Eternal Idol | "A Touch of Evil" | Rocking with the Idols | We need our stories more than we need their morals. |
| 2021-02-19 | 54 | Secret Sphere | "The End of an Ego" | single | We know what to do when we fail to lift ourselves clear of the granite quays: |
| 2021-02-19 | 55 | Ronnie Atkins | "Scorpio" | single | we line them with another layer of stone or boardwalk and try again. |
| 2021-02-19 | 57 | Atreides | "Flor de Madrugada" | single | but then shine our brightest lights on the embossed covers of franchised sequels. |
| 2021-02-19 | 58 | Orden Ogan | "Let the Fire Rain" | Let the Fire Rain +3 | We sing "tonight" to be heard tomorrow morning. |
| 2021-02-19 | 59 | Matenrou Opera | "hakanakukieruainosanka" | hakanakukieruainosanka +2 | The people we were when we started to believe |
| 2021-02-19 | 60 | The Crown | "We Drift On" | single | or to love |
| 2021-02-19 | 61 | Gojira | "Born For One Thing" | Born For One Thing +1 | are gone. |
| 2021-02-19 | 64 | Dordeduh | "Desferecat" | single | built on rune-inscribed layers, |
| 2021-02-19 | 65 | The Devil's Trade | "Dead Sister Merope" | single | with close streets leading to a bakery overlooking a harbor. |
| 2021-02-19 | 66 | Mother of All | "Autumn" | single | Sometimes we sing to admit that we miss places we don't remember, |
| 2021-02-19 | 67 | Suffering Hour | "Transcending Antecedent Visions" | The Cyclic Reckoning | sometimes we howl just to judge our distance from walls |
| 2021-02-19 | 68 | Rise to the Sky | "Dream the Pain is Gone" | single | in the darkness. |
| 2021-02-12 | 1 | Close the Hatch | "Enjoy the Silence" | single | Sometimes it takes 20 years for a song to find its true self. I always thought even the Depeche Mode original of "Enjoy the Silence" had an implied "all I ever wanted is [lying dead] here in my arms", and covers by Tori Amos and Lacuna Coil seemed at least emotionally compatible with this notion, but Dayton post-doom band Close the Hatch finally render it in perfectly gloriously morose blacklight. |
| 2021-02-12 | 2 | Sirenia | "Downwards Spiral" | Riddles, Ruins & Revelations | Silence and darkness can be anthemic and bright, of course. |
| 2021-02-12 | 3 | Issa | "The Way Out" | single | Sometimes the way out is down and through the core, |
| 2021-02-12 | 4 | Imperia | "Starlight" | single | clear into the occluded night underfoot. |
| 2021-02-12 | 5 | Nocean | "The Phantom" | single | Sometimes the ghosts are the only ones who return a particular touch, |
| 2021-02-12 | 62 | Crossfaith | "Dead or Alive" | single | But this headlong anti-gravity forward listening |
| 2021-02-12 | 63 | Bloodred Hourglass | "Drag Me the Rain" | single | allows greatness to gush out of nothing |
| 2021-02-12 | 64 | Wesenwille | "A Material God" | single | in part as a way to assert the possibility of momentary improvisational greatness |
| 2021-02-12 | 65 | Aara | "Nimmermehr" | single | for love of moments, |
| 2021-02-12 | 66 | Paysage D'Hiver | "Bluet" | single | and of course in part to avoid acknowledging that every look backwards in time |
| 2021-02-12 | 67 | Emptiness | "Le mal est chez lui" | Vide | implies an equal and opposite and thus potentially untenable look into the glaring future. |
| 2021-02-12 | 68 | Altarage | "Magno Evento" | single | The optimist thinks the past is scarier, |
| 2021-02-12 | 69 | Mork | "Svartmalt" | single | or wants to. |
| 2021-02-12 | 70 | Crown | "Illumination" | single | I am an optimist: |
| 2021-02-12 | 74 | Forlorn Hope | "To the Bitter End" | single | This is why we hear our dead heroes in surviving guitar solos, |
| 2021-02-12 | 75 | Durbin | "Into the Flames" | The Beast Awakens | and how we contrive to unfear the reaper by hearing his songs in our own. |
| 2021-02-12 | 76 | The Pretty Reckless | "My Bones" | Death By Rock And Roll | We will leave skeletal traces |
| 2021-02-12 | 77 | Chez Kane | "Rocket on the Radio" | single | of ideas only materialized in muscle and skin. |
| 2021-02-12 | 80 | Varang Nord | "Cīņis Gors" | single | and we recall the legions of the damned to tear up the cursed roads and restore |
| 2021-02-12 | 81 | Salduie | "Descarnatio" | single | our ancestral right to wander. |
| 2021-02-12 | 83 | Nifrost | "Eit siste Ynskje" | single | Roads are paths plus bureaucracy, |
| 2021-02-12 | 84 | IOTUNN | "The Tower of Cosmic Nihility" | single | in the same way that astronomy is astrology plus telescopes -- |
| 2021-02-12 | 85 | Rise to the Sky | "Let Me Drown With You" | single | or minus, because the problem with superstition is too much elaboration |
| 2021-02-12 | 100 | Sirenia | "Into Infinity" | Riddles, Ruins & Revelations | Courage is taking the next step when the road crumbles back into a path. |
| 2021-02-05 | 1 | Flight of Icarus | "Our Burning Star" | single | I have only sometimes, in my life, had a Favorite Song, and even less often had anything I would nominate for Best Song, which is an untenable concept by its nature. And yet, here it is. Flight of Icarus are a pop metal band from Gothenburg, and this is the first single from their upcoming second album, and it's my new favorite song and I keep playing it over and over and every single time I have the same thought, which is "This may be the best song ever. Ever." It's too pretty and oohs too much if you demand that metal involves aggression, and maybe too dense and overdriven if you demand that pop be gentle, and there are many things I love in music that aren't present in this song, but there is nothing in this song that I do not adore, nothing I want to change, nothing I want them to improve. It's "Dancing Queen", but the Queen is omnibenevolent and she is watching us. It's "Amaranth" but the verses are just as delirious as the chorus. It's proof of our individual humility and our collective immortality. The sun beams at our approach, grateful for the opportunity to shine however briefly on our wings. |
| 2021-02-05 | 2 | Evergrey | "Where August Mourns" | Where August Mourns +2 | And if I had any illusion that my musical curiosity were motivated by an end, rather than a feeling of motion, it would be disspelled by the fact that I do eventually stop hitting Back and allow this week of new music to continue, and am still overjoyed to listen to these other songs that seem merely wonderful. We encompass melanchonic progressive-metal bombast, |
| 2021-02-05 | 3 | Azure | "Mistress" | single | math-rock Supertramp, |
| 2021-02-05 | 4 | Marius Danielsen | "Stars Will Light the Way" | single | galloping battle-hymns, |
| 2021-02-05 | 5 | Kalidia | "Hiding from the Sun - New Version 2021" | Lies' Device | reticent perfectability, |
| 2021-02-05 | 6 | Carmilla | "Nevermore" | single | guttural restlessness. |
| 2021-02-05 | 7 | Arion | "In The Name Of Love (feat. Cyan Kicks)" | single | We are only loosely in control of our most boundless powers, |
| 2021-02-05 | 8 | As Everything Unfolds | "Grayscale" | Grayscale 5 | only uneasily situtated along the spectra of our joys and vulnerabilities. |
| 2021-02-05 | 9 | Torn Between Two Worlds | "The Beauty of Deception" | single | Joy, too, is a response to triggers, |
| 2021-02-05 | 10 | Heart Healer | "Into the Unknown" | single | and thus cannot be trusted as a moral guide. |
| 2021-02-05 | 12 | Alteria | "Nessuna pietà" | Vita Imperfetta | does not determine the elevation of the destination. |
| 2021-02-05 | 14 | Persona | "Alpha" | single | just inertial; |
| 2021-02-05 | 15 | Lollia | "Ghost Rule" | single | these joys and angers are elemental, not legislative. |
| 2021-02-05 | 49 | Skyliner | "Break The Surface" | Dark Rivers, White Thunder | It is time for stomping on black ice stretched over the roiling surface of deep water. |
| 2021-02-05 | 50 | Korpiklaani | "Anolan aukeat" | Jylhä | It is time for rituals of redemption, |
| 2021-02-05 | 51 | Incursed | "The Black Hunter" | Baskavígin | for frantic errands in search of the materials for desperate spells, |
| 2021-02-05 | 52 | Wolfchant | "Komet" | single | for burning arcs |
| 2021-02-05 | 53 | Frostnatt | "Det Kommer Til Å Bli Kaldt" | single | above frozen ground. |
| 2021-02-05 | 54 | Heldom | "Vaknan" | single | The old gods repay our conditional allegiance with ambiguous stories |
| 2021-02-05 | 55 | The Ruins Of Beverast | "Deserts to Bind and Defeat" | The Thule Grimoires | we can recast with our own oaths and enemies, |
| 2021-02-05 | 56 | Blurr Thrower | "Amnios" | Les Voûtes | and thus use to alloy new morals. |
| 2021-02-05 | 57 | Moonthoth | "Hymny nocy" | single | They know that the more languages we learn, |
| 2021-02-05 | 58 | Deception (NOR) | "Remission" | The Mire | the higher our towers grow, |
| 2021-02-05 | 59 | Coldbound | "Slumber of Decay" | Slumber of Decay +2 | and the clearer it becomes that higher vantages are not intended for looking up. |
| 2021-02-05 | 60 | Maelstrom Aeterna | "When Light Has Faded" | single | It is time for another imperfectable night that will not break us. |
| 2021-02-05 | 61 | Fenris Vrede | "Dødsriket" | single | The realms of the dead, once mapped, |
| 2021-02-05 | 62 | Andromida | "The Cataclysm" | single | turn out to be uncannily familiar. |
| 2021-02-05 | 63 | Interiors | "Focus" | single | Anthems are not devotional, |
| 2021-02-05 | 64 | Amarionette | "Get Back" | single | which is why you can sing them for anything or nothing. |
| 2021-02-05 | 65 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Gone Sour Doomed" | single | All of these songs are "Dancing Queen" somehow, |
| 2021-01-29 | 22 | Utsu-P | "ダブルラリアット [Double Bass Drum Remix 2021]" | single | I don't mean that we grasp it, |
| 2021-01-29 | 23 | Circus of Fools | "Affair of the Poisons Part IV: The Iron Mask" | single | or that we stop struggling, |
| 2021-01-29 | 24 | Souls Of Diotima | "The Dark Lady" | Janas | but we learn, maybe, to disentangle curiosity from the unknowable. |
| 2021-01-29 | 25 | Scarlet Dorn | "Back to the Ground" | Blood Red Bouquet | If religious awe is the feeling of submitting yourself to guidance that cannot be interrogated, |
| 2021-01-29 | 26 | Crashing Atlas | "Graveyard" | single | then rationalist, humanist curiosity is the willingness to ackowledge that your movements are not guided, |
| 2021-01-29 | 27 | DEAR MOTHER | "Symbiose" | single | and then to keep making them. |
| 2021-01-29 | 33 | Ainur | "Spirit Of Fire" | single | We organize the darkness. |
| 2021-01-29 | 34 | Aetherian | "Primordial Woods" | single | We take whatever narrow range of wavelengths we are alive for, |
| 2021-01-29 | 35 | Einherjer | "The Blood and the Iron" | single | and spread them across the bounds of what we know |
| 2021-01-29 | 36 | Tribulation | "In Remembrance" | Where the Gloom Becomes Sound | until we think of new words |
| 2021-01-29 | 37 | Minutian | "Magical Thinking" | single | for the worlds just beyond what we thought were the edges. |
| 2021-01-29 | 39 | Soen | "Lumerian" | IMPERIAL | The days that remain to you |
| 2021-01-29 | 40 | Celestial Sanctuary | "Soul Diminished" | single | outnumber the days you can relive. |
| 2021-01-29 | 41 | Luciferian | "The Bringer of Light" | Luciferian | The dark lord comes to you in a chariot drawn by a three-headed wolf, |
| 2021-01-29 | 42 | BAEST | "Necro Sapiens" | Necro Sapiens +2 | and you say "Dude, the left head is about to fall off, and is the right one supposed to be an...ostrich? |
| 2021-01-29 | 70 | Harakiri for the Sky | "Song to Say Goodbye" | single | and ambiguity |
| 2021-01-22 | 22 | Shereign | "Against the Odds" | single | We are unlikely, but inevitable; |
| 2021-01-22 | 23 | Secret Sphere | "Lifeblood" | single | hopeless, but invincible; |
| 2021-01-22 | 24 | Turbulence | "Madness Unforeseen" | single | chaos, but also glee. |
| 2021-01-22 | 25 | Dust in Mind | "Break" | single | The usefulness of standing on giants |
| 2021-01-22 | 26 | Labyrinth | "Finally Free" | Welcome to the Absurd Circus | is often phrased in terms of horizon distance, |
| 2021-01-22 | 27 | The Lightbringer of Sweden | "Farewell" | single | but more often the giants are standing abs-deep in wolf-blood |
| 2021-01-22 | 28 | MajorVoice | "Waves of Love" | Morgenrot | and rising seas, |
| 2021-01-22 | 29 | Therion | "The Leaf on the Oak of Far" | Leviathan | and it's less pressing to know what else we can't swim to |
| 2021-01-22 | 30 | Antonamasia | "End Oblivion" | single | than to find out what the giants believe about their own fates |
| 2021-01-22 | 31 | Crystallion | "The Wild Hunt" | single | before they carry us into it. |
| 2021-01-22 | 32 | Epica | "Rivers" | Rivers +2 | Of the countless moral errors of astrology, |
| 2021-01-22 | 33 | Phantom Elite | "Glass Crown" | Titanium | maybe the worst is the failure to acknowledge the angular momenta of our only frames of reference. |
| 2021-01-22 | 52 | Moongates Guardian | "Over Withered Land" | Till The Wind Of The Morning | remorse and rebirth. |
| 2021-01-22 | 53 | Wolfheart | "Skull Soldiers" | single | Our militaristic rhapsodies are strength-training for defiance, |
| 2021-01-22 | 54 | Lombolo | "Skuggan från prärien" | single | and as with any obsession, quickly become their own ends. |
| 2021-01-22 | 55 | Alkonost | "Там, Где Живут Ветра" | Ведомые Ветром | Laws written to encode justice |
| 2021-01-22 | 56 | Tanzwut | "Die Tanzwut kehrt zurück" | single | create establishments by this same act; |
| 2021-01-22 | 57 | Aspar | "Mond" | Maifrost | traditions shaped out of respect |
| 2021-01-22 | 58 | Moonspell | "All or Nothing" | single | replace the empathy of honor |
| 2021-01-22 | 59 | Equilibrium Falls | "Square zero constant" | single | with catalogs of merchandised binaries |
| 2021-01-22 | 60 | Lake Of Tears | "In Wait and in Worries" | In Wait and in Worries +1 | of exclusion and implied entitlement. |
| 2021-01-22 | 64 | Soen | "Illusion" | single | At best, pride is a rehearsal for empathy, |
| 2021-01-22 | 66 | Subterranean Masquerade | "Ascend" | Ascend +1 | like naming the countries from their inverted outlines |
| 2021-01-22 | 67 | Creye | "Broken Highway" | II | we see from inside the warm heart of the planet. |
| 2021-01-22 | 68 | W.E.T. | "The Moment of Truth" | Retransmission | Every new map is fractionally less political, |
| 2021-01-22 | 69 | Wig Wam | "Hypnotized" | Never Say Die | less sure that we draw maps in order to bound the alien, |
| 2021-01-22 | 70 | Ronnie Atkins | "One Shot" | single | less invested in relimning the old lines |
| 2021-01-22 | 71 | Giorgio Vanni | "Hearthstone siamo gli Eroi" | single | but more intrigued to know where they have been. |
| 2021-01-22 | 72 | Amadeüs | "El Dolor Fantasma" | single | We are tragedians of our most fantastic regrets. |
| 2021-01-22 | 73 | Atreides | "Servet" | single | We walk out of the silver mines with our pockets full of sand. |
| 2021-01-22 | 90 | Labyrinth | "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" | Welcome to the Absurd Circus | But it's OK, it's OK, they only ever wanted us to fall in love with errors we have a chance to not make, with fates we might write into elusively epic stories |
| 2021-01-15 | 1 | Issa | "Angels Calling" | single | We make these cloudbusting machines to reveal the imaginary heroic, |
| 2021-01-15 | 2 | Metalite | "A Virtual World" | A Virtual World +1 | or we imagine inverted worlds in which the clouds collect only below our wings. |
| 2021-01-15 | 3 | LiSA | "dawn" | dawn +3 | Maybe this is the sentimental price of amateur sentience: |
| 2021-01-15 | 4 | BAND-MAID | "Warning!" | Unseen World | delusions of immortality |
| 2021-01-15 | 5 | Enemy Inside | "Crystallize" | single | born of barely-emergent self-awareness. |
| 2021-01-15 | 6 | Alteria | "Punto di rottura" | single | But so too are delusions of immortality a provocational gift |
| 2021-01-15 | 7 | FATE GEAR | "The Sky Pirates feat.NANA" | The Sky Prison | from our naive histories |
| 2021-01-15 | 8 | Sirenia | "We Come To Ruins" | single | to our future selves: |
| 2021-01-15 | 9 | Neopera | "An Eternal Night" | single | if we can manage the difficult feat |
| 2021-01-15 | 10 | Black Light Discipline | "Not the Way" | single | of internalizing hypothetical immortality |
| 2021-01-15 | 12 | Jorn | "Faith Bloody Faith" | single | instead of a divine rationalization for arbitrary power, |
| 2021-01-15 | 13 | Orden Ogan | "Inferno" | Inferno +2 | we become capable of participating in justice; |
| 2021-01-15 | 14 | Tribulation | "Funeral Pyre" | single | if not, we accelerate inelegantly towards death. |
| 2021-01-15 | 15 | Dragony | "Love You to Death" | Viribus Unitis | We have these agonizingly if not inexplicably unmade choices: |
| 2021-01-15 | 16 | Bloodbound | "When Fate Is Calling" | single | recognize ourselves as the authors of our churches, |
| 2021-01-15 | 17 | Simulacrum | "Arrhythmic Distortions" | single | or allow our lives to subsidize already-bloated plagiarists; |
| 2021-01-15 | 18 | Aspar | "Fluch" | single | let an awareness of our own ungovernable strength |
| 2021-01-15 | 19 | Mork | "Arv" | single | be a constant ambient vibration along the lengths of each of our bones, |
| 2021-01-15 | 20 | Antre | "Through These Dead Eyes" | Dark Spectrum | or helplessly destroy everything we touch; |
| 2021-01-15 | 21 | Owl | "Conquering the Kingdom of Rain (Enter Her Holy Halls)" | Owl | feel every loss as a personal blow, |
| 2021-01-15 | 22 | Bhleg | "Alyr III" | Ödhin | or lose without feeling; |
| 2021-01-15 | 23 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "Orphan Limbs" | The Helm of Sorrow 4 | cut away the grotestque evils we have grown as if they were extensions of ourselves, |
| 2021-01-15 | 74 | Cosmophobe | "Astral Disarray" | single | To misinterpret our attempts to make a just human civilization |
| 2021-01-08 | 7 | As Everything Unfolds | "Wallow" | Wallow +3 | they stomp in waving racist heraldry and reiterating their ignorance in voluble frothing pathetic hatred. |
| 2021-01-08 | 8 | Phantom Elite | "Deliverance" | single | We can always see them coming. They declare themselves with sub-infantile pride. |
| 2021-01-08 | 10 | We Are the Catalyst | "Doomed" | single | and elaborate incessantly on their delusional nihilistic schemes. |
| 2021-01-08 | 11 | Cellar Darling | "DANCE" | single | They gather in grim daylight, |
| 2021-01-08 | 12 | Manora | "Wired to obey" | single | on the steps of our temples of belief in their humanity, |
| 2021-01-08 | 13 | Souls Of Diotima | "Janas" | single | and demonstrate to convince us we were wrong to dedicate buildings to this faith. |
| 2021-01-08 | 14 | Keoma | "Mirror Symmetry" | single | They look for the cameras before starting the itemization of their pointless intended treasons. |
| 2021-01-08 | 15 | Control the Storm | "Desire" | single | Not content with brown shirts, they print up imbecilic commemorative hats |
| 2021-01-08 | 16 | Dreamshade | "Shanghai Nights" | single | in assiduous anticipation of their crimes. |
| 2021-01-08 | 17 | Durbin | "Evil Eye" | single | Their coups fail on their own declared terms, inevitably, |
| 2021-01-08 | 18 | Evergrey | "Eternal Nocturnal" | Eternal Nocturnal +1 | and never had anything remotely like an actual plan. |
| 2021-01-08 | 19 | MajorVoice | "Ruf Mich" | single | You can't rage-tweet a country great again |
| 2021-01-08 | 20 | Fiaba | "La gemella tradita" | Di gatti di rane di folletti e d'altre storie | with a week-old cheeseburger in your other tiny hand. |
| 2021-01-08 | 21 | Korpiklaani | "Niemi" | Niemi +3 | You do not become the Speaker's voice by taking her lectern, |
| 2021-01-08 | 22 | Ravenstorm | "The Spirit of the Wolf" | single | any more than you become a foretold king by pulling |
| 2021-01-08 | 23 | IOTUNN | "Voyage of the Garganey I" | single | an ironic costume sword |
| 2021-01-08 | 24 | Aspar | "Inferno" | single | out of a lake of unironic shit |
| 2021-01-01 | 2 | PassCode | "SPARK IGNITION" | STRIVE | seething with promise, |
| 2021-01-01 | 24 | HYDE | "DEFEAT" | single | is like leaving a plastic bowl of shit on a lit gas burner |
| 2021-01-01 | 27 | ゼラ | "黒よりも暗い黒" | 黒よりも暗い黒【TYPE-A】 3 | Trump is a plague and an embarrassment to us as a nation and a species, |
| 2021-01-01 | 29 | Naked Identity Created by King | "Seed" | single | His pointless narcissism is undisguised and unmistakable, |
| 2021-01-01 | 30 | lynch. | "ALLIVE" | single | and telling his supporters that he doesn't really care about them |
| 2021-01-01 | 31 | Mind Driller | "Prophecy" | single | is like digging through the smoking rubble of the house until you find the charred shit that was in the plastic bowl |
| 2021-01-01 | 32 | Seas on the Moon | "Gone" | single | and telling it that the bowl doesn't love. |
| 2021-01-01 | 33 | ILLUMISHADE | "The Endless Vow" | The Endless Vow +1 | Nobody believed for a second that Donald Trump was going to personally join a pedestrian liberating march |
| 2021-01-01 | 34 | Circus of Fools | "Affair of the Poisons Part III: Chambre Ardente" | single | on a citadel of usurpers. |
| 2021-01-01 | 35 | Sacrament | "Лги мне" | single | He wouldn't have been able to walk that far without stopping for a meal halfway, |
| 2021-01-01 | 36 | The Trophy | "The Gift Of Life" | The Gift Of Life | and his golf cart wouldn't have been able to get up the Capitol steps, |
| 2021-01-01 | 37 | Aspar | "Lawine" | single | and of course he does not ever lead. |
| 2021-01-01 | 38 | Nårdegaist | "Bjärskåkken" | Haimganggsringgninggi | He basks. |
| 2021-01-01 | 39 | Ius Talionis | "Divide et frange" | Theomorphose 2 | He is a toxic container full of shit, |
| 2021-01-01 | 40 | Aspar | "Strand der Zeit" | single | but in the stove-bowl-shit allegory, |
| 2021-01-01 | 69 | ChuggaBoom | "One More Christmas Song" | single | There was, ultimately, nothing out of character about our terrible day, or these horrifying four years. I know us when I see us, and that was definitely us. We made this mess together. |
| 2021-01-01 | 70 | Elegy Of Madness | "Carol of the Bells" | single | But if we have one thing other countries do not, one thing other generations of humans have not (and I'm by no means certain that we do, but it's believe or give up), it might be our chaotic, insatiable, relentlessly unstable character and its obtuse but self-preservational ability to shudder and scrape off the shit and melted plastic and light a new fire under a new oath as if this one can still, after everything, be different. |
| 2020-12-25 | 1 | Synthvvitch | "shimmering mists (into the gloaming)" | Mortifer | We set imaginary boundaries |
| 2020-12-25 | 2 | Rise to the Sky | "A Cold Embrace From Life" | A Cold Embrace from Life | lightly, momentarily, down on the flowing surface of time |
| 2020-12-25 | 3 | The Ruins Of Beverast | "Kromlec'h Knell" | single | as a necessary mechanism for coping with the vertigo of eternity: |
| 2020-12-25 | 4 | Akhlys | "Somniloquy" | Melinoë | ceremonially, and they are immediately and unceremoniously borne away. |
| 2020-12-25 | 5 | Tomorrow's Rain | "דורסי לילה" | Hollow (Hebrew Version) | We may as well draw our plans on scritta |
| 2020-12-25 | 6 | Alekhine's Gun | "Tonglen" | Year of the Lazarus 3 | with molten pens. |
| 2020-12-25 | 7 | Aspar | "Der Aufstieg" | single | Nothing ends today |
| 2020-12-25 | 8 | Korpiklaani | "Sanaton maa" | Sanaton Maa 3 | of its own internal volition, |
| 2020-12-25 | 9 | Hora Zulu | "El Más Solo del Cementerio" | single | but we take our unnumbered inhalations |
| 2020-12-25 | 10 | Tribulation | "Hour of the Wolf" | single | and select one to be assigned episodic finality. |
| 2020-12-25 | 11 | Crystallion | "Knights and Heroes" | single | Here the old year ends, and we are allowed to choose our roles anew. |
| 2020-12-25 | 12 | Mendel | "Discover" | Neoblivion | All structural implications inherently persist, |
| 2020-12-25 | 15 | Vajra | "Sever the Tie" | single | and because this is unstable to contemplate, |
| 2020-12-25 | 16 | NEVIAH | "EMBERS IN THE EYE" | EMBERS IN THE EYE | and we are even worse at ungrounded reasoning |
| 2020-12-25 | 17 | Postmodern Fantasy | "When Destiny Calls" | single | than reasoning in general, |
| 2020-12-25 | 18 | Tuatha de Danann | "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" | In Nomine Éireann | we pretend that we can only do so occasionally, |
| 2020-12-25 | 61 | Dead by April | "Let It Go" | single | And then we laugh, and turn, and run a foot through the line as we step back into everything. |
| 2020-12-18 | 12 | Sam Fender | "Winter Song" | single | or soft metal instead of aromatic resin. |
| 2020-12-18 | 16 | Syqem | "beLIEf (The Christmas Song)" | single | With this power you open a portal |
| 2020-12-18 | 17 | Majestica | "A Christmas Story" | A Christmas Carol | to uncountable glorious realms |
| 2020-12-18 | 18 | Gathering Of Kings | "December (Christmas)" | December (Christmas) +1 | that have always been layers of our skin. |
| 2020-12-18 | 19 | Me And The Rest | "Last Christmas" | single | This year will be different. |
| 2020-12-18 | 20 | Cole Rolland | "Carol of the Bells" | single | But then, cyclic difference is all we mean by years, |
| 2020-12-11 | 24 | Skarlett Riot | "Gravity" | single | you have extracted the power |
| 2020-12-11 | 25 | Blame Me! | "Fire, Fuel And Scars" | single | that you breathed into them in the first place, |
| 2020-12-11 | 26 | September Mourning | "Wake The Dead" | single | and you're back to almost exactly where you started. |
| 2020-12-11 | 27 | Sirenia | "Addiction No. 1" | single | Almost. |
| 2020-12-11 | 28 | Edenbridge | "Tauerngold" | single | We will bring the tables back out, |
| 2020-12-11 | 29 | Sebastien | "Zatmění" | Integrity | but the floors will remember the months they spent empty. |
| 2020-12-11 | 30 | Dark The Suns | "Everywhere" | single | You will feel the breath of strangers. |
| 2020-12-11 | 31 | dArtagnan | "C'est la vie" | single | You will catch yourself missing the warmth of masks. |
| 2020-12-11 | 32 | Creye | "Find a Reason" | single | We careened off of paranoia and futility, |
| 2020-12-11 | 33 | W.E.T. | "Got to Be About Love" | single | not always that much more effectively in socially empathic earnest |
| 2020-12-11 | 34 | Soen | "Monarch" | single | than in imperious nihilist denial, |
| 2020-12-11 | 35 | 3.2 | "A Fond Farewell" | single | and even at the end, the race between deliverance and inevitability |
| 2020-12-11 | 36 | Harakiri for the Sky | "And Oceans Between Us" | single | may require unsatisfying arbitration. |
| 2020-12-11 | 37 | Mesarthim | "Planet Nine 15:29" | Planet Nine | But this is not a defeat for science, any more than implacable cosmology is defeat for orbital physics. |
| 2020-12-11 | 38 | Mesarthim | "Laniakea" | The Degenerate Era | We made the vaccines, |
| 2020-12-11 | 39 | Saħħar | "Nilqghu..." | Tigrif Tal-Gnus | but we also made the wet markets |
| 2020-12-11 | 40 | Einherjer | "Stars" | single | and the air filters |
| 2020-12-11 | 41 | Aspar | "Rom" | single | and the masks |
| 2020-12-11 | 42 | Asphyx | "Knights Templar Stand" | single | and the conduits for idiotic conspiracy theories |
| 2020-12-11 | 43 | From North | "Fearless" | Lurhorns Call 3 | and the ordering systems for body bags |
| 2020-12-11 | 44 | Moonspell | "Common Prayers" | single | and the fear we have shared and the hope. |
| 2020-12-11 | 45 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "Hollywood" | single | There is only us. |
| 2020-12-11 | 46 | For Giants | "What Happened To You" | single | We survive definitionally, |
| 2020-12-04 | 3 | Rave The Reqviem | "Colossvs" | Stigmata Itch | or the last narcissist fed by obsequities, |
| 2020-12-04 | 4 | Souls Of Diotima | "The Black Mask" | single | or the last time we defeat them |
| 2020-12-04 | 5 | A Swift Farewell | "Save Yourself" | single | or survive. |
| 2020-12-04 | 6 | Dark Princess | "Феникс" | single | Love expands, infuses, animates, multiplies. |
| 2020-12-04 | 7 | As Everything Unfolds | "Stranger in the Mirror" | Stranger in the Mirror +2 | Hatred clenches, divides, flees into isolated shadows. |
| 2020-12-04 | 8 | Ann My Guard | "Nyx" | Furia | Good inspires, evil commands, |
| 2020-12-04 | 9 | Dark Horse White Horse | "Judgement Day" | single | and this is why fascism's obscene parody of populism |
| 2020-12-04 | 10 | Elyose | "Mille silences" | single | relies on misinformation and conjured enemies and festering fear, |
| 2020-12-04 | 11 | Seas on the Moon | "Opium" | Sanctuary 5 | and authority as a moral abscess. |
| 2020-12-04 | 12 | Die So Fluid | "Walk With Me" | single | We are flawed deeply, |
| 2020-12-04 | 13 | Phantom Elite | "The Race" | single | but never all the way down. |
| 2020-12-04 | 14 | The Dead Deads | "Hey Girlfriend" | single | If you want to save someone, look into their eyes. |
| 2020-12-04 | 18 | BAND-MAID | "Different" | Different +2 | in the sodden costumes of loyal also-drowning wolves, |
| 2020-12-04 | 29 | Armed Cloud | "Big Bang Theory" | Torque | and then realizing it is everywhere around us. |
| 2020-12-04 | 30 | Nemoreus | "Bring the Demons to the Hall" | single | We had a vaccine before we had a pandemic. |
| 2020-12-04 | 31 | Felo De Se | "Shattered Sky" | Essence of Illusions | The race was never between virus and RNA, |
| 2020-12-04 | 32 | Orden Ogan | "Heart of the Android" | single | always between conscientiousness and complacency. |
| 2020-12-04 | 33 | Evergrey | "Forever Outsider" | single | All morality tales are scarecrows made of |
| 2020-12-04 | 34 | Iron Savior | "Skycrest" | Skycrest | difficult rewarding truths stuffed into compellingly worthless evasions, |
| 2020-12-04 | 35 | Labyrinth | "Live Today" | single | topped with shitty hats. |
| 2020-12-04 | 36 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "Torture" | Glare of Deliverance | An administration of humans raised on consequence could have faced this challenge with more courage or more compassion, |
| 2020-12-04 | 37 | Hyrgal | "Colère Noire" | Fin De Règne | but if you have 74 million people willing to believe in imaginary enemies but not existential ones, |
| 2020-12-04 | 38 | Knogjärn | "Älskar ingen" | Stora och farliga | that's a lot of bad hats. |
| 2020-12-04 | 39 | Mägo de Oz | "El Cervezo - El árbol de la birra" | single | Less systemically-dysfunctional countries than ours |
| 2020-12-04 | 40 | Saurom | "Mi Gente" | Música | failed this challenge in their own ways, too. |
| 2020-12-04 | 41 | Waltari | "Fire Dance - Single Edit" | single | In terms of practical human qualities, this was bad year |
| 2020-12-04 | 44 | Rave The Reqviem | "Aerial" | Stigmata Itch | try again in 2021, |
| 2020-12-04 | 104 | The HU | "Sad But True" | single | Open your eyes. |
| 2020-12-04 | 105 | Iconic Eye | "Jane" | Back from Behind the Sun 5 | Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. |
| 2020-11-27 | 23 | Metalite | "Peacekeepers" | single | and where we pass, there will be chaos and power and peace. |
| 2020-11-27 | 24 | Epica | "Freedom - The Wolves Within-" | Freedom - The Wolves Within 2 | We are ungoverned animals, |
| 2020-11-27 | 25 | Votum | "Prey" | Duhkha | half the time barely aware enough to save ourselves from our own nature |
| 2020-11-27 | 26 | Eleine | "Crawl from the Ashes" | Dancing in Hell | disguished as fire or teeth, |
| 2020-11-27 | 27 | Intra | "Maya" | single | and yet also poetic architects |
| 2020-11-27 | 28 | Juliet Ruin | "Dark Water" | single | and the creatures who see emotional hue in physical texture, |
| 2020-11-27 | 29 | As December Falls | "Afterglow" | single | and what it feels like when a war ends |
| 2020-11-27 | 30 | TEARS OF TRAGEDY | "Outsider" | TRINITY | and you have this accumulated will to fight |
| 2020-11-27 | 31 | Rie a.k.a. Suzaku | "World Journey" | World Journey | and a guitar and a travel ban. |
| 2020-11-27 | 32 | Dual Alter World | "STAR ENHANCER" | WORLD DISTONATION | The sunlight feels like purpose, |
| 2020-11-27 | 33 | Cran Arcanaria | "PERSONA" | single | but it was discarded 93 million miles ago, |
| 2020-11-27 | 64 | Melodicka Bros | "Complicated (But it's Prog Metal)" | single | systemically immature and mostly incapable of rational self-evaluation, |
| 2020-11-27 | 65 | Amahiru | "Innocent" | Amahiru | proudest of our least distinguished flaws, |
| 2020-11-27 | 66 | Grimgotts | "Land of Tomorrow" | single | dreaming of trivia utopias, |
| 2020-11-27 | 67 | Paysage D'Hiver | "Dans le rêve lucide" | Im Traum | misconstruing a single subdivided rock as vastness and empire. |
| 2020-11-27 | 68 | Arrayan Path | "The Marble Gates to Apeiron" | The Marble Gates to Apeiron | You ask if we are evil, and we say "No, no, 'eeviel'. Totally different. We changed it to make this clear." |
| 2020-11-27 | 69 | Dread Sovereign | "Nature is the Devil's Church" | single | You would be confused if you had to live here, too. |
| 2020-11-27 | 70 | Varde | "Skuld" | Fedraminne | It's hard to believe that virtue derives from will |
| 2020-11-27 | 71 | Ondskapt | "Semita Sinistram" | Grimoire Ordo Devus | when will is so helpless against so many external forces, |
| 2020-11-27 | 72 | Ablaze My Sorrow | "My Sorrow" | single | hard to grant authority to our hearts |
| 2020-11-27 | 73 | Panychida | "Abele" | Gabreta Aeterna | when we spend half of every second wondering if they will beat again as supposedly scheduled. |
| 2020-11-27 | 74 | Corrupt Moral Altar | "Cathedral of Porn" | Patiently Waiting for Wonderful Things 5 | You would suffer a teleology exactly as bizarre as ours |
| 2020-11-27 | 75 | Suffering Hour | "Strongholds of Awakening" | single | if you had to assemble it while spinning at these speeds and angles. |
| 2020-11-27 | 76 | Imha Tarikat | "Klimax Downpour" | single | How do you think we ended up with all these mythologies |
| 2020-11-27 | 77 | Mork | "Pesta" | Pesta +3 | flexed in collaborationist opposition to the void? |
| 2020-11-27 | 78 | Serpents Oath | "Malediction" | single | All our anthems reduce to "I will follow you into the dark", |
| 2020-11-27 | 79 | Paysage D'Hiver | "Schnee (I)" | Schnee | and "my love is this candle and you are this cold wind". |
| 2020-11-27 | 80 | Kaunis Kuolematon | "Syttyköön toinen aurinko" | Syttyköön Toinen Aurinko | And you sit nestled in your lush enclaves of karst, |
| 2020-11-27 | 81 | Marras | "Mustavalkoista" | Henkilökohtainen Helvetti 4 | listening to us on receptors suspended securely from towers, |
| 2020-11-27 | 85 | Saurom | "La Danza De Los Mundos" | single | But, of course, our fragility is exactly how our languages operate. |
| 2020-11-27 | 101 | Batushka | "TRETIJ CZAS" | BLACK LITURGY | and by reverently surging devotion to everything we claim to resist. |
| 2020-11-27 | 104 | UMC | "Sweet but Psycho (Metal Version)" | CHAPTER 2 | This is what our entry says in the new edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide: "Poison but tasty*." |
| 2020-11-27 | 108 | Firstborne | "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" | single | but from worlds apart, of course that doesn't matter. |
| 2020-11-20 | 14 | Within Temptation | "The Purge" | The Purge +3 | We fight over their meanings, |
| 2020-11-20 | 15 | Aeternitas | "Fountain of Youth" | Haunted Minds | leaving the deeper satisfaction of ambivalence untouched. |
| 2020-11-20 | 16 | Chrysilia | "Dragunera: Act II" | single | Love does not nominate and then eliminate. |
| 2020-11-20 | 17 | Moyra | "The Eyes of Rats" | single | We aspire nihilistically to reduce each year |
| 2020-11-20 | 18 | TRiDENT | "JUST FIGHT" | JUST DO IT !!! 3 | to a single pop performance by a trio or septet, |
| 2020-11-20 | 20 | WAGAMAMA RAKIA | "SURVIVE" | single | one regional Japanese music album (including kawaii metal), |
| 2020-11-20 | 30 | Dark Tranquillity | "Remain in the Unknown" | Moment | but who would we be without it? |
| 2020-11-20 | 31 | Moonspell | "The Greater Good" | single | 10,000 steps :: 10,000 chances to fall. |
| 2020-11-20 | 32 | Frosttide | "We Will Be Gone" | single | We pass our most mundane days in inexplicable magic. |
| 2020-11-20 | 33 | Human Fortress | "The Grimoire - Remastered" | single | The legends are as emphatic on this point |
| 2020-11-20 | 34 | Korpiklaani | "Mylly" | Mylly +1 | as they are evasive on its reasoning. |
| 2020-11-20 | 35 | Knogjärn | "Likbil" | Kvarlevor | Do you blame us for wanting preemptive forgiveness |
| 2020-11-20 | 75 | Liturgy | "Apparition of the Eternal Church" | Origin of the Alimonies | a 9999m peak is the planet's sword for killing ships of fools, |
| 2020-11-20 | 76 | Hermóðr | "Two Ravens" | Korpsträd | and a 1001m peak is the paradise we have sought for plunder. |
| 2020-11-20 | 77 | Tombs | "Void Constellation" | Under Sullen Skies | We become free by learning to breathe salt water or open space, |
| 2020-11-20 | 78 | Communic | "Scavengers Await" | Hiding from the World | and empowered by how much else we are able to translate into the same revelatory fictions. |
| 2020-11-20 | 79 | Maraton | "Almost Human" | Meta + | The legends smile and say "Now you see how we ended up this way. |
| 2020-11-20 | 80 | Loch Vostok | "Disillusion" | single | We were as sure as you are in this perfect moment, |
| 2020-11-20 | 81 | VOLA | "Head Mounted Sideways" | single | and just as comprehensively wrong, |
| 2020-11-20 | 82 | 616 | "Black Diamond" | single | and just as magnificently determined to be undeterred by pervasion. |
| 2020-11-20 | 102 | PassCode | "Maze of mind - PassCode STARRY TOUR 2020 FINAL at KT Zepp Yokohama" | PassCode STARRY TOUR 2020 FINAL at KT Zepp Yokohama | is made of the same history as the sinkholes and oases |
| 2020-11-20 | 103 | Diamond Head | "No Remorse" | single | we mapped as if geology could be disentangled from belief. |
| 2020-11-20 | 104 | Ellefson | "Holiday in Cambodia" | No Cover | Exploration is a meager apology for complacency, |
| 2020-11-13 | 1 | a crowd of rebellion | "Meteor" | Zealot City | The path runs through the woods to the river, |
| 2020-11-13 | 8 | BASEMENT PROPHECY | "Guardians of the Light" | single | All these songs, then, become running songs. |
| 2020-11-13 | 9 | Eleine | "Memoriam" | single | I loop through the expansive initial drafts of these playlists over the course of each week, |
| 2020-11-13 | 10 | Snow White Blood | "Longing For the Sea" | Hope Springs Eternal | in reluctant subtractive judgment, |
| 2020-11-13 | 11 | Therion | "Leviathan" | single | and the runs are shorter than the songs of the injured and defiant world, |
| 2020-11-13 | 12 | Amahiru | "Lucky Star" | single | and thus routes and subsequence themes find strange resonances: |
| 2020-11-13 | 13 | Seas on the Moon | "Break Out" | single | burrowing into oncoming rivershore wind to twice as many power-chirp J-pixie songs as I kept, |
| 2020-11-13 | 14 | DIAMANTE | "I Love Myself For Hating You" | single | dodging Harborwalk turns to fairytale-metal arias, |
| 2020-11-13 | 30 | All Wasted | "Towards the End" | Towards the End +2 | The essential malleability of music |
| 2020-11-13 | 31 | W.E.T. | "Big Boys Don't Cry" | single | is that all anthems can be anthems of your own steps, |
| 2020-11-13 | 32 | Pyramaze | "Bird of Prey" | Epitaph | welcoming you back to body-weights you have weighed before, |
| 2020-11-13 | 33 | Shattered Skies | "Starbound" | single | to the nearest corners you've turned a thousand times |
| 2020-11-13 | 34 | Intervals | "Luna[r]tic" | Circadian | or the farthest ones only just touched by your range. |
| 2020-11-13 | 35 | Black Fate | "Maze" | single | I imagine the hesitant geese |
| 2020-11-13 | 36 | Cadaveria | "Matryoshcada" | single | hearing passing djent thud from inside my head |
| 2020-11-13 | 37 | Mitochondrial Sun | "Pulsar 3" | Sju Pulsarer | never getting to find out how the songs end. |
| 2020-11-13 | 38 | Dark Buddha Rising | "Uni" | Mathreyata | I couldn't tell you, either. |
| 2020-11-13 | 39 | Harakiri for the Sky | "Sing for the Damage We've Done" | single | The moment before a song ends, I twitch sideways out of the universe. |
| 2020-11-13 | 41 | Liturgy | "SIHEYMN's Lament" | single | All I ask is for the next one to begin. |
| 2020-11-13 | 42 | Katla | "Húsavíkur-Jón" | Allt þetta Helvítis Myrkur | Any amount of in medias res |
| 2020-11-13 | 43 | Soul Dissolution | "Where The Clouds Stand Still..." | Winter Contemplations 2 | keeps this interminable chapter notionally finite, |
| 2020-11-13 | 44 | Décembre Noir | "Streets of Transience" | The Renaissance of Hope | however transhorizonal its boundaries. |
| 2020-11-13 | 45 | Helsott | "Painless Journey of Death" | Woven | Some performative viking from the wrong continent's wrong coast hits a cymbal. |
| 2020-11-13 | 46 | Tuatha de Danann | "The Tribes of Witching Souls" | The Tribes of Witching Souls | I come back. |
| 2020-11-13 | 84 | Ellefson | "Sheer Heart Attack" | single | Tear apart the flags. Line up the rendered stripes to make new solid colors, and vice versa. |
| 2020-11-06 | 30 | Rave The Reqviem | "Holy Homicide" | single | It will be a relief to live again in a time when you can reasonably expect to |
| 2020-11-06 | 31 | Seas on the Moon | "Hell March (2020)" | Mioritual Healing | avoid running into Rudy Giuliani by walking past the porn store, |
| 2020-11-06 | 32 | Walk in Darkness | "On the Moon or on Mars" | On the Road to Babylon | but we're only getting a different president of the same country. |
| 2020-11-06 | 33 | Iconic Eye | "Back from Behind the Sun" | single | We're still the place that let a serial adulterer and bankruptcist |
| 2020-11-06 | 34 | Jaded Star | "Female Fronted" | Realign | tell us we are freest when we are loyal and stranded, |
| 2020-11-06 | 35 | Surma | "Like the River Flows" | The Light Within | but also the people who will fill his Presidential Library |
| 2020-11-06 | 36 | Averlanche | "The Diamond Hills" | Life's Phenomenon | with the positive negative space around his deleted tweets. |
| 2020-11-06 | 37 | As Everything Unfolds | "Take Me There" | Take Me There +1 | We're still the island where the persecuted came to learn to be bullies, |
| 2020-11-06 | 38 | Snow White Blood | "Drop a Stitch" | single | but also the continent where we chose to stay as dreamers |
| 2020-11-06 | 39 | Dark Horse White Horse | "Black Hole" | single | after we discovered the Bully University was a scam. |
| 2020-11-06 | 40 | Vermilia | "Suru On Kunniavieras" | single | We're the patriots who screamed "Live Free or Die" in open-mouthed righteousness |
| 2020-11-06 | 41 | Ayasa | "GUNSHOT〜memory of loved" | single | during an aerosol pandemic, |
| 2020-11-06 | 51 | a crowd of rebellion | "°OD。" | single | We are the atheists who will elect a Catholic to banish a demon, |
| 2020-11-06 | 61 | Eternal Idol | "Black Star" | Renaissance | and then self-awareness, |
| 2020-11-06 | 62 | Sólstafir | "Dionysus" | Endless Twilight of Codependent Love | and then empathy. |
| 2020-11-06 | 63 | Fortíð | "Pandemic" | single | We are the country that will wear hats advertising our entitlement, |
| 2020-11-06 | 64 | Massemord | "Millenial Kingdom" | Blut Des Nordens 6 | but not masks acknowledging our responsibility, |
| 2020-11-06 | 65 | Saħħar | "Belt Stuprata" | single | and every four years we get to flip 150 million coins to decide |
| 2020-11-06 | 66 | Stoort Neer | "Sthöretn" | MÖRRINJÖ 3 | if we barely deserve a government levitated by our erratic potential, |
| 2020-11-06 | 67 | Déluge | "Gloire Au Silence" | Ægo Templo | instead of one grounded by our relentless moral abdication. |
| 2020-11-06 | 68 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "Examination" | single | We attribute the success of others to the tactics we ourselves have employed, |
| 2020-11-06 | 69 | Sebastien | "Nechtěná" | Nechtěná +2 | which is why Trump blames his loss on cheating |
| 2020-11-06 | 70 | Fates Warning | "Shuttered World" | Long Day Good Night | and we blame the narrowness of his defeat on our failure to connect with the disenfranchised. |
| 2020-11-06 | 71 | Von Kaiser | "Valley of Dying Stars" | single | The inexplicable public indulgence of an incompetent toddler-tyrant |
| 2020-11-06 | 82 | Eoront | "The Bonfires of Times" | Gods Have No Home | Taxes, like every other apparent restriction of your "freedom", |
| 2020-11-06 | 83 | Reliquiae | "Sisyphos" | single | from speed limits to plague masks, |
| 2020-11-06 | 84 | Surma | "The Selkie (Kópakonan)" | The Light Within | are awkward symptomatic remediations for untreated civil dysfunction. |
| 2020-10-30 | 13 | Phantom Elite | "Diamonds and Dark" | single | I'm no longer entirely sure it matters. |
| 2020-10-30 | 14 | Eleine | "Dancing in Hell" | single | If nearly half the nominal adults in this country lived through the last four years and thought |
| 2020-10-30 | 15 | Darzamat | "Clouds, Clouds, Darkening All" | A Philosopher at the End of the Universe | "yes, this is working", |
| 2020-10-30 | 16 | Ann My Guard | "Furia" | single | in what sense is this conglomeration of moral orthogonalities "united"? |
| 2020-10-30 | 17 | Seraphic | "The Monster Within" | Chrysalis | I'm supposed to believe we can be healed, |
| 2020-10-30 | 18 | Alkonost | "Подруга-Ночь (Пиано Версия)" | single | to believe that I voted for our capacity to be healed. |
| 2020-10-30 | 19 | Transworld Identity | "Somewhere East of Eden" | single | I just voted to stop the molten bile from spewing out of the very top of the volcano of myopic racist self-destruction. |
| 2020-10-30 | 20 | Ultimatium | "Run like the Wind" | single | I don't think Joe Biden can heal us. |
| 2020-10-30 | 33 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "Killing Floor" | May Our Chambers Be Full | you've already gone wrong so badly, |
| 2020-10-30 | 34 | The Inferno Doll | "Land of the Lords" | Sacrifice 3 | and pleading for them to submit to higher brackets in order to pay for |
| 2020-10-30 | 35 | Katla | "Sálarsvefn" | single | displaced coal workers to go back to community college to learn how to wire solar panels |
| 2020-10-30 | 36 | Auðn | "Eldborg" | Vökudraumsins Fangi | is like trying to mount the engine for the firehose pump |
| 2020-10-30 | 37 | Fluisteraars | "Plankenwambuis" | Relaas | on top of the fire. |
| 2020-10-30 | 38 | Grafvitnir | "Helvetesnatt" | Death's Wings Widespread | The education has to come before the reform, |
| 2020-10-30 | 39 | Svartsyn | "The Pale Horse" | Requiem | so you get a society that understands why we need to stop burning coal. |
| 2020-10-30 | 40 | Bliss of Flesh | "Vanitas" | Tyrant | The social security needs to come before the schooling, |
| 2020-10-30 | 41 | Déluge | "Digue" | single | not after retirement, |
| 2020-10-30 | 42 | Botanist | "Chlorophyll" | Photosynthesis | so that we don't produce humans who are alienated before they're even enfranchised. |
| 2020-10-30 | 43 | Draconian | "Claw Marks on the Throne" | Under A Godless Veil | The imperatives of human well-being have to be incorporated as foundational, |
| 2020-10-30 | 44 | Dark Tranquillity | "The Dark Unbroken" | single | not imposed and retracted in regulatory alternation by successive administrations. |
| 2020-10-30 | 45 | Mors Subita | "Black and White" | Extinction Era | We have trivial policy fights |
| 2020-10-30 | 46 | Psycroptic | "A Fragile Existence" | single | over profound moral precepts, |
| 2020-10-30 | 47 | Enter Tragedy | "Es war einmal" | Canossa | and then fanciful ideological wars |
| 2020-10-30 | 48 | Starbynary | "Saturn" | single | over indirectly symptomatic logistics. |
| 2020-10-30 | 49 | FEST VAINQUEUR | "Valensia&Virginia" | DIX | We surround ourselves with terrible television, |
| 2020-10-30 | 50 | NUL. | "nomad" | single | and then are surprised to find ourselves swallowed by its distortions and voiced by its static. |
| 2020-10-30 | 51 | Shiva | "bansyū ni aka" | single | We abdicate responsibility for our value systems, |
| 2020-10-23 | 1 | Leaves' Eyes | "Flames in the Sky" | The Last Viking | The snow has been falling since dawn. |
| 2020-10-23 | 2 | Neperia | "The Story Is Told" | The Story Is Told +1 | Things for which we have remotely and theoretically prepared ourselves, |
| 2020-10-23 | 3 | Song of Anhubis | "Misantropía" | Reversed Reflection | knowing they belong to possible futures, |
| 2020-10-23 | 4 | Arvandil | "Dance in the mist" | single | show up outside our doors in the cold. |
| 2020-10-23 | 17 | Pyramaze | "Particle" | single | a kid with a copy of The Portable Nietzsche; |
| 2020-10-23 | 18 | Black Fate | "Ithaca" | Ithaca | lonely, married, a parent; |
| 2020-10-23 | 19 | Darzamat | "The Great Blaze" | single | fortunate, doomed. |
| 2020-10-23 | 20 | Mörk Gryning | "Black Spirit" | Hinsides Vrede | Having unexpectedly become a person who sits at home doing my job, |
| 2020-10-23 | 21 | Wake | "Disparity and Chaos" | Confluence 3 | punctuated by short trips to the front door to take in deliveries |
| 2020-10-23 | 22 | Liturgy | "Lonely OIOION" | single | and periodic expeditions to the second floor to annoy my teenage daughter by making dumb faces at her while she's trying to survive "remote learning", |
| 2020-10-23 | 60 | Naevius | "Shame" | single | abundant curious, |
| 2020-10-23 | 61 | envy | "Fingerprint mark - Live at LIQUIDROOM Tokyo" | Fingerprint mark 2 | benificently abundant, |
| 2020-10-23 | 64 | Leaves' Eyes | "Varangians" | The Last Viking | I want to spend another Thanksgiving cooking with my parents. |
| 2020-10-16 | 19 | Bad Pollyanna | "The Escape" | single | and then return them to their heartbroken owners, |
| 2020-10-16 | 20 | Galactic Superlords | "Freight Train" | Freight Train | and then walk home imagining what else we can reunite tomorrow. |
| 2020-10-16 | 21 | Furies | "The Fortune's Gate" | Fortune's Gate | We need to know our streets, |
| 2020-10-16 | 22 | Skies Collide | "Down" | single | and this is why, on emptyhanded days, |
| 2020-10-16 | 23 | Averlanche | "Imagined Nothing" | single | or days burdened with neglect, |
| 2020-10-16 | 24 | Memoremains | "Riot In The Crowd" | The Cost of Greatness | it is enough to wander, |
| 2020-10-16 | 25 | Snow White Blood | "Shared Hearts" | single | learning the scale of the smallest differences |
| 2020-10-16 | 26 | Sacrament | "Поговори со мной" | single | with which to calibrate the fragility of the largest. |
| 2020-10-16 | 27 | a crowd of rebellion | "無罪者" | single | Confinement is just what illuminated introspection looks like from outside the glass, |
| 2020-10-16 | 35 | Ninja Sex Party | "The Mystic Crystal" | The Prophecy | and govern at the same time. |
| 2020-10-16 | 36 | Eternal Idol | "Dark Eclipse" | single | As with all chapters, though, |
| 2020-10-16 | 37 | Starbynary | "Stellae Fixae" | single | and thus with all stories animated by love, |
| 2020-10-16 | 38 | Phoenix Rising | "Deriva Speranza" | single | we continue most humanely by carrying the sigils of our enemies |
| 2020-10-16 | 39 | Iron Savior | "Our Time Has Come" | single | in our pockets, or keeping them in intricately hinged chests. |
| 2020-10-16 | 40 | Dark Tranquillity | "Identical to None" | single | For the empathic, enmity is a crude foreshadowing of romance; |
| 2020-10-16 | 41 | Auðn | "Verður von að bráð" | single | for the self-righteous, reckoning. |
| 2020-10-16 | 42 | A Pregnant Light | "With Excruciating Finesse" | You Cannot Pour from an Empty Vessel | You cannot drink from a well pumped dry |
| 2020-10-16 | 43 | Arkan | "Seeds of War" | Lila H | of both tears and venom. |
| 2020-10-16 | 67 | A Pregnant Light | "Spear Through My Head" | You Cannot Pour from an Empty Vessel | Really it was probably a thousand rivers before that, |
| 2020-10-16 | 76 | Mary's Blood | "INVOKE" | Re>Animator | There is a light that doesn't belong to anyone. |
| 2020-10-16 | 79 | Ninja Sex Party | "It's Bedtime" | The Prophecy | but if you never listen, you will be the lesson. |
| 2020-10-09 | 1 | Thrudvangar | "Siegvaters Maid" | single | Summon the old gods. |
| 2020-10-09 | 3 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "Edict" | single | We have lost track of grandeur, of coherent vindictive grudges. |
| 2020-10-09 | 4 | Cemican | "Yóok' ol Kaab Maya" | Yóok' ol Kaab Maya +1 | We have traded too much of the immortal power of knowledge for the transient satisfaction of image. |
| 2020-10-09 | 5 | Rise to the Sky | "From the Distance" | Death Will Not Keep Us Apart | We have fallen in with kobolds fleeing from the abyss that made them. |
| 2020-10-09 | 6 | Vhäldemar | "Death to the Wizard!" | Straight to Hell | We have trivialized expertise to the point where even bankruptcy claims the attributes of incantation, |
| 2020-10-09 | 7 | Helion Prime | "The Final Theory" | Question Everything | and the gravity of significance. |
| 2020-10-09 | 8 | Sinner's Blood | "Phoenix Rise" | The Mirror Star | We have become afraid to be born again in flame, not water. |
| 2020-10-09 | 11 | Fates Warning | "Now Comes the Rain" | single | Fatalist symmetry is worse than the vertigo of doubt. |
| 2020-10-09 | 12 | Teramaze | "Ocean Floor" | I Wonder | We are worse than we were. |
| 2020-10-09 | 13 | Jaded Star | "Breathing Fire" | Breathing Fire +1 | Our brightest eras have been forged in uncertainty, |
| 2020-10-09 | 14 | Two and a Half Girl | "Page One Rewrite" | Disconnected 5 | and the attendant sense of purpose as an infinite quantity, |
| 2020-10-09 | 15 | Song of Anhubis | "My Own Enemy" | single | not a closed state. |
| 2020-10-09 | 16 | Epica | "Abyss of Time - Countdown to Singularity -" | single | We are not pus in hats, measuring ourselves in debt and dribbling purchased spasms of role-played dominance. |
| 2020-10-09 | 17 | BABYMETAL | "BxMxC" | single | We rise out of the sea, |
| 2020-10-02 | 3 | Metalite | "We Bring You the Stars" | single | not just all grief. |
| 2020-10-02 | 4 | Amaranthe | "Fearless" | Manifest | We do not fear tears of snow-white sorrow. |
| 2020-10-02 | 5 | Surma | "Until It Rains Again" | single | The rain keeps returning, but it definitely fades in between. |
| 2020-10-02 | 6 | Louna | "Начало нового круга" | Начало нового круга | How do they manage in non-cyclic universes |
| 2020-10-02 | 7 | Mindmaze | "Stand Your Ground - Advanced Version" | single | where viable habitats don't spin? |
| 2020-10-02 | 8 | Eleine | "Ava of Death" | single | We are the native fauna of this particular oscillation rate, |
| 2020-10-02 | 9 | Ultimatium | "The Seer" | single | and of incremental mortality |
| 2020-10-02 | 10 | Vicky Psarakis | "Vampira" | single | relentlessly recurring. |
| 2020-10-02 | 11 | WAGAMAMA RAKIA | "Why?" | Why? +1 | Terrible days end, |
| 2020-10-02 | 12 | BRATS | "Lost Place - Version 2020" | Karma | and we get another chance tomorrow: |
| 2020-10-02 | 45 | Botanist | "Bacteria" | single | The tragedy of privilege is not the inevitable eventual accountability, |
| 2020-10-02 | 46 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Create Art, Though the World May Perish" | Endarkenment | which is inevitable only for the rest of us, |
| 2020-10-02 | 47 | Enslaved | "Flight of Thought and Memory" | Utgard | but the way in which even the smallest amounts of privilege |
| 2020-10-02 | 48 | Mors Principium Est | "My Home, My Grave" | My Home, My Grave +2 | so absolutely and desperately demand all-consuming defense. |
| 2020-10-02 | 49 | Helsott | "Agamemnon" | single | Give a single fish to the curious, and come back in a month, |
| 2020-10-02 | 50 | DevilDriver | "Wishing" | Dealing with Demons I | and they'll have opened a cooking school that has somehow ended up mostly teaching about fruit-filled pastries, |
| 2020-10-02 | 51 | Necrophobic | "Devil's Spawn Attack" | single | and started a fanfic site for stories about the ancient mountaintop kingdom |
| 2020-10-02 | 52 | Dark Charybdis 暴噬者 | "The Infinite Regress" | Reincarnation | from which they've decided the fish came. |
| 2020-10-02 | 53 | Second To Sun | "Eerie" | Leviathan | This is what you get for giving them one fish, |
| 2020-10-02 | 54 | Sallow Moth | "Necrogenesis" | Arcane Treachery 2 | with documentation auto-generated from its skeleton. |
| 2020-10-02 | 55 | The Monolith Deathcult | "The White Silence" | single | Give a single fish to the precarious class reliant on unearned hierarchy, though, |
| 2020-10-02 | 56 | Tombs | "Bone Furnace" | single | and you'll return to a dissolute gasping empire, |
| 2020-10-02 | 57 | Accept | "The Undertaker" | The Undertaker +1 | and a throne room that smells of rotting gills. |
| 2020-10-02 | 58 | Statue of Goat | "Ghosts" | Ghosts +2 | How do I know? We are that empire, |
| 2020-10-02 | 59 | Wildness | "Die Young" | single | commemorated in statues of traitors |
| 2020-10-02 | 88 | The Sound That Ends Creation | "If the Spaghetti Monster Doesn't Exist, Why Do Planets Look Like Meatballs" | Memes, Dreams, and Flying Machines | delusion and the impulse to attribute the astonishing mundane to the imperceivable immanent. |
| 2020-09-25 | 14 | Lethian Dreams | "Never Be Found" | A Shadow of Memories | and then argue about the contents of a single glass. |
| 2020-09-25 | 15 | Era of ephemeris | "Secret Garden" | single | We are all hidden here together, |
| 2020-09-25 | 16 | Carpathia | "In Romance" | single | spinning in love, |
| 2020-09-25 | 17 | AfterTime | "Planetary Eyes" | The Farthest Shore (Deluxe Version) | hoping to impress alien astronomers. |
| 2020-09-25 | 18 | Soulspell | "Sign of the Cross" | single | We are emerging from layers of old sacred skin, |
| 2020-09-25 | 19 | Obsidian Kingdom | "FLESH WORLD" | MEAT MACHINE | slowly realizing that the material between our hearts and our air |
| 2020-09-25 | 20 | Krashkarma | "Mechanical Heart (Radio Edit)" | single | is a transition from art to artifice, |
| 2020-09-25 | 21 | Postmodern Fantasy | "Pardon Me" | single | and thus from anthem to apology. |
| 2020-09-25 | 22 | Seven Kingdoms | "The Great Goat Rodeo" | single | Immunity is the dress intolerance wears when it thinks it's alone. |
| 2020-09-25 | 23 | A Light Divided | "Radio Silence" | Radio Silence +1 | The clothes we wear are ways we choose to muffle our own voices, |
| 2020-09-25 | 31 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "The Valley" | single | Nothing makes us irremediably different. |
| 2020-09-25 | 32 | Svalbard | "Open Wound" | When I Die, Will I Get Better? | Remedies, however, are a confused dream of angels. |
| 2020-09-25 | 33 | Wintaar | "World Without End" | There Is No God in War | Teleology is the compression tights economy puts on in the morning half-dark, |
| 2020-09-25 | 34 | Mors Subita | "Black and White" | single | and then takes off again before leaving the house. |
| 2020-09-25 | 35 | Pyramaze | "World Foregone" | single | We have a few more layers left to shed. |
| 2020-09-25 | 36 | Teramaze | "Sleeping Man" | single | Wake up, shake off yesterday's lingering hopelessness. |
| 2020-09-25 | 37 | Ayreon | "This Human Equation (feat. Tom Baker, Simone Simons, Marcela Bovio, Caroline Westendorp, Joost van den Broek)" | Transitus | Repeat. We can do this again. |
| 2020-09-25 | 38 | Emyn Muil | "Where the Light Drowns" | Afar Angathfark | The things that didn't kill us yesterday |
| 2020-09-25 | 61 | Marras | "Tyhjä Käsi" | single | not for the planet before we poisoned it, |
| 2020-09-18 | 1 | Ayreon | "Talk of the Town (feat. Paul Manzi, Tommy Karevik, Cammie Gilbert, Patty Gurdy, Joost van den Broek)" | Talk of the Town 4 | Five minutes can contain lifetimes, |
| 2020-09-18 | 2 | Scardust | "Tantibus II" | single | but the next song still plays. |
| 2020-09-18 | 3 | Leaves' Eyes | "Chain of the Golden Horn" | Chain of the Golden Horn +1 | You don't ask songs whether they will accept the passing of time. |
| 2020-09-18 | 4 | Amaranthe | "Archangel" | Archangel +2 | We come back from all of these heavens |
| 2020-09-18 | 5 | Burning Witches | "The Circle Of Five" | single | and start imagining the next ones. |
| 2020-09-18 | 6 | Vicky Psarakis | "Only for the Weak" | single | Song lives are always beginning in hope, |
| 2020-09-18 | 7 | MoonSun | "Never Too Late" | single | always pausing in tentative resolution, |
| 2020-09-18 | 8 | Neperia | "Contrast" | Contrast +1 | never really ending. |
| 2020-09-18 | 9 | Neith | "The Way You Know" | single | Silent lives merely continue, |
| 2020-09-18 | 10 | Mezmerized | "Ready to Go" | Electrolyze | declaring airless victory |
| 2020-09-18 | 11 | Louna | "Станем стеной" | single | in meaningless spaces between actual moments. |
| 2020-09-18 | 12 | Malaя | "Второе я" | single | These anarchist jurisdictions are where we come |
| 2020-09-18 | 13 | As Everything Unfolds | "Hiding from Myself" | single | to not be afraid of each other, |
| 2020-09-18 | 14 | Icon For Hire | "Curse Or Cure" | single | to feel the breadth in other humans' dreams. |
| 2020-09-18 | 15 | Stateside | "Chaos" | Havøc 5 | To understand an isolationist plague, |
| 2020-09-18 | 16 | Furies | "You & I" | single | you have to care about breath to begin with. |
| 2020-09-18 | 17 | Dark The Suns | "Seeker" | single | You can tell a bully from a leader by how they slump when they turn towards what ought to be their homes, |
| 2020-09-18 | 18 | Draconian | "Moon over Sabaoth" | single | by how they cannot look up on even the clearest night, |
| 2020-09-18 | 19 | Varg | "Fara Til Ránar" | Zeichen | by how plaintively they decry the things they can't have. |
| 2020-09-18 | 20 | Khors | "Starvation" | Where the Word Acquires Eternity | Four years can unravel decades, |
| 2020-09-18 | 58 | Boris | "Huge" | single | We will again be ominous and giant, |
| 2020-09-18 | 59 | The White Swan | "Nocturnal Transmission" | Nocturnal Transmission +3 | but able to sleep. |
| 2020-09-18 | 60 | Ancst | "The Burden of Hope, Pt. II" | Summits of Despondency | We realize it is harder to hope, |
| 2020-09-18 | 61 | Morokh | "Serpent's Nest" | Serpent's Nest 5 | harder to love new questions more than old answers, |
| 2020-09-18 | 62 | Fawn Limbs | "Metrae" | Sleeper Vessels | harder to shape noise than to hear yourself whimper, |
| 2020-09-18 | 63 | Raven Throne | "Zaklaccie" | Viartannie | harder to see yourself in other people's struggles |
| 2020-09-18 | 64 | Auðn | "Ljóstýra" | single | than to imagine yourself insulated by oceans, |
| 2020-09-18 | 65 | Dynfari | "Myrkurs er þörf" | Myrkurs er þörf | harder to remember that the water is only another mood of the air. |
| 2020-09-18 | 66 | Frowning | "Ad Finem" | Death Requiem | It is harder to care about how you win, |
| 2020-09-18 | 84 | MIYAVI | "Over The Rainbow" | single | collective majesty, constructive absurdity, convulsive wonder. |
| 2020-09-11 | 16 | Starkill | "Reckless and Infinite" | single | circular self-destructive optimization of proxy metrics, |
| 2020-09-11 | 17 | Rave The Reqviem | "Riptide" | single | nihilist suction. |
| 2020-09-11 | 18 | Regardless Of Me | "Awake" | Black Flowers Blossom | And yet I trust strangers singing in languages I can't follow in real-time, |
| 2020-09-11 | 19 | Vajra | "Maya" | single | and often don't bother to look up, |
| 2020-09-11 | 21 | Helion Prime | "The Gadfly" | single | or maybe because. |
| 2020-09-11 | 22 | Crown Of Glory | "Emporium of Dreams" | Ad Infinitum | It's not that you can't sing bad ideas. |
| 2020-09-11 | 23 | Dark Tranquillity | "Phantom Days" | single | Songs elicit your dreams, |
| 2020-09-11 | 24 | Mors Principium Est | "Lost in a Starless Aeon" | Lost in a Starless Aeon +1 | and you can have terrible dreams. |
| 2020-09-11 | 25 | Genus Ordinis Dei | "Hunt" | Ritual / Hunt 2 | In our ongoing assembly of peace, |
| 2020-09-11 | 26 | Mörk Gryning | "A Glimpse of the Sky" | single | art can still be weaponry, |
| 2020-09-11 | 27 | The Unguided | "Never Yield" | single | perpetuating the war even in the interest of ending it. |
| 2020-09-11 | 28 | Once Awake | "Last Days" | Last Days 5 | But the wires and knobs of anti-fascist machines |
| 2020-09-11 | 29 | Skeletoon | "Nemesis" | single | are not expended in blows. |
| 2020-09-11 | 30 | Eternal Idol | "Into the Darkness" | single | Art can beckon towards the void, |
| 2020-09-11 | 31 | Apulanta | "60 uutta ongelmaa" | single | but not without the motion becoming a dance, |
| 2020-09-11 | 53 | Uniform | "The Shadow of God's Hand" | Shame | in lawsuits received after campaign rallies. |
| 2020-09-11 | 54 | Theotoxin | "Through Hundreds of Years" | Fragment : Erhabenheit | Public-policy proposals are hard, |
| 2020-09-11 | 55 | Ihsahn | "Losing Altitude" | Pharos 5 | and can encode moral failure in complex and implicative ways. |
| 2020-09-11 | 56 | Völur | "Psychopomp II" | Psychopomp 2 | But dancing on a rooftop is easy |
| 2020-09-11 | 86 | Andromida | "The Abyss" | single | it's a scaffolding bolted over the molten chasms in our souls. |
| 2020-09-11 | 94 | Volymian | "Larger Than Life" | single | and the mechanics of every machine that destroys silence. |
| 2020-09-04 | 1 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Lost" | single | It is superfluous to remind ourselves about death, |
| 2020-09-04 | 2 | Oceans of Slumber | "The Soundtrack to My Last Day" | Oceans of Slumber | the one thing we reliably eventually remember, |
| 2020-09-04 | 3 | Anaal Nathrakh | "The Age of Starlight Ends" | single | but superfluity is a medium, not a pointlessness. |
| 2020-09-04 | 4 | Fawn Limbs | "Sleeper Vessels" | single | Grace is a measurement of how you perform the inevitable, |
| 2020-09-04 | 5 | LIK | "Funeral Anthem" | single | or perhaps of how performative the inevitable can be made. |
| 2020-09-04 | 6 | Sólstafir | "Drýsill" | single | We scoff at Calvinist or Odinist fatalisms, |
| 2020-09-04 | 7 | MajorVoice | "Sunbed in the Rain" | single | but then we attribute volition to markets, |
| 2020-09-04 | 8 | Sinner's Blood | "The Mirror" | single | and wait for them to improve us by discrete ministries. |
| 2020-09-04 | 9 | DGM | "Hope" | single | All of these numbers are us. |
| 2020-09-04 | 12 | Darzamat | "A Philosopher at the End of the Universe" | single | as capitulation to collective demand. |
| 2020-09-04 | 13 | Eleine | "As I Breathe" | single | The history of your choices |
| 2020-09-04 | 16 | exist†trace | "I'm still not dead" | The Only Garden 6 | but of the degrees of freedom you thought you had, |
| 2020-09-04 | 39 | Ancst | "Razed Eden" | single | like they will stop for a moment in mid-battle to admire themselves in the blade of a new sword. |
| 2020-09-04 | 40 | Dauþuz | "Erþæ" | single | But you have given them reflection, |
| 2020-09-04 | 41 | ColdWorld | "Ragnarök" | The Stars are Dead Now | and now they see that they look like you would look |
| 2020-09-04 | 42 | Antαres | "Outer Worlds And Inner Voids" | single | without the pallor of corruption |
| 2020-09-04 | 43 | Thurisaz | "Eternity Expires" | Re-Incentive | or its inextricable fear. |
| 2020-09-04 | 44 | Alkonost | "Prorochestvo" | Prorochestvo +1 | Now they have bright swords. |
| 2020-08-28 | 1 | Ihsahn | "Manhattan Skyline" | single | The obvious regressive telltale in "Make America Great Again" is "Again". |
| 2020-08-28 | 2 | Chaos Divine | "Beacon" | single | This is a finite, defeatist aspiration, |
| 2020-08-28 | 3 | Fates Warning | "Scars" | single | from a lumpy icon of the finite, |
| 2020-08-28 | 4 | Pain of Salvation | "UNFUTURE" | PANTHER | whose only notion of greatness is somebody else's defeat |
| 2020-08-28 | 5 | Enslaved | "Urjotun" | Urjotun +2 | for which you can falsely claim credit. |
| 2020-08-28 | 6 | Grauen | "Сквозь бесконечные перерождения" | single | Dreams of retreat are solace for the loss of hope |
| 2020-08-28 | 7 | Helion Prime | "Madame Mercury" | single | sold to us by merchants who never saw the margin in hope anyway. |
| 2020-08-28 | 8 | Vanishing Point | "Dead Elysium" | Dead Elysium | But naturally a material narcissist knows only proclamations of defeat. |
| 2020-08-28 | 9 | Silentium | "Tide" | Motiva | Capitalism, to the extent it constitutes an ethos at all, |
| 2020-08-28 | 10 | Konomi Suzuki | "REALIZE" | OPENING THEME FROM TV SERIES ”RE:ZERO -STARTING LIFE IN ANOTHER WORLD-” 2ND SEASON 4 | is formulated on symbolic defeat, |
| 2020-08-28 | 60 | Dreams of Avalon | "Run for Cover" | Beyond the Dream | Any half-decent human would take one step back, |
| 2020-08-28 | 61 | Meridian | "Out In The Fields" | single | and think for half a minute about what it was like to be a giant, |
| 2020-08-28 | 62 | Kalmhain | "Triest Afscheid" | single | and why the giants aren't gathered around our graves |
| 2020-08-28 | 63 | Aleynmord | "Spores of Possession" | The Blinding Light | thinking about what it was like to be us, |
| 2020-08-28 | 64 | Pig Destroyer | "The Octagonal Stairway" | The Octagonal Stairway | but also: what they loved even though it eventually destroyed them, |
| 2020-08-28 | 65 | Necrophobic | "The Infernal Depths of Eternity" | single | what they feared even though it could have saved them, |
| 2020-08-28 | 66 | Spook the Horses | "Cell Death" | Empty Body | and how they sang, in the dark spaces suspended between the two. |
| 2020-08-28 | 67 | Botanist | "Water" | single | A three-fourths-decent human would grasp that as the giants pass into legend |
| 2020-08-28 | 68 | The Devil's Trade | "The Iron Peak" | The Call of the Iron Peak | we become stewards of every inumerable way in which we are just like them: |
| 2020-08-21 | 1 | Unleash The Archers | "The Wind That Shapes the Land" | Abyss | This terrible year's best album is as good as any better year's. |
| 2020-08-21 | 2 | Oceans of Slumber | "To the Sea - A Tolling of the Bells" | single | Misery doesn't make us less human, |
| 2020-08-21 | 3 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "Ancestral Recall" | single | or less majestic, |
| 2020-08-21 | 4 | X-Perience | "Everytime" | 555 | or less aware of our capacities for grace. |
| 2020-08-21 | 5 | Reasons Behind | "Shades Of Neon" | Project: M.I.S.T. | It only makes us hoard joys more fruitlessly, |
| 2020-08-21 | 6 | The Waymaker | "Kingdom of Heaven" | single | waiting to feel like it's safe again to let them go into the air. |
| 2020-08-21 | 7 | WagakkiBand | "Singin' for..." | single | Meanwhile they hum inside us |
| 2020-08-21 | 9 | Varg | "Auf die Götter" | single | I miss fearing wolves, |
| 2020-08-21 | 10 | Pukuut | "Sumununa Pisunga" | Minutsit Kingulliit | or flying over Greenland, |
| 2020-08-21 | 11 | Veonity | "Acceptance" | Sorrows | or whatever else it was I used to do. |
| 2020-08-21 | 12 | Draconian | "The Sacrificial Flame" | single | We will not extricate ourselves from this with ritual, |
| 2020-08-21 | 13 | Mors Subita | "Into Eternity" | single | but measuring routine against ritual gives us a way to talk about the difference between entitlement and legend. |
| 2020-08-21 | 14 | Graupel | "Fade Away" | Fade Away +2 | Mythologies are moral structures against which to brace ourselves, |
| 2020-08-21 | 15 | Incantation | "Siege Hive" | Sect of Vile Divinities | not temples to cower in. |
| 2020-08-21 | 16 | Expander | "Waste Ranger" | Neuropunk Boostergang | All grandeur converges in wreckage |
| 2020-08-21 | 17 | Unleash The Archers | "Abyss" | Abyss | and waits there for the light. |
| 2020-08-21 | 39 | Unleash The Archers | "Carry the Flame" | Abyss | We agree to dream in metaphor and smoke. |
| 2020-08-21 | 52 | Protest The Hero | "Gift Horse" | Fabula & Syuzhet 2 | So much powerless belief. |
| 2020-08-21 | 56 | Unleash The Archers | "Afterlife" | Abyss | waiting to come alive again when we've been alive the whole time. |
| 2020-08-14 | 10 | Leaves' Eyes | "Dark Love Empress" | single | We used to be able to balance crowns on our heads |
| 2020-08-14 | 11 | Amaranthe | "Strong" | Strong +1 | even as we fell to earth. |
| 2020-08-14 | 12 | Crown Of Glory | "Something" | single | We are no longer those emperors |
| 2020-08-14 | 13 | April Art | "Break Out" | single | of longing and dust. |
| 2020-08-14 | 14 | Reasons Behind | "Living A Lie" | single | We have sold our glaciers for air, |
| 2020-08-14 | 15 | Memoremains | "Eternal Fame" | single | and then stood breathless in the cold. |
| 2020-08-14 | 16 | Soulspell | "March of Mephisto" | single | We have beaten sigils into filigree |
| 2020-08-14 | 17 | Helion Prime | "The Forbidden Zone" | single | that our skins shine through. |
| 2020-08-14 | 18 | Mors Principium Est | "A Day for Redemption" | single | So many suspended promises now expire. |
| 2020-08-14 | 19 | Profane Sanctum | "March" | single | The mountains kneel to greet our converging roads, |
| 2020-08-14 | 20 | Spook the Horses | "Inheritance" | single | and we shuffle timidly forward onto the greatest heights. |
| 2020-08-14 | 21 | Black Magnet | "Hegemon" | single | We have listened poorly to legends of wings, |
| 2020-08-14 | 22 | Wounds of Recollection | "Limping Away from the Water" | Nowhere Else Feels More Like Home | and mistaken their mechanism for escalators |
| 2020-08-14 | 23 | Ancst | "Final Hour" | single | and their ethereal motives for our own remedial grief. |
| 2020-08-14 | 24 | Wayfarer | "The Iron Horse (Gallows Frontier, Act II)" | single | We have traveled with our eyelids before us like plows, |
| 2020-08-14 | 25 | Uada | "No Place Here" | single | recognizing no blur 'til the darkness of home. |
| 2020-08-14 | 26 | Synthvvitch | "Potters Field" | Baby, the Inferno Is Here Now | We have been diffidently escorted in tiny ceremonial circles, |
| 2020-08-14 | 27 | Theotoxin | "Prayer" | single | and then told of orbits by severe priests. |
| 2020-08-14 | 28 | Raven Throne | "U Daloniach Zimy" | single | You pass all the way around the center of the earth by simply holding still. |
| 2020-08-14 | 29 | Pain of Salvation | "PANTHER" | single | A fool mistakes diagnostic tests for achievement, |
| 2020-08-14 | 30 | Gaztrea | "Moonlight" | single | and has waited so long for revenge |
| 2020-08-14 | 31 | Veonity | "Blinded Eyes Will See" | single | against letter carriers |
| 2020-08-14 | 32 | Vanishing Point | "Count Your Days" | Count Your Days +2 | for letters never written |
| 2020-08-14 | 33 | Rising Steel | "Fight Them All" | single | and then never signed "love,". |
| 2020-08-14 | 37 | Perfect Plan | "Heart To Stone" | single | lost in the war between wind machines and airbrushes. |
| 2020-08-14 | 76 | Atrium | "6equj5" | One Day at a Time 5 | fending off dire-wolf attacks while delivering carburetor parts, |
| 2020-08-14 | 77 | Yohei Kimura | "Omnislash" | single | or driving night nurses through lava to safety if the dormant volcano under Medford reawakens. |
| 2020-08-14 | 91 | Thou | "Into the Void" | A Primer of Holy Words | These interregna end. |
| 2020-08-14 | 92 | UMC | "Physical (Metal Version)" | single | We are no longer subject to empires of division and hoarding. |
| 2020-08-14 | 93 | The Longing | "It's a Sin" | single | We used to be able to balance crowns on our heads as we fell to earth. This seemed like a skill. But without the crowns, that falling is flying. |
| 2020-08-07 | 1 | Equilibrium | "One Folk" | single | The essence of globalist humanism is saying that we are all one in your own roaring language. |
| 2020-08-07 | 2 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Endarkenment" | single | Nihilist grotesques agree, at least, that none of us are immune to apocalypse, |
| 2020-08-07 | 3 | Duma | "Corners in Nihil" | Duma | and in shared despair there is at least a grounding for hope. |
| 2020-08-07 | 4 | Saltatio Mortis | "Für immer jung" | Für immer jung +2 | It can't take us all is tautologically credible, |
| 2020-08-07 | 5 | ENGST | "Wieder da" | single | because we definitely won't live to be proven wrong. |
| 2020-08-07 | 6 | Gojira | "Another World" | single | There are other worlds is a fantasist's response to petty dominance in this one, |
| 2020-08-07 | 7 | DGM | "Flesh and Blood" | single | and the willingness to imagine the rules and striations of an invented realm |
| 2020-08-07 | 8 | Seas on the Moon | "Opium" | single | is the base of an avenging bridge back to this one. |
| 2020-08-07 | 9 | Black Rose Maze | "Earth Calling" | Black Rose Maze | We scrape against the void as we spin, |
| 2020-08-07 | 10 | Reasons Behind | "(E)met" | single | and against our own lungs as we breathe, |
| 2020-08-07 | 11 | Flowerleaf | "We Will Stand (United)" | single | and these abrasions are bows along our veins and wires |
| 2020-08-07 | 12 | Canterra | "No Bitter End" | Heartmachine | and resonant chambers of the heart. |
| 2020-08-07 | 13 | Unlucky Morpheus | "Unending Sorceress" | Unfinished | Long ago we traded the last magic for the first lever, |
| 2020-08-07 | 39 | Expander | "Cryptosteal" | single | against manifest destiny recast as cryogenic utopianism; |
| 2020-08-07 | 43 | Sólstafir | "Akkeri" | single | against lines drawn on the ground or along the seabed; |
| 2020-08-07 | 44 | Incantation | "Fury's Manifesto" | Entrails of the Hag Queen 3 | against cheap magic sold as a bargain replacement for precious anger; |
| 2020-08-07 | 45 | Wintaar | "A World in the Axe's Shadow" | Streams of the Paleghosts | against unwillingness to enumerate the sacraments we have to destroy; |
| 2020-08-07 | 46 | Batushka | "IRMOS I" | "RASKOL" | against systems of planet-sharing that are structural guarantors |
| 2020-08-07 | 47 | Selbst | "The Weight of Breathing" | Relatos De Angustia | of periodic exploding harbors, |
| 2020-07-31 | 1 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Cry of Love" | single | Grace and horror are convolutions of a single force, |
| 2020-07-31 | 4 | Disillusion | "Between" | single | Nothing that happens here belongs to us alone. |
| 2020-07-31 | 6 | Fenrir's Scar | "Curse of Mankind" | single | and waits to tell you until it thinks you are prepared. |
| 2020-07-31 | 7 | Pain of Salvation | "RESTLESS BOY" | single | It's always wrong. |
| 2020-07-31 | 8 | Dwell in Doom | "Immortal Beast" | single | Love is our name for all the externalities we perceive as imposed upon us from within. |
| 2020-07-31 | 9 | Manticora | "The Farmer's Tale, Pt. 3 - Eaten by the Beasts" | single | I did not exactly choose these songs, or the way guitars change my breath. |
| 2020-07-31 | 10 | Imperial Triumphant | "Alphaville" | Alphaville (Bonus Tracks Edition) | I did not plan to remember this miserable year by three albums of chaos organized obliquely into implicit taxonomies of exemption, |
| 2020-07-31 | 11 | Ethicist | "Foreign Lines" | Songbird | nor to yearn for exemption in the first place, |
| 2020-07-31 | 12 | Black Magnet | "Punishment Map" | single | nor for this year to last 20,000 identical days |
| 2020-07-31 | 13 | Drouth | "O Time Thy Pyramids - An Unfinished Nightmare" | Excerpts from a Dread Liturgy | and still be no closer to resolution. |
| 2020-07-31 | 14 | Batushka | "IRMOS IV" | single | We rarely plan our purgatories. |
| 2020-07-31 | 15 | The Infernal Sea | "Befallen Order" | single | We have exultory tracts declaring us chosen for reward |
| 2020-07-31 | 34 | Season of Ghosts | "A Place to Call Home (Radio Edit)" | single | or stealing a bright blue car, |
| 2020-07-31 | 35 | Adamantia | "Caminar Sobre el Viento" | single | and I pick up a glass that was empty of ice coffee the previous two times I picked it up, too, |
| 2020-07-31 | 36 | Era for a Moment | "So Long" | single | and put it down and turn the page. |
| 2020-07-31 | 37 | Oceans of Slumber | "The Colors of Grace" | single | We take turns constructing elaborate distractions for each other, |
| 2020-07-31 | 38 | Null Positiv | "Phantomschmerz" | Independenz | and then tearing them apart in reductive fury, |
| 2020-07-24 | 41 | Orden Ogan | "In the Dawn of the AI" | single | Any flag you fly without having sewn it out of your own feathers |
| 2020-07-24 | 42 | Veil Of Delusions | "Over the Edge" | single | is a remedial conversation with the wind. |
| 2020-07-24 | 43 | Perfect Plan | "Time for a Miracle" | single | We pause and shout "Now!" and gesture at the space in front of us. |
| 2020-07-24 | 44 | Creye | "Face to Face" | single | Maybe a vaccine will appear. It can only hurt to try |
| 2020-07-24 | 45 | Two and a Half Girl | "Carried Away" | single | if we keep trying only that for longer than a minute. |
| 2020-07-24 | 46 | Haken | "Messiah Complex V: Ectobius Rex" | Virus (Deluxe Edition) | Wear your fucking masks unless you arrive bearing the antidotes to all of your toxins. |
| 2020-07-24 | 47 | Pyogenesis | "The Capital (A Silent Soul Screams Loud) - Single Edit" | single | Charity is being willing to trade neglible fractions of your own well-being |
| 2020-07-17 | 2 | Dark Sarah | "The Chosen One" | Grim | But then, trance is about meticulous modulation, not continuous frenetic catharsis, |
| 2020-07-17 | 3 | Unleash The Archers | "Soulbound" | single | which is probably why I fall in love with an average of .25 trance songs a week when Emma isn't involved, |
| 2020-07-17 | 4 | MoonSun | "Lost in a Dream" | Lost in a Dream +1 | but seem to have basically no resistance at all to convulsive gothic symphonic metal |
| 2020-07-17 | 48 | Expander | "Megacorp" | single | you can only grow through consumption, |
| 2020-07-17 | 49 | Havukruunu | "Uinuos Syömein Sota" | Uinuos Syömein Sota | and only move by expansion. |
| 2020-07-17 | 50 | Black Magnet | "Divination Equipment" | single | Modern Odins have their ravens killed and gilded, |
| 2020-07-17 | 51 | Rise to the Sky | "Together in the Grave" | single | and then wonder why the mortals gather outside the gates. |
| 2020-07-17 | 52 | The Lightbringer of Sweden | "Fallen Angels" | Rise of the Beast | But we reinforce the gates by gathering outside them. |
| 2020-07-17 | 53 | Ayreon | "Hopelessly Slipping Away (feat. Tom Baker, Cammie Gilbert, Tommy Karevik)" | Hopelessly Slipping Away / Get Out! Now! 2 | Maybe topography is exactly how to deal with the rising seas. |
| 2020-07-17 | 54 | Carthagods | "Whispers from the Wicked" | The Monster in Me | Maybe the right response, when it seems like you have only 2:27 left, |
| 2020-07-17 | 55 | Varg | "Zeichen" | single | is to say "Tell me that again in 5:13." |
| 2020-07-17 | 56 | Nothgard | "Lightcrawler" | single | Maybe it's not actually any more exhausting to blast the endless minutes |
| 2020-07-17 | 57 | Draconian | "Sorrow of Sophia" | single | than to endure them. |
| 2020-07-17 | 58 | The Lust | "Hate at First Sight" | Honest | It's not that we were never great, |
| 2020-07-17 | 59 | Imperial Triumphant | "Atomic Age" | single | it's that our greatness has always been entropic and unmanageable and mixed with terror and noise, |
| 2020-07-17 | 60 | Ihsahn | "Spectre At The Feast" | single | and dependent on our ability to ascribe meaning to or at least towards it. |
| 2020-07-17 | 61 | Derek Sherinian | "Empyrean Sky" | single | Our rockets keep not reaching Heaven, |
| 2020-07-17 | 69 | Keoma | "Gaia" | single | You can't just hold it up, |
| 2020-07-10 | 26 | Raven Black | "Hear Me Cry" | single | on the highest ground. |
| 2020-07-10 | 27 | Black Rose Maze | "Maze" | single | Take short, begrudging breaths of contaminated air, |
| 2020-07-10 | 28 | Hamka | "Suffering Ages" | single | and give them back flecked with judgment and blood. |
| 2020-07-10 | 29 | Ensiferum | "Cold Northland (Väinämöinen Part III)" | Thalassic | Read only the beginnings of legends, |
| 2020-07-10 | 30 | Athanasia | "Obelisk" | single | or better yet, have them paraphrased for you by termites, |
| 2020-07-10 | 31 | Oceans of Slumber | "The Adorned Fathomless Creation" | single | and replace every seventh noun with the name of an unreciprocated crush. |
| 2020-07-10 | 32 | Veil Of Delusions | "Prisoner" | single | Set hydras to guard the doors |
| 2020-07-10 | 33 | The Devil's Trade | "Három Árva" | single | to rooms of your own home. |
| 2020-07-10 | 34 | Aseitas | "Behemoth's Dance" | False Peace | Misspell the names of your aspirational enemies. |
| 2020-07-10 | 35 | Korgonthurus | "Kuolleestasyntynyt" | Kuolleestasyntynyt | Break the handles off of your cookware; |
| 2020-07-10 | 36 | Rebel Wizard | "Magickal Mystical Indifference" | Magickal Mystical Indifference | goad corrosion into your sleep; |
| 2020-07-10 | 37 | Mora Prokaza | "Blacker Than Black" | By Chance | learn to say only "no" in all of the languages. |
| 2020-07-10 | 38 | Theotoxin | "Golden Tomb" | single | And yet, |
| 2020-07-10 | 39 | Drouth | "An Apiarist" | single | if you do all of this, |
| 2020-07-10 | 40 | Enslaved | "Jettegryta" | Jettegryta +1 | hate can become your temporary resonant wavelength |
| 2020-07-10 | 41 | Veonity | "Graced or Damned" | single | but never quite your blood-type |
| 2020-07-10 | 42 | Dimitriy Pavlovskiy's Powersquad | "Book of Myths" | single | or your blood. |
| 2020-07-03 | 33 | The Spider Accomplice | "Crawl" | single | is evident in his features, |
| 2020-07-03 | 34 | NEVIAH | "ROOTS MEAN SCARS" | single | and it is tempting to conclude that the statue is thus morally inert, |
| 2020-07-03 | 35 | Dark Sarah | "Illuminate" | single | or that it sleeps with the dreams |
| 2020-07-03 | 36 | Reasons Behind | "Binary Stars" | single | of those who share with it their own pure love. |
| 2020-07-03 | 37 | System Divide | "Rise Again" | single | But put a rope around its neck, |
| 2020-07-03 | 38 | PassCode | "MANTRA" | single | and pull with orthogonal purpose |
| 2020-07-03 | 55 | Wintaar | "So Be It" | I Am Ruin, I Am Death | practicing the exact petty opposite of stewardship, |
| 2020-07-03 | 56 | Satylus | "Brightness" | Brightness +1 | waiting to see how long it will take us to decide to blame it |
| 2020-07-03 | 57 | Ars Magna Umbrae | "Oracle of Luminous Dark" | single | for exactly what it is guilt of. |
| 2020-07-03 | 58 | Vhäldemar | "Afterlife" | single | Tearing it down releases its truth again, |
| 2020-07-03 | 59 | Varus | "Die Letzte Schenke" | A New Dawn | and returns all of us to its point of irresolution. |
| 2020-07-03 | 60 | Second To Sun | "L" | single | The story is unsuspended. |
| 2020-07-03 | 61 | Imperial Triumphant | "City Swine" | single | We can talk about reparations |
| 2020-07-03 | 62 | Limos | "Rise to Arms" | Tales of the White Eye 4 | for things done by our distant ancestors, |
| 2020-07-03 | 63 | Myridian | "Light Is Lost" | Light in the Abyss | because they didn't have that talk. |
| 2020-07-03 | 64 | Profane Sanctum | "Soldiers Epitaph" | single | We can print new copies of every treaty Trump petulantly tore up |
| 2020-07-03 | 65 | Doomcave | "The Illumination" | The Illumination | because it didn't mention his name anywhere, |
| 2020-07-03 | 66 | Highborne | "Inquisitor of Frailty" | single | and resign ourselves to repairing his damage. |
| 2020-07-03 | 67 | Samael | "Transcendence" | single | A standing statue is a power lesson; |
| 2020-07-03 | 68 | Balance Breach | "Bad Blood" | Dead End Diaries | a fallen one, that is the history lesson. |
| 2020-07-03 | 69 | Pain of Salvation | "ACCELERATOR" | single | History beats power: |
| 2020-07-03 | 72 | Jet Jaguar | "No Surrender" | single | All of us are flawed, but some of us are trying to improve the world and/or ourselves anyway, |
| 2020-07-03 | 73 | DevilDriver | "Iona" | single | and some of us are trying to be adored for existing, |
| 2020-07-03 | 76 | Liturgy | "Antigone" | single | History prefers books to statues; |
| 2020-06-26 | 1 | Neptunian Maximalism | "Daiitoku-Myōō no Ōdaiko" | Éons | If we measure by the level of percussive creativity on metal records, instead of pandemics or police brutality, we're having a pretty good year. |
| 2020-06-26 | 2 | Jesu | "Because of You" | single | I am disinclined to credit art to concurrent oppression or adversity, |
| 2020-06-26 | 3 | Al-Namrood | "Al Hallaj" | Wala'at | but happy to give art extra glory for everything it transcends. |
| 2020-06-26 | 4 | Astaroth | "Obscura -Another scenario-" | Genesis of "Astaroth" -Chapter 1- 5 | I will tolerate, apparently, any number of metal bands named after variant demons, |
| 2020-06-26 | 5 | Feuerschwanz | "Malleus Maleficarum" | Das Elfte Gebot | or marching anthems dedicated to specious grimoires, |
| 2020-06-26 | 6 | Romuvos | "Aizkraukle (1279)" | The Baltic Crusade | or bookish processionals extrapolated from feudal disputes whose Wikipedia explanations may as well involve Grand Fenwick. |
| 2020-06-26 | 7 | Aseitas | "Blood Into Oil" | single | There are universes hidden in morbid dreams. |
| 2020-06-26 | 8 | Brujeria | "Covid-666" | Covid-666 +1 | We are made of crawling flesh, |
| 2020-06-26 | 9 | Atlases | "Dreadlight" | single | as surely as spinning atoms |
| 2020-06-26 | 10 | Thecodontion | "Pangaea" | Supercontinent | and the slow flex of the turtles that wager our fortunes. |
| 2020-06-26 | 11 | Fellwarden | "Pathmaker" | Wreathed in Mourncloud | Our notions of elegance are formulated in decay, |
| 2020-06-26 | 12 | Grief & Bliss | "A Walking Void" | Hiraeth 3 | or maybe our tolerance of chaos is predicated on our ability to conflate it with complexity. |
| 2020-06-26 | 13 | Red Moon Architect | "Rise" | single | We seek an element of will in a possibility-space of wishful unattended vindication. |
| 2020-06-26 | 14 | Amaranthe | "Viral" | single | We are indignant when asked to take practical steps we used to reserve for ritual, |
| 2020-06-26 | 15 | Volturian | "Haunting Symphony" | single | and awakened by questions posed about our movitations for sleep. |
| 2020-06-26 | 16 | Jasmine Cain | "Burnout" | SEVEN | But we do not sleep to make a point, |
| 2020-06-26 | 32 | JAM Project | "Versus Road 〜非現実的サバイバル〜" | single | all the regret within range of your aura will be lifted three inches into the air. |
| 2020-06-26 | 74 | Anup Sastry | "The Only Thing They Fear Is You" | single | but it won't restore squandered joy. |
| 2020-06-26 | 91 | Minniva | "The Human Paradox" | single | and look up |
| 2020-06-26 | 92 | Red Handed Denial | "Telephone" | single | into a rendered sky |
| 2020-06-26 | 98 | Inter Arma | "Purple Rain" | Purple Rain +2 | We haven't the patience for dystopia, either, fortunately. |
| 2020-06-19 | 23 | Jessica Wolff | "Perfect Kind of Wrong" | Para Dice | but the moment-width of right now is the ideal scale for action: |
| 2020-06-19 | 24 | Barbie Sailers | "Decode" | single | for translating one bitter secret into one declarational love, |
| 2020-06-19 | 25 | Beyond The Black | "Horizons" | Hørizøns | for recognizing one assumed limit as a perspectival mirage, |
| 2020-06-19 | 26 | Sellout | "Всё как всегда" | single | for learning one new chord at one new volume setting, |
| 2020-06-19 | 27 | Elysian Gates | "Shelter from the Storm" | single | for mastering the shape of "no" in the mirror |
| 2020-06-19 | 28 | Sascha Paeth's Masters Of Ceremony | "Under Fire" | Under Fire +1 | before putting on your mask and going out to march, |
| 2020-06-19 | 29 | Operus | "The Mirror" | Score of Nightmares | for asking your soul what it needs |
| 2020-06-19 | 30 | Primal Fear | "I Am Alive" | I Am Alive +1 | in a moment when you are ready to hear it if it gives you an answer. |
| 2020-06-19 | 31 | Machine Head | "Stop The Bleeding (Feat. Jesse Leach)" | Civil Unrest 2 | We attribute volition to violence, |
| 2020-06-19 | 32 | Lamb of God | "New Colossal Hate" | Lamb of God | and thus blame to fear, |
| 2020-06-19 | 33 | Hail Spirit Noir | "The First Ape on New Earth" | Eden in Reverse | because we know what kind of animals we are the bodies of, |
| 2020-06-19 | 34 | Ensiferum | "Andromeda" | single | but our legends are not made of bodies |
| 2020-06-19 | 35 | Blot | "Howl From the North" | Howl From the North | or their frostbitten surfaces, |
| 2020-06-19 | 36 | Fellwarden | "Scafell's Blight" | single | they are made of the auras that linger |
| 2020-06-19 | 37 | Vile Creature | "Apathy Took Helm!" | Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm! | when the skin is gone. |
| 2020-06-19 | 38 | Expander | "Hyper-Flesh Aedificium" | single | We are allegories composed of husks, |
| 2020-06-19 | 90 | AvAciA | "Halua minua" | single | Your steps and the steps of the parade diverge. |
| 2020-06-12 | 39 | Moyka | "Kanazawa (Maybe We Don't Have To Go There)" | Spaces 5 | losing weight; |
| 2020-06-12 | 40 | Maggie Szabo | "I Don't Need You" | single | understanding how we developed an economy based on |
| 2020-06-12 | 41 | Carolyn Miller | "Ain't About That" | single | celebrating (and monetizing) weight lost |
| 2020-06-12 | 42 | Imogen Clark | "My Own Worst Enemy" | single | and monetizing (and ignoring) excess incurred; |
| 2020-06-12 | 46 | Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall | "Kingdom Falls (feat. Renan Zonta)" | We Are the Night | supporting the parts of a barely-functional society that barely encourage the people you love |
| 2020-06-12 | 47 | Michael Angelo Batio | "Laser Guided" | More Machine Than Man | to do the work that makes them and the rest of us more joyous |
| 2020-06-12 | 48 | Breed of Burden | "Revolution" | single | without implicitly perpetuating every toxic -archy whose power-structures are woven through it; |
| 2020-06-12 | 49 | Rimortis | "Peklo, co říká si svět" | single | driving without being part of "traffic"; |
| 2020-06-12 | 50 | Korpiklaani | "Shai Shai - Siberia" | single | breathing and eating without being part of "consumption"; |
| 2020-06-12 | 51 | The HU | "Sugaan Essena - Original Music from "Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order"" | single | surviving one more day without being part of somebody else's death; |
| 2020-06-12 | 74 | Behold... The Arctopus | "Blessing In Disgust" | Hapeleptic Overtrove | Thus nominally participatory democracy is reduced to picking oligarchs by color, |
| 2020-06-12 | 75 | Calór | "Ebu" | Ambivalent 2 | and complex policy initiatives and non-trivial moral premises are reduced to sloganeering. |
| 2020-06-12 | 77 | Paralydium | "Synergy" | Worlds Beyond | in the same suggestively symptomatic sense of "loose" as loose stools, |
| 2020-06-12 | 79 | Fermentor | "Mechanism" | single | yelling at people to tighten up their own shit. |
| 2020-06-12 | 80 | Uada | "Djinn" | single | Demanding, of others or yourself, the micromanaging of the operation of your internal organs is not a plan. |
| 2020-06-12 | 81 | Ulthar | "Undying Spear" | Providence | Nobody wins any war between soiled flags |
| 2020-06-12 | 82 | Dispyt | "Min sanna vän" | Min sanna vän / svept i vita lakan 2 | except the people selling you flag-soap |
| 2020-06-12 | 83 | Gaerea | "To Ain" | single | and whatever invasive weeds have cultivated the cynical ability to fix nitrogen out of soil into which blood has soaked. |
| 2020-06-12 | 84 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Earthless" | single | If the revolution fills your streets, |
| 2020-06-12 | 85 | Phyllomedusa | "Turning Away from the Overthrow" | Turning Away from the Overthrow | your streets are probably paved with blood and poison. |
| 2020-06-12 | 86 | Voidceremony | "Sacrosanct Delusions" | single | But then, our streets are always paved with blood and poison, |
| 2020-06-12 | 91 | Soulspell | "My Heart Will Go On" | single | named for slave-traders or martyrs of liberation or bureaucrats of systemic reform, |
| 2020-06-05 | 11 | Oceans of Slumber | "A Return to the Earth Below" | single | We need to say Black Lives Matter because we need to demonstrate, |
| 2020-06-05 | 12 | Mezmerized | "Rage" | single | each of us to ourselves and each of us to every other one of us, |
| 2020-06-05 | 13 | Moonlight Haze | "Till the End" | single | that we are capable of applying the universal to the specific, |
| 2020-06-05 | 14 | Emerald Mind | "Almagest" | single | both to specifics in general, and to this one right now. |
| 2020-06-05 | 15 | Woodscream | "Водяной" | Варево | We need to take this stand, right now because now is the closest we can come to all the times we should have taken this stand already, |
| 2020-06-05 | 16 | The Power of the Pudú | "Calentamiento Global" | single | because if you can put your knee on another human's neck, |
| 2020-06-05 | 17 | Operus | "Ruin" | single | you can also take it off. |
| 2020-06-05 | 18 | Blade of Surtr | "Ymir" | HEATHEN | You can stand up and shake centuries of exploitative cultural grime off of your skin, |
| 2020-06-05 | 24 | Madmans Esprit | "Mangtanshi - Kopanese Version" | Mangtanshi 3 | thrown into the air before an audience of gods |
| 2020-06-05 | 57 | Xordia | "Neon Lights" | Neolux | between moral humility and seeing huddled masses yearning to breathe free |
| 2020-06-05 | 61 | The Atlas Frame | "Haven" | single | necessary but so plaintively far from sufficient, |
| 2020-06-05 | 62 | Frost* | "Fathers" | Others - EP | but the magnitude of its should-be obviousness |
| 2020-06-05 | 74 | Myridian | "Babylon" | single | We are creatures of genocide and hereditary royalty |
| 2020-06-05 | 94 | Inter Arma | "March of the Pigs" | March of the Pigs +1 | A fascist hoards order |
| 2020-06-05 | 95 | Thou | "Endless Nameless" | Blessings of the Highest Order | because they fear their own life doesn't matter on its own. |
| 2020-05-29 | 9 | DIAMANTE | "Ghost Myself" | single | a social media optimized for propogating cynical opportunism across networks of self-satisfaction, |
| 2020-05-29 | 10 | Jessica Wolff | "Superhero" | single | a spiritual infrastructure monopolized by maintaining obsolete power-structures, |
| 2020-05-29 | 11 | Smackbound | "Those Who Burn" | single | a guy blocking the sidewalk with his mask down on his chin so he can smoke, |
| 2020-05-29 | 12 | Black Sun | "Resist" | single | a million micro-cultures that tolerate macro-aggressions |
| 2020-05-29 | 13 | Graveshadow | "Gwynnbleidd" | single | and innumerable macro-cultures that without micro-aggressions for energy would have to be towed by ducks. |
| 2020-05-29 | 14 | Silentium | "Truth - Single Version" | single | We elected a bloated ass who doesn't know what to do because all of the important problems affect people and he doesn't know or care about people. |
| 2020-05-29 | 15 | Binary Creed | "Mother" | single | We might improve upon this by electing a genial comforter who is at least demonstrably capable of loving other humans, |
| 2020-05-29 | 52 | Boisson Divine | "Lo Pèla Pòrc" | La Halha | on elaborated superstition and laws you are willing to proofread as long as they don't apply to you, |
| 2020-05-29 | 53 | Cvlt Ov the Svn | "Twilight" | single | on altars of temples of love lacquered with indigenous blood, |
| 2020-05-29 | 61 | Behemoth | "Shadows Ov Ea Cast Upon Golgotha" | A Forest 4 | We have to prepare for floods, |
| 2020-05-29 | 62 | Imperial Triumphant | "Rotted Futures" | single | not by rotating our misaligned cities so they're 5' higher and the onramps run perpendicular to the ley lines that connect us to Cumbre Vieja, |
| 2020-05-29 | 63 | Acârash | "Descend to Purity" | Descend to Purity | but by turning them inside out so that they serve the goal of giving all of us a shared home. |
| 2020-05-29 | 64 | Almyrkvi | "Asomatous Grove" | Almyrkvi / The Ruins of Beverast Split | We have tried to punish other people's bodies for the transgressions of our own souls, |
| 2020-05-29 | 65 | The Ruins Of Beverast | "The Grand Nebula Pulse" | Almyrkvi / The Ruins of Beverast Split | and to glue together souls all broken the same way by blaming their identical fractures on the variety of bodies. |
| 2020-05-22 | 8 | Kandia | "4 Walls" | single | or stores on fire. |
| 2020-05-22 | 9 | Dark Sarah | "All Ears!" | single | The quieter it gets, the more you hear, |
| 2020-05-22 | 10 | Against Myself | "The Tempest" | single | but the louder you turn up the quiet noises, |
| 2020-05-22 | 11 | Nemesea | "Wake up!" | single | the more of them get inside you. |
| 2020-05-22 | 12 | Raven Black | "Darkest Pit" | single | "You breathe it in, and it changes you from the inside" is the biography of both insidious plagues |
| 2020-05-22 | 13 | Tigersclaw | "Walpurgis Night - Single Edit" | single | and salvational revolutions. |
| 2020-05-22 | 14 | Natural Spirit | "Гори, палай!" | Під серпом часу | We are born defenseless, |
| 2020-05-22 | 15 | Fate DeStroyed | "Crave" | single | and mostly accumulate rationalizations |
| 2020-05-22 | 16 | Feminazgul | "Bury the Antlers With the Stag" | No Dawn for Men | for things we have long been ready to discard. |
| 2020-05-22 | 17 | Vermilia | "Taivas hiljaa huutaa" | Keskeneräisiä tarinoita 4 | We have elaborate schemes designed to conceal our most obvious faults, |
| 2020-05-22 | 18 | One Desire | "Godsent Exstasy" | Midnight Empire | and thus suitable for nothing but eventually letting go. |
| 2020-05-22 | 19 | Caligula's Horse | "Salt" | Rise Radiant (Bonus Tracks Version) | Only a few of the things you think you need are actually elemental: |
| 2020-05-22 | 20 | Enslaved | "Homebound" | single | a sense of place that isn't limited to the one where you find yourself, |
| 2020-05-22 | 21 | Fairyland | "Of Hope and Despair in Osyrhia" | Osyrhianta | some story of your destiny that you can tell yourself without worrying that it will end before it takes you far enough, |
| 2020-05-22 | 22 | Feral Light | "Hex of Inverses" | Life Vapor | a map between pains and painful truths, |
| 2020-05-22 | 52 | Ruadh | "Embers" | The Rock of the Clyde | Outside the wolves gather loosely, |
| 2020-05-15 | 6 | Minniva | "I'll Make a Man out of You" | single | into diorama drama, |
| 2020-05-15 | 7 | Soulspell | "Ever Dream" | single | time to elaborate our dreams. |
| 2020-05-15 | 10 | Derange | "Forgotten" | Senses, Pt. 2 5 | journals of abandoned thoughts, |
| 2020-05-15 | 11 | Ravenscry | "Leader" | 100 | belief systems composed entirely of doubt, |
| 2020-05-15 | 12 | ILLUMISHADE | "Tales Of Time" | ECLYPTIC: Wake of Shadows | lists of refuted mythologies and their enduring allegorical truths. |
| 2020-05-15 | 13 | Sertraline | "2205" | Clouded Minds & Silver Lines 5 | Every life is a path through misfortune |
| 2020-05-15 | 14 | Lacey Sturm | "The Decree" | single | and appeal, |
| 2020-05-15 | 15 | Firewind | "Orbitual Sunrise" | Firewind | but so too through confetti |
| 2020-05-15 | 16 | Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall | "Dreams and Scars (feat. Renan Zonta)" | single | and real and metaphorical blood. |
| 2020-05-15 | 17 | Kee Marcello | "Starless Sky - Single Version" | single | You can look up and see nothing |
| 2020-05-15 | 18 | Vega | "Don't Fool Yourself" | single | in a thousand cynical and convenient ways, |
| 2020-05-15 | 19 | Thessa | "Dunes" | single | and change nothing about the teeming galaxies or our tenuous interruption |
| 2020-05-15 | 20 | Paradise Lost | "Ravenghast" | Obsidian | of their magnanimity of void and light. |
| 2020-05-15 | 21 | Primal Fear | "Along Came the Devil" | single | All these plagues were implicit in us. |
| 2020-05-15 | 22 | Hanging Garden | "Welkin Aflame" | single | Without night, we would be other selves: |
| 2020-05-15 | 23 | Māra | "Leaking Guilt" | Self-Destruct. Survive. Thrive! 6 | more corrupt, but maybe less beholden to our corruption; |
| 2020-05-15 | 24 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Feet of Jeremiah" | single | buried in shallower soil, |
| 2020-05-15 | 25 | Okkultokrati | "The Dying Grass Moon" | La Ilden Lyse | but exhumed by subtler shifts; |
| 2020-05-15 | 26 | Horn | "Vom Tribock hohl geschossen" | Mohngang | explicated in denser verse |
| 2020-05-15 | 27 | Fellwarden | "An Elder Reckoning" | single | but illuminated by cleanser bursts. |
| 2020-05-08 | 3 | Feuerschwanz | "I See Fire" | single | or organizing mythology |
| 2020-05-08 | 4 | Chaos Magic | "Desert Rose" | Desert Rose +3 | or orbiting acceptance. |
| 2020-05-08 | 5 | Secret Rule | "I Think I'm Paranoid" | Quarantine: The Other Side of Us | Every beginning is the beginning of someone's love for something, |
| 2020-05-08 | 6 | Halocene | "Toxicity" | single | or the end, |
| 2020-05-08 | 11 | UMC | "Blinding Lights (Metal Version)" | single | or along the internal surfaces |
| 2020-05-08 | 21 | Secrets Of The Moon | "Mute God" | Black House | Hatred does not summon the virus, |
| 2020-05-08 | 22 | Biesy | "Uwaga: świat" | Transsatanizm | but empty hearts will struggle to send it away. |
| 2020-05-08 | 23 | Winterfylleth | "A Hostile Fate (The Wayfarer Pt. 4)" | The Reckoning Dawn | You may notice a correlation between narcissistic idiocracy and plague acceleration. |
| 2020-05-08 | 24 | Forgotten Tomb | "Active Shooter" | Nihilistic Estrangement | When you think you can spot your enemies by the color of their names, |
| 2020-05-08 | 25 | Draconian | "Lustrous Heart" | single | you build pale walls. |
| 2020-05-08 | 26 | Regardless Of Me | "Obsidian" | single | And then one day you try to go out, and there's a wall there, so you order food, |
| 2020-05-08 | 27 | Joachim Witt | "Schmerzende Welt" | Rübezahls Rückkehr | and they leave it for you on the other side of the wall. |
| 2020-05-08 | 28 | Tokyo Motor Fist | "Youngblood" | single | We are saved not by walls or zealot bombast, but by predictable bureaucracy |
| 2020-05-08 | 29 | Fairyland | "The Hidden Kingdom of Eloran" | single | and effusive legends and discrete math. |
| 2020-05-08 | 30 | Saurom | "Amanecer" | single | We fly imaginary grandeurs like kites, |
| 2020-05-08 | 31 | Within Temptation | "Entertain You" | single | from upstairs windows. |
| 2020-05-08 | 32 | Serpentyne | "Away from the World - Single Mix" | single | We are not hiding, we are watching. |
| 2020-05-08 | 33 | Woodscream | "Василиса" | single | Our stories about this time |
| 2020-05-08 | 34 | Cyan Kicks | "Wish You Well" | single | will tell of sincerity |
| 2020-05-08 | 35 | YOHIO | "LIGHT MY WAY" | single | at war with the outdated faith that air has no agency, |
| 2020-05-08 | 36 | heidi. | "玉響" | 玉響 +2 | and we will see that "this time" has been long underway. |
| 2020-05-08 | 37 | The Guzmania | "Glow" | single | This is the era of the painful slow replacement of invisible majestic authority |
| 2020-05-01 | 33 | The Unity | "You Don't Walk Alone" | single | I have soared with them in boxes, |
| 2020-05-01 | 34 | Pop Evil | "Let The Chaos Reign" | single | sharing air we brought with us specifically to share in joy and hope. |
| 2020-05-01 | 35 | Æther Realm | "Goodbye" | Redneck Vikings from Hell | We have cultivated nomadic souls, |
| 2020-05-01 | 36 | Havok | "Betrayed by Technology" | V | and purchased shoes optimized for the movements we hoped to be expected to make, |
| 2020-05-01 | 37 | Acârash | "Below Ceremonial" | single | and now they sit by the door, |
| 2020-05-01 | 38 | Irdorath | "Redeemer of the Heretics" | The Final Sin | with the deliveries we're insisting will be purified and consecrated |
| 2020-05-01 | 39 | Thrawsunblat | "Until Ebb the Waters" | Insula EP 4 | if we spend 24 consecutive hours not touching them |
| 2020-05-01 | 40 | Salqiu | "Orfeu II" | Orfeu | and endlessly washing our hands. |
| 2020-05-01 | 41 | Nordsind | "Dvale" | single | In a moment we will return to normal. |
| 2020-05-01 | 42 | Reliqa | "Mr. Magic" | single | In a moment we will send most of our normalities back in their unopened original packaging |
| 2020-05-01 | 43 | Ravenscry | "The Gatekeeper" | single | because the machines that took those refills |
| 2020-05-01 | 44 | Jessica Wolff | "Ella's Song" | single | no longer make things we consume fast enough |
| 2020-05-01 | 45 | Canterra | "A Lifetime" | single | to justify manufacturing them ourselves. |
| 2020-05-01 | 46 | Moonlight Haze | "The Rabbit of the Moon" | single | You have time to make bread, |
| 2020-05-01 | 47 | Lesoir | "Mosaic" | Mosaic | if you want the baker's children to starve. |
| 2020-05-01 | 48 | Xordia | "Stained" | single | You have time to decry the flaws in other countries' public-health policies |
| 2020-05-01 | 49 | Haken | "Canary Yellow" | single | if nobody you love has been confirmed to be dying today. |
| 2020-04-24 | 27 | LOVEBITES | "Thunder Vengeance" | Electric Pentagram | I miss feeling guilt instead of desperate relief over trivial distractions. |
| 2020-04-24 | 28 | Rabia Perez | "Inmortal" | Un nuevo mundo | I miss soccer, and my friend Matt's photographs from punk shows, |
| 2020-04-24 | 29 | Bloodparade | "Un Mal Sueño" | single | and the weird semi-comradery of raid hours. |
| 2020-04-24 | 30 | Sertraline | "Isolation" | single | All of these moments will be found again in time, |
| 2020-04-24 | 31 | Louna | "Вендетта - акустика" | single | like stars returning in regulated waves to evacuated skies. |
| 2020-04-24 | 32 | Volturian | "Forevermore" | Crimson | Our ghosts are waiting to tell us how lucky we were to escape. |
| 2020-04-24 | 33 | Ravenscry | "The Door Inside" | single | We were interrupted by vociferous materialized xenophobia |
| 2020-04-24 | 34 | Signum Regis | "Given Up For Lost" | single | while quietly preparing to drown, |
| 2020-04-24 | 35 | Gathering Of Kings | "From a Whisper to a Scream" | single | and now we can no longer claim the same helplessness. |
| 2020-04-24 | 36 | Fairyland | "Heralds of the Green Lands" | single | We have stood within six feet of the heralds |
| 2020-04-24 | 37 | Paradise Lost | "Ghosts" | Ghosts +1 | for long enough to memorize the song of what they gave up |
| 2020-04-24 | 48 | Together to the Stars | "Forgotten Tongue" | As We Wither | and text to say that contactless delivery has been performed. |
| 2020-04-24 | 49 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "ミライシグナル" | single | We imagined this tentative, distanced future, |
| 2020-04-24 | 50 | Japanese Folk Metal | "TSUJIGIRI-SAKE" | single | we just thought it would have fancier sunglasses, |
| 2020-04-24 | 51 | Corvus Corax | "Yggdrasill - Era Metallum - Single Edit" | single | and smartwheel skateboards instead of quite so many Subaru Crosstreks. |
| 2020-04-24 | 52 | Nomans Land | "No Compromises" | single | We thought we would dart furtively home to secret rooms in the forgotten interstices of sleepless cities; |
| 2020-04-24 | 53 | Riesa | "Moukanmoukari" | single | instead we sit on uninstrumented couches in ordinary houses, |
| 2020-04-24 | 54 | When the Sun Sets | "Ceiling" | single | and the cities go to bed early and rise late. |
| 2020-04-17 | 30 | LOVEBITES | "Golden Destination" | single | our smallness |
| 2020-04-17 | 31 | DIAMANTE | "Serves You Right" | single | and how thoroughly we have usually been lost. |
| 2020-04-17 | 32 | Lollia | "Decode" | single | We painted meritocracies on plywood |
| 2020-04-17 | 33 | Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall | "Queen of Fire (feat. Noora Louhimo)" | single | and perched them on cliff edges. |
| 2020-04-17 | 34 | South Haven | "Winter in June" | Motion | We proclaimed ridiculous triumphs |
| 2020-04-17 | 35 | Dark Sarah | "Melancholia" | single | over needed things we broke. |
| 2020-04-17 | 36 | Ravenscry | "The Entertainer" | single | We tolerated horrible leaders with a fascination |
| 2020-04-17 | 37 | Elane | "My Guardian of Dawn" | My Guardian of Dawn +1 | borrowed from treating cysts like pets, |
| 2020-04-17 | 38 | Dream Ocean | "Pendulum of Time" | single | and the same conflation of narcissistic self-loathing |
| 2020-04-17 | 39 | Ignea | "Чорне Полум'я" | The Realms of Fire and Death | with strength. |
| 2020-04-17 | 40 | Second To Sun | "I Psychoanalyze My Ghosts" | I Psychoanalyze My Ghosts +1 | But here we are, a glorious civilization of golden towers and greatnesses nobody has ever seen anything like before, |
| 2020-04-17 | 41 | A Pregnant Light | "Part II: The Purple Heart" | I and I 6 | and somebody ate a bat in a city of 11 million people that I'd never heard of, |
| 2020-04-17 | 42 | Brother Firetribe | "Bring on the Rain" | single | or maybe that wasn't it at all, |
| 2020-04-17 | 43 | WAЯROCK | "Call my name" | The Declarer 〜An it harm none, do what ye will.〜 | but you pull any string and all of this so quickly unravels. |
| 2020-04-17 | 44 | i.D.A | "SHIBAZAKURA" | LRRH. 4 | There are no faraway places far away enough. |
| 2020-04-17 | 58 | Noxfilia | "Pánico Escénico" | Tierra de Nadie | and think "wait, we cleaned our asses how?" |
| 2020-04-10 | 16 | Metalite | "Hunting High and Low" | single | and yet we made it this far. |
| 2020-04-10 | 17 | Fairyland | "Hubris Et Orbis" | single | At least we figured out what RNA is |
| 2020-04-10 | 18 | Volturian | "Broken" | single | before it killed us. |
| 2020-04-10 | 19 | Ignea | "Jinnslammer" | single | The dinosaurs had no astronomodon to explain that |
| 2020-04-10 | 20 | Rabia Perez | "Rabia" | single | standing 60 feet apart wasn't going to help. |
| 2020-04-10 | 21 | Fallen Arise | "Forsaken" | Enigma | Then again, they also had no conspiracy theorists |
| 2020-04-10 | 22 | Tulip | "Midnight in the Desert" | High Strangeness | to infer political motives to orbital mechanics. |
| 2020-04-10 | 23 | Nightwish | "Music" | HUMAN. :II: NATURE. | We get to live, |
| 2020-04-10 | 24 | Mornir | "Flammenschwinge" | Dämmerstund | but the price is chaos. |
| 2020-04-10 | 25 | Dark Forest | "Wayfarer's Eve" | Oak, Ash & Thorn | We have learned to build structures that collapse, |
| 2020-04-10 | 26 | Woodscream | "Круговерть" | single | to explicate insane moral strategies, |
| 2020-04-10 | 27 | Feuerschwanz | "Das elfte Gebot" | single | to act elaborately against our own basic interests. |
| 2020-04-10 | 28 | Ember Falls | "We Are Become Fire" | single | These are stranger talents than bioluminescence |
| 2020-04-10 | 29 | Dead by April | "Memory" | single | or chromatophoria, |
| 2020-04-10 | 30 | Stellar Master Elite | "A New Galactic Empire" | Hologram Temple: Ominous 3 | mutations evolutionarily selected for their capacity |
| 2020-04-10 | 31 | Litterbox Massacre | "Served on a Dish II" | The Rise of Lucifur | to preserve ignorance |
| 2020-04-10 | 32 | ...And Oceans | "Five of Swords" | single | against the relentless pressure of the evident. |
| 2020-04-10 | 33 | Azusa | "Golden Words" | Loop of Yesterdays | Even the virus knows that we constitute a single connected organism. |
| 2020-04-10 | 34 | Stvore | "Zamri" | One | amongst whose nodes air circulates, |
| 2020-04-10 | 36 | Hämatom | "#FCKCRN" | #FCKCRN 5 | and cadences and awe. |
| 2020-04-10 | 62 | Megaraptor | "Airship Theme" | single | We have flashbacks, flashes forward, |
| 2020-04-03 | 17 | コドモドラゴン | "pest" | pest +2 | A face on the news informs us of hourly fluctuations in the indices of contrition: |
| 2020-04-03 | 18 | D | "Narrow Escape" | Narrow Escape | we amass 340 points of remorse |
| 2020-04-03 | 31 | Memoremains | "Pounding Heart" | single | and now you open your mouth and everybody knows if you're a myopic sociopath. |
| 2020-04-03 | 32 | Alter Noir | "Menneisyyden Haamut" | single | We will emerged masked, |
| 2020-04-03 | 33 | Miracle Flair | "In Love and Hate" | Synchronism | but revealed. |
| 2020-04-03 | 34 | Ad Infinitum | "Infected Monarchy" | Chapter I: Monarchy | There is no place left on earth without |
| 2020-04-03 | 35 | MoonSun | "One by One" | Escapalace | somebody, tonight, making beats about quarantine |
| 2020-04-03 | 36 | Beyond The Black | "Golden Pariahs" | single | on their phone. |
| 2020-04-03 | 37 | Devilskin | "Bright Lights" | RED | Tomorrow we exchange these. |
| 2020-04-03 | 38 | Noxfilia | "Fuerzas de Flaqueza" | single | Tomorrow we sing songs from within walled cities |
| 2020-04-03 | 39 | Mezmerized | "Hybrid" | single | and heroic voivodships, |
| 2020-04-03 | 54 | Irdorath | "Debaptized" | single | The pointlessly rich retain their golden towers, |
| 2020-04-03 | 55 | Exlibris | "Megiddo" | single | and sputter over crackly intercoms for the guards to bar the lobby doors. |
| 2020-04-03 | 56 | Dynazty | "The Dark Delight" | The Dark Delight | If your resources are spent cultivating flattery |
| 2020-04-03 | 57 | Hartmann | "Walking on a Thin Line" | single | and maintaining a supply of burned steaks, |
| 2020-04-03 | 58 | Conception | "Of Raven and Pigs" | State of Deception | you will eventually find that they have grown difficult to renew. |
| 2020-04-03 | 59 | Haken | "Prosthetic" | single | We have seen the Himalayas from Jalandhar, |
| 2020-04-03 | 63 | Megaraptor | "Dragon Rider" | single | You can't conflate markets with meritocracy |
| 2020-04-03 | 64 | Alex Yarmak | "Slum Lord" | single | if day-traders keep changing the prices of stock |
| 2020-04-03 | 86 | Lauren Babic | "Ohioisonfire" | single | or respect, |
| 2020-04-03 | 87 | DCCM | "The Box" | single | but the chance to walk away from a ruin you brought upon us. |
| 2020-04-03 | 88 | Elvenking | "No Prayer for the Dying" | single | These resonant survival chambers that have meanwhile accumulated music and contained our breath, |
| 2020-04-03 | 89 | Eclipse | "Driving One of Your Cars" | single | and learned which compulsory things are actually necessary, |
| 2020-04-03 | 90 | Allegaeon | "Roundabout" | single | will create different cities of purpose when they are reopened. |
| 2020-03-27 | 4 | Igorrr | "Downgrade Desert" | Spirituality and Distortion | We were not ready, but we were ready enough to take our aspirational worlds inside with us, |
| 2020-03-27 | 8 | Ad Infinitum | "Live Before You Die" | single | but there are still songs. |
| 2020-03-27 | 9 | Silentium | "Unchained" | single | There will continue to be songs. |
| 2020-03-27 | 10 | Ravenscry | "Maybe" | single | I believe that music is the thing that humans do best, |
| 2020-03-27 | 11 | Sacred Groove | "Ghosts of Yesterday" | single | and this will not be the plague that takes our souls from us. |
| 2020-03-27 | 12 | Nevaria | "Drowning" | single | We may be literally decimated by silence, |
| 2020-03-27 | 13 | Divitius | "Phalanx" | single | but we will not be silenced. |
| 2020-03-27 | 14 | LOVEBITES | "The Unbroken" | single | We may never go back to flying around the planet |
| 2020-03-27 | 26 | Unreqvited | "Deadmoon" | single | affectation and talismans. |
| 2020-03-27 | 27 | Joshua Travis | "4-24-20" | single | The concert halls close for a year, |
| 2020-03-27 | 28 | No Ostriches | "Ostrich Nominalism" | single | and we are confronted with economic constraints |
| 2020-03-27 | 29 | Kreator | "666 - World Divided" | single | that were already mostly prohibitive when they were open, |
| 2020-03-27 | 30 | Aeternam | "Hanan Pacha" | Al Qassam | but not inherently existential. |
| 2020-03-27 | 31 | Okkultokrati | "Kiss of Death" | single | We may never go back to contact sports in stadia, |
| 2020-03-27 | 32 | Wake | "In the Lair of the Rat Kings" | Devouring Ruin | but there were no indie football players. |
| 2020-03-27 | 33 | WuW | "Ce silence qui nous délivre de tout" | Rétablir L'eternité | Modern spectator sports are linear descendants of imperial gladiator contests |
| 2020-03-27 | 34 | Naglfar | "Vortex of Negativity" | single | but modern popular music is an exponential extrapolation of royal court-music patronage. |
| 2020-03-27 | 35 | Ghostheart Nebula | "Apathetic Lacrymae" | single | When Daniel Ek stakes Spotify to the goal of a million creators living off their work, |
| 2020-03-27 | 39 | Brutus | "Sand" | single | The NFL has fewer than 2000 players. |
| 2020-03-27 | 49 | The Anix | "Give It Up" | Give It Up | not congregational super-contagion. |
| 2020-03-27 | 50 | Havok | "Post-Truth Era" | single | There is a message about churches |
| 2020-03-20 | 2 | Timo Rautiainen & Trio Niskalaukaus | "Tie uuteen kotiin" | Mahdoton yhtälö | and we have learned, unintentionally, to pause in furious sympathetic silent sync. |
| 2020-03-20 | 3 | Heaven Shall Burn | "Children of a Lesser God" | Of Truth and Sacrifice | You have had days in which maybe the world continued, but you did not check to see, |
| 2020-03-20 | 4 | Epsilon Zero | "Solar Flame" | Solar Flame +3 | so a day of stasis is beneath remark, |
| 2020-03-20 | 5 | Eternal Delyria | "Dying to Live" | single | between notice, |
| 2020-03-20 | 6 | Katatonia | "Behind the Blood" | single | behind us even as it begins: |
| 2020-03-20 | 7 | Turmion Kätilöt | "Kyntövuohi" | single | Forgettable, |
| 2020-03-20 | 8 | Kamara | "Tämäkin vielä" | single | and all we have to do in the morning is forget the number of days, |
| 2020-03-20 | 9 | Hecate | "Fragment d'ether" | Ode au désert suspendu | and the one before, and do this one simple tenable tolerable exhausting thing |
| 2020-03-20 | 10 | Serpent Column | "Pantheoclasm" | Endless Detainment | again. |
| 2020-03-20 | 11 | Regardless Of Me | "My Bloody Eyes" | single | The cats observe my emotional state with the same perpetual patronizing pity as always. |
| 2020-03-20 | 12 | Azusa | "Kill / Destroy" | Kill / Destroy +3 | "All cat days are exactly like this, but the food is worse and we poop in a tray." |
| 2020-03-20 | 13 | Kirkkovene | "Epäröimättä Hetkeekään" | single | Afterwards, they sleep, |
| 2020-03-20 | 14 | In This Moment | "As Above, So Below" | As Above, So Below / Hunting Grounds / The In-Between 3 | but sleep is disregard, and I have not their trust, |
| 2020-03-20 | 15 | SinHeresY | "Immortals" | single | nor their ability to permit animal fatalism to be anthropomorphized as trust. |
| 2020-03-20 | 16 | Atlántida | "3.2.5.12.5.2.3.24" | α 3.2.5.12.5.2.3.24 Ω 3 | At dinner our daughter demands Rose/Bud/Thorn, |
| 2020-03-20 | 17 | Ani Lo Projekt | "Walk Alone" | A Time Called Forever | and I know she doesn't want to hear |
| 2020-03-20 | 18 | Miracle Flair | "The Untold" | single | We Didn't Die Today/ |
| 2020-03-20 | 19 | Dylem | "Eye of the Storm" | Eye of the Storm 5 | Someday Not Dying Today Will Again Not Be So Obviously the Rose/ |
| 2020-03-20 | 20 | ILLUMISHADE | "Crystal Silence" | single | Tomorrow Will Not Be That Day. |
| 2020-03-20 | 21 | Skarlett Riot | "Human" | single | The roses hear us out and then say "But spring!" |
| 2020-03-20 | 39 | Eluveitie | "The Call of the Mountains" | The Call of the Mountains & Ambiramus in Russian 2 | Alexandria, |
| 2020-03-20 | 40 | Tomorrow's Eve | "Imago" | single | Rio de Janeiro, |
| 2020-03-20 | 41 | Exlibris | "Shadowrise" | single | Shanghai |
| 2020-03-20 | 42 | Paralydium | "Finding the Paragon" | single | and the moon. |
| 2020-03-20 | 43 | The Third Grade | "The Lost" | Of Fire and Ashes (Pt. 2) | But previously, in this halucination of collective rationality, |
| 2020-03-20 | 44 | Posthumanbigbang | "Homebound II" | Jungle Eyes | I have wanted to believe in the obviousness of a lot of other obvious things. |
| 2020-03-20 | 45 | Shattered Skies | "Born of Solder" | single | The virus has the advantage of nominal invisible omnipresence, |
| 2020-03-20 | 46 | Firewind | "Rising Fire" | single | while the seas are unmistakable. |
| 2020-03-20 | 47 | Conception | "By the Blues" | single | We can't simply bluff them into retreat by closing some food courts for a month. |
| 2020-03-13 | 38 | The Unity | "You Don't Walk Alone" | Pride | Every social measure that reduces the 10%, |
| 2020-03-13 | 39 | Dynazty | "Waterfall" | single | and every drug that reduces the two weeks, |
| 2020-03-13 | 40 | Sutrah | "Variation I.Ii - Lethe" | Aletheia | gets us farther from catastrophe and closer to poison ivy, |
| 2020-03-13 | 41 | Stitched Up Heart | "Dirty Secrets" | Darkness | closer to summer, closer to love. |
| 2020-03-13 | 42 | Fourth Circle | "Awake and Lost" | Worlds | We have factors we can change in our hearts. |
| 2020-03-13 | 43 | Evereal | "Falling Down" | Falling Down +3 | We need faster vaccines, that's a thing we've definitely learned. |
| 2020-03-13 | 44 | Shaman | "Brand New Me" | single | But we also, beyond any political doubt, need universal health care. |
| 2020-03-13 | 55 | Fleddy Melculy | "Damn Tam Tam feat. Franky DSVD from Channel Zero" | Sabbath Fleddy Sabbath | they're at home because the social value of them staying home just temporarily skyrocketed. |
| 2020-03-13 | 82 | UMC | "Don't Start Now (Metal Version)" | single | The dinosaurs weren't killed by a meteor, they were killed by the orange idiosaur who went on TV and promised them that the comet was going very substantially away, not towards. |
| 2020-03-06 | 1 | Nightwish | "Harvest" | Harvest +1 | As bad as this is probably going to be, this is the practice pandemic. |
| 2020-03-06 | 3 | Burning Witches | "The Sisters of Fate" | Dance with the Devil | an enthusiastic willingness to be guided by science; |
| 2020-03-06 | 4 | Allen/Olzon | "My Enemy" | Worlds Apart | fast distribution of truth; |
| 2020-03-06 | 5 | Beyond The Black | "Misery" | single | public honesty by broadcast voices; |
| 2020-03-06 | 6 | Crystal Ignite | "Black Mamba" | single | ruthless shared math; |
| 2020-03-06 | 7 | Xtasy | "Eye of the Storm" | Eye of the Storm | acceptance that borders are a fiction situated somewhere between illusion and delusion; |
| 2020-03-06 | 9 | Alter Noir | "Uhri" | single | competent hand-washing; |
| 2020-03-06 | 10 | Neverlight | "Thirteen Nails" | single | a social structure that doesn't punish individuals for contributing to collective need |
| 2020-03-06 | 11 | Sertraline | "Inside Out" | single | or rely on discretionary sacrifice to achieve collective goals; |
| 2020-03-06 | 12 | Semblant | "Left Behind" | Obscura | political leaders who know more tactics than just denial and bankruptcy; |
| 2020-03-06 | 13 | Fallcie | "Your Own Misery" | Bad Blood | the willingness to prepare for the possible |
| 2020-03-06 | 14 | Noxfilia | "Carne de Cañón" | single | as well as the convenient; |
| 2020-03-06 | 15 | LOVEBITES | "Holy War" | single | control over the implications of our environment on our infrastructure; |
| 2020-03-06 | 16 | FAKE ISLAND | "All At Once" | Cell Division | an eagerness to account for consequences; |
| 2020-03-06 | 18 | WAGAMAMA RAKIA | "rain" | single | and our culpability for their state; |
| 2020-03-06 | 39 | Khymera | "Master of Illusions" | Master of Illusions | But it will probably not destroy us. |
| 2020-03-06 | 42 | Conception | "Waywardly Broken" | single | and that would be enough to kill millions more. |
| 2020-03-06 | 44 | Dool | "Wolf Moon" | single | we are stress-testing our species |
| 2020-03-06 | 45 | Naglfar | "Cerecloth" | single | and its adaptations. |
| 2020-03-06 | 46 | Vredehammer | "Suffocate All Light" | Viperous | The next one will be worse, |
| 2020-03-06 | 47 | Atavist | "Self-Realisation" | single | but also, |
| 2020-03-06 | 48 | DaizyStripper | "INFINITY" | INFINITY【通常盤】 | the "next" one was already circulating |
| 2020-03-06 | 49 | utsusemi | "Mukuro" | Mukuro +1 | in warm ocean currents |
| 2020-02-28 | 4 | Ardours | "Ti Sento" | Eu4ria 4 | I've seen a lot of people campaign to be elected |
| 2020-02-28 | 5 | Violet Cold | "Battle Unicorn" | Noir Kid | by telling a story about what it would signify if they were to win. |
| 2020-02-28 | 8 | Earthists. | "RESONATING LIGHT 2.0" | single | You are the first one in my lifetime to campaign by trying to work out both what a victory would symbolize, |
| 2020-02-28 | 10 | Jibaku Shonen Band | "No.7 - Yoji Ikuta Ver." | No.7 5 | but also exactly what it would enable. |
| 2020-02-28 | 18 | Together to the Stars | "Respire" | single | and its miniaturizations as routine lying and betrayal, |
| 2020-02-28 | 19 | Azusa | "Detach" | Detach +2 | are the only life tactics he ever learned. |
| 2020-02-28 | 20 | Mila Mar | "Lou" | Harar | Bernie winning would enable moral urgency, |
| 2020-02-28 | 22 | Halflives | "Hard to Break" | Hard to Break +2 | but probably increases its likelihood. |
| 2020-02-28 | 24 | Evereal | "When You're Gone" | single | Joe himself can't necessarily be counted on to know right from wrong on first or even second guess, |
| 2020-02-28 | 25 | Yanakoto Sotto Mute | "Gifted" | single | as of course you too well know, |
| 2020-02-28 | 35 | Dynazty | "Heartless Madness" | single | not in the abstract sense of Barack's "hope", |
| 2020-02-28 | 36 | The Unity | "Line and Sinker" | single | but in laborious and daunting detail, |
| 2020-02-28 | 37 | XIV Dark Centuries | "Skogafulka" | Waldvolk | and thus your campaign showed that people can recognize purpose |
| 2020-02-28 | 38 | Elder | "Embers" | single | when it is demonstrated to them. |
| 2020-02-28 | 48 | Shakra | "A Roll of the Dice" | Mad World | can tell that they will suffer less under Bernie or Joe, even as the minority opposition, |
| 2020-02-28 | 57 | ChuggaBoom | "Bohemian Rhapsody" | single | So much safer to know that Trump would never go in a kitchen, Bernie would stand on the porch bellowing, and Joe would end up at somebody else's house. |
| 2020-02-28 | 58 | Cole Rolland | "Heaven" | single | "This fight goes on", you say four times in your exit memo: against debt, racism, climate change and nihilism. |
| 2020-02-28 | 59 | Grand Design | "The Warrior" | single | Against gold, you might as well have said: the gold of money as an end, the gold of defining victory by opposition to defeat, the gold dug out of rock, the gold against our souls. |
| 2020-02-28 | 61 | Violet Cold | "Noir Kid" | Noir Kid | We persist after loss because you have to lose something. We persist because victory is not the opposite of loss, but the product of it. Today we surrender with grace. Tomorrow, nevertheless, we once again persist. |
| 2020-02-21 | 21 | Lucifer | "Midnight Phantom" | single | until somebody is too tired to take them any way but literally. |
| 2020-02-21 | 22 | In This Moment | "Hunting Grounds (feat. Joe Cotela of Ded)" | Hunting Grounds / The In-Between 2 | Exhaustion is a form or catalyst of rebellion, |
| 2020-02-21 | 23 | Allen/Olzon | "Never Die" | single | a cathartic forfeiture of collaborationist resilience. |
| 2020-02-21 | 24 | Demons & Wizards | "Invincible" | lll (Deluxe Edition) | Stop and turn around. |
| 2020-02-21 | 25 | Semblant | "Murder of Crows" | single | Bring the meteor down, |
| 2020-02-21 | 26 | Exlibris | "Hell or High Water" | single | the seas up, |
| 2020-02-21 | 27 | Grimgotts | "For the Power" | single | the greatness back, |
| 2020-02-21 | 28 | Fallcie | "A Martyr Is Born" | single | apocalypse or rapture. |
| 2020-02-21 | 29 | Winterfylleth | "The Reckoning Dawn" | single | All of these deliverances and disasters are the same. |
| 2020-02-21 | 30 | Blut Aus Nord | "Anthosmos" | Hallucinogen | All of these corrupt cosmologies preach alien exceptionalisms |
| 2020-02-21 | 31 | VETUR | "Gandreið" | Vist | attributed to volumes that itemize, in fact, our indelible estate of ebullient literacy and familial habit. |
| 2020-02-21 | 32 | Verikalpa | "Peikon Kieli" | Tuoppitanssi | All of these scriptures codify benedictions |
| 2020-02-21 | 33 | Solkyri | "Shambles" | single | where what we really need is blank space and an hour. |
| 2020-02-21 | 34 | On Thorns I Lay | "Ouranio Deos" | Threnos | We imagine our robots as marionettes on wireless strings, |
| 2020-02-21 | 35 | Wardruna | "Grá" | single | and then stand waiting crossly for the trees to move. |
| 2020-02-14 | 14 | LOVEBITES | "Signs of Deliverance" | Signs of Deliverance / When Destinies Align 2 | no erupting joy, |
| 2020-02-14 | 15 | Stitched Up Heart | "Straitjacket" | Straitjacket | no seething fury. |
| 2020-02-14 | 16 | Fourth Circle | "The Truth" | single | And then their momentary death passes, and they shudder once and shout. |
| 2020-02-14 | 17 | Diabulus in Musica | "One Step Higher" | Euphonic Entropy | We are not serene objects; |
| 2020-02-14 | 18 | Amaranthe | "Do or Die" | single | we have no essential crystalline structure |
| 2020-02-14 | 19 | Seven Spires | "Unmapped Darkness" | Emerald Seas | or single resonant frequency |
| 2020-02-14 | 20 | Emerald Mind | "We Are One" | single | unless you count "once" and "never" as frequencies. |
| 2020-02-14 | 21 | ILLUMISHADE | "Rise" | Rise +1 | Once we were the void; |
| 2020-02-14 | 22 | FAKE ISLAND | "Just wanna live" | single | never again. |
| 2020-02-14 | 23 | Aiolin | "Dusk Reaper" | single | While we are here, we are here forever, |
| 2020-02-14 | 24 | Demons & Wizards | "Wolves in Winter" | single | disorganized immortals who always intended to unionize, |
| 2020-02-14 | 25 | Black Royal | "Hail Yourself" | Firebride | complaining about the naive solutions proposed |
| 2020-02-14 | 26 | Blaze of Perdition | "Królestwo Niebieskie" | The Harrowing of Hearts | to our hastily drafted declarations of entitlement. |
| 2020-02-14 | 27 | Dark Fortress | "The Spider in the Web" | single | Our demons disavow us, |
| 2020-02-14 | 28 | Ihsahn | "Telemark" | Telemark 5 | and we get up and walk to the other side of the gym, |
| 2020-02-14 | 48 | Votum | "Void" | single | and a cold sure grip. |
| 2020-02-14 | 49 | Nicumo | "Time Won't Heal" | single | We have belated vaccines, |
| 2020-02-14 | 50 | Shakra | "Fireline" | single | slow election cycles, |
| 2020-02-14 | 51 | Harem Scarem | "Change the World" | single | obsolete promises |
| 2020-02-14 | 52 | Ani Lo Projekt | "A Time Called Forever" | single | and oversimplified fables. |
| 2020-02-14 | 54 | Timo Rautiainen & Trio Niskalaukaus | "Kolme vuotta sitten" | single | in order to spurn mere grace, |
| 2020-02-14 | 55 | Hora Zulu | "De-Que-Rer-Ser (2020)" | single | and then wonder why heroism seems like |
| 2020-02-14 | 56 | Kvelertak | "Discord" | Splid | a transience that augurs guilt. |
| 2020-02-07 | 4 | Nightwish | "Noise" | single | The challenge of presence is grasping this moment as decisive, |
| 2020-02-07 | 5 | Operose | "Battle Swan" | Oceans of Starlight | as one of the ones we will not have to revise in retrospect, |
| 2020-02-07 | 6 | Rainover | "Lumina Omnia" | single | as exemplary of our ability to not just accept the nominally inevitable. |
| 2020-02-07 | 7 | Delain | "Legions Of The Lost" | Apocalypse & Chill | The crassest storytelling is linear by resigned default: |
| 2020-02-07 | 8 | Gallia | "Cast It All Away" | single | we fall to constant forces, |
| 2020-02-07 | 9 | Derange | "The Hunted" | single | evil and selfishness combine to triumph, |
| 2020-02-07 | 10 | Secret Rule | "Shades of Humanity" | single | the velocity of misery is allowed to imply acceleration. |
| 2020-02-07 | 11 | Burning Witches | "Dance with the Devil" | Dance with the Devil +1 | Bad poets try to sell you the invincibility of your enemies, |
| 2020-02-07 | 12 | Fallcie | "Parasites" | single | set to cadences of catharsis. |
| 2020-02-07 | 13 | Project Aegis | "And the Rest Is Mystery" | single | The ones you need offer you your own accountability |
| 2020-02-07 | 14 | Exlibris | "Rule #1" | single | in incipient crescendo and lasciviously suspended resolution. |
| 2020-02-07 | 15 | KAQRIYOTERROR | "Persona_" | single | All moral anthems roar the same irrepressible true chorus: |
| 2020-02-07 | 27 | 「Story of Hope」 | "Life is a journey to find you" | single | You need new songs, |
| 2020-02-07 | 28 | GRANRODEO | "少年の果て" | single | not just to know what the rest of your species can still or only now do, |
| 2020-02-07 | 29 | envy | "Dawn and gaze" | The Fallen Crimson | but to know what else you are capable of hearing. |
| 2020-02-07 | 30 | Ihsahn | "Nord" | single | You are capable of hearing pain |
| 2020-02-07 | 31 | OvO | "Psora" | Miasma | and not treating it as an invisible contagion. |
| 2020-02-07 | 32 | Azusa | "Monument" | Monument +1 | You are capable of hearing resistance |
| 2020-02-07 | 33 | Berried Alive | "Prunatic" | single | and letting it impart its motion. |
| 2020-02-07 | 34 | Unzucht | "Kein Land in Sicht" | Jenseits der Welt | We are creatures of the same unclarified viscera, |
| 2020-01-31 | 16 | Mobius | "Mukti" | Kala | which doesn't keep us from seeking it in our leaders. |
| 2020-01-31 | 17 | Neopera | "Euphoria" | In Memoriam | We dream of being lead by our mythic selves, |
| 2020-01-31 | 18 | Killin' Baudelaire | "Lullaby" | single | which is another way of saying that we only tolerate guidance we can think of |
| 2020-01-31 | 19 | South Haven | "Better" | single | as our own moral inertia molded in plastic and then doubted in real-time by petulant blue dots. |
| 2020-01-31 | 20 | Ad Infinitum | "Marching on Versailles" | single | We cannot be marshaled towards unfamiliar palaces, |
| 2020-01-31 | 21 | Amberian Dawn | "Eternal Fire Burning" | Looking For You | and thus advocacy for change is usually some kind of burnished atavism, |
| 2020-01-31 | 22 | The Unity | "We Don't Need Them Here" | single | fit like armor around swollen pride, |
| 2020-01-31 | 23 | Serenity | "Souls and Sins" | The Last Knight | misconstruing inflamation for strength. |
| 2020-01-31 | 24 | Ascend The Hollow | "Polaris Calling" | single | We dream of our precepts disintegrating |
| 2020-01-31 | 25 | Rides In ReVellion | "-Hankouseimei-" | -Hankouseimei- +1 | because asleep we know: |
| 2020-01-31 | 34 | Shakra | "Turn the Light On" | single | but you'll notice we're conveniently carrying extra water and a spare pair of shoes. |
| 2020-01-31 | 35 | H.E.A.T | "Dangerous Ground" | single | There will be one about a truck, and a few other clichés before we get there. |
| 2020-01-31 | 36 | Candlemass | "The Pendulum" | single | A cliché is what a chorus leaves behind |
| 2020-01-31 | 37 | Saudade | "Lions" | single | when it molts. |
| 2020-01-31 | 38 | Nechochwen | "The Megalith" | Nechochwen 4 | We transcribe old legends with new ink or warm blood |
| 2020-01-31 | 39 | Panopticon | "Rune's Heart" | single | because we need to know our children will be remembered by wolves. |
| 2020-01-31 | 40 | Ghost Toast | "Frankenstein's" | single | There will be sidelong epics about literally how our hearts mend, |
| 2020-01-31 | 41 | Drakum | "The Big One" | Zombie Dragons from Outer Space | and flagrant operas of denied remorse. |
| 2020-01-24 | 61 | Temperance | "Let It Beat" | Viridian | Some weeks we think we know a lot of things, and some weeks we suspect that most of these things are either wrong or alternate ways of saying "Fall in love with everything." |
| 2020-01-24 | 62 | Allen/Olzon | "Worlds Apart" | single | A frantic tension between breadth-wise obsession and depth-wise obsession |
| 2020-01-24 | 63 | Crimson Sun | "Virtual Reality" | Fates | holds us temporarily in place or focus, |
| 2020-01-24 | 64 | Elegy Of Madness | "Apnoea" | Invisible World | and we form transient guilds around conjectural permanence |
| 2020-01-24 | 65 | Revolution Saints | "Million Miles" | Rise | of coincident bonds. |
| 2020-01-24 | 66 | Megaraptor | "Thunderhorse" | single | The viridian impulse is a belief in joy |
| 2020-01-24 | 67 | Temperance | "I Am the Fire" | Viridian | as a transformational response to catastrophe, |
| 2020-01-24 | 68 | ACME | "ROTTEN ORANGE" | WE ARE VISUALKEI | a willingness to understand the meagerness of nostalgic glories, |
| 2020-01-24 | 69 | Xmas Eileen | "PATH" | PROTOTYPE 5 | the realization that the habits we are forced to abandon were mostly always bad. |
| 2020-01-24 | 81 | Thy Catafalque | "Vető" | Naiv | Anticipated apocalypse is an optional interpretation of catalysis, |
| 2020-01-24 | 82 | Dawn Of Solace | "Choice" | Waves | and collapse is only one of the possible ways in which our behaviors could change. |
| 2020-01-24 | 83 | The Great Old Ones | "Lost Carcosa" | Cosmicism (Deluxe Edition) | Some days we feel like we have run out of hope, |
| 2020-01-24 | 84 | OvO | "You Living Lie" | single | and it is true that we sometimes run out of things: |
| 2020-01-24 | 85 | Mitochondrial Sun | "The Great Filter" | single | oat milk, |
| 2020-01-24 | 86 | Nero Di Marte | "Sisyphos" | Immoto | moral senators, |
| 2020-01-24 | 87 | Scars of Solitude | "Drown" | single | ways to excuse power, |
| 2020-01-24 | 93 | Pyogenesis | "Survival of the Fittest" | A Silent Soul Screams Loud | The pessimist imagines chewing abjectly on bugs. |
| 2020-01-24 | 94 | Andromida | "Abstraction" | single | The futurist imagines new tacos |
| 2020-01-24 | 95 | Temperance | "Nanook" | Viridian | that fly to us on their own delicious wings. |
| 2020-01-24 | 121 | Crimson Sun | "The Prison" | Fates | You can't breathe wrong. Or rather, of course you can, but it doesn't help to think about it that way. |
| 2020-01-24 | 122 | Temperance | "Viridian" | Viridian | We might be doomed, but it won't help to think we're doomed. |
| 2020-01-24 | 123 | Jorn | "Winning" | Heavy Rock Radio II - Executing The Classics | Better to believe that we, like all of these songs, |
| 2020-01-24 | 124 | Thunder And Lightning | "Hungry Eyes - Metal Version" | single | are immortal and continuously reconstituted. |
| 2020-01-24 | 125 | Militant Me | "Sweet Child O' Mine" | single | Some weeks this reinvention may feel like regression and defeat, |
| 2020-01-17 | 13 | Serenity | "My Kingdom Comes" | single | or every day, |
| 2020-01-17 | 14 | We Sell The Dead | "Carved in Stone" | Carved in Stone / Black Sleep / Across the Water 3 | and thus probably every moment. |
| 2020-01-17 | 15 | Victorius | "Astral Assassin Shark Attack" | Space Ninjas From Hell | I'm at least half serious. |
| 2020-01-17 | 16 | Amberian Dawn | "Looking for You" | single | Or maybe at most. |
| 2020-01-17 | 17 | Crimson Sun | "The Last Day on Earth" | single | Seriousness, like certainty, is an artifact of constrained perspective |
| 2020-01-17 | 18 | Ann My Guard | "V0Id" | single | and interrupted time. |
| 2020-01-17 | 19 | DIAMANTE | "Obvious" | single | The glass has and will have had every amount of water. |
| 2020-01-17 | 20 | Darktribe | "Voici l'homme" | Voici l'homme | We have or will have sung every possible song. |
| 2020-01-17 | 21 | Sabaton | "Angels Calling" | single | But this, this is the perfect moment when we sang this song in particular, |
| 2020-01-17 | 22 | Dark Fortress | "Isa" | single | basked in its shameless or complicated lineage, |
| 2020-01-17 | 23 | Erebos | "Nighted and Abysmal Secrets of the Infinite" | single | allowed ourselves to be gnawed by its fears, |
| 2020-01-17 | 24 | Karg | "Tod, wo bleibt dein Frieden" | single | howled at its fate or on behalf of its victims. |
| 2020-01-17 | 25 | Godthrymm | "The Sea as My Grave" | single | We walk among the entombed, |
| 2020-01-17 | 26 | Black Royal | "Firebride" | single | taking our turns or giving them back. |
| 2020-01-17 | 27 | Tombs | "The Dark Rift" | single | Sometimes you close your eyes in darkness, |
| 2020-01-17 | 28 | Porta Nigra | "Die Entweihung von Freya" | Schöpfungswut | not to compound absence but to disentangle yourself from inevitability, |
| 2020-01-17 | 29 | envy | "A faint new world" | single | however partially or briefly. |
| 2020-01-17 | 30 | Irdorath | "Serca Raskolata" | single | Tradition is the slow thought-experiment of inferring motive |
| 2020-01-17 | 37 | Khymera | "Walk Away" | single | Gravity holds you where you are, |
| 2020-01-17 | 38 | Sacrilegio | "Quien Te Ayudara" | ...Y Se Te Va la Vida [Vinyl Remastered] | but gently, glad for whatever time you have together, |
| 2020-01-17 | 39 | Magnum | "Madman or Messiah" | The Serpent Rings | always knowing you are taller and stronger than this surface, |
| 2020-01-17 | 40 | Oniromantic | "Saturn" | Chaos Frames | than any whirling surface. |
| 2020-01-17 | 41 | Mobius | "Bhati" | single | Every separation is context for a potential reunion, |
| 2020-01-17 | 42 | Divitius | "Memento Mori" | single | every kiss a proactive farewell, |
| 2020-01-17 | 43 | Stömb | "Dimension Zero" | single | every universe in line to have us sign a copy |
| 2020-01-17 | 44 | The Anix | "If This World Is With You" | If This World Is With You +1 | of their book of laws. |
| 2020-01-17 | 68 | Azusa | "Memories of an Old Emotion" | single | and souvenirs of redemption. |
| 2020-01-17 | 69 | AvAciA | "Vihermaa" | single | You open your eyes, and for a moment you have no idea how much time has passed. |
| 2020-01-17 | 70 | Fleddy Melculy | "De Hel Niet Gezien" | single | This is a gift. |
| 2020-01-10 | 10 | miscast | "23:00PM" | 23:00PM +1 | absorbed and encoded into the humility of our breath. |
| 2020-01-10 | 33 | Lacrimas Profundere | "I Knew and Will Forever Know" | single | It is not enough to be honest, |
| 2020-01-10 | 34 | Pyogenesis | "Modern Prometheus" | single | in the same way that it is necessary but insufficient to inhale. |
| 2020-01-10 | 35 | Heaven Shall Burn | "Weakness Leaving My Heart" | single | You will be defined by what you refuse to believe, |
| 2020-01-10 | 36 | Misanthrope | "Le fléau de Dieu" | Bâtisseur de cathédrales | and what you consume in order to feel certain, |
| 2020-01-10 | 37 | Korpiklaani | "Beer Kill Kill - USA" | single | and how much you empathize with the pieties you decline. |
| 2020-01-10 | 38 | Verikalpa | "Talonväen Teuraat" | single | You will be warmed by the burning of strangers' homes; |
| 2020-01-10 | 39 | Circus of Fools | "Lost" | Contracult | effectiveness is not a measurement of moral velocity. |
| 2020-01-10 | 40 | Erdling | "Blizzard" | Yggdrasil | The traditional arsonist lights fires to draw a crowd to whom can be sold their own guilt. |
| 2020-01-10 | 41 | Kvelertak | "Crack of Doom (feat. Troy Sanders)" | single | The modern arsonist crowdfunds the hypothetical burning of notional churches in advance, |
| 2020-01-10 | 43 | H.E.A.T | "Come Clean" | single | and then claims to see farther by standing on a hill of ash. |
| 2020-01-10 | 47 | Superdeathflame | "Dying Embers" | single | Seeking the elusive in the communal |
| 2020-01-03 | 24 | ROKUGEN ALICE | "me = ["true", "false"]" | Virtue & monochrome | In this one we use drones to shoot music videos, |
| 2020-01-03 | 25 | Stitched Up Heart | "Dead Roses" | Bones | and flowers as synecdoche instead of consolation. |
| 2020-01-03 | 26 | Red Ivy | "Nowhere" | single | In this one we will defend no home, |
| 2020-01-03 | 27 | Circus of Fools | "Daughters of the Occult" | single | and thus be welcome everywhere. |
| 2020-01-03 | 28 | Moriah Formica | "Champion" | single | We are wholeheartedly virtual, |
| 2020-01-03 | 29 | Amaranthe | "82nd All the Way" | single | and thus exempt from repeating mistakes of history |
| 2020-01-03 | 30 | Gathering Of Kings | "Kiss from Above" | single | or belief. |
| 2020-01-03 | 31 | Darktribe | "Prism of Memory" | single | Our nostalgia is ceremonial, |
| 2020-01-03 | 40 | Megaraptor | "Hungarian Dance No. 5" | single | all of the people you envy or fear are selves you could have been; |
| 2019-12-27 | 1 | Lotus Thief | "Libation Bearers" | single | The year could just keep indefinitely going, and I would barely be surprised, |
| 2019-12-27 | 2 | Neverlight | "Of Flame and Ash" | The Quiet Room | each week half as many new songs to consider but somehow the same number irresistible, |
| 2019-12-27 | 3 | Teodasia | "Hysteria" | single | until in week 78 there is nothing I don't love, |
| 2019-12-27 | 4 | Circus of Fools | "Eris (To the Fairest One)" | single | the universe and I reconciled and converged. |
| 2019-12-27 | 5 | Mindmaze | "Slave to the Cycle" | single | Which suggests, probably, that I could just abandon the outside flow of time entirely, |
| 2019-12-27 | 6 | DEATH'S-HEAD AND THE SPACE ALLUSION | "Shrouded Stars" | single | and instead run it back and forth over itself, |
| 2019-12-27 | 7 | Crashing Atlas | "The Light" | single | or pick a random week from history for every week of life, |
| 2019-12-27 | 24 | Unreqvited | "Pale" | single | in the same way that the opposite of chaos is not predestiny, but love as well. |
| 2019-12-27 | 25 | LUNA SEA | "Pulse" | CROSS | Maybe all of this time has been this one same year, |
| 2019-12-27 | 26 | Thy Catafalque | "Tsitsushka" | single | twisted into coastlines along an anticipated shore, |
| 2019-12-27 | 27 | Unhold | "Barren" | single | stalked by shattered oblivions |
| 2019-12-27 | 29 | Drakum | "Urashima" | single | and the sky from below. |
| 2019-12-27 | 30 | Nylithia | "Born Machines" | Goddamn Type 1 5 | They say the sky keeps going, too, |
| 2019-12-27 | 39 | OCTAVIAGRACE | "Raise a Belief" | Radiant | Learning to open your mind is learning to unhinge its lower jaw |
| 2019-12-27 | 42 | Master Sword | "The Final Door" | The Final Door | and was last week's love enough to prepare you for more? |
| 2019-12-27 | 45 | Andromida | "Fortitude" | single | or the ones in any other nearby sky. |
| 2019-12-20 | 1 | Megaraptor | "Carol of the Bells" | single | Every year I think "Maybe this year just no Christmas music. The world has enough. Really, more than enough." But then every year there's something like a metal version of "Carol of the Bells" by some Finnish half-joke act called Megaraptor that apparently hardly anybody knows, and I accept that some dissident fragment of this grand and horrible shared task falls to me. |
| 2019-12-20 | 8 | Orion's Reign | "Joy to the World (Symphonic Heavy Metal Version)" | single | The room you prepare for imaginary regents |
| 2019-12-20 | 15 | Temperance | "Lost in the Christmas Dream" | single | or less, |
| 2019-12-20 | 28 | NanowaR of Steel | "Valhalleluja" | single | They do not exist to supply the rest of us with distraction. |
| 2019-12-20 | 32 | A Hero for the World | "Angels We Have Heard On High / Hark The Herald Angels Sing" | single | The angels sing, or we would have forgotten them long ago. |
| 2019-12-20 | 35 | Cole Rolland | "Carol of the Bells" | single | and tolerant pantomimes we hope one day all or none of us believe. |
| 2019-12-13 | 2 | PRXJEK | "BITCH! I'M FINALLY VERIFIED" | single | You could get cartoon Satanism from death metal, |
| 2019-12-13 | 3 | 7xvn | "FEAR!" | single | bad low-fi grimness from garage black metal, |
| 2019-12-13 | 9 | Aphonnic | "En Globo" | single | noisy things that used to be distant? |
| 2019-12-13 | 15 | BAND-MAID | "Liberal" | CONQUEROR | We knew so little. |
| 2019-12-13 | 17 | Hold out Hope | "September" | single | but we never seem to let this teach us doubt as a superior liturgy. |
| 2019-12-13 | 18 | September Mourning | "Madness" | Volume III 4 | You think you know why you love what you love, |
| 2019-12-13 | 19 | Secret Rule | "Purgatory" | single | why your enemies are wrong, |
| 2019-12-13 | 20 | Die Happy | "Guess What" | single | and how to become right. |
| 2019-12-13 | 22 | We Sell The Dead | "Black Sleep" | Black Sleep / Across the Water 2 | and not as much illusions as reflections we coyly admire, |
| 2019-12-13 | 23 | Ascend The Hollow | "Swarms Within" | single | approving ourselves from very slightly different angles. |
| 2019-12-13 | 24 | Mystic Prophecy | "Eye to Eye" | single | Explain nothing. |
| 2019-12-13 | 25 | Ihsahn | "Stridig" | single | Grant it space and time and moss with which to explain itself by the way in which it ages. |
| 2019-12-13 | 26 | Massemord | "Lifeless" | single | The bombast pauses, halfway through the grape, |
| 2019-12-13 | 27 | Pyogenesis | "Will I Ever Feel the Same" | single | to lecture us on its cultivation and significance. |
| 2019-12-13 | 28 | Widek | "Nandaya" | The Garden of Existence | A tuft of hair has escaped tenure |
| 2019-12-13 | 29 | Alex Yarmak | "Inner Animal" | single | and flinches at alternate consonants. |
| 2019-12-13 | 30 | the cibo | "Everything is Good Night" | single | Self-righteousness is a ballet, |
| 2019-12-13 | 37 | Officium Triste | "The End is Nigh" | The Death of Gaia | while watching how his lips push the word "Vitis" into the center of the room, |
| 2019-12-13 | 38 | Vredehammer | "Aggressor" | single | the farthest point from all of our circled chairs, |
| 2019-12-13 | 41 | Porta Nigra | "Das Rad des Ixion" | single | just enough to, with a toe, nudge it back into play. |
| 2019-12-06 | 2 | Amberian Dawn | "United" | single | I hear your voice in other people's voices, |
| 2019-12-06 | 9 | BRIDEAR | "Ghoul" | Expose Your Emotions | I still believe Per is the greatest pop songwriter to work during my lifetime, |
| 2019-12-06 | 10 | KAQRIYOTERROR | "lilithpride" | lilithpride +1 | but without you that wasn't enough. |
| 2019-12-06 | 13 | FATE GEAR | "Headless Goddess" | Headless Goddess | But that isn't why we mattered. |
| 2019-12-06 | 14 | Mardelas | "Cleopatra" | Ground ZERO 6 | The greatness that raises empires is not the greatness that survives their fall. |
| 2019-12-06 | 16 | SHINGEKI | "Shinsoukyoku:TEMPEST" | single | It must have been love, but it's over now. |
| 2019-12-06 | 19 | Onyria | "Father" | single | I saw Roxette play only once, at 11:30 in the morning with just acoustic guitars in a converted Boston dog-track. |
| 2019-12-06 | 20 | El Cuervo de Poe | "Paredes Blancas" | single | I have walked down Strandvägen dozens of times, pretending to be prepared to run into the two of you, strolling bouncily down the sidewalk discussing chorus teleology and the transliteration of ebullience. |
| 2019-12-06 | 21 | Leaves' Eyes | "Black Butterfly - EP Version" | Black Butterfly 4 | Now you are gone, and the city is mine. All the cities are mine. |
| 2019-12-06 | 22 | Symfobia | "Bury It" | Smog of Tomorrow | We leave the winter on the ground, where we found it. |
| 2019-12-06 | 23 | Diabulus in Musica | "Otoi" | single | It was love, and it's never over. |
| 2019-12-06 | 24 | Lindsay Schoolcraft | "See the Light" | Martyr | I never was prepared. |
| 2019-12-06 | 25 | Sanguine | "I Had a Dream" | Cold Blood | I never had the slightest idea what I would say to you. |
| 2019-12-06 | 26 | Elegy Of Madness | "Egodemon" | single | The best Roxette songs were the best demonstrations of the encapsulation of glittering rapture into a living tesseract. |
| 2019-12-06 | 27 | Smackbound | "Run" | single | Even the saddest ones, even now that all of them are sad, isolated the uplift in solemnity. |
| 2019-12-06 | 30 | Kaleido | "Pretending" | single | This air is never silent. |
| 2019-12-06 | 34 | Helion Prime | "Mr. Torture" | single | because loneliness is less necessary, |
| 2019-12-06 | 35 | Crystal Eyes | "Gods of Disorder" | Starbourne Traveler | and heroism is the ability to respond to necessity with compassion, |
| 2019-12-06 | 36 | Helleborus | "Celestial Grave" | Saprophytic Divinations | and tragedy is the explication of heroism's futility. |
| 2019-12-06 | 37 | Bucovina | "Stahl kennt keinen Rost" | single | We hold these dreams until the time has run out. |
| 2019-12-06 | 38 | Pagan Reign | "In Gods We Trust" | Art of the Time | The tear becomes singular in your hand. |
| 2019-12-06 | 39 | Fen | "Breath of Void" | The Dead Light | I hear your voice too in these guttural evasions, |
| 2019-12-06 | 40 | Rattenfänger | "Pestarzt" | Geisslerlieder | in these other portals into night and winter in our souls |
| 2019-12-06 | 41 | Regarde Les Hommes Tomber | "A New Order" | single | in the squeak of children's snow boots across frost-dusted astroturf, |
| 2019-12-06 | 44 | Edge Of Forever | "Carry On" | Native Soul | You don't pick a short haircut thinking "It'll be faster to grow back". |
| 2019-12-06 | 45 | Walking Across Jupiter | "Nerve" | Sane | You don't plan for tendrils of stardom or a brain tumor at 44, or surviving it to 61. |
| 2019-12-06 | 46 | Johari | "Jewel" | single | We don't really plan for things at all, |
| 2019-11-29 | 3 | WagakkiBand | "Ignite" | REACT 4 | scents of purpose watching from the edges of buildings and parked cars and tethered dragons. |
| 2019-11-29 | 5 | Amiliyah | "Beyond the sea" | Beyond the sea | nor justified by cloaked appeals to fear. |
| 2019-11-29 | 7 | Amberian Dawn | "Lay All Your Love on Me" | single | What you claim to hate grows from inside you, envy oxidizing as enmity. |
| 2019-11-29 | 8 | Stitched Up Heart | "This Skin" | This Skin | Thus your desperation becomes your complexion, |
| 2019-11-29 | 9 | RedHook | "Fake" | single | a shell contracting from contact with air. |
| 2019-11-29 | 10 | a crowd of rebellion | "Alone//Dite" | :12_White 4 | Self-awareness starts with the realization that everybody but you sees the edges of your mask. |
| 2019-11-29 | 12 | NoisyCell | "Ouroboros" | 8. | which is how closeness is leverage. |
| 2019-11-29 | 17 | Crimson Sun | "Essence of Creation" | single | Joy is a motion, |
| 2019-11-29 | 18 | Human Fortress | "Thunder" | single | a flourish not meant to denote possession |
| 2019-11-29 | 19 | Serenity | "Set the World on Fire" | single | or outline regions of control. |
| 2019-11-29 | 20 | Coronatus | "No Planet B" | The Eminence of Nature | You can have your own planet, any of these countless uninhabited worlds with which the sky overflows, |
| 2019-11-29 | 21 | Symphonity | "Marco Polo, Pt. 2: Crimson Silk - 2019 Version" | single | but if you think isolation will be peace, |
| 2019-11-29 | 22 | Fen | "The Dead Light, Pt. 1" | single | you haven't thought through the composition of the atmophere, |
| 2019-11-29 | 23 | Nero Di Marte | "L'arca" | single | and if you think authority is affirmation, |
| 2019-11-29 | 24 | Öxxö Xööx | "3ën" | Ÿ | you haven't absorbed what "uninhabited" means. |
| 2019-11-29 | 25 | Howling North | "Deprivation" | Diffusion | Immunity to loss |
| 2019-11-29 | 26 | WAЯROCK | "Perfect Triumph" | Perfect Triumph +1 | can be developed by an assiduous refusal to feel responsible for your own defeats |
| 2019-11-29 | 27 | KAMIJO | "TEMPLE -Blood sucking for praying-" | TEMPLE -Blood sucking for praying- | or anybody else's incurred pain, |
| 2019-11-29 | 28 | PENICILLIN | "九龍頭" | 九龍頭 6 | in the same way that an immunity to breath |
| 2019-11-29 | 29 | Shiva | "Tokyo Guernica" | Tokyo Guernica +2 | can be cultivated by a sufficiently expansive orbit. |
| 2019-11-29 | 31 | Disillusion | "Time to Let Go - Single Edit" | single | and you fake-grin and say "maybe in eons". |
| 2019-11-29 | 37 | Mobius | "Akasha" | single | Government can be a system for using tenable rules to catalyze social grace, |
| 2019-11-29 | 42 | Cattle Decapitation | "One Day Closer to the End of the World" | Death Atlas | Apocalypse is a system for replacing systems. |
| 2019-11-29 | 45 | Kvelertak | "Bråtebrann" | single | not a path from one thing we already know to another. |
| 2019-11-29 | 46 | Massemord | "Chaos Within You" | Luciferi Imperium | We are not trophies for each other, |
| 2019-11-29 | 48 | Fleddy Melculy | "De Wereld Is Wondermooi feat. Sven DC from Aborted" | single | Today is not a day of rest. |
| 2019-11-29 | 50 | Reism | "This Reality" | Dysthymia | It is hard to categorize hypothetical afterlives, |
| 2019-11-29 | 51 | Raven Tide | "Born Killer" | single | as well as pointless. |
| 2019-11-29 | 55 | Dawn Of Solace | "Lead Wings" | single | in order to compose anthems of defiance. |
| 2019-11-29 | 63 | Penitence Onirique | "La cité des Larmes" | single | as long as you have a system for converting combinations of mistake and rue into different mistakes, |
| 2019-11-29 | 67 | Magica | "My Sweetest Sentinel" | single | Vigilance is a system for separating recrimination from justice. |
| 2019-11-29 | 69 | Kaunis Kuolematon | "Tuhottu elämä" | single | The forest spirits do not exist to be retained for change-management consulting. |
| 2019-11-22 | 11 | Eleine | "All Shall Burn" | All Shall Burn 5 | They rise as the result of bad decisions we made as best we knew, |
| 2019-11-22 | 12 | Fate DeStroyed | "Shattered" | single | and learning one mistake renders you no less likely to make the next one. |
| 2019-11-22 | 13 | Nevaria | "Finally Free" | single | Wisdom is not making the same one again, |
| 2019-11-22 | 14 | Aeverium | "Safe Harbour" | single | but "same" is as inexact as "safe". |
| 2019-11-22 | 15 | Avatarium | "The Fire I Long For" | The Fire I Long For | The stone giants do not exist for our admonition or convenience. |
| 2019-11-22 | 16 | Ancient Bards | "Home of the Rejects" | single | They have their own constitutional crises, |
| 2019-11-22 | 17 | Temperance | "My Demons Can't Sleep" | single | their own inflexible self-doubt, |
| 2019-11-22 | 18 | Thy Catafalque | "Embersólyom - Kaláka" | single | their own house-concert laments. |
| 2019-11-22 | 19 | Unreqvited | "Nightfall" | single | The snow melts black on the streets tonight; |
| 2019-11-22 | 20 | Obsequiae | "Morrígan" | The Palms of Sorrowed Kings | tomorrow we will be expected on the same routes despite degraded service. |
| 2019-11-22 | 21 | King | "One More War" | Coldest of Cold | Of course it is true that one of us is the fifth element. |
| 2019-11-22 | 22 | Moonreich | "Wormgod" | Wormgod 5 | What Frozen 2 reserves for later in the franchise, I assume, is that we are also the sixth, |
| 2019-11-22 | 23 | Cattle Decapitation | "Death Atlas" | single | and all the innumerable elements thereafter, |
| 2019-11-22 | 24 | Ivenberg | "Levande helvete" | Leben heißt Sterben | each one of us as fundamental as air or earth. |
| 2019-11-22 | 25 | Lord Mantis | "Consciousness.Exe" | Universal Death Church | Water has memory. We have legends. |
| 2019-11-22 | 38 | Baldrs Draumar | "Friso" | Magnus | We rarely learn any significant fraction of the possible lessons from our errors, |
| 2019-11-22 | 39 | Her Despair | "Pandaemonium" | Exorcisms of Eroticism 6 | but we are patiently willing to make them as many times as necessary in compensation. |
| 2019-11-22 | 46 | The Sound That Ends Creation | "This Math Problem Divides the Internet" | Music Designed to Give You Ideas... Incase You Should Run Out of Ideas | But add people and you can make chaos, and from chaos you can make everything else. From chaos you can make new things, and joy. |
| 2019-11-15 | 9 | Ex Libris | "Chapter 3 - Anne Frank: The Annex" | Ann | Spirituality, however, is not a measurement of the gods or the lack of them, |
| 2019-11-15 | 10 | Scarleth | "No Return" | Vortex | but of your own relationship to whatever is or isn't, |
| 2019-11-15 | 11 | Spoil Engine | "Medicine" | Renaissance Noire | and there is always more awaiting depth to your relationships. |
| 2019-11-15 | 12 | In Mute | "Just(ice)" | Chaos Breeder | I claim no meaningful progress yet in coming to terms with death, |
| 2019-11-15 | 13 | Seven Spires | "Succumb" | single | but I feel like I'm making nearly constant microprogressions in coming to terms with life. |
| 2019-11-15 | 14 | Sin7sins | "As Rain Falls Down" | single | Both journeys are definitional, of course. |
| 2019-11-15 | 15 | Delain | "One Second" | single | The cynic says that progress is a matter of pointing decisively in the direction you happen to be moving. |
| 2019-11-15 | 16 | The Murder of My Sweet | "Head of the Snake" | single | The optimist says "Yes, exactly!" |
| 2019-11-15 | 17 | Candye Syrup | "WHITE RUSSIAN" | single | The direction I am pointing is towards openness over judgment; |
| 2019-11-15 | 27 | Dragon Ash | "ROCKET DIVE" | single | I say "You have not yet heard your favorite song" a lot, |
| 2019-11-15 | 28 | Aiolin | "Clear Gray" | Clear Gray +2 | and the point of this formulation is that it expresses an infinity-esque finity in finite-universe terms. |
| 2019-11-15 | 29 | Thorr | "Unicorn Deathsquad" | Unicorn Deathsquad | You can usually get a person who belives the universe is huge to believe that it's huger. |
| 2019-11-15 | 30 | Liturgy | "HAJJ" | H.A.Q.Q. | You can try to get the love you want by identifying it, and there are even worksheets, |
| 2019-11-15 | 31 | Seth | "Hymne au vampire acte I" | Les Blessures De L'âme: XX Ans De Blasphème | but the main thing you accomplish by naming your goal is reducing your receptivity to the unanticipated. |
| 2019-11-15 | 32 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Connect the Goddamn Dots" | single | There are innumerable paths to joy, |
| 2019-11-15 | 33 | envy | "A step in the morning glow" | single | until and unless you stipulate that you will not step on any of them but one, |
| 2019-11-15 | 34 | Avatarium | "Voices" | single | and these are not that one. |
| 2019-11-08 | 2 | Esoteric | "Sick and Tired" | A Pyrrhic Existence | and darkness. |
| 2019-11-08 | 3 | Slow | "Futilité" | VI - Dantalion | Our prescient hoardings -- |
| 2019-11-08 | 4 | Monolithe | "Onset of the Eigth Cycle" | single | of books, |
| 2019-11-08 | 5 | Obsequiae | "The Palms of Sorrowed Kings" | single | dilemmas, regrets, |
| 2019-11-08 | 6 | Second To Sun | "Raida" | Legacy | of things that do not age but were not dead from the start -- |
| 2019-11-08 | 7 | Schammasch | "Rays Like Razors" | Hearts of No Light | these will be our new gold. |
| 2019-11-08 | 8 | Darkestrah | "Black Cathedral" | Embrace of Memory | Memories of light will be broken into negotiable shards. |
| 2019-11-08 | 9 | Helleborus | "Saprophytic Divinations" | single | We will learn to touch their edges so lightly, in the silence, that we can measure sharpness by smelling its sublimated yearning to cut us. |
| 2019-11-08 | 10 | Raven Black | "He Is the One" | single | Lightless cosmologies will proliferate, |
| 2019-11-08 | 11 | Neverlight | "Unravel" | single | competing to ennoble our entombment |
| 2019-11-08 | 12 | Edge Of Paradise | "Electrify" | Universe | as temporal tunneling, |
| 2019-11-08 | 13 | Windrunner | "Heather" | single | or an evasion forced on us by the patriarchies of fossil records and ledger domains. |
| 2019-11-08 | 14 | Walk in Darkness | "Nothing" | single | Sigils will be ranked by remembered glow, |
| 2019-11-08 | 15 | Celestial Ruin | "Heart Shaped Ashes" | single | and the word-counts of circumscribed creation myths, |
| 2019-11-08 | 16 | Rivals | "Thunderstorm" | Supernova 2 | but in our isolation we will be safe. |
| 2019-11-08 | 17 | The Dark Element | "Silence Between the Words" | Songs the Night Sings | Or so the songs will sing until the day when they don't. |
| 2019-11-08 | 18 | Alteria | "Apnea" | single | A white hawk will land on a petrified branch outside a sentry's watch. |
| 2019-11-08 | 19 | Djelmash | "Talk That Talk" | single | Various forgotten notifications will arrive in a deferent rush. |
| 2019-11-08 | 20 | Andromida | "Panspermia" | single | We will realize, in the middle of an ancient story, that it has never stopped being about us. |
| 2019-11-08 | 21 | We Sell The Dead | "Across the Water" | single | We will take a last fortifying breath of still air, |
| 2019-11-08 | 22 | H.E.A.T | "Rise" | single | check that our headphones are fully charged, |
| 2019-11-08 | 23 | Revolution Saints | "When the Heartache Has Gone" | single | and allow ourselves to reacknowledge |
| 2019-11-08 | 24 | Pretty Maids | "Will You Still Kiss Me (If I See You in Heaven)" | Undress Your Madness | yearning and thus hope. |
| 2019-11-01 | 1 | IKINÄ | "Tulisilla hiilillä" | Millenniaalin itsehoito-opas epävarmaan aikuisuuteen | I grew up knowing mostly the things I could hear on the radio in Dallas, which meant the things everybody knew or a few things that George Gimarc would bring back from somewhere and play late on Sunday nights. |
| 2019-11-01 | 2 | Merta | "Ei enää" | single | Thus I grew up believing that Other music was also sung in English and mainly came from the UK. Gimarc didn't go to Finland, so I didn't know any Finnish music. |
| 2019-11-01 | 15 | Tales Of Evening | "Torn Apart" | A New Dawn Awaits | but only really if I pretend that it's me, not her. |
| 2019-11-01 | 16 | Sin7sins | "Prayer For Night Eternal" | single | Drum machines are not why she likes Alessia. |
| 2019-11-01 | 17 | Sōlborn | "Lunar Fantasy" | single | They're not what I appreciate about Alessia, either, I just like knowing what she's talking about, |
| 2019-11-01 | 18 | Derange | "Zero" | Senses, Pt. 1 5 | and wait for my opportunity to offhandedly explain the reference. |
| 2019-11-01 | 19 | Sanguine | "5 Seconds to Midnight" | single | But I never had an 808. I had an Alesis HR16. |
| 2019-11-01 | 20 | Eleine | "Mein Herz brennt" | Mein Herz brennt +1 | The 808 inspired a revolution and a documentary. |
| 2019-11-01 | 21 | Tales Of Evening | "Halls of Peace" | A New Dawn Awaits | The HR16 helped proto-twee indie kids who never learned to drum make songs that sounded like they were made by kids with cheap drum machines who never learned how to drum. |
| 2019-11-01 | 22 | Symphony Of Tragedy | "Rise Again" | single | You can't be a role model in retrospect. If I had had Spotify when I was 12, I would definitely have used it to listen to all the Black Sabbath and Judas Priest and Iron Maiden albums, |
| 2019-11-01 | 23 | Pretty Maids | "Undress Your Madness" | single | rather than just the few I could afford to buy. |
| 2019-11-01 | 24 | Apocalyptica | "Rise" | single | My daughter doesn't have to decide whether to spend a limited allowance on an Alessia Cara EP, or a collaboration single with Bastille. |
| 2019-11-01 | 27 | Voyager | "Entropy" | Colours in the Sun | We start with whatever exists, |
| 2019-11-01 | 28 | Wilderun | "Far from Where Dreams Unfurl" | Veil of Imagination | and then our own legends begin. |
| 2019-11-01 | 29 | Schammasch | "A Paradigm of Beauty" | single | Racists misunderstand globalism as a form of nihilism, |
| 2019-11-01 | 30 | King | "Star" | single | because racism is nihilism flavored with narcissism, |
| 2019-11-01 | 31 | Massemord | "Alas! The Lord is Dead" | Gravkammer 2 | and globalism is a threat to the smugness that is narcissism's only comforting mode. |
| 2019-11-01 | 32 | Litterbox Massacre | "Red Dot Mystery" | single | Self-aware nihilism is a profoundly comic existential reaction. |
| 2019-11-01 | 52 | IKINÄ | "Paljaana" | Millenniaalin itsehoito-opas epävarmaan aikuisuuteen | By her age, I had eaten Finnish crackers. She has been to Finland. |
| 2019-11-01 | 60 | Oceans | "Scars to Your Beautiful (feat. Anna Murphy)" | Cover Me in Darkness 4 | She should know, as should you, that there's a hope waiting for you in the dark, |
| 2019-10-25 | 20 | Shellmy | "Kashokusei Shougai Outo" | single | the one we don't understand with the colors and the explosions |
| 2019-10-25 | 21 | heidi. | "一瞥" | 標本 TYPE-B | that makes us feel like angels without heavens. |
| 2019-10-25 | 22 | ACME | "WONDERFUL WORLD" | WONDERFUL WORLD +1 | Tonight the world ends again, and is beautiful, |
| 2019-10-25 | 23 | GALNERYUS | "MY HOPE IS GONE" | INTO THE PURGATORY | and we say rehearsed things we obviously don't mean |
| 2019-10-25 | 24 | Temperance | "Mission Impossible" | single | literally. |
| 2019-10-25 | 25 | The Dark Element | "The Pallbearer Walks Alone" | single | We have hypothetical hopelessnesses, |
| 2019-10-25 | 26 | Leaves' Eyes | "Serkland" | single | half-domesticated ideologies of immunity |
| 2019-10-25 | 27 | Cathubodua | "My Way to Glory" | Continuum | and its imagined consequences. |
| 2019-10-25 | 28 | Edge Of Paradise | "Fire" | single | Our hills burn, |
| 2019-10-25 | 29 | Spoil Engine | "The Hallow (feat. Jeff Walker)" | single | consuming ignorance without reducing it, |
| 2019-10-25 | 30 | Derange | "Human" | single | but nothing the flames illuminate is scarier than us. |
| 2019-10-25 | 31 | The Murder of My Sweet | "Tin Soldiers" | single | We are not robots, |
| 2019-10-25 | 32 | Metalite | "Biomechanicals" | Biomechanicals | but neither are our robots limited technically to their shells. |
| 2019-10-25 | 33 | Edenbridge | "The Memory Hunter" | Dynamind | We bleed from analog into digital, |
| 2019-10-25 | 34 | Ivy Crown | "Bad Dream" | Echo | into never-complete zeroes and the promise of eventual ones. |
| 2019-10-25 | 35 | Jinjer | "Pit of Consciousness" | Macro | Telemetry rests. |
| 2019-10-25 | 36 | Savage Master | "Myth, Magic and Steel" | Myth, Magic and Steel | The cars you thought you'd drive when you were old enough aren't made any more, |
| 2019-10-25 | 38 | Cloak | "The Cleansing Fire" | The Burning Dawn | and applying that earnestness to resistance. |
| 2019-10-25 | 39 | Dødsdrift | "Aufs Meer hinaus" | Weltenszission | You can afford to lose every argument |
| 2019-10-25 | 40 | Alcest | "Les jardins de minuit" | Spiritual Instinct | but the one with the self you will be one minute from now. |
| 2019-10-25 | 41 | Thy Catafalque | "Szélvész" | single | You can wish for your enemies to fail, |
| 2019-10-25 | 42 | Aephanemer | "Prokopton" | Prokopton | but not without becoming the inheritor of their debts. |
| 2019-10-25 | 43 | Cleric | "Lucifer Triumphant" | Serpent Psalms | You can have enemies, |
| 2019-10-25 | 44 | Noctem | "Dichotomy of Malignancy" | single | but only by teaching them methods for treachery. |
| 2019-10-25 | 45 | Dawn of Disease | "Where the Clouds Reach the Ground" | single | You can reject curiosity |
| 2019-10-25 | 46 | Nifrost | "Blykrone" | Blykrone | in the same simple way that you can step into the air |
| 2019-10-25 | 47 | Leprous | "Foreigner" | Pitfalls | and refuse to descend until the world has rotated under you to your specified coordinates. |
| 2019-10-25 | 48 | Hevisaurus | "Pianon kannen alla" | Bändikouluun! | You can only condescend to things you miscontrue. |
| 2019-10-25 | 49 | Ars Amandi | "Cada Noche (La Leyenda de Manque Os Pese)" | En Tierra de Castillos | Every triumphant rebellion leaves behind a heartbroken empire, |
| 2019-10-25 | 50 | DLD | "MIÉRCOLES" | single | an empty weeknight throne |
| 2019-10-25 | 51 | Dragonfly | "La Travesía" | Zeitgeist | with a storybook sitting closed on the armrest. |
| 2019-10-25 | 83 | Mesarthim | "Ghost Condensate, Pt. 1" | Ghost Condensate | You have every substance that has ever been misidentified as animus, and thus you are the inexorable catalyst with which this moment becomes the next. |
| 2019-10-18 | 6 | IKINÄ | "Lässyä tarinaa" | single | but it suggests we're using language for purposes beyond |
| 2019-10-18 | 9 | Utsu-P | "お天道様とドブネズミ" | RENAISSANCE | We imagine these robots as translators, but they're only made of wire and what-if. |
| 2019-10-18 | 10 | GALNERYUS | "THE FOLLOWERS" | single | They don't have your interests at heart, due superficially to the no-heart thing, |
| 2019-10-18 | 16 | Metalite | "Social Butterflies" | single | or made everything else retreat, |
| 2019-10-18 | 17 | Moriah Formica | "I Hate" | single | which can seem the same if you're dizzy to begin with. |
| 2019-10-18 | 18 | MAN WITH A MISSION | "Dark Crow" | single | Now you wonder. |
| 2019-10-18 | 19 | Rivals | "Supernova" | single | We measure relative velocities and debate which one of us would age faster if we reached impractical speeds, |
| 2019-10-18 | 20 | Pagan Fury | "Broken Heroes" | Warrior Queen 4 | or counterpose speculative outcomes |
| 2019-10-18 | 21 | Scarleth | "Feel the Heat" | single | from meeting mythical beasts. |
| 2019-10-18 | 26 | REXORIA | "The Rise of the Phoenix" | Ice Breaker | So many things that should kill us fail to; |
| 2019-10-18 | 27 | Crimson Sun | "The Beast Within" | single | of course we feel immortal |
| 2019-10-18 | 28 | Cyhra | "Battle From Within" | Battle From Within +1 | and not quite responsible for our fates. |
| 2019-10-18 | 29 | Crystal Eyes | "Side by Side" | single | Odin will push back the impudent seas. |
| 2019-10-18 | 31 | Lord Mantis | "Qliphotic Alpha" | single | or SeeClickFix will add a category for "salinity in ground water", |
| 2019-10-18 | 33 | Cleric | "All Death Unseeing" | single | The mountains once believed in their own level composure, |
| 2019-10-18 | 36 | The Grand Masquerade | "In the Heart of the Opera" | single | but it's not a life you'd choose for your children. |
| 2019-10-18 | 37 | Obsequiae | "In the Garden of Hyacinths" | single | Canvas elides, |
| 2019-10-18 | 38 | Fen | "Nebula" | single | that's why me make art in the image of things we could just as well see: |
| 2019-10-18 | 39 | Teitanblood | "Leprous Fire" | The Baneful Choir | to separate their complexities |
| 2019-10-18 | 40 | Necronomicon | "From Ashes into the Flesh" | Unus | from their significances, |
| 2019-10-18 | 41 | Brothers of Metal | "Njord" | single | to colocate realms of legends |
| 2019-10-18 | 42 | 梁釗峰 | "天知 - 劇集 "解決師” 主題曲" | single | with disputed lands, |
| 2019-10-18 | 43 | Pretty Maids | "Firesoul Fly" | single | to insist we have time for a guitar solo, |
| 2019-10-18 | 45 | Alkonost | "Парус" | Парус +1 | to assert our power over essences |
| 2019-10-18 | 46 | Tandra | "Thunder’s Calling" | Time and Eternity | in the same terms with which we admit our powerlessness over conditions. |
| 2019-10-18 | 47 | Rimfrost | "Damned Jaws" | Expedition: Darkness | Doesn't apocalyptic defeat tell you anything about survival? |
| 2019-10-18 | 48 | Ars Amandi | "Defensoras de Pallantia" | single | Don't you also have these portals in the Southern lands? |
| 2019-10-18 | 49 | Nemuer | "Ymir's Death" | Urðarbrunnr | A warming world demands a reduced allegorical dependence on frost, |
| 2019-10-18 | 50 | 1349 | "Abyssos Antithesis" | The Infernal Pathway | and a grim readiness for new plagues. |
| 2019-10-18 | 67 | Mass Worship | "Sibylline Divination" | Mass Worship | Evangelists prosper |
| 2019-10-18 | 68 | Alter Bridge | "Godspeed" | Walk The Sky | in the threat and absence of demons. |
| 2019-10-11 | 1 | BABYMETAL | "Arkadia" | METAL GALAXY | We can be glorious. |
| 2019-10-11 | 2 | 眩暈SIREN | "滲む錆色" | Nijimu Sabiiro / Ajisai 3 | Every day we do not spend gloriously is a choice we have made to indulge our self-doubt. |
| 2019-10-11 | 4 | Unleash The Archers | "Heartless World" | single | If you can avoid being wrong with earnest effort, |
| 2019-10-11 | 5 | Ethereal Kingdoms | "Beginnings" | Hollow Mirror | as is often quite possible, |
| 2019-10-11 | 6 | Dream State | "Twenty Letters" | single | it's usually a good idea, |
| 2019-10-11 | 7 | Cathubodua | "Hero of Ages" | single | not invariably but at least generally, |
| 2019-10-11 | 8 | Lacuna Coil | "Black Feathers (Bonus track)" | Black Anima | but of course it doesn't always work. |
| 2019-10-11 | 11 | Infected Rain | "Black Gold" | single | There's not always a right to be, |
| 2019-10-11 | 12 | Tai Sui | "Devito" | single | not always even a coherent state to occupy. |
| 2019-10-11 | 26 | Vanden Plas | "The Phantoms Of Prends-Toi-Garde" | The Ghost Xperiment - Awakening | And you think "I am afraid of so many things, |
| 2019-10-11 | 27 | The Unity | "Welcome Home" | single | but how would it work to be invulnerable while everybody else is drowning, |
| 2019-10-11 | 28 | The Ferrymen | "Don't Stand in My Way" | A New Evil | and does invulnerable cover drowning or do you end up at the bottom of the ocean |
| 2019-10-11 | 29 | Degreed | "Sex" | single | effortlessly fending off lobsters but unable to resurface?" |
| 2019-10-11 | 30 | Eclipse | "Mary Leigh" | Paradigm | And does wanting the things you get make them more glorious or less? |
| 2019-10-11 | 31 | Solar Storm | "Frozen Sky" | single | And if they taste like algebra when they're raw, does that mean we can find out what algebra tastes like cooked? |
| 2019-10-11 | 32 | Massemord | "The Age of the Wolf" | single | We began huddled in caves, |
| 2019-10-11 | 33 | Cloak | "A Voice in the Night" | single | but then we realized how much we could make by Airbnbing them, |
| 2019-10-11 | 34 | King | "Beyond the Exosphere" | single | and so we accidentally learned to travel by inviting travelers to come. |
| 2019-10-11 | 35 | Entrails | "For Hell" | Rise of the Reaper | Thinking about your darkness as a machine to be operated by untrained strangers |
| 2019-10-11 | 36 | Noctem | "Coven" | single | is a methodology for spell-breaking, |
| 2019-10-11 | 37 | Shadecrown | "Not Until the End" | Riven | and spell-breaking only seems like witch-hunting if you ultimately believe you are charmed. |
| 2019-10-04 | 26 | Ember Falls | "Divine" | single | We are exactly that kind of god, |
| 2019-10-04 | 27 | IKINÄ | "En tullu pysähtyy" | single | making endless uncontrollable chaos-engines |
| 2019-10-04 | 28 | REXORIA | "Roaring" | single | shaped grandly like noise. |
| 2019-10-04 | 29 | Dreamhouse | "All In" | single | It would be foolish to bet on us, |
| 2019-10-04 | 30 | Lacuna Coil | "Save Me" | single | but also pointless to bet against us, |
| 2019-10-04 | 31 | Eleine | "Enemies" | single | which is how knowledge keeps losing to purpose |
| 2019-10-04 | 32 | Apocalyptica | "Ashes Of The Modern World" | single | despite any amount of preparation or attention to tactics. |
| 2019-10-04 | 33 | Alfahanne | "Lovers Against the World" | Atomvinter | Once you have learn to write a love song about death |
| 2019-10-04 | 34 | Necronomicon | "The Thousand Masks" | single | you are invested with an unruly power, |
| 2019-10-04 | 35 | Cattle Decapitation | "Bring Back the Plague" | single | with the tension between a measurement of the depth of your own darkness |
| 2019-10-04 | 36 | Vukari | "Abrasive Hallucinations (Reality Hemorrhaging)" | Aevum | and the knife that was used to poke stars in the sky. |
| 2019-10-04 | 37 | In Mourning | "Hierophant" | Garden of Storms | You have replays of destruction, |
| 2019-10-04 | 38 | Insomnium | "Wail of the North" | Heart Like a Grave | and somewhere there is always something breaking apart on camera. |
| 2019-09-27 | 1 | The Neptune Power Federation | "I'll Make a Man out of You" | Memoirs of a Rat Queen | Somewhere your world is beginning with this the way mine began with "Godzilla" and "Iron Man", |
| 2019-09-27 | 2 | Memoremains | "Sorry" | single | but with wireless wires running from Finland straight to your ears, |
| 2019-09-27 | 3 | Alia Tempora | "Dragonfly Effect" | Dragonfly Effect | and I won't pretend to totally understand what that changes. |
| 2019-09-27 | 4 | Delain | "Burning Bridges" | single | So many of the things that were obscure to me will be present to you, |
| 2019-09-27 | 5 | Edge Of Paradise | "Alone" | single | so much that I dreamed of will be free to you. |
| 2019-09-27 | 6 | Neverlight | "Trapped" | single | And yes, some of what was free to me will be dear to you, |
| 2019-09-27 | 7 | Xiphea | "The Cave Of The Golden Rose - Part II - A Truth Awakens" | single | or some of what seemed free to us has costs we all now recognize. |
| 2019-09-27 | 9 | PassCode | "GOLDEN FIRE" | ATLAS 4 | or like everything is now timeless, |
| 2019-09-27 | 10 | BABYMETAL | "Shanti Shanti Shanti" | Shanti Shanti Shanti / Elevator Girl (English Version) / PA PA YA!! / Starlight 4 | like we are a flashmob wherever we go. |
| 2019-09-27 | 24 | Excalion | "Sunshine Path" | Emotions | and some way for that to be triumphant. |
| 2019-09-27 | 25 | Trick or Treat | "Libra: One Hundred Dragons Force" | single | You will have dragons, |
| 2019-09-27 | 26 | DragonForce | "Cosmic Power of the Infinite Shred Machine" | Extreme Power Metal | and patience for our questions: |
| 2019-09-27 | 27 | Epidemia | "Вне Правил" | Вне правил 3 | Did you learn their language or did the dragons learn ours? |
| 2019-09-27 | 28 | Utmarken | "Svåra år" | single | Was there a period of despair before it became clear how you would survive? |
| 2019-09-27 | 29 | Vorna | "Toinen" | Sateet palata saavat | Did the seed vaults flood |
| 2019-09-27 | 30 | Cyhra | "Out Of My Life" | single | before or after we learned how to make better plants? |
| 2019-09-27 | 32 | Alcest | "Sapphire" | single | Did our angels forgive us, |
| 2019-09-27 | 33 | Obsequiae | "Ceres in Emerald Streams" | single | or join us to accept our guilt as their own? |
| 2019-09-27 | 34 | Netherbird | "The Obsidian White" | Into The Vast Uncharted | What monuments remain from the once unknown, |
| 2019-09-27 | 35 | E-L-R | "Lunar Nights" | Mænad | from the decadent ages of the moon as metaphor, |
| 2019-09-27 | 63 | Doom Unit | "Black Day Comes" | single | We will sing you these songs that all mean "We just didn't know". |
| 2019-09-27 | 67 | The Neptune Power Federation | "Watch Our Masters Bleed" | Memoirs of a Rat Queen | Your world will begin with all the parts from our ruins, |
| 2019-09-20 | 1 | Edenbridge | "On the Other Side" | single | Portals to other worlds, made out of chords and words and internal logics: |
| 2019-09-20 | 2 | IKINÄ | "Senkin millenniaali" | single | this isn't the only disruption capable of wielding power through music, but it's probably the primordial one. |
| 2019-09-20 | 3 | Metalite | "Apocalypse" | single | It's certainly and uncertainly how the dire can be expanding, |
| 2019-09-20 | 4 | Chasing Embers | "Spiritual" | single | how cathedrals can be atheist transmutation, |
| 2019-09-20 | 5 | Ethereal Kingdoms | "Distance" | single | how revolution can be confirmational. |
| 2019-09-20 | 6 | Minniva | "In Orbit" | single | We see others fight their versions of our battles, |
| 2019-09-20 | 7 | Transworld Identity | "Part Maroon, Part Indigo" | single | and learn something about ourselves by relative disassembly. |
| 2019-09-20 | 20 | In Mute | "Chaos Breeder" | single | Of course you can argue that it was never silent, |
| 2019-09-20 | 21 | Earth Moves | "Into the Ether" | single | since of course it was never silent, |
| 2019-09-20 | 23 | DIR EN GREY | "The World of Mercy" | The World of Mercy +2 | or inspired to undo our exquisite errors, |
| 2019-09-20 | 24 | DEXCORE | "Without a Doubt" | DON'T BE AFRAID 3 | they are terrified of hope. |
| 2019-09-20 | 26 | Ereb Altor | "Avgudadyrkans Väg" | Järtecken | the nihilist says "I alone", |
| 2019-09-20 | 27 | Omnium Gatherum | "Chaospace" | Chaospace +1 | which is a good demonstration of how you can be less wrong but still wrong. |
| 2019-09-20 | 28 | Syberia | "Seeds of Change" | single | The one thing you can never be is alone. |
| 2019-09-20 | 29 | Leprous | "Alleviate" | single | You can row to an island in between continents, and you'll find that they've had government there for a million years. |
| 2019-09-20 | 30 | HELGA | "Into the Light" | The Autumn Lament | You can invest in the darkness, but every market moves in cycles. |
| 2019-09-20 | 31 | Dancing With Azerus | "Ofelia, Together We Will Watch the Storm" | Shelter in the Storm 4 | You can buy a bigger bass drum, |
| 2019-09-20 | 32 | YYNOT | "Wildest Dreams" | Resonance | but the waves still stop at zero and end somewhere out past your illusions. |
| 2019-09-20 | 38 | Orbit Culture | "Nensha" | single | and cargo-cult dissidence set aflame, |
| 2019-09-20 | 39 | Noctem | "Sulphur" | single | and the kind of hopelessness that you achieve by letting go. |
| 2019-09-20 | 40 | Estuarine | "The Pain Never Dulls" | single | It's rational enough to fear hope: |
| 2019-09-20 | 65 | Dragonfly | "El Guardian del Tiempo" | single | We fight half of our battles for an audience of darkness, |
| 2019-09-20 | 66 | Debler | "Adictium" | single | half for the sound of striking metal |
| 2019-09-20 | 67 | Eveth | "Entre las Sombras" | Puerta Áurea | out here where we have agreed not yet to sleep. |
| 2019-09-20 | 68 | Bon Vivant | "Cuentos y Retratos" | single | Portals to other worlds in which all things but one are the same, |
| 2019-09-20 | 69 | Alvin és a Mókusok | "VILÁGVÉGE" | single | which is how you learn one thing about yourself. |
| 2019-09-13 | 31 | PassCode | "ATLAS" | single | Any energy that takes us out of ourselves creates space for revelation, |
| 2019-09-13 | 33 | DIVELA | "METEOR" | ミライコレクション | All these disasters vie for our regard, |
| 2019-09-13 | 46 | Dragon Ash | "Fly Over feat. T$UYO$HI" | single | (Do you remember?) |
| 2019-09-13 | 47 | Stitched Up Heart | "Warrior" | Warrior +3 | Our prayers coalesce into blades whether that's what we need now or not, |
| 2019-09-13 | 48 | Infinitas | "Avnas" | single | but we have fire |
| 2019-09-13 | 49 | Cathubodua | "Hydra" | single | and water |
| 2019-09-13 | 50 | Signum Regis | "Kings of the Underground" | single | and legends of their eternal pointless war. |
| 2019-09-13 | 51 | The 69 Eyes | "Two Horns Up feat. (Dani Filth)" | West End | We have preventative benedictions of doom |
| 2019-09-13 | 52 | Dimman | "Capsized Reverie" | single | and spells for summoning disasters when they won't materialize on their own. |
| 2019-09-13 | 53 | Insomnium | "Heart Like a Grave" | single | We have the capacity for loss, |
| 2019-09-13 | 54 | Necronomicon | "Singularis Dominus" | single | and for solemnizing loss as catharsis. |
| 2019-09-13 | 55 | Windfaerer | "Rite Of Emptiness" | Alma | No outward-facing walls are ever actually hopetight. |
| 2019-09-13 | 56 | Esoteric | "Descent - Single Version" | single | A temple is a engineered allegory |
| 2019-09-13 | 57 | Nyss | "Let The Devil ln" | Depayser | of a suspension of collapse, |
| 2019-09-13 | 58 | Infant Annihilator | "The Kingdom Sitteth Lonely Beneath Thine Hollowed Heavens" | The Battle of Yaldabaoth | waiting to be scattered like bones. |
| 2019-09-13 | 59 | Cloud Rat | "Delayed Grief // Farmhouse Red" | Pollinator | We are not yet finished, |
| 2019-09-13 | 66 | Sometime The Wolf. | "Earth Wane" | From Here and Earth | If these are the end times, then the whole of our brief human reign was end times. |
| 2019-09-13 | 73 | Ghost | "Kiss The Go-Goat" | Seven Inches Of Satanic Panic 2 | Any nominal magic is mostly a conduit of entropy in sparkly paint, |
| 2019-09-06 | 33 | The Dark Element | "Songs the Night Sings" | single | They need their own stories about how you are, because your stories about how you are have nothing to do with them. |
| 2019-09-06 | 34 | Crimson Sun | "We Are One" | single | Our patience runs out, and we populate our own cosmologies. |
| 2019-09-06 | 35 | Neverlight | "Dreadful Night" | single | Nobody who has seen our blades forgets. |
| 2019-09-06 | 36 | Magica | "In Alt Univers" | single | You cursed us to spend eternity pushing rocks uphill, |
| 2019-09-06 | 37 | Liv Sin | "Dead Wind Intermezzo" | Burning Sermons | and now the mountain reaches to your gates. |
| 2019-09-06 | 38 | Kassogtha | "The Greatest Fall" | The Call 4 | If we fall now, we take you with us. |
| 2019-09-06 | 39 | Nikander | "Utkáno z prostých řas" | Nikander - stolen kidneys | Then again, that was also true at sea level. |
| 2019-09-06 | 40 | Spoil Engine | "R!OT" | single | The rocks and salt will not outlive us unchanged. |
| 2019-09-06 | 41 | Madder Mortem | "Shadows Coming Home" | Mercury (20th Anniversary Edition) | We were the demons of hope. |
| 2019-09-06 | 42 | Liturgy | "God of Love" | single | The dinosaurs had stature, but not posture; |
| 2019-09-06 | 43 | Foscor | "Laments" | Els Sepulcres Blancs | they fell, but we collapse. |
| 2019-09-06 | 44 | Cathedraline | "Tephra" | Kosmonolith 4 | Paleontologists reason indirectly that saurian skin may have been hued. |
| 2019-09-06 | 45 | Borknagar | "Up North" | single | Our alien excavators will know all about our colors. |
| 2019-09-06 | 46 | Everfrost | "Chainlace Angel" | Winterider | Too much. Nobody who knows us can tell us apart. |
| 2019-09-06 | 47 | Sonata Arctica | "Message from the Sun" | Talviyö | The dawn sends its love, but also says to tell us to get up and come outside. |
| 2019-09-06 | 48 | AGE OF REFLECTION | "Here I Stand" | single | We can stand on a hill in the sunshine. |
| 2019-09-06 | 49 | Detraktor | "Parasita" | single | It's not a trick. The hill accepts us, the sun is not diminished by our presence. |
| 2019-09-06 | 50 | Voodoo KungFu | "Rule by Legalists" | single | We are exempt from half of the most intractable obstacles to civilization. |
| 2019-09-06 | 51 | Japanische Kampfhörspiele | "Kaputt" | Verk Ferever | The oceans rise, but we have oceans. |
| 2019-09-06 | 52 | Visenya | "Proxima" | Drift | Hatred surges, but only in the tiny vacuums left by the turbulent passage of love. |
| 2019-08-30 | 10 | Unleash The Archers | "Northwest Passage" | single | our abstruse genuflections to the gods of chaos and fear. |
| 2019-08-30 | 11 | Visions of Atlantis | "Release My Symphony" | Wanderers | We go in search of paths off the surface of our limits, |
| 2019-08-30 | 12 | Tarja | "Goodbye Stranger" | In the Raw | expecting darkness, |
| 2019-08-30 | 13 | Darksense | "Fearless" | single | and discover luminous realms |
| 2019-08-30 | 14 | Kassogtha | "Pale Horizon" | single | awaiting demons or stewards. |
| 2019-08-30 | 16 | Ivy Crown | "Our Worst Days" | single | like idolization without vertigo, |
| 2019-08-30 | 18 | Edge Of Paradise | "Universe" | single | We imagine worlds simplified to this tension between power and conscience, |
| 2019-08-30 | 19 | Pentastone | "Keep Falling" | single | but making a moral choice is the easy twitch |
| 2019-08-30 | 20 | Derange | "Higher" | single | at the hypothetical instant where you understand the implications of your possible actions. |
| 2019-08-30 | 22 | NoGoD | "絶色" | single | You cannot negotiate with absence. |
| 2019-08-30 | 35 | DragonForce | "Heart Demolition" | single | it surrenders to the touch, to the breath, |
| 2019-08-30 | 36 | Elvenking | "Heathen Divine" | Reader of the Runes - Divination | to toy swords wielded with elan, |
| 2019-08-30 | 37 | Fjøsnisse | "Sorgens Flamme" | Heksedreper 5 | to wasteland regard, |
| 2019-08-30 | 38 | Kultasiipi | "Mahtaja" | Mahtaja | to footsteps. |
| 2019-08-30 | 39 | Imperium Dekadenz | "Transcendence" | When We Are Forgotten | The trolls brandish the unknown because that's what they fear. |
| 2019-08-30 | 40 | Tides From Nebula | "Ghost Horses" | single | We counter with loneliness, |
| 2019-08-30 | 41 | TOOL | "Pneuma" | Fear Inoculum | but this is the one error on which nihilists and narcissists agree. |
| 2019-08-30 | 42 | Dance Gavin Dance | "Jesus H. Macy" | Acceptance Speech 2.0 | Remand them to the judgment of their supposed gods; |
| 2019-08-30 | 44 | Marble | "Pygmalion speech" | single | I have the best prayers, probably ever. Nobody is prayer than me." |
| 2019-08-30 | 45 | Vanden Plas | "The Ghost Xperiment" | single | And the gods sigh, and go back to designing cosmologies, |
| 2019-08-30 | 50 | Andromida | "Dimensions" | single | It does matter what they do, but less than it probably should. |
| 2019-08-30 | 51 | coldrain | "MAYDAY (feat. Ryo from Crystal Lake)" | THE SIDE EFFECTS | We are illuminated, |
| 2019-08-23 | 9 | Nemesea | "White Flag" | White Flag | but like every other posture of nominal surrender, |
| 2019-08-23 | 10 | Elephant Gun Riot | "Man Down" | single | we strike it fully aware of which lights will result in our casting which shadows. |
| 2019-08-23 | 12 | Minniva | "Amongst Stars" | single | and whatever climbs out of the carapaces of the old gods. |
| 2019-08-23 | 13 | Kobra And The Lotus | "Get the F*ck out of Here" | Get the F*ck out of Here +1 | We are marshaled for escape, |
| 2019-08-23 | 14 | MoonSun | "Into the Fire" | single | but always going back. |
| 2019-08-23 | 15 | Visions of Atlantis | "Nothing Lasts Forever" | single | Listen to your heart. |
| 2019-08-23 | 16 | Metalite | "Far from the Sanctuary" | single | It has a resonant frequency; |
| 2019-08-23 | 17 | South Haven | "Sweet Suffering" | single | you think you have limits. |
| 2019-08-23 | 19 | Lilith Czar | "100 Little Deaths" | single | considered with more earnestness |
| 2019-08-23 | 26 | Survive Said The Prophet | "MUKANJYO" | Mukanjyo 3 | falling as gracefully as we can tolerate, |
| 2019-08-23 | 28 | Edenbridge | "Live and Let Go" | single | When we let go, |
| 2019-08-23 | 29 | Ascend The Hollow | "Vessels" | single | we are the thing that is being released. |
| 2019-08-23 | 30 | Freedom Call | "The Ace of the Unicorn" | M.E.T.A.L. | Dundee's mistake was xenophobia. |
| 2019-08-23 | 31 | Eclipse | "Viva La Victoria" | single | Dehumanizing the seekers is how you make zombies, |
| 2019-08-23 | 32 | REXORIA | "Reach for the Heavens in Time" | single | righteousness is how you kill them: |
| 2019-08-23 | 33 | Equilibrium | "Renegades - A Lost Generation" | Renegades | this is a well-conceived and self-sustaining industry |
| 2019-08-23 | 34 | Sonata Arctica | "Cold" | single | motivated by fear it has the alacrity to externalize. |
| 2019-08-23 | 35 | Ewigkeit | "Point of Origin" | Starscape 2.019 | Begin again, in the New World colonies. |
| 2019-08-23 | 36 | Massemord | "Dust and Void" | single | This was, of course, our founding delusional nihilism. |
| 2019-08-23 | 38 | The Great Old Ones | "Nyarlathotep" | single | Exploration requires unspecified goals for an unknown transit. |
| 2019-08-23 | 39 | Alcest | "Protection" | single | If you think you know what you're going to come home with, the thing you're on is not a quest, it's an errand, |
| 2019-08-23 | 40 | Alfahanne | "Atomvinter" | single | and doing errands in armor is errant errantry. |
| 2019-08-23 | 41 | Necronomicon | "Paradise Lost" | single | We are defied not by what we have lost, but by what we characterize as loss. |
| 2019-08-23 | 42 | Cloud Rat | "Wonder" | single | Despair, too, collapses into yearning. |
| 2019-08-23 | 43 | Djevel | "Illoeygd Foedt Som Satans Barn, Paa Ferd Uden Spor Af Menneskeverd" | single | Maybe there was never really a difference. |
| 2019-08-16 | 4 | Madder Mortem | "Vigil" | single | Or rather, emergence is always an act of resistance, |
| 2019-08-16 | 27 | えっちゃん | "自制心シンパシー" | single | The translation of bodies into avatars is not a disregard of biology, |
| 2019-08-16 | 28 | Minniva | "Ameno" | single | but an isolation of their representative aspects. |
| 2019-08-16 | 29 | Kalidia | "Circle of Six" | single | Legends note the things that will survive us; |
| 2019-08-16 | 30 | Bare Infinity | "The End of Heartache" | single | anthems nominate the beliefs we will consume as fuel. |
| 2019-08-16 | 31 | Eternal Melody | "Eternal Black" | Eternal Black | Eternity, like all counterfactual tropes, |
| 2019-08-16 | 32 | Twilight Force | "Thundersword" | Dawn of the Dragonstar | allows us to begin mortal stories from within a structure pre-prepared with allegorical precedent. |
| 2019-08-16 | 33 | Freedom Call | "Spirit of Daedalus" | single | To the lazy, this is briefly convenient, |
| 2019-08-16 | 34 | Battledragon | "Back to the Future" | single | but the guides that take you into the future cheaply |
| 2019-08-16 | 35 | HammerFall | "Never Forgive, Never Forget" | Dominion | will leave you at a train station with a useless flag and all it is is tomorrow. |
| 2019-08-16 | 36 | Nemecic | "Wardenclyffe" | Wardenclyffe +1 | You can wave the flag, but somebody's version of socialism built the trains. |
| 2019-08-16 | 37 | Foscor | "Cançó de Mort" | single | Somebody's divided and recombined loyalty will help you with your bags. |
| 2019-08-16 | 38 | Diocletian | "Degenerate Swarm" | Amongst the Flames of a Burning God | The ideologue believes at least in a deductive order. |
| 2019-08-16 | 47 | Red Raven Down | "C4" | single | It is not unreasonable to be terrified, |
| 2019-08-16 | 48 | Mono Inc. | "Louder Than Hell" | single | just unhelpful. |
| 2019-08-16 | 54 | Valor | "Reflections" | single | but probably also not more, |
| 2019-08-09 | 6 | Iron Heade | "Dragons" | Tales from Another War | So it seems non-crazy to feel at least a little excitement for a new Taylor Swift song about an Issue. |
| 2019-08-09 | 8 | Liv Sin | "Chapter of the Witch" | single | Racists and homophobes aren't being "too loud", they're being sociopathic. |
| 2019-08-09 | 9 | Tarja | "Tears in Rain" | single | Cardi B is interviewing Bernie Sanders, |
| 2019-08-09 | 10 | Leaves' Eyes | "Night of the Ravens" | single | and Taylor Swift is impersonating a teenager discovering hatred for the first time as an Instagram hashtag. |
| 2019-08-09 | 11 | Frantic Amber | "Lagertha" | Bellatrix | But the irony, I think, is that as a song sung from the perspective of a teenager discovering hatred and reacting with instinctive trivializing exasperation, "You Need to Calm Down" is pretty great. |
| 2019-08-09 | 12 | My Immortal Enemy | "Paradise" | single | Taylor may have no idea what to do with power, but she originally started earning that power by showing that she deeply understood what it felt like to search for and find power in yourself. |
| 2019-08-09 | 13 | Ardours | "Last Place on Earth" | Last Place on Earth | Sung in the voice of one of the world's most dominant pop stars, the wordless stairstep rise in the chorus is a distraction, |
| 2019-08-09 | 43 | Phyllomedusa | "Shovelhead" | Shovelhead | We need a wrecking ball made by bonding desperation and glee, |
| 2019-08-09 | 44 | Massemord | "Down" | single | swung not at the supposed fortresses of our imagined enemies, |
| 2019-08-09 | 45 | Cloud Rat | "Seven Heads" | single | but from within at the walls with which we have trapped ourselves and too little music and too much CO2. |
| 2019-08-09 | 46 | Netherbird | "Saturnine Ancestry" | single | Fewer equal-time op-eds, |
| 2019-08-09 | 47 | King Satan | "The Killing of God" | The Killing of God +1 | more frenetic drumming. |
| 2019-08-09 | 48 | The 69 Eyes | "Black Orchid" | Black Orchid +2 | Fewer symptomatic histrionics, |
| 2019-08-09 | 49 | Elvenking | "Divination" | single | more essential drama of causes. |
| 2019-08-02 | 8 | Sublime Eyes | "Med Tiden Gror" | single | and yet all of this still happened. |
| 2019-08-02 | 9 | Hive | "Fear of a Female Planet" | Most Vicious Animal | We mistake scars for lessons |
| 2019-08-02 | 17 | Visions of Atlantis | "A Journey to Remember" | single | Is this restless quest for provocation |
| 2019-08-02 | 18 | Ardours | "The Mist" | single | ultimately more than procrastinating the hard chapters by always starting over? |
| 2019-08-02 | 21 | Finsterforst | "Weltenbrand" | Zerfall | Odin was good with birds, |
| 2019-08-02 | 22 | HammerFall | "Dominion" | single | but his governing coalitions were prone to dissolution and disfunctional petulance. |
| 2019-08-02 | 23 | Crystal Ball | "Suspended" | 2020 | Mainly, I think, we like imagining ourselves looking down from a commanding height, |
| 2019-08-02 | 24 | Narnia | "Has the River Run Dry?" | From Darkness to Light | moral or metaphorical, |
| 2019-08-02 | 25 | Civil War | "Dead Man's Glory" | single | notionally serviced by valkyries |
| 2019-08-02 | 26 | DragonForce | "Highway to Oblivion" | single | but after one too many labor dispute they finally built a funicular, |
| 2019-08-02 | 27 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Pulsating Black" | Abyssal | so that our ascensions and falls may be rendered regenerative. |
| 2019-08-02 | 28 | Massemord | "Deception" | Devil | We have stood upon the shoulders of giants |
| 2019-08-02 | 29 | Cloud Rat | "Webspinner" | single | as they lay sleeping, |
| 2019-08-02 | 30 | Sammath | "Bitter fighting amongst the dead" | single | and now we lie here awake, |
| 2019-08-02 | 31 | 1349 | "Enter Cold Void Dreaming" | single | realizing our own turn under giant soles is probably next. |
| 2019-08-02 | 32 | DEVILOOF | "GOUZINZANGOKU" | ONI | Science gives us ways to measure our imaginary immunities, |
| 2019-07-26 | 4 | Kobra And The Lotus | "Burn!" | single | We assemble authority into shimmery glass towers, |
| 2019-07-26 | 5 | Nemesea | "Fools Gold" | single | and then walk to the other side of the room holding rocks. |
| 2019-07-26 | 6 | The Agonist | "Burn It All Down" | single | Your day will come. |
| 2019-07-26 | 7 | Lacuna Coil | "Layers of Time" | single | You wait for your day to come, |
| 2019-07-26 | 8 | Roses Unread | "Rapture" | single | but of all the angles its plane could take to yours, |
| 2019-07-26 | 9 | Neverlight | "Gatherer" | Nova Red (Expanded Edition) | all the relative velocities, |
| 2019-07-26 | 15 | Sūrya | "Anthropocene" | Solastalgia | You will walk to the end of the world and look over the edge, |
| 2019-07-26 | 16 | Warkings | "Sparta (feat. The Queen of the Damned)" | single | and then notice, to the left, a bit below you on the outer wall, |
| 2019-07-26 | 17 | Dire Peril | "Godzilla" | single | a spray-tagged quote from a movie you had almost forgotten. |
| 2019-07-26 | 18 | SinHeresY | "What Makes Us Human" | Out of Connection | Did somebody climb down there to paint that? |
| 2019-07-26 | 19 | Equilibrium | "Path of Destiny (feat. The Butcher Sisters)" | Path of Destiny (feat. The Butcher Sisters) +1 | Would you suspend yourself over the abyss just to repeat somebody else's joke? |
| 2019-07-26 | 20 | Head Phones President | "Until I Die" | Respawn | What else are abysses for, I guess. |
| 2019-07-26 | 27 | Leo Imai | "夏の日の午後" | 6 Japanese Covers | almost to the surface. |
| 2019-07-26 | 34 | Wormwood | "The Achromatic Road" | Nattarvet | The end is coming, |
| 2019-07-26 | 35 | The Great Old Ones | "The Omniscient" | single | but all movement is relative to apocalypse. |
| 2019-07-26 | 36 | Imperium Dekadenz | "Frozen in Time" | single | All static positions are relative to the void. |
| 2019-07-26 | 37 | Vagrant | "Blinded by Destiny" | The Rise of Norn | The periodic ascension of evil is the moral component of our orbit. |
| 2019-07-26 | 38 | Finsterforst | "Zerfall" | single | We are the distraction spirits, |
| 2019-07-26 | 39 | Myrone | "Subroutine" | single | and thus our automata are caricatures of purpose, |
| 2019-07-26 | 40 | Perfect Plan | "Stay" | single | and thus our malignancies begin as cysts of ceaseless need. |
| 2019-07-26 | 41 | Lacrimas Profundere | "I Knew and Will Forever Know" | Bleeding the Stars | We bemoan the reduction of discourse to epigrams, |
| 2019-07-26 | 42 | Wounds of Recollection | "Fog Over Appalachia" | You Were a Garden of Empyrean Light | but Roy Batty's complete death speech fits into a tweet. |
| 2019-07-26 | 47 | The 69 Eyes | "Cheyenna" | Cheyenna +1 | Once you smash a glass, |
| 2019-07-26 | 50 | NOCTURNAL BLOODLUST | "shonenjidai" | UNLEASH | forgetting the bad parts of the things that haven't happened yet. |
| 2019-07-26 | 51 | Rides In ReVellion | "INNOVATOR" | Re:Vellion【初回限定盤】 | All inventions are manipulations of the accumulation of memory, |
| 2019-07-26 | 52 | Walking Across Jupiter | "Eschatology" | single | or at least maybe that's how it will come to seem, |
| 2019-07-26 | 53 | Uneven Structure | "Innocent" | single | as we retreat inside arcologies, |
| 2019-07-26 | 63 | Infant Annihilator | "Three Bastards" | single | instead of watching all these other fascinating people; |
| 2019-07-26 | 88 | Control the Storm | "Darkest Fantasy" | Forevermore | and prove or displace something elemental; |
| 2019-07-26 | 101 | Massemord | "Goddess of Perversion" | Massemord | You don't believe one thing, |
| 2019-07-19 | 8 | PitchBlack | "I Spit Blood" | All Black | Do not give up yet, and hold this axe for a second, |
| 2019-07-19 | 10 | Diocletian | "Nuclear Wolves" | single | Darkness and atomic structure rebel, |
| 2019-07-19 | 11 | Eviction | "Terusir Dari Tanah Sendiri" | single | and you bear their sigils in your eyes in the moonlight. |
| 2019-07-19 | 12 | Ars Veneficium | "A Thousand Weeping Angels" | In Death's Cold Embrace 2 | Anthems are the noise of crumbling temples, |
| 2019-07-19 | 13 | Plague of Carcosa | "Crawling Chaos" | Ocean Is More Ancient Than the Mountains 2 | and if you're going to hold that axe, |
| 2019-07-19 | 14 | Burning Witches | "Wings of Steel" | single | you may as well hold it above your head. |
| 2019-07-19 | 15 | Brocelian | "Speed of Light" | Guardians of Brocéliande | We pass through paradise with the windows up, |
| 2019-07-19 | 16 | FAKE ISLAND | "Throw Down" | Throw Down +2 | uncertain even to ourselves whether we're more impatient or distrustful, |
| 2019-07-19 | 17 | Voodoo KungFu | "Mongolian Stallion" | single | but sure we don't want to die the way these people live. |
| 2019-07-19 | 18 | Frozen Dreams | "The Night of No Tomorrow" | Rising from the Ashes | Look at their finite houses, |
| 2019-07-19 | 19 | Fear Of Domination | "Dead Weight" | single | and the way their streets are named after dead people and lead to graves. |
| 2019-07-19 | 20 | Tigersclaw | "The Fallen Queen" | single | Other people's origin myths reek of inevitable defeat, |
| 2019-07-19 | 21 | Xiphea | "The Cave Of The Golden Rose - Part I - The Prophecy" | single | and their deep caves of muttering about entrapment and sulfur and cloves. |
| 2019-07-19 | 22 | Twilight Force | "Dawn of the Dragonstar" | single | But once a year, when the sunrise aligns with the narrow gaps between your fears |
| 2019-07-19 | 23 | Sabaton | "The Future Of Warfare" | The Great War | and your grimmest lessons, |
| 2019-07-19 | 24 | SoulHealer | "Don't Shoot the Dancing Dwarf" | single | you can see the way back out. |
| 2019-07-19 | 25 | Freedom Call | "M.E.T.A.L." | single | Stand up, walk out, don't give up yet. |
| 2019-07-19 | 26 | Andromida | "Dissimulation" | single | It's never half as simple as they want you to believe, |
| 2019-07-19 | 27 | Valis Ablaze | "Neon Dreaming" | Render | or a tenth as dark. |
| 2019-07-19 | 34 | Mary's Blood | "エイム" | CONFESSiONS | We are teams disguised as cultures, |
| 2019-07-19 | 35 | Mashiro Ayano | "GLAMOROUS SKY" | Get Over / Confession / Glamorous Sky 5 | waving axes as flags, or flags as axes, |
| 2019-07-19 | 36 | Soraru | "幻日" | ワンダー | and trying to make the faces we would make if the difference mattered. |
| 2019-07-19 | 60 | Marathonmann | "Totgeglaubt" | Die Angst sitzt neben dir | In the right light, one day, we will be able to read the words on the surface of the metal. |
| 2019-07-12 | 26 | D | "オーガを喰らった牡猫の奇術師" | 道化師のカタルシス 3 | All engineering exists in relation to the assumed height of the sky, |
| 2019-07-12 | 28 | kiryu | "tamakinohasinakigagotosi" | tamakinohasinakigagotosi +3 | If you can bring the stars down among us, |
| 2019-07-12 | 40 | Visionatica | "Dance of Fire" | Enigma Fire | There are messages that only blood can distribute, |
| 2019-07-12 | 41 | September Mourning | "Unholy" | single | most of them internal, |
| 2019-07-12 | 42 | Visions of Atlantis | "Heroes of the Dawn" | single | none of them new. |
| 2019-07-12 | 43 | Hollow Haze | "Through Space and Time" | Between Wild Landscapes and Deep Blue Seas | We have said "it's over" so many times, |
| 2019-07-12 | 44 | Korpiklaani | "Pivo Pivo - Croatia" | single | and always been right about something. |
| 2019-07-12 | 45 | Cantus Levitas | "Karges Land" | single | No legend ever ends "And after that, nothing ever again changed." |
| 2019-07-12 | 47 | Gyze | "Far Eastern Land" | Asian Chaos | or piled in between stones and set on fire. |
| 2019-07-12 | 48 | Batushka | "Dziewiatyj Czas" | Hospodi | Something died, and your eyes always reveal if you know what it was. |
| 2019-07-12 | 65 | Faithsedge | "Angelic" | single | and yet imagine that doubt would be better. |
| 2019-07-05 | 15 | YUZUKINGDOM | "Jail" | DADAISM | and when I believe this I definitely believe it doesn't operate solely by connecting each single song to a single listener. |
| 2019-07-05 | 39 | Madder Mortem | "He Who Longed for the Stars - 2019 Re-Recording" | single | Taxonomy is a systematized optimism: |
| 2019-07-05 | 40 | Second To Sun | "Pages from a Manuscript" | single | it will matter to have ways to categorize curses and defeats |
| 2019-07-05 | 41 | Immortal Bird | "House of Anhedonia" | Thrive on Neglect | because we will have that much time and that much peace |
| 2019-07-05 | 42 | Noctem | "The Black Consecration" | single | after the liberating repeal of these corrupt edicts. |
| 2019-07-05 | 43 | Foscor | "Cel Rogent" | single | We will take our hammers to the monuments erected briefly by fascists for themselves, |
| 2019-07-05 | 44 | Dispyt | "Men åndå ska man dit" | Livsglädje 6 | but not without noting aspects of the sculptor's style. |
| 2019-07-05 | 45 | Finsterforst | "Ecce Homo - Short Single Version" | single | Our oppressors are us. |
| 2019-07-05 | 46 | Vorna | "Maa martona makaa" | single | The beneficiaries of the patronage of oppressors are us. |
| 2019-07-05 | 47 | Berried Alive | "Fruit Punch" | single | The hammer sellers are us. |
| 2019-07-05 | 48 | Thorr | "Light Em Up" | Light Em Up | The blows are ours, |
| 2019-06-28 | 9 | Lingua Ignota | "DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR" | single | as is money and power and fear, |
| 2019-06-28 | 13 | Torche | "Admission" | single | We will bind their eventual confessions in volumes. |
| 2019-06-28 | 15 | Batushka | "Liturgiya" | single | You can't be a fascist without ideas. |
| 2019-06-28 | 16 | Yellow Eyes | "Light Delusion Curtain" | Rare Field Ceiling | My Struggle, My Anger, My Way; Trump's book can only be called My Book, |
| 2019-06-28 | 17 | Deitus | "Via Dolorosa" | single | and exists only to have his picture on the front cover and fake praise on the back. |
| 2019-06-28 | 18 | Bloodred Hourglass | "Ask and You Shall Receive" | Godsend | This is the Interregnum of Shitty Hats. |
| 2019-06-28 | 19 | Amanita Virosa | "I Walk Away" | single | What is the opposite of a dynasty? |
| 2019-06-28 | 20 | ACME | "Mononoke Requiem" | Mononoke Requiem +1 | A degeneracy? An atrophasty? |
| 2019-06-28 | 21 | HAVAMAL | "Dawn of the Frost Giants" | Tales from Yggdrasil | A collapse. |
| 2019-06-28 | 22 | Heilung | "Galgaldr" | Futha | We earned this, this open wound bleeding ignorance, |
| 2019-06-28 | 23 | Danheim | "Bana" | single | this petty authoritarianism that oppresses for no higher purpose than to induce sycophancy for its own sake, |
| 2019-06-28 | 24 | Hollow Haze | "Destinations" | single | this fecal sculpture of smug rage stuffed into bad suits, |
| 2019-06-28 | 25 | Trick or Treat | "Cancer: Underworld Wave" | single | this self-proclaimed builder who has to be told in brightly colored pictures |
| 2019-06-28 | 26 | Sabaton | "Great War" | single | that his parade tanks would crush the roads. |
| 2019-06-28 | 27 | HammerFall | "One Against the World" | single | His ralliers cheer for him because he needs nothing from them, |
| 2019-06-28 | 28 | Visionatica | "Roxana, The Great" | single | which is exactly what he desperately, gnawingly, bulgingly needs from them. |
| 2019-06-28 | 29 | Nemesea | "Kids with Guns" | single | His enablers see a vicarious evocation of power without accountability, |
| 2019-06-28 | 30 | Reality Suite | "Live Now Forever" | Awaken (Deluxe Edition) | a Jabba the Hutt in a plastic Darth Vader mask slimmed down just enough to squish into a golf cart, |
| 2019-06-28 | 31 | Terra | "Confidence" | single | with an Advisor instead of a captive princess, |
| 2019-06-28 | 32 | Elusion | "Lovelorn" | Singularity | although that's stretching the definition of "instead" to the thinness |
| 2019-06-28 | 33 | Doll Skin | "Don’t Cross My Path" | Love Is Dead And We Killed Her | of a gold bikini. |
| 2019-06-21 | 23 | Tarja | "Railroads" | single | The distinction between ornament and foundation is an anthropism. |
| 2019-06-21 | 24 | Minniva | "The Red Baron" | single | Weaponry is a failure-mode of toolmaking, |
| 2019-06-21 | 25 | Moonlight Haze | "Odi et amo" | De Rerum Natura | design frustrations corroding into hate. |
| 2019-06-21 | 26 | Snow Black Sunday | "Misled" | Snow Black Sunday | You are the beginning of a necessary confession. |
| 2019-06-21 | 27 | Celtian | "La Musa del Bosque" | En Tierra de Hadas | Somebody must begin, so it could be you. |
| 2019-06-21 | 28 | Freedom Call | "111 – the Number of the Angels" | single | All decent excuses for redemption are arbitrary; |
| 2019-06-21 | 29 | Sonata Arctica | "A Little Less Understanding" | single | all the indecent ones are rooted in ignorance, |
| 2019-06-21 | 30 | Dünedain | "A un Paso del Cielo" | Memento Mori | but anything rooted in something is capable of growth. |
| 2019-06-21 | 31 | Valis Ablaze | "The Convincer" | single | Erroneous beliefs are a form of exercise, |
| 2019-06-21 | 32 | Anup Sastry | "Story of Us" | Illuminate | a way of preparing yourself to lift heavier truths if you find them, or when. |
| 2019-06-21 | 33 | Berried Alive | "Legendberry" | single | Daylight is a muscle you are preparing to misflex |
| 2019-06-21 | 34 | Rabea Massaad | "Cthulhu" | Grinding Gears, Vol. 2 | less misguidedly tomorrow. |
| 2019-06-21 | 35 | Glare Of The Sun | "IV" | Theia | Count up, not down. We don't know where it ends. |
| 2019-06-21 | 36 | Halls of Oblivion | "Vanishing Woods" | Endtime Poetry | Our images of hell are painted from safe distances |
| 2019-06-21 | 37 | Temple of Demigod | "Him Who Is Not to Be Named" | Onslaught of the Ancient Gods | covered by imagination and oil. |
| 2019-06-21 | 38 | Enthroned | "Silent Redemption" | Cold Black Suns | We are saved from only the most fractional damnations. |
| 2019-06-21 | 39 | Immortal Bird | "Avolition" | single | You will exhaust your chosen gods, |
| 2019-06-21 | 40 | Devourment | "Cognitive Sedation Butchery" | single | or you will be exhumed from their embrace. |
| 2019-06-21 | 41 | Eeviomorfia | "Ex Umbra in Solem" | single | Hope is always in motion relative to the canvas, |
| 2019-06-21 | 42 | Slough Feg | "Headhunter" | New Organon | or anything else we thought we knew. |
| 2019-06-14 | 24 | Minniva | "Mighty Wings" | single | Arguably anthems in the shadow of extinction are our cheapest trick, |
| 2019-06-14 | 25 | Timo Tolkki’s Avalon | "We Are the Ones" | Return to Eden | rewards for resolution we don't honestly possess |
| 2019-06-14 | 26 | Chaos Magic | "You Will Breathe Again" | Furyborn | and invitations to the unarriving. |
| 2019-06-14 | 27 | The Ocean Cure | "Divided" | RE: Discover 5 | But what were we, here, if not anthems? |
| 2019-06-14 | 28 | Vadikan | "Farewell" | Farewell +1 | What vanishes with us? |
| 2019-06-14 | 29 | Teramaze | "From Saviour to Assassin" | From Saviour To Assassin 3 | What warnings should we bury for the colonists who will one day arrive |
| 2019-06-14 | 30 | Infected Rain | "The Earth Mantra" | single | at this welcomingly drowned waiting home? |
| 2019-06-14 | 31 | Torulf | "Yngve-Frej" | Midsolsblot 2 | We had legends that ultimately told us nothing with sufficient power. |
| 2019-06-14 | 32 | Fuimadane | "Thor" | single | We had gods who looked away. |
| 2019-06-14 | 33 | Frijgard | "Falling Stars" | Chapter Zero | We thought we were entitled to a final battle, |
| 2019-06-14 | 40 | Frantic Amber | "Joshitai" | single | But to be defined by outcomes |
| 2019-06-14 | 41 | Raven Black | "Risen From The Ashes" | single | is to ignore your context, |
| 2019-06-14 | 42 | Imperium Dekadenz | "Absenz Elysium" | single | which is exactly how we got here. |
| 2019-06-14 | 43 | Diocletian | "Repel the Attack" | single | Every day spent preparing for war |
| 2019-06-14 | 44 | Manntra | "Yelena" | single | is a day closer to war. |
| 2019-06-14 | 45 | Equilibrium | "Renegades - A Lost Generation" | single | If you want something else, |
| 2019-06-14 | 46 | Sweet Oblivion | "True Colors" | Sweet Oblivion (feat. Geoff Tate) | you have to understand your days as a different currency. |
| 2019-06-14 | 47 | Tau Cross | "Burn with Me" | single | Your belief is not a marker for cartoon endings. |
| 2019-06-14 | 48 | Lamori | "Heaven Ain't for Us" | single | These patterns are not lines along which to walk into some other more-magical world, |
| 2019-06-07 | 30 | The Agonist | "In Vertigo" | single | Would you eat those sandwiches if you had to go outdoors to get here? |
| 2019-06-07 | 31 | Memoremains | "Inferno" | single | What do all those people do for a bank? |
| 2019-06-07 | 32 | Chaos Magic | "I'm Your Cancer" | single | I should have come here half an hour earlier. |
| 2019-06-07 | 33 | Tigersclaw | "Tigersclaw, Vol. 2 - Radio Edit" | single | Some of these buildings are actually quite nice. |
| 2019-06-07 | 34 | Iron Heade | "At the Mountains of Madness" | The Queen's Cuts 5 | Not the one I look at out our office window, which is the helmet Darth Vader would have worn if he had channeled his malevolence into bureaucracy. |
| 2019-06-07 | 35 | MØL | "Sundrowned" | I/II | But some of the other ones have details, or grandeur, or space in front of them for food trucks. |
| 2019-06-07 | 36 | Batushka | "Wieczernia" | single | We used to have an elevated highway down the middle of this, and now there's a sunlit park, |
| 2019-06-07 | 37 | Abbath | "Outstrider" | single | so don't believe that you are doomed by past mistakes. |
| 2019-06-07 | 38 | Glare Of The Sun | "XI" | single | We dumped tea in the harbor rather than pay taxes, |
| 2019-06-07 | 39 | Enthroned | "Hosanna Satana" | Cold Black Suns | and now we pay it back in coffee. |
| 2019-06-07 | 40 | Vingulmork | "Ytterst" | Avgrunn 4 | The vikings didn't make it this far south, |
| 2019-06-07 | 41 | Esoctrilihum | "Thar-Voknargh" | The Telluric Ashes of the Ö Vrth Immemorial Gods | the old gods never cursed this place. |
| 2019-06-07 | 42 | Varg | "Wolfszeit" | Wolfszeit II | You never feel entirely certain that if the wolves come, this place will be defended, |
| 2019-06-07 | 43 | Aether | "Wildfire Within" | In Embers | but also, maybe, like this is not where they would choose to attack. |
| 2019-06-07 | 44 | Bloodred Hourglass | "The Unfinished Story" | single | I live in the 57th largest metro area in the world, |
| 2019-06-07 | 45 | Heilung | "Traust" | single | right behind Bandung, Indonesia, and ahead of Randstad, Netherlands. |
| 2019-06-07 | 51 | Degrees of Truth | "The Remedy" | Time Travel Artifact | and translations of chowder into other media. |
| 2019-06-07 | 52 | Twilight Force | "Night of Winterlight" | single | The subway barely runs, but you can walk along a lot of the harbor now. |
| 2019-06-07 | 53 | Elvenking | "Under the Sign of a Black Star" | single | We have dour icons, but makeshift legends of survival. |
| 2019-06-07 | 54 | Unruly Child | "Living in Someone Else's Dream" | single | Our soccer team is 0 of 4 in championship games, but somebody has to be 57th. |
| 2019-06-07 | 55 | THE NEW DEATH CULT | "True Eyes" | single | The place I grew up is 61st, and their soccer team is 0 of 1 in championship games, |
| 2019-05-31 | 16 | Gloryhammer | "Masters of the Galaxy" | Legends from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex | ignoring the shiny blades resting coolly against your neck. |
| 2019-05-31 | 17 | Narnia | "A Crack in the Sky" | single | We are born in freefall, and spend irreplaceable vertical miles fighting over the rules of gravity. |
| 2019-05-31 | 18 | Visionatica | "Fear" | single | You dread the unmasking of the heroes you are not, |
| 2019-05-31 | 19 | Blackbriar | "Snow White and Rose Red" | single | the footnotes to legends in which you played no role, |
| 2019-05-31 | 20 | Silentium | "Empty" | single | the glory that flourishes without your touch. |
| 2019-05-31 | 21 | Veil of Mist | "Scarecrow" | single | We are effigies of our own pride. |
| 2019-05-31 | 22 | Ivy Crown | "Lonesome and Cold (feat. Kim Song Sternkopf)" | single | We are a frozen shape of flame. |
| 2019-05-31 | 29 | Mentor | "Нити" | single | and be transported by none of its madness. |
| 2019-05-31 | 30 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "Aorta" | single | We are equipped with organs designed to dispense adoration and alarm, |
| 2019-05-31 | 31 | Adrift | "Mist" | Pure | and we connect them to distortion pedals |
| 2019-05-31 | 32 | NYT LIV | "Aske Og Blod" | single | and pull on heavy boots. |
| 2019-05-31 | 33 | Darkthrone | "I Muffle Your Inner Choir" | Old Star | Sometimes you invest in heresy for its own sake, |
| 2019-05-31 | 34 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Bursting Bowel of Tellus" | single | and it betrays you with rapture. |
| 2019-05-31 | 35 | 1914 | "Arrival. The Meuse-Argonne" | The Blind Leading The Blind | We are the creatures who fight over transmitted memories of war. |
| 2019-05-31 | 36 | Frijgard | "Aftermath" | single | We are the survivors of geology and geography and haunting, |
| 2019-05-31 | 37 | Fólkvangr | "Hel's Demise" | Hel's Demise +3 | emerging in formation from the abyss. |
| 2019-05-24 | 5 | Cold Kingdom | "Desire" | Into the Black Sky | our mundane appetites no less fascinating |
| 2019-05-24 | 6 | The Lust | "Gimme Gimme Your Loving" | Lustration | and their resolutions no less satisfying. |
| 2019-05-24 | 7 | The Scars Heal in Time | "Save Me" | single | The sun goes both up and down, |
| 2019-05-24 | 25 | Enchantya | "Last Moon of March" | On Light and Wrath | We look down, am I right? |
| 2019-05-24 | 26 | SinHeresY | "Out Of Connection" | single | What are you looking at? There's no problem down there, I assure you. |
| 2019-05-24 | 27 | Timo Tolkki’s Avalon | "Hear My Call" | single | I realize I'm the only dinosaur on the planet who insists on wearing ill-fitting suits, but I assure you I'm not hiding anything. |
| 2019-05-24 | 28 | Sershen&Zaritskaya | "Barracuda" | single | I would show you, and I will, but I'm not going to. Vegetarians, all of them. |
| 2019-05-24 | 29 | Gathering Of Kings | "Heaven on the Run" | single | They're the ones that should worry. |
| 2019-05-24 | 30 | LeBrock | "Bright Lights" | Bright Lights +1 | Good luck eating plants after the fake impact that isn't going to happen." |
| 2019-05-24 | 31 | Valis Ablaze | "Hollow Heart" | single | And raptors and learned ankylosaurs, we look at each other, |
| 2019-05-24 | 32 | MØL | "Airy" | single | with everything we know about microaggressions and process, |
| 2019-05-24 | 33 | Finsterforst | "Fluch des Seins - Short Single Version" | single | and the social cost of whatever you call carnivorousness when it admits a single exception for ketchup, |
| 2019-05-24 | 34 | Stormlord | "Mediterranea" | Far | and we turn away and ask each other for money to pay for more emails asking for money to help. |
| 2019-05-24 | 35 | Misþyrming | "Orgia" | Algleymi | We need to be much smarter than this. |
| 2019-05-24 | 36 | Gaahls WYRD | "From the Spear" | Gastir – Ghosts Invited | We need the least smart people to be smarter than this. |
| 2019-05-24 | 37 | Martyrdöd | "Hexhammaren" | Hexhammaren | We need role models with better traits than tiny brains and hunger, |
| 2019-05-24 | 38 | Deathspell Omega | "Standing on the Work of Slaves" | The Furnaces of Palingenesia | and a vision for the future that encompasses more contingencies than which of us we will eat tomorrow. |
| 2019-05-24 | 40 | AvAciA | "Päivä kerrallaan" | Uusi maailmanjärjestys | This doesn't have to be a dying world. |
| 2019-05-24 | 41 | Voodoo KungFu | "Celestial Burial" | single | We outlived gods and their squabbles and plagues, |
| 2019-05-24 | 43 | King Satan | "Dance with the Devil" | King Fucking Satan | We created these self-destructive systems, |
| 2019-05-24 | 44 | UMC | "Don't Call Me Up (Metal Version)" | single | we can turn them on themselves. |
| 2019-05-17 | 16 | The Ocean Cure | "Huntress" | single | how we learned to turn destruction against entropy, |
| 2019-05-17 | 17 | Liv Sin | "Blood Moon Fever" | single | how we clove strength from barbarism, |
| 2019-05-17 | 18 | Reality Suite | "Kiss the Ring" | single | how we externalized defiance as a shared response to adversity instead of nihilist/narcissist infighting. |
| 2019-05-17 | 19 | Starkill | "Fly With Me" | Gravity | This is how we escape from the forces we inherited. |
| 2019-05-17 | 20 | Degrees of Truth | "The Void Within" | single | Our triumphs over airlessness are seeded by our willingness to release our own gnawing emptinesses, |
| 2019-05-17 | 21 | Pythia | "Ghost in the Woods" | The Solace of Ancient Earth | to share them as curious obelisks instead of hollow hearts, |
| 2019-05-17 | 22 | Hollow Haze | "It's Always Dark Before the Dawn" | single | to believe inane excuses for hope |
| 2019-05-17 | 23 | Majesty | "Wasteland Outlaw" | single | and comic-book stories of who we have been. |
| 2019-05-17 | 24 | Diablo | "Grace Under Pressure" | single | Other things could have killed us. |
| 2019-05-17 | 25 | Voodoo KungFu | "Only Gods Can Judge Me" | single | Survivor bias is an enemy of understanding, but a friend of survival. |
| 2019-05-17 | 26 | Frijgard | "Falling Stars" | single | The falling stars are a perspective effect of our rise; |
| 2019-05-17 | 27 | Batushka | "Polunosznica" | single | this is obviously idiotic and false and dangerous, |
| 2019-05-17 | 28 | Bethlehem | "Verdaut in klaffenden Mäulern" | Lebe Dich Leer | but the passageways that lead to truth are most densely packed in the oldest cities accreted of reverent paradoxes and centuries of earnestly incompatible delusions. |
| 2019-05-17 | 29 | Enthroned | "Vapula Omega" | single | Where our own mortality paralyzes us, |
| 2019-05-17 | 30 | This Gift Is A Curse | "Monuments for Dead Gods" | single | the mortality of our gods will restore to us our will. |
| 2019-05-17 | 31 | Full Of Hell | "Haunted Arches" | Weeping Choir | Fear is a nutrient, but you have to chew it properly. |
| 2019-05-17 | 33 | Sannhet | "Short Life" | Short Life +1 | No other blood can replace yours, and thus the smallest wound will begin your collapse. |
| 2019-05-17 | 34 | Cvlt Ov the Svn | "The Pit" | single | We are each other's storms, |
| 2019-05-17 | 35 | Bloody Hammers | "From Beyond the Grave" | single | and only truly united in non-existence. |
| 2019-05-10 | 1 | BABYMETAL | "Elevator Girl" | Elevator Girl / Starlight / Distortion 3 | I believe, and this is at once a profound hope and a debilitating fear, that we haven't done very much as a species that is qualitatively superior to having the gimmick impulse to combine chirpily buoyant J-Pop vocals with crunchy hyperarena metal arrangements and then executing this potentially throwaway concept with the maximum possible earnest human commitment. |
| 2019-05-10 | 4 | MoonSun | "Between the Flags" | single | Embracing holistic and systemic accountability for things you mostly can't see? Not really working smoothly yet. |
| 2019-05-10 | 5 | CELESTIVL | "Melisandre" | TenTimesTwo | Moving people around an occupied city without smashing them into each other? Issues persist. |
| 2019-05-10 | 9 | Chaos Magic | "Furyborn" | single | And we mean no offense by this, but we're going to wait up here while you think about your answer, |
| 2019-05-10 | 10 | Bloodred Hourglass | "Waves of Black" | single | because, really, what the hell?" |
| 2019-05-10 | 11 | Tengger Cavalry | "Unite" | Northern Memory, Vol. 1 | And I want to be able to say to them, in return, that the creatures who can't solve these problems for ourselves couldn't sing these songs. |
| 2019-05-10 | 12 | Varg | "Skål" | single | We taught ourselves some power-chords in our spare time, but of course we're mainly focused on developing sustainable infrastructure and reaching empathic moral consensuses. |
| 2019-05-10 | 18 | Pulse Factory | "to the ray world" | ray world 2 | and that currency is a logistical convenience not a value system. |
| 2019-05-10 | 19 | Minniva | "Bismarck" | single | We realize that certain kinds of people are inherently better at some kinds of important tasks, but that with appropriate safety precautions it's possible to allow men to particpiate in government in limited but emotionally satisfying ways. |
| 2019-05-10 | 21 | Arch/Matheos | "Pitch Black Prism" | Winter Ethereal | including the dimensions in which the directions are explication and implication. |
| 2019-05-10 | 39 | Warforged | "Beneath the Forest Floor" | I: Voice | A city is a machine we operate collectively, |
| 2019-05-10 | 55 | Embracing Soul | "Plague" | Mass Extinction | And I want to tell the aliens above that our diseases are not as communicable |
| 2019-05-10 | 56 | The Mariana Hollow | "Only the Fear" | The Abandoned Parade | as our loving effusions are universal, |
| 2019-05-10 | 57 | Hunters Grace | "Perceived in Light" | Perceived in Light | that our monumentally petty isms against each other |
| 2019-05-10 | 73 | UMC | "Bad Guy (Metal Version)" | single | and said "Wait." |
| 2019-05-03 | 25 | Full Of Hell | "Armory of Obsidian Glass" | single | maybe you can dance and you're afraid to admit you share this with the rest of us, |
| 2019-05-03 | 26 | Valborg | "Nahtod" | single | or maybe you can't stand not knowing which of these we'll decide when we see you move. |
| 2019-05-03 | 27 | Time Lurker | "Unstable Night" | Cepheide Time Lurker Split | So this is, of course, why Trump can't bear to ever reveal anything: |
| 2019-05-03 | 28 | Amon Amarth | "Mjölner, Hammer of Thor" | Berserker | not his taxes, which demonstrate he's a business amateur; |
| 2019-05-03 | 29 | Kolossus | "Mantsurian Kätyri" | single | not his grades, which demonstrate he's barely semi-literate; |
| 2019-05-03 | 30 | Origin | "Insanity" | Abiogenesis: A Coming Into Existence | not his scalp, a thin layer in between his insecurities and the sunlight; |
| 2019-05-03 | 31 | Kampfar | "Dominans" | Ofidians Manifest | not his total inability to judge other humans individually or collectively, |
| 2019-05-03 | 32 | Martyrdöd | "Pharmacepticon" | single | which is how he became famous for firing people |
| 2019-05-03 | 33 | Abbath | "Calm in Ire (Of Hurricane)" | single | and racism |
| 2019-05-03 | 34 | Second To Sun | "Once Upon a Time in Russia" | single | and betrayal mitigated plaintively by incompetence. |
| 2019-05-03 | 35 | Stellar Master Elite | "Tetragon" | Hologram Temple | Every secret you hold in concealed orbit around your own heart |
| 2019-05-03 | 36 | Tanzwut | "Galgenvögel" | single | is a gyroscope that keeps you from standing up straight or walking without a golf cart, |
| 2019-05-03 | 37 | Munarheim | "Dein ist der Tag" | Willens & frei | and a shard of truth waiting to finally tear its way out through your throat. |
| 2019-05-03 | 40 | Tarja | "Dead Promises" | single | isolated feats of stupefying elegance, |
| 2019-05-03 | 41 | Ethereal Kingdoms | "Heartchamber" | single | moments of planet-changing realization and love, |
| 2019-05-03 | 42 | Myrath | "Lili Twil" | Shehili | and a general historic progression away from squallid brutality, |
| 2019-05-03 | 43 | Arch/Matheos | "Wanderlust" | single | but moral bankruptcy is protected by no convenient codes of technical forgiveness. |
| 2019-05-03 | 44 | Sweet Oblivion | "Sweet Oblivion" | single | You can't be a bad person just for tax purposes. |
| 2019-05-03 | 52 | Into Orbit | "Between Stars" | Kinesis | or we had somewhere else to go. |
| 2019-05-03 | 65 | Emil Bulls | "You Should See Me in a Crown" | You Should See Me in a Crown / River 2 | We'll remember you, you win that much. |
| 2019-04-26 | 9 | Sabbath Assembly | "The Serpent Uncoils" | A Letter of Red | satellites of our deferred hopes |
| 2019-04-26 | 10 | The Last Martyr | "Echoes" | Creatrix 5 | and muses of our speculatively broken hearts. |
| 2019-04-26 | 12 | April Art | "Rise & Fall" | Rise & Fall | and another one to understand that reflection is its only real power. |
| 2019-04-26 | 13 | The Animal In Me | "Old Town Road" | single | With a blade you can show your enemies themselves, |
| 2019-04-26 | 16 | Asylum Pyre | "One Day - Silence / Part 2: Daydreaming" | N°4 | Your life is a loosely organized concept album |
| 2019-04-26 | 24 | Teodasia | "Out of Time" | single | Scabbards in moonlight |
| 2019-04-26 | 25 | Janet Gardner | "Your Place in the Sun" | single | are cardboard at dawn, |
| 2019-04-26 | 26 | Enforcer | "Mil años en las sombras" | Zenith (Spanish Version) | but only if the night doesn't last forever. |
| 2019-04-26 | 27 | Steel Prophet | "Dark Mask (Between Love and Hate)" | The God Machine | You trade your heroes for goats. |
| 2019-04-26 | 36 | ARVAN阿尔梵 | "远山" | 我们不是都要沉睡 | We have equations of denial, but can't stay immune. |
| 2019-04-26 | 37 | Varaha | "Severance" | A Passage for Lost Years | We already know how it ends, |
| 2019-04-26 | 38 | Belzebubs | "Cathedrals of Mourning" | Pantheon Of The Nightside Gods | because the ends are the only parts whose functions we recognize while they're happening. |
| 2019-04-26 | 39 | Deception (NOR) | "Grimalkin" | single | But how did it start? |
| 2019-04-26 | 40 | Archons | "Nostalgia (Almost Giving Up)" | Buried Underneath the Lies | How did we tithe these hegemonies into their legacies? |
| 2019-04-26 | 41 | Helms Alee | "Beat Up" | Noctiluca | How did sinuous fragility assemble itself into these certain stones? |
| 2019-04-26 | 42 | sunn O))) | "Between Sleipnir's Breaths" | Life Metal | We know how to speak to dragons and mountains, |
| 2019-04-26 | 43 | Darkthrone | "The Hardship of the Scots" | single | but we never listen to their songs; |
| 2019-04-26 | 44 | Månegarm | "Krakes sista strid" | Fornaldarsagor | thus their fates prefigure our own. |
| 2019-04-26 | 45 | Mornir | "Herr in Wind und Tälern" | Hexer 2 | The devil carries an encyclopedia of inexorable storms, |
| 2019-04-26 | 46 | Enbilulugugal | "Sponsored Paralyzation of the Nungoat" | Offerings to Noizemongers | and a bunch of old magazines nobody reads, |
| 2019-04-26 | 47 | Illyria | "Kenopsia" | The Carpathian Summit | and always walks the same path through your chest. |
| 2019-04-26 | 48 | Saħħar | "Irmied Tal-Haruf" | Qilla Tal-Qrun | Breath is a defiance shaped in memory, |
| 2019-04-26 | 49 | Marianas Rest | "Restitution" | Ruins | torn out of our lungs and sold at desultory auction |
| 2019-04-26 | 50 | Maraton | "Blood Music" | Meta | to agents of a guild of the mundane and immortal. |
| 2019-04-26 | 51 | Lines in the Sky | "Thalassophobia" | single | They get our future, we get more goats. |
| 2019-04-26 | 52 | Edge of Reality | "Puzzle Man" | single | You may not think we need goats more than a future, but we have a plan for the goats, |
| 2019-04-26 | 53 | Rendezvous Point | "Universal Chaos" | single | and the future was kind of a mess, |
| 2019-04-26 | 54 | Lonely Robot | "When Gravity Fails" | Under Stars | and if we're going to live on the moon, something is going to have to eat these gray rocks. |
| 2019-04-26 | 59 | The Thirteen | "last period." | ALONE | Is this where it ends? |
| 2019-04-19 | 1 | Not Secured, Loose Ends | "Odd eye" | Odd eye +2 | When I first came across this band, they were credited as "Not Secued,Loose Ends", with no "r" and no space after the comma. It is totally plausible for a Japanese band to have named themselves with an English error for reasons of their own, but I was curious what the reasons were, so I tried to look, which is how I discovered that the error is non-canonical, and they are sometimes listed as "Not Secued, Loose Ends", "Not Secured,Loose Ends" and "Not Secured, Loose Ends", and all of this is just their "English" name, because their Japanese name is actually ゆくえしれずつれづれ, which translates as "Everywhere", and which I think should be transliterated as "Yukue Shizeru Tsuredzure", but they seem to have gone with "YukueshizeruTsurezure". Asking questions does not always produce an immediate decrease in local entropy, and anyway when you send an anthem through the vortex you have to be prepared for it to come out scrambled, with bits of death metal and trap and yami kawaii scattered around, and "yami kawaii" means "sick cute" and is sort of Japanese emo-goth, except I initially mistyped it as "yama kawaii" which would be "mountain cute" and is almost certainly also a thing but not this thing. |
| 2019-04-19 | 11 | Cold Kingdom | "A New Disaster" | single | But also maybe part of why I feel a reflexive sense of relief when a female voice emerges in a metal song, or really any song. Not entirely dudes. But then you look at the band photo and it's four bearded dudes and a female singer, and are three of them twins? Not-all-dudes is not enough. |
| 2019-04-19 | 12 | Visionatica | "The Pharaoh" | single | Electing Elizabeth Warren president would be a great act of symbolism, as well as a reasonable political measure, but it's going to take more than a couple of demographic electoral breakthroughs to turn this into something other than one thin end of a cultural bell-curve whose pudgy center put Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell and Brett Kavanaugh into positions of literally-obscene power. |
| 2019-04-19 | 13 | Hollow Haze | "Oblivion" | single | Ivanka Trump had every advantage her father had, and can't possibly be dumber by process of elimination, and yet he's president and she had some symbolic company nobody missed when it was gone. |
| 2019-04-19 | 14 | Månegarm | "Ett sista farväl" | single | Farewell, sister, the frost giants aren't going to rehire you to "advise" them. |
| 2019-04-19 | 15 | Sister Shotgun | "She Lives" | Fragments | The future isn't female, it's just that anything even close to an equitable future is going to seem vastly female by contrast with these centuries of bludgeoning patriarchy. |
| 2019-04-19 | 16 | Zephyra | "Dreams Denied" | Fall. Rise. Conquer. | Men took a turn. We did about as well as you'd guess. We made it to airplanes that only sometimes crash, and smart phones, and death metal, slightly faster than we rendered the planet uninhabitable. So it could've been worse. |
| 2019-04-19 | 17 | The Last Martyr | "Creatrix" | single | Kind of a long turn, though, for how badly it was obviously going at most points. |
| 2019-04-19 | 21 | Magica | "In Puterea Ta" | single | I mean, one in which we have the luxury of nostalgia, |
| 2019-04-19 | 22 | LOST NEBULA | "A Tragic Dilemma" | single | not days spent hunting rats and fighting over the "good" dust masks. |
| 2019-04-19 | 23 | Drudkh | "Golden Horse" | A Few Lines in Archaic Ukrainian | All dudes in this one. Hoarse shrieking, masturbatory blastbeats. It's really great. Men's music can be quite intriguing in some ways, if you take it on its own terms. |
| 2019-04-19 | 24 | From The Bogs Of Aughiska | "The Great Sea Stack at the Cliffs of Moher" | From the Bogs of Aughiska | But I know this about myself: if, halfway through that abyssal Drudkh thrash or this textural voidscape, some idol singers suddenly blasted their way in with rainbow lasers and started singing, I would love it even more. |
| 2019-04-19 | 25 | Allegaeon | "Interphase // Meiosis" | Apoptosis | Not every individual thing has to be balanced, |
| 2019-04-19 | 26 | Amon Amarth | "Crack the Sky" | single | only the whole Earth itself, in order to not roll off of the turtle's back. |
| 2019-04-19 | 27 | Starkill | "Detonate" | single | I love death-metal's rasp. I admit I love it, and believe it doesn't have to be part of anything beyond itself, but I also admit I love it even more as contrast, and even more as part of deliberate and self-aware contrast. |
| 2019-04-19 | 28 | sunn O))) | "Troubled Air" | single | In order to love something flawed, meaning anything, don't you have to believe it doesn't have to recapitulate phylogeny? Doom is a compelling aesthetic, |
| 2019-04-19 | 29 | Pinkish Black | "Until" | single | but an unwelcome compulsory in scenario futurism. |
| 2019-04-19 | 31 | Atlas Pain | "Hagakure's Way" | Tales of a Pathfinder | but not via inertia alone. |
| 2019-04-19 | 32 | Varg | "Das alte Feuer" | single | Not while fleeing the wolves and idolizing them at once. |
| 2019-04-19 | 33 | Stormlord | "Leviathan" | single | Not without teaching your warriors to recognize subtlety. |
| 2019-04-19 | 34 | Gaahls WYRD | "Carving the Voices" | single | Not without acknowledging the casualties of your history. |
| 2019-04-19 | 35 | Avast | "Birth of Man" | single | Not without starting over, |
| 2019-04-19 | 36 | Varaha | "Climax & Exile" | single | or at least understanding how profoundly the end of your battle patterns |
| 2019-04-19 | 37 | Minniva | "Never Enough" | single | is not a victory. |
| 2019-04-19 | 38 | The Anix | "Chrome" | Chrome +1 | But apocalypse is a transition, |
| 2019-04-19 | 39 | Andromida | "Soulseeker" | single | and every transition is an opportunity. |
| 2019-04-19 | 40 | Arch Echo | "Stella" | single | When you automate a social process, you get a chance to think about what its rules have been, |
| 2019-04-19 | 41 | Fuimadane | "Freyja" | Kominn Vel á Sik | and how they formed that way, |
| 2019-04-19 | 43 | Grand Magus | "Dawn Of Fire" | Wolf God | We are composed of the same elements as always, |
| 2019-04-19 | 52 | AELONIA | "Forever Alive" | We Are One | or just to escape it. |
| 2019-04-19 | 63 | Abigail | "Despertar" | Despertar | Don't name your men's-music band "Abigail", that will also help. |
| 2019-04-19 | 64 | Stellar Master Elite | "Ad Infinitum" | single | Hear the men when they speak. Their experiences are important to them, |
| 2019-04-12 | 10 | Stitched Up Heart | "Lost (feat. Sully Erna)" | single | Agree to grant provisional divinity to one idea each day, |
| 2019-04-12 | 13 | Astral Doors | "Night of the Hunter" | single | is only a waste of time if you're actually good at it, |
| 2019-04-12 | 14 | Steel Prophet | "The God Machine" | single | and you probably aren't. |
| 2019-04-12 | 15 | Solarus | "My Darkest Days" | Darkest Days | Music is a distillation of emotional experience, |
| 2019-04-12 | 16 | Numenorean | "Horizon" | Adore | and thus the most portable form of empathy; |
| 2019-04-12 | 17 | Inter Arma | "A Waxen Sea" | Sulphur English | not always the most intelligible, |
| 2019-04-12 | 18 | Waldgeflüster | "Der Steppenwolf" | Mondscheinsonaten | but usually better for that same reason. |
| 2019-04-12 | 20 | Dreadnought | "Tempered" | single | but you can swallow its ghost, and become modulated by its immanent obsessions. |
| 2019-04-12 | 21 | Erebos | "The Starless Vale" | A Flame That Pierces With a Deadly Cold | This is what happens when you fall in love, |
| 2019-04-12 | 22 | Belzebubs | "Nam Gloria Lucifer" | single | with a moon queen or a promise of malicious immortality: |
| 2019-04-12 | 23 | Xaon | "Monolith" | Solipsis | you become the implications |
| 2019-04-12 | 24 | Blame Me! | "Trauma" | single | not of your constant retreat |
| 2019-04-12 | 25 | Kampfar | "Syndefall" | single | but of the stands you could take. |
| 2019-04-12 | 26 | Helheim | "Ísuð" | single | You assume citizenship of an invented realm, |
| 2019-04-12 | 27 | Abbath | "Harvest Pyre" | single | naturally on the cusp of revolution, |
| 2019-04-12 | 28 | Voodoo KungFu | "SAW" | single | triumph and dissidence gathered on a hill to pick complementary colors for their banners, |
| 2019-04-12 | 30 | Gloryhammer | "Gloryhammer" | single | In this moment you may win an argument with yourself about who you are. |
| 2019-04-12 | 36 | Ghost Ship Octavius | "Ocean of Memories" | Delirium | sustainably, or at least self-sustainably. |
| 2019-04-12 | 37 | Hacktivist | "Reprogram - Single Version" | single | Truth is beyond fragile, a literalist illusion |
| 2019-04-12 | 38 | Merrow | "Heart of the Sea Nymph" | Reading the Bones | limned in seduction |
| 2019-04-12 | 39 | Umpfel | "Sphere of War" | As the Waters Cover the Sea | and disarray. |
| 2019-04-12 | 42 | Grand Magus | "A Hall Clad In Gold" | A Hall Clad In Gold +2 | in oblique equations of resolvability |
| 2019-04-12 | 43 | Scarlet Valse | "Metamorphosis" | Metamorphosis | and architectures of dismay. |
| 2019-04-12 | 54 | Pure Bathing Culture | "All Night" | single | Each new box is a different resource to her, |
| 2019-04-12 | 61 | Marianas Rest | "Unsinkable" | single | at the sheerest warning of resonance or grace. |
| 2019-04-12 | 65 | Emerald Mind | "Children of the Damned" | single | and incandenscent spires, |
| 2019-04-12 | 67 | Sühnopfer | "Je vivroie liement" | single | and obviated, |
| 2019-04-12 | 68 | Sadness | "In the Distant Travels" | I Want to Be There | in quests for grief |
| 2019-04-12 | 73 | Embracing Soul | "Alien" | single | Loss is, definitionally, a way of talking about things we still have or inhabit. |
| 2019-04-05 | 1 | Forodwaith | "Happy Death Day" | single | There's a frost giant at the door again. |
| 2019-04-05 | 2 | Eluveitie | "Deathwalker" | Ategnatos | She wants to know our plans for the patch of ivy and lilacs next to our driveway, |
| 2019-04-05 | 3 | Inter Arma | "Howling Lands" | single | and if we know if iron still binds dire wolves, |
| 2019-04-05 | 4 | GGGOLDDD | "Things I Wish I Never Knew" | Why Aren't You Laughing? | and where she should go after everything melts, |
| 2019-04-05 | 5 | Chaos Magic | "Like Never Before" | single | and if we can come out to play. |
| 2019-04-05 | 19 | Ankor | "Ghosts" | single | or how does it work? |
| 2019-04-05 | 20 | Altered Sky | "Surrounded" | single | She isn't asking for it to be like it was, |
| 2019-04-05 | 22 | Eight Bells | "Torpid Dreamer" | single | or these gifts not wrapped or labeled for frost giants. |
| 2019-04-05 | 33 | Jøtnarr | "Ever Further Mark" | Jotnarr | the water |
| 2019-04-05 | 60 | Stellar Master Elite | "Apocalypsis" | single | and don't connect any places she belongs. |
| 2019-04-05 | 67 | Mork | "I Flammens Favn" | single | and the rules about where they can go, |
| 2019-04-05 | 81 | Enchantya | "The Beginning" | single | It's hard for her here. |
| 2019-04-05 | 92 | Nekrasov | "Through Blind Acceptance the Nightmare Continues" | single | what it would be like to stand outside her home in an unfamiliar realm not intended to accomodate us. |
| 2019-03-29 | 6 | Rage Of Light | "Light" | Imploder | The bad news, for some sense of "bad", is that I easily found 200 songs I wanted to hear. |
| 2019-03-29 | 7 | Forever Still | "Rewind" | Breathe in Colours | Extrapolating lazily from a single data-point, this suggests that I've been missing half of the music I want to hear. |
| 2019-03-29 | 8 | A Brilliant Lie | "The Tarot" | Threads: Weaver 5 | Of course, extrapolating from every other kind of data I know about music suggests that music is effectively infinite, and measuring the amount of it I'm "missing" is an exercise in inherent epistemological futility. |
| 2019-03-29 | 9 | Sabbath Assembly | "Ascend and Descend" | single | There's a vivid practical difference, though, between knowing abstractly that human creativity is uncontainable and actually seeing it listed, |
| 2019-03-29 | 12 | MØL | "Kathexis" | single | but then you have to retrain yourself to correspond. |
| 2019-03-29 | 17 | Månegarm | "Hervors arv" | single | Now what if the radio dial never ever ends, and the same budget buys you everything? |
| 2019-03-29 | 20 | Brutus | "Techno" | Nest | You don't discover a person's character until they have power over you, |
| 2019-03-29 | 22 | Holy Fawn | "Dark Stone" | Death Spells | The optimist is terrified, but prepared to be impressed. |
| 2019-03-29 | 24 | Devin Townsend | "Spirits Will Collide" | Empath | The optimist says "Useless, sure, but don't I look awesome?" |
| 2019-03-29 | 25 | Lacrimas Profundere | "Father of Fate" | single | The pessimist decides whether they feel cruel or merely disgusted. |
| 2019-03-29 | 48 | Avalanch | "El Peregrino" | El Secreto | probably won't mistakenly think any crisis is over for good. |
| 2019-03-29 | 51 | Sutekh Hexen | "E Siel Enna Lehcim" | Sutekh Hexen | or bear witness, |
| 2019-03-29 | 57 | Sadness | "Eye of Prima" | Circle of Veins | The old gods watch you, knowingly; |
| 2019-03-29 | 70 | Elessär | "Afraid" | Kósmos | other universes coruscating while you were asleep, |
| 2019-03-29 | 71 | Vetrar Draugurinn | "Hinterlands" | Hinterlands | or cuddled with some equally bad excuse. |
| 2019-03-22 | 1 | Emerald Mind | "Genetic Paradise" | single | There are no neutral fonts, no neutral voices. |
| 2019-03-22 | 2 | Cellar Darling | "Pain" | The Spell | Everything you say carries an inherent lineage of failure and misguided attempts at dominance |
| 2019-03-22 | 3 | MoonSun | "Hearing Your Screams" | single | and every kind of love we ever halfway learned. |
| 2019-03-22 | 4 | Battle Beast | "Unbroken" | No More Hollywood Endings | All language is heraldry, |
| 2019-03-22 | 5 | Frozen Crown | "In The Dark" | Crowned In Frost | and "anthem" is what they call a song when they want to believe you believe something they need. |
| 2019-03-22 | 6 | Bloodbound | "Skyriders And Stormbringers" | Rise Of The Dragon Empire | But this is true of all words, and all worlds. |
| 2019-03-22 | 7 | Rage Of Light | "Battlefront" | single | We exchange connected needs thinly disguised as phonemes that exist somehow between us, |
| 2019-03-22 | 8 | Aephanemer | "Prokopton" | Prokopton | pretending to be isolated by air |
| 2019-03-22 | 9 | Aoratos | "Of Harvest, Scythe and Sickle Moon" | Gods Without Name | when of course air is exactly what unites us. |
| 2019-03-22 | 10 | Novarupta | "Mare Tranquillitatis" | single | Hatred aspires inchoately to both displace and hoard the atmosphere, |
| 2019-03-22 | 11 | Ghost Ship Octavius | "Turned to Ice" | Delirium | which is why it turns your face bad colors. |
| 2019-03-22 | 12 | Full Of Hell | "Burning Myrrh" | single | The living fetishization of death is a longing for release from this complexity, |
| 2019-03-22 | 25 | HYDE | "HONEY" | MAD QUALIA 2 | "Anthem" is a name for what you feel when somebody hits a drum and you think "Yes, better to be alive than dead, so far, |
| 2019-03-22 | 29 | Amon Amarth | "Raven's Flight" | single | Are your transformations intended for hunting enemies or gathering information? |
| 2019-03-22 | 42 | Pathogenic | "Suicide Itch" | single | self-deprivation crudely relabeled as self-confidence. |
| 2019-03-22 | 46 | Warforged | "Voice" | single | and language can transcend divinity. |
| 2019-03-22 | 49 | Grand Magus | "Brother of the Storm" | Brother of the Storm +1 | without revealing the location of your rebellion's base. |
| 2019-03-22 | 50 | GGGOLDDD | "Taken by Storm" | single | We tender offers to chaos, |
| 2019-03-22 | 51 | Aseethe | "No Realm" | single | knowing its reponses are not subject to our consent, |
| 2019-03-22 | 56 | Brutus | "Django" | single | and the implied consumed libraries |
| 2019-03-22 | 57 | Blood Command | "S01E02.Return.Of.The.Arsonist.720p.HDTV.x264" | single | we notionally architect to take this seriously |
| 2019-03-22 | 60 | Stahlmann | "Vom Himmel verloren" | Kinder der Sehnsucht | in the giant boots we've been saving for just this day. |
| 2019-03-22 | 61 | UMC | "Without Me (Metal Version)" | single | The ways to be lonely are factorials of permutations of everything possible. |
| 2019-03-22 | 62 | MajorVoice | "Shot in the Silence" | The Newer Chapter | The ways to be awed are additive and multiplicative and relentless. |
| 2019-03-22 | 63 | Death Angel | "Humanicide" | single | If you really believed in doom, you wouldn't spend a month learning a guitar solo, |
| 2019-03-22 | 69 | Spotlights | "The Particle Noise" | single | scattering trolls to the margins of firelight |
| 2019-03-22 | 70 | Moon Tooth | "Awe at All Angles" | single | or weak attractors, |
| 2019-03-22 | 73 | Windfaerer | "A Glimpse of Light" | Solar | which is like saying that light can be illuminating, |
| 2019-03-22 | 76 | The Great Discord | "Afterbirth" | Afterbirth +3 | Everything begins in triumph, |
| 2019-03-22 | 78 | Destrage | "The Chosen One" | single | A good travel guide would say "Go there. Leave this book at home." |
| 2019-03-22 | 82 | Dominanz | "Let The Death Enter" | Let The Death Enter | The didact wants to be right, the narcissist wants to be central, the nihilist wants to be left; |
| 2019-03-15 | 19 | Allegaeon | "Extremophiles (B)" | single | coallescing through immanent wreckage |
| 2019-03-15 | 20 | Waldgeflüster | "Von Winterwäldern und Mondscheinsonaten" | single | instead of always emerging out of memorial mist. |
| 2019-03-15 | 21 | Numenorean | "Adore" | single | We are the descendants of our future better selves and their more perfect love, |
| 2019-03-15 | 22 | Sinmara | "Úr Kaleik Martraða" | Hvísl Stjarnanna | governed by parliaments chartered by continents not yet formed |
| 2019-03-15 | 23 | Bethlehem | "Niemals mehr leben" | single | and thus intrinsic to contested ground. |
| 2019-03-15 | 24 | Fallujah | "Last Light" | Undying Light | A fascination with death and endings |
| 2019-03-15 | 25 | Origin | "Mind Asylum" | single | is also a willingness to face forward. |
| 2019-03-15 | 26 | Inclination | "When Fear Turns to Confidence" | When Fear Turns to Confidence 5 | "Confidence" is a fancy word for "I don't know, but whatever it is, it can't be better to hit it ass-first". |
| 2019-03-15 | 27 | Leverage | "Wind of Morrigan" | single | We may look ridiculous in this armor and plumage, |
| 2019-03-15 | 28 | Sertraline | "Relapse" | single | but it's better than following a slowly retreating coward |
| 2019-03-15 | 29 | Devin Townsend | "Evermore" | single | in a hat worthy of no heraldry. |
| 2019-03-15 | 30 | Eluveitie | "Ambiramus" | single | Carry us in your arms. |
| 2019-03-15 | 31 | Asylum Pyre | "Sex Drugs and Scars" | single | We dream of the opposite of innocence, |
| 2019-03-15 | 32 | Forever Still | "Is It Gone" | single | the opposite of believing we were greater in some lost age, |
| 2019-03-15 | 33 | Ex Libris | "The Motherland" | Ann - Chapter 2: Anastasia Romanova 3 | the opposite of each inheriting exactly one place. |
| 2019-03-08 | 22 | Cellar Darling | "Drown" | single | to climb them to reach a vantage point |
| 2019-03-08 | 23 | Grimgotts | "The Last Dragon Warriors" | single | from which mortal decisions have been informed. |
| 2019-03-08 | 24 | Thormesis | "Sonnen" | The Sixth | You only have to come back down, |
| 2019-03-08 | 25 | Inter Arma | "The Atavist's Meridian" | single | and walk away, |
| 2019-03-08 | 26 | Sâver | "Dissolve to Ashes" | They Came with Sunlight | and know that no decisions in your power are final. |
| 2019-03-08 | 27 | Black Anvil | "Miles" | Miles +3 | Recoil with generous abandon, just know that every violent aversion |
| 2019-03-08 | 34 | HYDE | "MAD QUALIA - Japanese Version" | single | not their escape but yours, |
| 2019-03-08 | 42 | Korpiklaani | "Bier Bier - Germany" | single | Come in! We were just about to dance; |
| 2019-03-08 | 43 | Kalle Päätalo | "Lukupää (feat. Vesku Jokinen)" | single | weren't you? |
| 2019-03-08 | 44 | Týr | "Álvur Kongur" | Hel | You can have sailed here from only so far away: |
| 2019-03-08 | 45 | Nightrage | "Wolf to Man" | single | half a world, at most, |
| 2019-03-08 | 46 | Folkstone | "Astri" | Diario di un Ultimo | the stars laughing at us in what we absurdly think of as emptiness. |
| 2019-03-08 | 47 | Children Of Bodom | "Glass Houses" | Hexed (Deluxe Version) | You can have safety or a view, |
| 2019-03-08 | 48 | Helheim | "Kaldr" | single | except for safety; |
| 2019-03-08 | 49 | Atlas Pain | "Kia Kaha" | single | redemption or reward, |
| 2019-03-08 | 52 | Rage Of Light | "Away With You" | single | is how to delete things without declaring enmity, |
| 2019-03-08 | 69 | Mägo de Oz | "Te traeré el horizonte (feat. Ara Malikian)" | Ira Dei | not costumed to ward but to make up the colors under which we march. |
| 2019-03-08 | 70 | Salduie | "Las Crines de Epona" | Viros Veramos | Ask not for whom these songs were written, |
| 2019-03-08 | 71 | Onslaught | "A Perfect Day to Die" | single | because we can't hear you. They're too loud |
| 2019-03-08 | 84 | Nicumo | "Who You Are" | single | Naïve plans are the only ones with intriguing scope, |
| 2019-03-08 | 85 | ANTHEM | "Black Empire" | single | the only ones shaped like incipient legend, |
| 2019-03-08 | 86 | Moon Tooth | "Omega Days" | single | the only ones sincerely motivated by a particular kind of envisioned apocalypse. |
| 2019-03-08 | 87 | Lonely Robot | "Ancient Ascendant" | single | Does your Wikipedia page detail the colors of your guitars? Not yet? |
| 2019-03-08 | 95 | Kings Destroy | "Fantasma Nera" | Fantasma Nera | we had to learn to lose you, and this doomed and enchanted moment, |
| 2019-03-08 | 97 | AntropomorphiA | "Womb Ov Thorns" | single | but to return without feeling cursed for everything we ever left, |
| 2019-03-08 | 98 | Murdryck | "Sea Spirit of the Night" | single | and be thus entitled to invite you to come away again with us in the morning or right now without waiting to see what ghosts surrender with the dark. |
| 2019-03-01 | 6 | Children Of Bodom | "Platitudes and Barren Words" | single | but becoming meaningful is harder. |
| 2019-03-01 | 11 | Matenrou Opera | "Human Dignity" | Human Dignity | You will be photographed standing in ruins, |
| 2019-03-01 | 12 | ZAQ | "Against The Abyss" | 「トリニティセブン」劇場第2弾主題歌「Against The Abyss」 4 | so you can dress for this tableau, |
| 2019-03-01 | 15 | SHIN | "Tragedy" | single | Thus choose penitent choreography |
| 2019-03-01 | 24 | Periphery | "Garden in the Bones" | single | Virtue presents itself as a choice |
| 2019-03-01 | 25 | Myrath | "No Holding Back" | single | beckoning you one step too far |
| 2019-03-01 | 26 | Queensrÿche | "Propaganda Fashion" | The Verdict | for retreat, |
| 2019-03-01 | 35 | SALTY DOG | "Screams Within" | ELiXiR 3 | but never offered. |
| 2019-03-01 | 37 | Second To Sun | "Monster" | single | which is two mistakes and one apocalypse at once. |
| 2019-03-01 | 38 | Demon Hunter | "Close Enough" | War | We have inherent uncertainty |
| 2019-03-01 | 43 | New Years Day | "Shut Up" | single | and the superpower to not care what we think. |
| 2019-03-01 | 58 | Leo Jiménez | "Ballena Negra" | single | but have you ever tried to push any two of them back together? |
| 2019-03-01 | 59 | Legado de una Tragedia | "Escrito en Piedra" | El Secreto de los Templarios | Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: |
| 2019-03-01 | 63 | Deafheaven | "Black Brick" | single | Towns are roving accumulations of unease |
| 2019-03-01 | 64 | Show Me the Body | "Madonna Rocket" | single | until common peril turns them into cities. |
| 2019-03-01 | 77 | Pissgrave | "Canticle of Ripping Flesh" | Posthumous Humiliation | you've come somewhere people end up, |
| 2019-03-01 | 92 | Meridian | "Second Best" | single | of yesterday's truths, |
| 2019-03-01 | 93 | Valtari | "Your Enemy" | Origin Enigma | and thus inherit fading power and gathering foes, |
| 2019-03-01 | 97 | Murg | "Renhet" | single | Despair is no more or less radiant |
| 2019-03-01 | 98 | Kings Destroy | "Seven Billion Drones" | single | than fear |
| 2019-03-01 | 105 | Brutus | "Cemetery" | single | but also back. |
| 2019-02-22 | 1 | Bloodbound | "Rise of the Dragon Empire" | single | I will be a steward of embers and myths, |
| 2019-02-22 | 2 | Imperia | "Unspoken Words" | Flames of Eternity | an angel hiding industriously inside your reservations, |
| 2019-02-22 | 3 | Delain | "Art Kills" | Hunter's Moon | an author of peril, |
| 2019-02-22 | 4 | Rhapsody Of Fire | "Seven Heroic Deeds" | The Eighth Mountain | an arithmetic of fabulist historiography, |
| 2019-02-22 | 5 | Walk in Darkness | "Time to Rise" | single | the conscience of seismic ruins, |
| 2019-02-22 | 6 | Enforcer | "Die for the Devil" | single | the clothes you used to wear on days when you felt strong and too unnoticed, |
| 2019-02-22 | 12 | Candlemass | "House Of Doom" | The Door To Doom | the place in the night sky where a rainbow would be, |
| 2019-02-22 | 13 | Abyssic | "Adornation" | High the Memory | a ruthless stillness |
| 2019-02-22 | 14 | Fedrespor | "Kunsten av liv" | Fra en vugge i fjellet | and the marked ground where it until recently stood, |
| 2019-02-22 | 27 | Månegarm | "Sveablotet" | single | and grim fervor, |
| 2019-02-22 | 28 | Aephanemer | "Dissonance Within" | single | broken and reforged, |
| 2019-02-22 | 32 | Dream Theater | "S2N" | Distance Over Time | taking thankless jobs back from grateful robots, |
| 2019-02-22 | 33 | Devin Townsend | "Genesis" | single | balancing on event horizons |
| 2019-02-22 | 34 | RPWL | "What I Really Need" | single | between naiveté and |
| 2019-02-22 | 36 | The Moth Gatherer | "Utopia" | Esoteric Oppression | the shimmering fairy dust we get by carefully pulverizing dreams |
| 2019-02-22 | 37 | Teeth Of The Sea | "Burn of the Shieling" | Wraith | and the selfless dimensional-analysis breakthrough that renders it measurable. |
| 2019-02-22 | 45 | Forever Still | "Breathe in Colours" | single | wearing modern wicking armor |
| 2019-02-22 | 46 | Frozen Crown | "Neverending" | single | and forgotten insignia of, hopefully, grace. |
| 2019-02-22 | 48 | LEAV/E/ARTH | "Collapsing" | single | I will know why the land rises up on the outskirts, |
| 2019-02-22 | 49 | The Beautiful Monument | "Deceiver" | single | which is to say I won't know why we settled here in the first place, |
| 2019-02-22 | 54 | Avalanch | "Caduceus" | The Secret | one drawn fleetingly in exhalatory ink. |
| 2019-02-22 | 58 | Left Hand Solution | "Blessed Be My Fallen Angel" | Through the Mourning Woods | I will be a methodical decanter of animate wax into chrysalis archives, |
| 2019-02-22 | 59 | Grand Magus | "Wolf God" | single | yet always a visitor in their reawakened realms. |
| 2019-02-22 | 60 | Rob Scallon | "Theorbo Metal" | single | You will be their honored but essentially inscrutable guest. |
| 2019-02-15 | 1 | Delain | "Hunter's Moon" | single | Will you use your power to lend inevitability to grace? |
| 2019-02-15 | 2 | Avantasia | "Starlight" | Moonglow | If that sounds hard or like it misses the point, |
| 2019-02-15 | 3 | Cellar Darling | "Death" | single | then your power is unearned |
| 2019-02-15 | 4 | Tigersclaw | "Walpurgis Night" | Force Of Destiny | and your nominal grace mislabeled. |
| 2019-02-15 | 5 | The Lust | "You'll Never Be Mine" | You'll Never Be Mine | The delirious irony is that grace is a state you need only allow. |
| 2019-02-15 | 6 | Infected Rain | "Passerby" | single | Don't fight yourself. |
| 2019-02-15 | 7 | Rotting Christ | "Dies Irae" | The Heretics | To not fight yourself, you have to not hate yourself, |
| 2019-02-15 | 8 | Saor | "Forgotten Paths" | Forgotten Paths +3 | which in turn requires that you understand the complex responses you simplify as hate, |
| 2019-02-15 | 9 | Violet Cold | "Mamihlapinatapai" | Kosmik | or else that you externalize hate. |
| 2019-02-15 | 10 | Samael | "In The Deep" | single | This is more challenging, but takes much less effort. |
| 2019-02-15 | 11 | Numenorean | "Coma" | single | The plentiful existence of hard things that are hard because they require monumental effort |
| 2019-02-15 | 12 | Candlemass | "Splendor Demon Majesty" | single | can lead you to the understandable misapprehension that difficulty is a measure of effort, |
| 2019-02-15 | 13 | Vanum | "Eternity" | Ageless Fire | and from there to the further-astray delusion that reward is a measure of what you deserve. |
| 2019-02-15 | 21 | Vanir | "The Final Stand" | Allfather | Learn the Greek words for the changes you seek, |
| 2019-02-15 | 22 | Starkill | "The Real Enemy" | single | and their Platonic shapes. |
| 2019-02-15 | 23 | Kaunis Kuolematon | "Aseista riisuttu" | Elämä ei tarvitse minua 4 | Learn who else has ruins, |
| 2019-02-15 | 24 | MUCC | "サイコ" | 壊れたピアノとリビングデッド | so you imagine who else one day might, |
| 2019-02-15 | 26 | Diaura | "嘘とワルツを" | DEFINITION Atype | Everything you excavate once stood; |
| 2019-02-15 | 42 | Inter Arma | "Citadel" | single | if you have surrounded yourself with ramparts of terribleness |
| 2019-02-15 | 44 | Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard | "The Spaceships Of Ezekiel" | single | and skies your neck can't flex towards. |
| 2019-02-15 | 45 | East Of The Wall | "Clapping on the Ones and Threes" | single | But the road to your fortress leads also away. |
| 2019-02-15 | 49 | Fallujah | "Dopamine" | single | or maybe even your parents' accident, |
| 2019-02-15 | 50 | Queensrÿche | "Blood of the Levant" | single | not by conquest or right. |
| 2019-02-15 | 51 | The Omnific | "The Stoic" | single | There are no exceptional rights. |
| 2019-02-15 | 65 | We Are the Catalyst | "Coming Home" | Ephemeral | but a flaw as usable as any other structural element in Minecraft or teleology. |
| 2019-02-15 | 74 | Schattenmann | "Kopf durch die Wand" | single | of shuddering progress. |
| 2019-02-15 | 75 | Florian Grey | "Bluecifer - We out Here" | RITUS | Break up with your god, I'm bored. |
| 2019-02-15 | 80 | WAGAMAMA RAKIA | "We'll Keep Raising The Frag" | We'll Keep Raising The Frag / Leaving 3 | magnificent in itself, |
| 2019-02-15 | 84 | Hora Zulu | "Cave Ventum" | La Voz del Amo | and the empty spaces implied. |
| 2019-02-15 | 85 | Avalanch | "El Oráculo" | single | But what you forget is that you learn to hear |
| 2019-02-15 | 86 | Sabbath Assembly | "Solve Et Coagula" | single | just as lurchingly as you learn to explain. |
| 2019-02-15 | 87 | Skraeckoedlan | "Tentakler & Betar" | Eorþe | These uneven footfalls are the sound of your eventual demise, |
| 2019-02-15 | 93 | Diabolical | "Black Sun" | Eclipse | often refracted |
| 2019-02-15 | 97 | Tragedy | "Fame" | Tragedy Goes to the Movies | Take any of the outstretched hands. |
| 2019-02-15 | 98 | Kings Destroy | "Barbarossa" | single | In order to help you, they have learned not to fight themselves. |
| 2019-02-15 | 99 | Thundermother | "Da Igual" | single | You must have questions about their habits. |
| 2019-02-08 | 1 | Gaahls WYRD | "Ghosts Invited" | single | We are the avatars of our fragility, |
| 2019-02-08 | 2 | Drudkh | "Autumn in Sepia" | single | our silhouettes delineated by the plumage of a reconciliatory denial of inevitability. |
| 2019-02-08 | 3 | Downfall Of Gaia | "Guided Through a Starless Night" | Ethic of Radical Finitude | We are blasted repeatedly into voids, |
| 2019-02-08 | 4 | Yeruselem | "Babel" | The Sublime | catalogued by our nemeses, |
| 2019-02-08 | 5 | Xenoblight | "Descension" | Procreation | lowered into solvents. |
| 2019-02-08 | 6 | Imperia | "Book of Love" | single | And yet we take this moment to fall in love, |
| 2019-02-08 | 7 | Against Myself | "Unity" | Unity | to imagine our scattered selves as one, |
| 2019-02-08 | 8 | Beast In Black | "Cry out for a Hero" | From Hell with Love | to imagine that the one is us. |
| 2019-02-08 | 9 | November-7 | "Whole Lotta Love" | single | There are no new questions and no new answers, but innumerable permutations still awaiting. |
| 2019-02-08 | 10 | Echoes Of Eternity | "Smoke and Mirrors" | Ageless | The only significant enemy of truth is the fear of error, |
| 2019-02-08 | 11 | Týr | "Sunset Shore" | single | but this is an illusion based on the mistaken impression that truth and error oppose. |
| 2019-02-08 | 12 | Vanir | "Svoldir" | single | We create temporary truths by bundling errors together in such a way that you slice through them in cross-section and reveal the knowing face of a forgotten god. |
| 2019-02-08 | 13 | The Interbeing | "Depressor" | single | Thus one medium is used to render |
| 2019-02-08 | 16 | Labirinto | "Divino Afflante Spiritu" | Divino Afflante Spiritu | For this reason did we leave the ocean, |
| 2019-02-08 | 23 | Periphery | "Blood Eagle" | single | Character is how you welcome the invaders you can't repel, |
| 2019-02-08 | 24 | Dream Theater | "Paralyzed" | single | whether they arrive in subtle darkness or superfluous motorcade. |
| 2019-02-08 | 29 | YUZUKINGDOM | "Memento Mori" | PANDEMIC 5 | before it's too late? |
| 2019-02-08 | 32 | Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard | "Yn Ol i Annwn" | single | If you stand up, what have you endorsed? |
| 2019-02-08 | 54 | Awaken the Giant | "Miles Away" | single | too close. |
| 2019-02-08 | 71 | Sisters of Suffocation | "The Machine" | single | and the schematics for robots that ache to take over, |
| 2019-02-01 | 2 | Rage Of Light | "Fallen" | single | "Justice on our side" is different from "Run to the hills", |
| 2019-02-01 | 3 | Darkwater | "A New Beginning" | single | and the banner you raise changes what the rest of the crowd signifies, |
| 2019-02-01 | 4 | Sebastien | "Fight for Love" | Behind the World 4 | even when half of it is in the same party clothes |
| 2019-02-01 | 5 | Morlas Memoria | "Stormgiants" | Mine of Pictures | and monster costumes. |
| 2019-02-01 | 12 | Downfall Of Gaia | "Of Withering Violet Leaves" | single | We didn't need climate apocalypse to motivate our metaphors, |
| 2019-02-01 | 13 | Astronoid | "I Wish I Was There While the Sun Set" | Astronoid | but we will face our threatened doom the same way we have always faced the darkness: |
| 2019-02-01 | 14 | Der Rote Milan | "Gnosis der Vergänglichkeit" | Moritat | shattering but undaunted, |
| 2019-02-01 | 15 | Afraid of Destiny | "Take Me Home, Death" | S.i.g.h.s | transcendent in disintegration, |
| 2019-02-01 | 23 | Our Last Night | "High Hopes" | single | and that's not what anything feels like in your hands. |
| 2019-02-01 | 32 | Soen | "Opponent" | Lotus | and how one fights against |
| 2019-02-01 | 33 | Sketch The Sky | "WeaknessStrength" | Switching | the other. |
| 2019-02-01 | 34 | Daima | "On the Shoulders of Giants" | One Step Further, One Step Back 6 | The key thing to understand about giants is that standing on their shoulders is a collaborative venture, not a gesture of dominance you do after knocking them flat. |
| 2019-02-01 | 35 | Eluveitie | "Ategnatos" | single | From the Swiss Alps you can see Celtic Gaul, or close enough. |
| 2019-02-01 | 38 | Blood Stain Child | "Del-Sol" | single | It's the same sunlight, after all, |
| 2019-02-01 | 39 | Children Of Bodom | "This Road" | single | whether we claim to come from deep lakes |
| 2019-02-01 | 40 | Mustan Kuun Lapset | "Kohti Valoa" | single | or the moon, |
| 2019-02-01 | 52 | The Moth Gatherer | "The Drone Kingdom" | single | We took your moment and we stretched it out |
| 2019-02-01 | 55 | We Are the Catalyst | "Alone Against the World" | single | Oh, my petulant, terrified, unloved boy, a cyst of self-loathing doesn't count as an organ. |
| 2019-02-01 | 59 | Saltatio Mortis | "Brunhild - Klassik" | single | not least because you wouldn't know what to do in a kitchen except fire cooks. |
| 2019-02-01 | 60 | Fuchsteufelswild | "Nimmerland" | König Zeiger | Too late to start over with children's stories until you understand the simple lessons, |
| 2019-02-01 | 61 | Leize | "Mi Lugar" | Deriva | so that you'll recognize how the complicated lessons later can be simplified if you have morals. |
| 2019-02-01 | 62 | Opera Magna | "La Herida" | Del Amor y Otros Demonios | Too late to do something grand, so you know what that feels like to other, braver people. |
| 2019-02-01 | 63 | Leander Kills | "Sötét Én" | single | Too late to cultivate deliberate malice instead of gnawing ignorance; |
| 2019-02-01 | 66 | Aephanemer | "The Sovereign" | single | but the warlords of nihil have nowhere else to sit. |
| 2019-01-25 | 4 | Swallow The Sun | "Here on the Black Earth" | When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light | and how it could have ended |
| 2019-01-25 | 5 | Numenorean | "Regret" | single | differently. |
| 2019-01-25 | 6 | Altarage | "Sighting" | The Approaching Roar | Blood roars through us, |
| 2019-01-25 | 7 | A Secret Revealed | "The Downfall" | Sacrifices | barely contained, |
| 2019-01-25 | 8 | Slow | "The Drowning Angel" | IV - Mythologiae | and thus we relentlessly hum. |
| 2019-01-25 | 9 | Vessel of Iniquity | "Invocation of the Heart Girt with a Serpent" | Void of Infinite Horror 5 | We are impressionist clouds of roughly shaped chaos |
| 2019-01-25 | 10 | Ancient Bards | "Oscurità" | Origine (The Black Crystal Sword Saga, Pt. 2) | encased in perfect shiny armor, |
| 2019-01-25 | 11 | Evergrey | "A Secret Atlantis" | The Atlantic | and the implied interstices between sinuous fables. |
| 2019-01-25 | 12 | Avantasia | "Moonglow" | single | Our talismans fill our subjective sky; |
| 2019-01-25 | 13 | Secret Rule | "Dream" | The 7 Endless | our powers seethe |
| 2019-01-25 | 14 | Autumn | "Old Fuel" | Stacking Smoke | in rueful inadequacy |
| 2019-01-25 | 37 | Korpiklaani | "Kaljaa - Finland" | single | and their maleficient spirits, |
| 2019-01-25 | 38 | Fenrir | "A Red Sun Rises" | Legends of the Grail | and whatever wilderness we preserve as metaphor. |
| 2019-01-25 | 39 | Minas Morgul | "Niedergang" | single | The ice accumulates in towers, |
| 2019-01-25 | 62 | Helevorn | "Goodbye, Hope" | Aamamata | relinquished immunities |
| 2019-01-25 | 64 | Puppy | "Vengeance" | The Goat | Truth is not a rebranding of solemnity, |
| 2019-01-25 | 73 | Hecate Enthroned | "Temples That Breathe" | Embrace of the Godless Aeon | Alone we become our own monsters, |
| 2019-01-18 | 1 | Rotting Christ | "The Raven" | single | Mythology is a terrible source of modern laws, but a great source of emotional resonance and moral metaphor. |
| 2019-01-18 | 2 | Swallow The Sun | "Firelights" | single | Moral physics, like cartoon physics, allows you to cross space on bridges that retrospect reveals as illusory. |
| 2019-01-18 | 3 | Ancient Bards | "Light" | single | But only once. |
| 2019-01-18 | 4 | Brainstorm | "Secrets and Related Lies" | single | The second time, you need engineering. |
| 2019-01-18 | 5 | Evergrey | "Currents" | single | The things you achieve once are the proud accomplishments of your environment; |
| 2019-01-18 | 6 | Battle Beast | "No More Hollywood Endings" | single | the things you can repeat are the powers that define you. |
| 2019-01-18 | 7 | Cellar Darling | "The Spell" | single | Follow no leaders who can't tell the difference. |
| 2019-01-18 | 15 | BAND-MAID | "Bubble" | Bubble +1 | Because how else do you imagine this works? |
| 2019-01-18 | 19 | The Sound Bee HD | "DEADMAN’S WALK" | DEAD SILENCE 5 | Social-structure exists not to award and reward winners, |
| 2019-01-18 | 27 | Labirinto | "Agnus Dei" | single | and routine human experiences. |
| 2019-01-18 | 28 | Soen | "Lotus" | single | We don't need billionaires, |
| 2019-01-18 | 29 | Walking Across Jupiter | "Scarification/Induration" | single | or anything that only billionaires can support, |
| 2019-01-18 | 30 | Moongates Guardian | "Song Of Lorien" | single | any more than we needed hereditary kings. |
| 2019-01-18 | 32 | Trollfest | "Fjøsnissens Fjaseri" | Norwegian Fairytales | Fewer legends of divine right, more fables of what happens in dark forests. |
| 2019-01-18 | 33 | Nomans Land | "Silence" | single | Less deference, more shouting at the silence. |
| 2019-01-18 | 34 | Furor Gallico | "Nebbia Della Mia Terra" | Dusk of the Ages | All literature is cautionary; |
| 2019-01-18 | 35 | Vanir | "Fejd" | single | all caveats are inherently poetic. |
| 2019-01-18 | 36 | Edge Of Paradise | "Face of Fear" | single | So what now? |
| 2019-01-18 | 37 | Elephant Gun Riot | "You Should See Me in a Crown" | single | How do our stories about compassionate powerflow sing us out of this quagmire of bilious ignorance? |
| 2019-01-18 | 57 | Ewigheim | "C'est la vie" | Irrlichter | The easiest treatment for ignorant smugness is knowing more things that you don't understand. |
| 2019-01-18 | 63 | Noisem | "Eyes Pried Open" | single | scaffolding for joy. |
| 2019-01-11 | 1 | Swallow The Sun | "Upon the Water" | single | We are the animals that sing grand songs of sorrow, |
| 2019-01-11 | 2 | Penumbra | "Edén (Parte I)" | Silencio | that are capable of wordless joy and yet invent languages, |
| 2019-01-11 | 11 | Vanha | "The Road" | Melancholia | and how we spend it. |
| 2019-01-11 | 14 | Pissgrave | "Euthanasia" | single | We were inconceivably ancient before we ever knew who we were, |
| 2019-01-11 | 17 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "Sibirien" | single | Our journals are instruction manuals for obviated tasks. |
| 2019-01-11 | 22 | Trna | "Earthcult" | Earthcult +3 | with these ruins before they are ready to fall? |
| 2019-01-11 | 26 | Candlemass | "Astorolus - the Great Octopus" | single | We are the implications of mortality and zoning overlays and a planetary system with only one sun, |
| 2019-01-11 | 27 | Astronoid | "A New Color" | single | and thus we understand darkness |
| 2019-01-11 | 28 | A Secret Revealed | "Old Ghosts" | single | only half as well as shadows. |
| 2019-01-11 | 29 | Ancient Bards | "Fantasy's Wings" | single | But we understand revolution. |
| 2019-01-11 | 30 | Delain | "Masters Of Destiny" | single | We understand what defiance can win us, |
| 2019-01-11 | 31 | Valora | "Evil Circus" | single | what costumes can conceal from ourselves, |
| 2019-01-11 | 32 | Imperia | "Fear Is an Illusion" | single | and thus the negotiable terms of our freedom: |
| 2019-01-11 | 33 | Evergrey | "Weightless" | single | we give you legends, you give us gravity; |
| 2019-01-11 | 34 | Rhapsody Of Fire | "Rain of Fury" | single | we stipulate your permanence, you doubt our grace; |
| 2019-01-11 | 35 | Within Temptation | "In Vain - Single Edit" | single | we withhold diffidence, you suffuse; |
| 2019-01-11 | 36 | Beast In Black | "Die by the Blade" | single | but we only bow to gain a decisive second |
| 2019-01-11 | 37 | Darkwater | "Alive - Pt. II" | single | before you see the drawn sword |
| 2019-01-11 | 38 | Ancestral Legacy | "Leader Of Nothing" | The Silent Frontier 4 | and then nothing else. |
| 2019-01-11 | 51 | Lillake | "Waste" | Memory Lies | back into dream. |
| 2019-01-11 | 52 | Nailed to Obscurity | "The Aberrant Host" | Black Frost | Earth angels alight like the solid crushing sky just now touching the surface. |
| 2019-01-11 | 53 | Týr | "Fire and Flame" | single | This was why we employed gods to hold it up. |
| 2019-01-11 | 54 | Queensrÿche | "Dark Reverie" | single | In retrospect, we should have paid them, |
| 2019-01-11 | 55 | Degreed | "Ruins" | single | but we thought our walls would be enough. |
| 2019-01-11 | 56 | Dream Theater | "Fall into the Light" | single | You have medieval technology, but we have new Queensrÿche and Dream Theater songs on the same day. |
| 2019-01-11 | 57 | Oozing Wound | "Tween Shitbag" | single | An incomplete list of ungrateful things that will not be held in place by walls: |
| 2019-01-11 | 58 | Downfall Of Gaia | "We Pursue the Serpent of Time" | single | justice, |
| 2019-01-11 | 59 | Cyan Kicks | "Tidal Wave" | single | the sea, |
| 2019-01-11 | 60 | Swervedriver | "Spiked Flower" | single | everyone you have been, |
| 2019-01-11 | 81 | Integrity | "All Death is Mine" | single | These are our ritual end-times, |
| 2019-01-11 | 82 | Devil Master | "Desperate Shadow" | single | postulated in moral sihouette |
| 2019-01-11 | 85 | Skraeckoedlan | "Creature of Doggerland" | single | evil is just self-explanatory enough to provide for its self-defeat. |
| 2019-01-04 | 4 | IKINÄ | "Vaatteet päältä" | single | scream something wordless that means We Survived This Year no matter what it means. |
| 2019-01-04 | 5 | Rave The Reqviem | "Saint Jvdas" | FVNERAL [sic] | Circuitry and fury and redemption, |
| 2019-01-04 | 11 | Madder Mortem | "Liberator" | Marrow | Games are not substitutes for reform, but then theme songs for games are not subject to the rules of the games. |
| 2019-01-04 | 12 | Oceans of Slumber | "A Path to Broken Stars" | The Banished Heart | The war's winners get to write the anthems of record, |
| 2019-01-04 | 13 | Kobra And The Lotus | "My Immortal" | Prevail II | but the anthems you can think to write before the wars can win them without fighting. |
| 2019-01-04 | 14 | Myrkur | "Juniper" | single | To win a war without fighting it, you have to be able to see yourself losing it despite your righteousness, |
| 2019-01-04 | 15 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Nebulas" | Great Escape | to see your conscripted forces laying their weapons on the ground, |
| 2019-01-04 | 22 | PassCode | "Seize the day!!" | Locus | We are here with machines and lights and wonder, |
| 2019-01-04 | 33 | Dark Sarah | "Sky Sailing" | The Golden Moth | We have enough legends for |
| 2019-01-04 | 34 | Amaranthe | "365" | single | each day to hold one of its own, |
| 2019-01-04 | 35 | Alight | "Roses in the Dusk" | Spiral of Silence | and then set it free at sunset, |
| 2019-01-04 | 36 | Manigance | "Your Energy" | single | so that the night teems with disembodied allegory and the muttering of disenfrancised gods. |
| 2019-01-04 | 37 | Crematory | "Stay with Me" | Oblivion | We have enough love to swallow the hatred |
| 2019-01-04 | 38 | Amorphis | "Wrong Direction" | Queen of Time | and dissipate it into our blood as resolve. |
| 2019-01-04 | 39 | Deafheaven | "Honeycomb" | Ordinary Corrupt Human Love | We have enough blood. |
| 2019-01-04 | 40 | Therion | "Night Reborn" | Beloved Antichrist | We have seen this ornate evil in other outfits: |
| 2019-01-04 | 41 | June 1974 | "Arcadia" | Nemesi | brocade and exoskeletons and meticulous displays of violent precision, |
| 2019-01-04 | 45 | Issa | "Am I Losing You" | Run with the Pack | We make it to the lines of night and years for the feeling that this will end, |
| 2018-12-28 | 1 | Sithu Aye | "Primary Ignition" | Homebound | We are cryptic and obvious, |
| 2018-12-28 | 2 | Vision Divine | "Angel of Revenge" | single | gloriously uplifted |
| 2018-12-28 | 3 | Rotting Christ | "Heaven & Hell & Fire" | single | and gloriously entombed, |
| 2018-12-28 | 4 | Rimfrost | "Dawnbreaker" | single | marching. |
| 2018-12-28 | 5 | Fyrnask | "Blotan" | Forn | You cannot extend just one tiny hand into chaos, |
| 2018-12-28 | 17 | Dalriada | "Csillagok dala" | Csillagok dala +1 | regret on action. |
| 2018-12-28 | 25 | Sulphur Aeon | "The Summoning of Nyarlathotep" | The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos | We summon what we taunt, |
| 2018-12-28 | 26 | Collapse Under The Empire | "Anomaly" | single | institutionalize our improvised exceptions, |
| 2018-12-28 | 27 | Opera Magna | "In Nomine" | single | methodically strip words of their meanings |
| 2018-12-28 | 28 | Kaotiko | "Violencia" | single | by applying them as names. |
| 2018-12-28 | 41 | The Moth Gatherer | "Motionless in Oceania" | single | Look up, and then look down: |
| 2018-12-28 | 46 | Forest Green | "Send The Pain Below" | single | are usually just depressions where small pools of your emotion have become briefly isolated, |
| 2018-12-28 | 48 | Sorronia | "Nevermore" | single | But then, if we're honest, we only ever pretend to forget. |
| 2018-12-28 | 49 | Trepaneringsritualen | "A Cold Cell" | A Knife in Sound 2 | We accumulate wounds |
| 2018-12-28 | 50 | A Secret Revealed | "Empty Throne" | single | and scars, |
| 2018-12-28 | 51 | Svrm | "Zgaryshche" | Zgaryshche +3 | and draw maps of where we have survived, |
| 2018-12-28 | 59 | Andromida | "Enhanced" | single | You can change yourself slowly, with great effort; |
| 2018-12-28 | 63 | Pagan Reign | "Return of Slavonian Gods" | Once Again | Your clothes are somebody else's costume. |
| 2018-12-28 | 64 | September Mourning | "Glass Animals" | Glass Animals +1 | Your clothes are your own costume, |
| 2018-12-28 | 65 | As December Falls | "On the Edge" | single | and how all these stories that begin with defenseless nakedness |
| 2018-12-28 | 66 | Nailed to Obscurity | "Tears of the Eyeless" | single | become epic. |
| 2018-12-28 | 69 | Ewigheim | "Irrlicht" | single | No uniforms no wars, |
| 2018-12-28 | 71 | Altarage | "Inhabitant" | single | Chaos holds out a gauntlet |
| 2018-12-28 | 78 | Ääniportti | "Ihoonpiirtäjä" | single | Will you wear this as the regalia of dismay |
| 2018-12-21 | 1 | High Tension | "Red White Shame" | Purge | Bury the red and white hats, |
| 2018-12-21 | 2 | Candlemass | "The Omega Circle" | single | restart the ancient engines of justice and truth, |
| 2018-12-21 | 3 | Venom | "I Dark Lord" | Storm The Gates | send more guardians to the walls that face the northern abysses and holds. |
| 2018-12-21 | 4 | Vanum | "Jaws of Rapture" | single | We are done for now with gifts |
| 2018-12-21 | 5 | Ancient Bards | "Impious Dystopia" | single | and carollers' performative reverence. |
| 2018-12-21 | 6 | Mob Rules | "Way Back Home" | Beast Reborn | Repack the uneaten, |
| 2018-12-21 | 7 | Avantasia | "The Raven Child (feat. Hansi Kürsch & Jorn Lande)" | single | we return now to our homes |
| 2018-12-21 | 8 | Secret Rule | "The Endless" | single | and unwon battles, |
| 2018-12-21 | 9 | Myrath | "Dance" | single | reunbowed. |
| 2018-12-21 | 10 | Arwen | "Us or Them" | The Soul's Sentence | Time to redraw all the lines: |
| 2018-12-21 | 14 | Lemuria | "A Plague Upon the Land - Video Edit" | single | retributive and restorative. |
| 2018-12-21 | 15 | Crossfaith | "Soul Seeker" | single | Time to find our selves again, |
| 2018-12-21 | 16 | coldrain | "REVOLUTION" | single | and our powers, |
| 2018-12-21 | 17 | Discrepancies | "Let It Go" | single | and their triumphs. |
| 2018-12-21 | 18 | Atena | "Det Var Ikke Sånn Det Skulle Ende" | single | You think you command the encroaching frost, |
| 2018-12-21 | 21 | LiSA | "ADAMAS" | Akai Wana (Who Loves It?) / ADAMAS 4 | We multiply. |
| 2018-12-21 | 22 | シイナナルミ | "努力は必ず報われない" | single | You feel surrounded, |
| 2018-12-21 | 27 | Trollfest | "Kjettaren mot strømmen" | single | Time to retell legends of fearsome defeated monsters, |
| 2018-12-21 | 28 | Aktarum | "Trolls in the Fog" | Ragnatroll | so we remember the rhythms of how this will go, |
| 2018-12-21 | 29 | Bucovina | "Septentrion" | Septentrion | not so that we will win, because we will win regardless, |
| 2018-12-21 | 30 | Furor Gallico | "The Phoenix" | single | but so that the character of the victory will redeem as many of these losses as possible. |
| 2018-12-21 | 31 | Cruadalach | "Earth Café" | Rebel Against Me | Inhumanity cannot be subdued by margins, |
| 2018-12-21 | 32 | Irfan | "More Ta Nali" | Roots | it must be revealed. |
| 2018-12-21 | 47 | Demon Hunter | "Peace" | single | other than the shame you bring with you everywhere you step. |
| 2018-12-21 | 51 | Legion Of The Damned | "Slaves of the Southern Cross" | single | with a frankly stunning consistency of error, |
| 2018-12-21 | 59 | Khors | "Through the Realm of Unborn Stars" | Beyond the Bestial | in accidental magnanimity, which is the only kind you know, |
| 2018-12-21 | 60 | Elitania | "Cuando la Noche Abraza el Cielo" | single | donated your name. |
| 2018-12-21 | 61 | Cole Rolland | "Circles" | single | Digestion is a means, not an end, |
| 2018-12-21 | 62 | Louna | "Hearts of Steel" | Panopticon | and all that expensive steak and cheap ketchup is supposed to give you strength |
| 2018-12-07 | 6 | Rotting Christ | "Fire God and Fear" | single | Rotting Christ doom-march into "Fire God and Fear" and I'm in college discovering Bathory and Celtic Frost and the St. Matthew Passion. |
| 2018-12-07 | 7 | Windswept | "Stargazer" | single | "Stargazer" coruscates into blast-beat catharsis, and I'm buying Leviathan and Xasthur CDs, and I lived here because there were book stores and record stores. |
| 2018-12-07 | 8 | To the Rats and Wolves | "Cheap Love" | single | Things don't really end, but the next layer of secret truth is that they don't really begin. |
| 2018-12-07 | 10 | For I Am King | "Forever Blind" | I | The air moves. There are no parenthetical waves. |
| 2018-12-07 | 14 | Children Of Bodom | "Under Grass and Clover" | single | The guitar hook in "Under Grass and Clover" sinks its barbs, and I'm hearing "Neon Knights" for the first time. |
| 2018-12-07 | 15 | Dream Theater | "Untethered Angel" | single | "Untethered" spools out coils and currents and I have Queensrÿche and Fates Warning in my first headphones, also made of coils and currents. |
| 2018-12-07 | 16 | Soen | "Martyrs" | single | Every year there are fewer wires, but more connections. |
| 2018-12-07 | 18 | Ewigheim | "Vom Mond gemalt" | single | Every year the places you haven't been take one step closer. |
| 2018-12-07 | 55 | Percival Schuttenbach | "Pieśń małej Marii" | Dzikie pola | We will share the future with the legions of the reconstituted pasts, |
| 2018-12-07 | 58 | Barilari | "En Este Mismo Lugar" | single | Everywhere we look for gods, we catch sight of ourselves in other people's clothes. |
| 2018-12-07 | 65 | Vatican | "Thirty-One Staples" | single | We are all of these people |
| 2018-11-30 | 7 | Valkyrja | "Crowned Serpent" | Throne Ablaze | I have more songs than I have time, |
| 2018-11-30 | 8 | Beast In Black | "Sweet True Lies" | single | and this only makes my curiosity more frantic: |
| 2018-11-30 | 9 | Inglorious | "Ride to Nowhere" | single | if there are this many amazing songs, |
| 2018-11-30 | 10 | Cantique Lépreux | "Le feu Secret" | Paysages Polaires | there must be more. |
| 2018-11-30 | 11 | Downfall Of Gaia | "As Our Bones Break to the Dance" | single | If this world is collapsing, |
| 2018-11-30 | 12 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Come Forth Lazarus" | Vergelding – Dawn of the Planet of the Ashes | what other worlds are reaching their ends? |
| 2018-11-30 | 13 | Second To Sun | "Black Lines" | The Walk | If this is our new absence of light, |
| 2018-11-30 | 19 | Rhapsody Of Fire | "The Legend Goes On" | single | or lasercut into jigsaw puzzles, |
| 2018-11-30 | 20 | Veonity | "Rise Again" | Legend of the Starborn | autonomic rebellions |
| 2018-11-30 | 21 | Marius Danielsen | "Rise of the Dark Empire" | Legend of Valley Doom, Pt. 2 | and the intricately bottled pheromones of dramatic defeat, |
| 2018-11-30 | 24 | Windrunner | "Sakura" | MAI | toxic botany |
| 2018-11-30 | 25 | Monasteries | "Oxygen Debt" | Pulmonary Failure 5 | and the way my daughter still insists on calling the monasteries in Carcassone "monstrosities", |
| 2018-11-30 | 29 | Starkill | "Evil Inside" | single | and fear |
| 2018-11-30 | 30 | Liliac | "Paranoid" | single | until its own weight crushes it, |
| 2018-11-30 | 48 | OR3O | "Unravel" | single | All currencies are denominations of finity, |
| 2018-11-30 | 49 | Kuraiinu | "Katharsis" | single | redeemable for an illusory denial. |
| 2018-11-30 | 58 | Callejon | "Was Du Liebe nennst" | single | and searching dreams from which they awaken jolted |
| 2018-11-30 | 78 | LukHash | "Cyberninja" | single | and thus the first metal rats to come for us |
| 2018-11-30 | 97 | Lilith and the Knight | "War Cry" | single | pacifist battle anthems |
| 2018-11-30 | 103 | The Awakening | "Shore" | Chasm | Paint your armor; |
| 2018-11-30 | 105 | For I Am King | "Devotion" | single | The final battles are scheduled; |
| 2018-11-23 | 39 | Altarage | "Cyclopean Clash" | single | We are, maybe, at the beginning of the end of the era of borders. |
| 2018-11-23 | 40 | Evergrey | "A Silent Arc" | single | Maybe. |
| 2018-11-23 | 41 | MyGrain | "Deliverance" | III 3 | Some Japanese music-label executives and some American charlatans haven't accepted their fates, |
| 2018-11-23 | 42 | Within Temptation | "Firelight - Single Edit" | single | but there's good ramen in Boston and good sushi in Stockholm, |
| 2018-11-23 | 43 | Kalidia | "To the Darkness I Belong" | The Frozen Throne | and there's power metal in Italy |
| 2018-11-23 | 44 | Tigersclaw | "Force of Destiny" | single | and Germany and Russia. |
| 2018-11-23 | 45 | Tragodia | "Star-Driven" | Before the Fall | Oh, and Italy. |
| 2018-11-23 | 46 | Conception | "Grand Again" | My Dark Symphony | Last time Conception made an album, we still communicated with ravens. |
| 2018-11-16 | 1 | Myrkur | "Juniper" | single | We are redeemed by songs of imagined vengeance, |
| 2018-11-16 | 2 | Azusa | "Iniquitous Spiritual Praxis" | Heavy Yoke | by desperation as a geometry, |
| 2018-11-16 | 6 | In Mourning | "Debris" | Monolith | They used to come in the mail, harried by pelicans but essentially intact. |
| 2018-11-16 | 7 | Diabolical | "We Are Diabolical" | single | Nobody trusts the birds the same way any more. |
| 2018-11-16 | 8 | Dantalion | "Chaos is the New Age" | The Seventh Wandering Soul | Your logistics recapitulate your morality. |
| 2018-11-16 | 9 | Vanha | "Starless Sleep" | single | We are already mourning glaciers that have not yet fled. |
| 2018-11-16 | 10 | Divine Ascension | "New World" | The Uncovering | It will be different without ice. |
| 2018-11-16 | 18 | WagakkiBand | "光の中で" | 細雪 4 | The faraway are among us, |
| 2018-11-16 | 19 | D | "STAR SAPPHIRE" | Deadly sin 4 | that's how it works now. |
| 2018-11-16 | 22 | DEZERT | "ヘドロママ" | 「撲殺ヒーロー」 4 | when we have all these cameras |
| 2018-11-16 | 25 | Soen | "Rival" | single | We have called down the sky, |
| 2018-11-16 | 26 | Sarah Longfield | "Departure" | Disparity | and briefly mistaken its arrival for our power. |
| 2018-11-16 | 29 | Kalidia | "Circe's Spell" | single | that render all of us demiheroic. |
| 2018-11-16 | 31 | SuidAkrA | "Serpentine Origins" | Cimbric Yarns | we will still find you. |
| 2018-11-16 | 32 | Trollfest | "Espen Bin Askeladden" | single | Even the trolls |
| 2018-11-16 | 33 | Trollwar | "In Defiance" | Oath of the Storm | have indistinguishable factions |
| 2018-11-16 | 34 | Troll Bends Fir | "Две пьяненьких девчонки" | Лабиринт троллей | and what they believe is their own kind of moonlight. |
| 2018-11-16 | 36 | Queensrÿche | "Man the Machine" | single | and subjective infrared, |
| 2018-11-16 | 49 | Mendel | "Conjurer" | single | Drawing lines around where they may dream is a waste of even the most powerless magic, |
| 2018-11-16 | 71 | Sigh | "In Memories Delusional" | Heir To Despair | So tiny, so soft. |
| 2018-11-09 | 1 | Anomalie | "Aurora" | Integra | Who says funeral doom metal has no singles? |
| 2018-11-09 | 2 | Evoken | "Hypnagogia" | Hypnagogia | The apocalyptic is not inimical to concision, |
| 2018-11-09 | 3 | Ulthar | "Entropy-Atrophy" | Cosmovore | to the sharpness of the abyss in your trachea, |
| 2018-11-09 | 4 | Psycroptic | "As the Kingdom Drowns" | As the Kingdom Drowns | to the seductively gleaming gears of crushing machines. |
| 2018-11-09 | 5 | Four Stroke Baron | "Cyborg, Pt. 2: The City" | single | Steel troops pour through the rifts, |
| 2018-11-09 | 6 | Cult Leader | "Isolation in the Land of Milk and Honey" | A Patient Man | our fears shining in their lenses, |
| 2018-11-09 | 7 | Anal Trump | "If You Wanted to Qualify for Health Insurance, Then Maybe You Shouldn't Have Gotten Raped?" | The First 100 Songs | our vanity against their blades. |
| 2018-11-09 | 8 | Lucifer's Child | "Black Heart" | The Order | Dread and revulsion are powers; petulance is a weakness in the shape of power. |
| 2018-11-09 | 9 | NanowaR of Steel | "Barbie, Milf Princess of the Twilight" | Stairway To Valhalla | You shouldn't take anything seriously if it always or never wants to be taken seriously, |
| 2018-11-09 | 10 | Veonity | "Outcasts of Eden" | single | but any mixture is fine. |
| 2018-11-09 | 11 | Minniva | "Demons" | single | The dragons do not imagine themselves, |
| 2018-11-09 | 12 | Reliqa | "Hangman" | single | they know their own scalar mass, |
| 2018-11-09 | 13 | Flowerleaf | "Firesoul" | Stronger | and live with the eternal aftertaste of breathing fire. |
| 2018-11-09 | 43 | Nordic Union | "My Fear And My Faith" | Second Coming | We misunderstand the color of the air as metaphor |
| 2018-11-09 | 44 | Artillery | "Pain" | single | only until we inhale, |
| 2018-11-09 | 54 | Unhold | "Deeper In" | Here is the Blood | The interesting thing about our self-threatened existence |
| 2018-11-09 | 74 | Spell | "Never Enough" | Full Moon Sessions | and the memories of the nights |
| 2018-11-09 | 88 | Old Wounds | "Your God v. Their God" | Glow | and your blood is so close to their blood, |
| 2018-11-09 | 89 | Louna | "Shadow Kingdoms" | single | and you will both see morning |
| 2018-11-09 | 90 | Maraton | "Mosaic" | single | or neither. |
| 2018-11-02 | 11 | Sylvaine | "Severance" | Atoms Aligned, Coming Undone | and then it falls away out of our reach |
| 2018-11-02 | 12 | Azusa | "Fine Lines" | single | and we are left in these present moments with only whatever we are holding right now: |
| 2018-11-02 | 13 | envy | "Dawn and Gaze" | Alnair in August 2 | each other, our future, |
| 2018-11-02 | 14 | Minniva | "Home" | single | how we remember things better than they were, |
| 2018-11-02 | 15 | Raven Quinn | "Alchemy" | single | or at least grander, |
| 2018-11-02 | 16 | Cellar Darling | "Insomnia" | single | or part of stories we've had time to compose in redolent retrospect. |
| 2018-11-02 | 17 | Battledragon | "Bailando" | single | This is another of the thousand ways to delineate belief systems of fear or hope. |
| 2018-11-02 | 18 | Persona | "Skeleton Dance" | single | Fear sorts realities into that which much be distorted and that which must be denied. |
| 2018-11-02 | 27 | Cardio Kazan | "Pyro" | Masque Ellipse | Joy is not a result of what exists, |
| 2018-11-02 | 28 | Uni/Vs | "Smile" | Smile 6 | but of how gently we disassemble it |
| 2018-11-02 | 36 | Hysteric Panic | "ノット・イコール" | Hypnotic Poison | when we gently resort to revolutionary overwhelming hope. |
| 2018-11-02 | 42 | The Algorithm | "Superscalar" | Compiler Optimization Techniques | we can see how we might slowly win. |
| 2018-11-02 | 43 | The Ocean | "Ordovicium: The Glaciation of Gondwana" | Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic | Hate turns lumberingly upon itself, |
| 2018-11-02 | 44 | Toska | "Congress" | Fire by the Silos | but we can offer swords in advance of its teeth. |
| 2018-11-02 | 47 | Black Light Discipline | "Faded" | single | We can have the courage to answer simple questions. |
| 2018-11-02 | 48 | Huora | "Koditon" | Kosto elää! | We can hold systems to account for their willful misconstructions until they disintegrate |
| 2018-11-02 | 64 | Integrity | "Bark at the Moon" | single | We have done so much out of misguided reverence, but not much stays holy forever. |
| 2018-11-02 | 74 | Sündenrausch | "Kontrolle" | single | But love is not like penguins: |
| 2018-10-26 | 25 | Sirenia | "In Styx Embrace" | Arcane Astral Aeons | And then we explode |
| 2018-10-26 | 26 | Epica | "Beyond the Matrix: The Battle (feat. Metropole Orkest)" | Beyond the Matrix: The Battle (feat. Metropole Orkest) +1 | and simmer, in combinatorial orders. |
| 2018-10-26 | 27 | Blackbriar | "Let Me In" | We'd Rather Burn EP 5 | We have come from all of these stars; |
| 2018-10-26 | 28 | Kalidia | "Black Sails" | single | we will return to them as pirates and heroes, |
| 2018-10-26 | 29 | Cryptopsy | "Sire of Sin" | The Book of Suffering - Tome II 4 | basilisks and their idols, |
| 2018-10-26 | 30 | Cognitive | "Omnicide" | Matricide | avengers and their diffident biographers, |
| 2018-10-26 | 31 | Lantern | "In cambio di una pistola, Pt. 1" | Ancóra | confessions and cathartic battlements, |
| 2018-10-26 | 32 | Wolfhorde | "Doctor of the Plague" | single | disconcerted breath |
| 2018-10-26 | 33 | Elderwind | "Altay" | The Colder the Night | and its reconcerted air. |
| 2018-10-26 | 34 | Howling North | "From Nothing to Eternity" | single | All these paths, regardless of your attempted direction of movement, |
| 2018-10-26 | 35 | Eneferens | "Selene" | The Bleakness of Our Constant | lead past the same cairns |
| 2018-10-26 | 36 | THRON | "Under a Bloodred Sky" | Abysmal | into the same twilit abysses. |
| 2018-10-26 | 37 | Hissing | "Backwards Descent" | Permanent Destitution | The bleakest songs say "here we will camp", |
| 2018-10-26 | 38 | Haken | "Nil by Mouth" | Vector | but every moment we survive here, a little more mechanism asserts itself. |
| 2018-10-26 | 39 | The Ocean | "Cambrian II: Eternal Recurrence" | single | The dinosaurs had the kind of numerology you get from only being able to count to two; |
| 2018-10-26 | 40 | Poppy | "X" | single | we are omnivorous and have the necks to see both of our hands at once. |
| 2018-10-26 | 41 | Alkonost | "Тропа К Весне" | Октаграмма | This is why they have fossils and we have legends |
| 2018-10-26 | 42 | Nothgard | "Guardians of Sanity" | Malady X | and fortresses |
| 2018-10-26 | 43 | Rúnahild | "Disir" | Seidsang | and fire. |
| 2018-10-26 | 44 | Ahnengrab | "Katharsis" | Schattenseiten | And this in turn is why you have choices: |
| 2018-10-26 | 45 | Abstract Void | "As I Watch the Sunset Fade" | Back to Reality | corrode or effervesce; |
| 2018-10-26 | 71 | Skull Fist | "Witch Hunt" | Way of the Road | Witch hunts are allegories of reified intolerance. Unless you actually find witches, |
| 2018-10-26 | 72 | Icarus Witch | "Lightning Strikes" | Goodbye Cruel World | in which case they are love stories. |
| 2018-10-26 | 73 | Warrel Dane | "Madame Satan" | Shadow Work | The palaces and dungeons of the gods were laid out by the same planners. The lighting changes, the rituals proceed. |
| 2018-10-26 | 74 | Lotus Eater | "The Fear" | single | Different paths approach, the same roads leave. |
| 2018-10-26 | 75 | Invocation | "Vigilia" | En El Nombre De La Muerte 4 | We huddle between the infinite and the finite, |
| 2018-10-26 | 76 | Aethere | "Ouroboros" | Open My Wounds | but both of those are models of possibility: |
| 2018-10-26 | 83 | Нуки | "Страна" | single | or sluiced into moats when our aspirations overflow? |
| 2018-10-26 | 87 | Season of Ghosts | "Astero (Id)" | A Leap of Faith | saying "environmentalism is a rehearsal for living among the stars", |
| 2018-10-19 | 15 | Rave The Reqviem | "Saint Jvdas" | FVNERAL [sic] | to turn away people asking for our help. |
| 2018-10-19 | 16 | Amaranthe | "Momentum" | HELIX | This fear and hatred is human, of course. |
| 2018-10-19 | 17 | BABYMETAL | "Starlight" | single | It is human to panic in the instants when darkness falls, |
| 2018-10-19 | 18 | Arion | "No One Stands In My Way" | single | human to fight constantly for breath, |
| 2018-10-19 | 19 | Dust in Mind | "From Ashes to Flames" | From Ashes to Flames | human to lash out at things you don't understand. |
| 2018-10-19 | 20 | Orion's Reign | "The Gravewalker" | Scores of War | Mostly for babies, though, |
| 2018-10-19 | 21 | Guardians Of Time | "Valhalla Awaits" | Tearing up the World | or the nearly dead. |
| 2018-10-19 | 22 | The Unity | "You Got Me Wrong" | Rise | Children and adults and other people capable of understanding |
| 2018-10-19 | 23 | Septem Voices | "Камень на камне" | single | usually opt for it over ignorance, |
| 2018-10-19 | 31 | Windrunner | "Orchid" | single | you deserve a place here |
| 2018-10-19 | 32 | Haken | "A Cell Divides" | single | as much as, |
| 2018-10-19 | 33 | Witherfall | "Shadows" | single | just to pick a few random examples, |
| 2018-10-19 | 34 | Berried Alive | "Pun of You Left" | Bearies Alive | the proprietors of fraudulent universities, |
| 2018-10-19 | 35 | Andy James | "As I Fall" | Arrival | or literal infidels or systemic tax evaders, |
| 2018-10-19 | 36 | Rob Scallon | "Evidence in the Furnace" | Sunday Uke Group 6 | or people unwilling to raise their asses out of a golf cart to walk a couple blocks, |
| 2018-10-19 | 37 | Jinjer | "Ape" | single | or basically incapable of rising to any occasion. |
| 2018-10-19 | 38 | Nothgard | "Fall of an Empire" | single | Walking here is how we got people on this part of the planet in the first place. |
| 2018-10-19 | 39 | Einherjer | "Mine Våpen Mine Ord" | single | Americans let our government be temporarily run by racists, |
| 2018-10-19 | 58 | Jason Wallach | "The Dead City" | The Secrets of Vanished Aeons | Bring your despair; |
| 2018-10-19 | 59 | DEADLIFE | "Before the Rain Falls" | Variations on the Resolve | we have despair, too. |
| 2018-10-19 | 62 | Shining | "Take Me" | Animal | We know, as loudly as some of us pretend not to, |
| 2018-10-19 | 69 | Digimortal | "Новая эра" | single | and that the point of borders is not to defend them, |
| 2018-10-19 | 70 | Northward | "Storm in a Glass" | Northward | or render them in stone, |
| 2018-10-12 | 1 | Manigance | "Your Energy" | single | It is so tempting to believe that everyone would be improved if they just liked the things I like, starting with this majestic power-metal anthem by the French band Manigance. Not only does it instill an inexorable love of existence by its melodic nature, but it gives you a chance to think about whether they're actually singing "I want to feel your breasts" or it's an accent thing, and whether that affects what you think about it or whether you still feel like encouraging other people to listen to it and how those two things relate to each other. |
| 2018-10-12 | 2 | Sirenia | "Into the Night" | single | But of course the very first elementary lesson in social empathy is realizing that euphoria is universal, but catalysts are individual. |
| 2018-10-12 | 3 | Amaranthe | "Inferno" | single | This is good. Imagine a world where songs and things and humans had objective lovability, and the resulting competitive moral and logistical carnage. |
| 2018-10-12 | 4 | Divine Ascension | "Evermore" | single | If this run of new metal songs, which for me unravel despair and recenter me in a place of frankly unreasonable faith in humanity, leave you still nasueated by political hypocrisy and climate threat, this is normal. |
| 2018-10-12 | 5 | Xiphea | "Ice Blood Cave" | Everland | Regrettable, because listen how hard these people have clearly worked to learn to play like this. |
| 2018-10-12 | 6 | Dark Moor | "Birth of the Sun" | single | Centuries of erratic aesthetic evolution have gone into the development of the artistic calculus of metal, |
| 2018-10-12 | 7 | Dragony | "Angels on Neon Wings" | Masters of the Multiverse | establishing these particular parameters of maximalism as extensions of classical proportion and mythological resonance and what it looks like when things explode at a safe distance. |
| 2018-10-12 | 8 | Seventh Wonder | "Dream Machines" | Tiara | Decades of technology originally designed for the space program (I assume) have been repurposed to produce guitar tones that induce the same exhilirating vertigo as rocket launches, |
| 2018-10-12 | 9 | Guardians Of Time | "As I Burn" | single | but with apparently infinite passenger capacity, |
| 2018-10-12 | 10 | Nordic Union | "Because of Us" | single | and precisely because it's easier to imagine (if only partly true) that infinite listeners only elevate a song in the way that they would crush a restaurant or a pet goat, |
| 2018-10-12 | 11 | Agrypnie | "Neon" | Pavor Nocturnus | of course I want everyone to hear and love these songs. |
| 2018-10-12 | 12 | Agrypnie | "Grenzgænger" | Grenzgaenger | Because, also, they turn darker. |
| 2018-10-12 | 13 | Nachtmystium | "Silver Lanterns" | single | Mythologies counterbalance the ethereal and the infernal, and if you soar with me, you will crash with me, and then I won't crash alone |
| 2018-10-12 | 14 | Mesarthim | "Ω" | The Density Parameter | into the chaotic dimensions. |
| 2018-10-12 | 15 | Evoken | "Ceremony of Bleeding" | single | Shared mechanisms for triangulating joy are appealing, |
| 2018-10-12 | 16 | Set and Setting | "Revisions Through..." | Tabula Rasa | but shared mechanisms for confronting threats are crucial, |
| 2018-10-12 | 17 | Cantique Lépreux | "Paysages polaires III" | single | and voluntary immersion in the superficially antithetical is how we rehearse our responses. |
| 2018-10-12 | 18 | Vanhelgd | "Så förgås världens härlighet" | Deimos Sanktuarium | The ability to imagine a world in which everyone loves the frightening things you love is the dual application of curiosity and conscience to your own natural instincts. |
| 2018-10-12 | 19 | Akitsa | "Siècle Pastoral" | Credo | If we all loved the same things, we imagine that our responsibilities to each other would be more self-evident. |
| 2018-10-12 | 20 | Kjeld | "Banier fan Frisia" | Banier fan Frisia +2 | If we all feared the same things... |
| 2018-10-12 | 45 | Beyond Creation | "Surface's Echoes" | Algorythm | but in truth he would have to work to rise to the level of racism, |
| 2018-10-12 | 47 | Stam1na | "Gaian lapsi (feat. Anna Eriksson)" | Taival | and he has no such set. |
| 2018-10-05 | 6 | Behemoth | "Bartzabel" | single | He says his enemies are doing these things |
| 2018-10-05 | 7 | Author & Punisher | "The Speaker is Systematically Blown" | Beastland | because those are the things he would do if he were them. |
| 2018-10-05 | 8 | Zatokrev | "Silent Gods" | single | When our unjustified new justice tells the Senate and the public |
| 2018-10-05 | 9 | Arion | "Punish You" | single | that a sexual reference is a drinking game, |
| 2018-10-05 | 10 | Omnimar | "Forever" | single | he is explaining that he believes public discourse is a competition of assertions, |
| 2018-10-05 | 11 | Kalidia | "Frozen Throne" | single | won by faction dominance, |
| 2018-10-05 | 12 | Asphodelia | "Alive" | Welcome Apocalypse | not an assessment of truth or morality, |
| 2018-10-05 | 13 | Orion's Reign | "Nostos" | single | and he is declaring his faction. |
| 2018-10-05 | 23 | PassCode | "激動プログレッシブ" | Locus | and the Democrats who made them want to were its outriders. |
| 2018-10-05 | 24 | BAND-MAID | "glory" | single | The Democrats who did change the rule for federal judges |
| 2018-10-05 | 25 | NECRONOMIDOL | "Dawnslayer" | Voidhymn | were courtiers of a failed state, |
| 2018-10-05 | 62 | Psycroptic | "Directive" | single | Revoking environmental regulations on the verge of species collapse |
| 2018-10-05 | 63 | Arsis | "Hell Sworn" | single | is regal decadence |
| 2018-10-05 | 64 | Legion Of The Damned | "The Widow´s Breed" | single | of a failed state. |
| 2018-10-05 | 67 | Earth Ship | "Resonant Sun" | Resonant Sun | or will you take its debris in the back of your head? |
| 2018-10-05 | 93 | Massive Scar Era | "Oblivious" | Color Blind 5 | or looking away from the sun. |
| 2018-09-28 | 1 | Elyose | "Un autre été" | Reconnexion | Gravity pulls at us, but our light escapes, |
| 2018-09-28 | 2 | Amaranthe | "Countdown" | single | bounces off the turrets of the hovering battle cruisers, |
| 2018-09-28 | 3 | Leah | "Lion Arises" | single | and returns to awaken us. |
| 2018-09-28 | 4 | Raven Tide | "Lipstick Smile" | single | We gather our plans, |
| 2018-09-28 | 5 | Dynazty | "In the Arms of a Devil" | Firesign | cross-check our compacts, |
| 2018-09-28 | 6 | Stratovarius | "Enigma" | Enigma: Intermission 2 | and immure into incompleteness. |
| 2018-09-28 | 7 | Brainstorm | "Jeanne Boulet (1764)" | Midnight Ghost | Uncertainty always beats history. |
| 2018-09-28 | 8 | Skull Fist | "No More Running" | single | Time expires and you stand where you're standing. |
| 2018-09-28 | 9 | Edu Falaschi | "Streets of Florence" | The Glory of the Sacred Truth 2 | This is why we have zoning and draw lines on the streets, |
| 2018-09-28 | 10 | Romanthica | "Solo Si Estás" | Músicas para el Fin del Mundo | and then walk along them in the rain in glittering shoes: |
| 2018-09-28 | 11 | A Forest Of Stars | "Children of the Night Soil" | Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes | because we know the difference between darkness |
| 2018-09-28 | 12 | Vreid | "The Dead White" | Lifehunger | and heritage |
| 2018-09-28 | 13 | Horrendous | "Obulus" | Idol | is measured not in statuary mass |
| 2018-09-28 | 14 | Revocation | "That Which Consumes All Things" | The Outer Ones | but in the loving defiance of entropy. |
| 2018-09-28 | 15 | Anaal Nathrakh | "New Bethlehem / Mass Death Futures" | A New Kind of Horror | Defiance decodes denial; |
| 2018-09-28 | 16 | Wolfheart | "Forge with Fire" | Constellation of the Black Light | destruction is a cargo-cult version of forgetting; |
| 2018-09-28 | 17 | Slegest | "Blodets Varme Gjennom Meg" | single | you are walking along lines that have not been drawn yet. |
| 2018-09-28 | 18 | Dödsrit | "Aura" | Spirit Crusher | How could they be? Until you know where you will step? |
| 2018-09-28 | 36 | Haken | "Puzzle Box" | single | melts, |
| 2018-09-28 | 37 | Arkentype | "Rosetta" | single | drains away, |
| 2018-09-28 | 41 | The Angelic Process | "Burning in the Undertow of God" | Weighing Souls With Sand | You may not invoke higher auspices for your petty disdains. |
| 2018-09-28 | 50 | DIR EN GREY | "Followers" | The Insulated World | The point of gods, and of letting them in, |
| 2018-09-28 | 74 | Fleddy Melculy | "IK BEN KWAAD" | De Kerk Van Melculy | sometimes just to find out again that different answers aren't better, but having them is. |
| 2018-09-28 | 75 | Warrel Dane | "As Fast as the Others" | single | Legacies are not tax strategies. |
| 2018-09-21 | 11 | Dark Sarah | "Wheel" | The Golden Moth | all stories contain some kind of magnificence: |
| 2018-09-21 | 12 | Sirenia | "Love Like Cyanide" | single | magnificent self-destruction, |
| 2018-09-21 | 13 | Dragony | "Flame of Tar Valon" | single | glorious defeat, |
| 2018-09-21 | 14 | Skálmöld | "Móri" | single | methodical bravery, |
| 2018-09-21 | 15 | Brainstorm | "Revealing the Darkness" | single | embattled determination, |
| 2018-09-21 | 16 | MaYaN | "Rebirth from Despair" | Dhyana | memory in alabaster |
| 2018-09-21 | 17 | Ten | "Jericho" | single | or stones, |
| 2018-09-21 | 18 | Sound Storm | "To the Stars" | single | paths charted upwards |
| 2018-09-21 | 19 | Hell Boulevard | "Satan in Wonderland" | In Black We Trust | or down, |
| 2018-09-21 | 20 | Icarus Witch | "Misfortune Teller" | single | legends of the future |
| 2018-09-21 | 21 | Aborted | "Farewell to the Flesh" | TerrorVision | or its irrelevance. |
| 2018-09-21 | 22 | Draugurinn | "Spíra" | Spíra +3 | Even stasis is a landscape. |
| 2018-09-21 | 74 | Savn | "Save Me" | single | When you fear to sing, you want songs about you. |
| 2018-09-21 | 79 | Sumac | "Attis' Blade" | Love In Shadow | But the demon's blade is not a drinking game, either, |
| 2018-09-21 | 90 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Fist of Stalin" | single | I hope to one day be that brave. |
| 2018-09-21 | 91 | Abysmal Torment | "The Misanthrope" | The Misanthrope | Actually, in fact, I have to be some version of brave myself, right now. |
| 2018-09-21 | 92 | Forest of Shadows | "Drowned by Guilt" | single | Unlike you, of course, I brought this moment upon myself, |
| 2018-09-21 | 101 | Black Tongue | "Ultima Necat" | single | Ironic. I did study hard. Sadly, that's the true part, and the part that doesn't matter. |
| 2018-09-21 | 103 | Cruadalach | "Eyes Wide Open" | Raised by Wolves | I was raised to be a champion. |
| 2018-09-21 | 117 | Tenebra | "El Ultimo Viaje" | El ültimo Viaje | Maybe that's all you care about any more. But I have my daughters' basketball teams. Or maybe I don't, I don't know. I have to figure out how to tell them I'm sorry somehow, too. Jesus. |
| 2018-09-14 | 2 | Dark Sarah | "Sky Sailing" | single | And what is a song, by definition, if not an argument for not dying? |
| 2018-09-14 | 3 | Within Temptation | "The Reckoning" | single | I miss Scott Hutchinson and Scott Miller and Stuart Adamson. I miss my friend Art. |
| 2018-09-14 | 4 | Ignea | "Queen Dies" | single | They made decisions I disagree with, which would be fine if they weren't irrevocable. |
| 2018-09-14 | 5 | Leah | "Edge of Your Sword" | single | All I really ask is that you not give up on everybody by giving up on yourself. |
| 2018-09-14 | 6 | The Unity | "Last Betrayal" | Rise | I mean, that's not true, it's not all I ask, |
| 2018-09-14 | 7 | Rob Scallon | "Prison Break" | single | but if it were all I could ask, |
| 2018-09-14 | 8 | Northward | "Get What You Give" | single | I could make it be enough. |
| 2018-09-14 | 12 | Tribulation | "Nightbound" | Down Below | every time someone has the courage to say something both true and new, |
| 2018-09-14 | 13 | Bosse-de-Nage | "The Trench" | Further Still | every time someone holds an opportunity for cynical nihilism in their hand |
| 2018-09-14 | 14 | Abhorrence | "Anthem for the Anthropocene" | Megalohydrothalassophobic 5 | and chooses, instead of inflicting it on the world, to give it an endearing name and a creation myth and keep it as a pet and a warning. |
| 2018-09-14 | 15 | Dödsrit | "A Drowning Voice" | single | We are imperfect, |
| 2018-09-14 | 16 | Future Usses | "What Is Anything" | single | but we can be the elegant museums of our weakest inclinations. |
| 2018-09-14 | 40 | A Storm of Light | "Prime Time" | single | when will you ever get a chance to evaluate your alternative theories? |
| 2018-09-14 | 41 | Ally the Fiddle | "Center Su(O)N'" | Up | We are the creatures who won't shut up, and we're all over this thing. |
| 2018-09-14 | 46 | Treat | "Build the Love" | Tunguska | it just never gives up. |
| 2018-09-14 | 47 | Dynazty | "Firesign" | single | Can you live for Swedish power-metal for four minutes? |
| 2018-09-14 | 50 | Romanthica | "Esta Oscuridad" | single | There isn't that much ocean between Galway and Graceland and Ceuta and St. John. |
| 2018-09-14 | 51 | Ethernity | "The Human Race Extinction" | The Human Race Extinction | Emigrating won't be easy, but the vikings sailed to lands they couldn't even see. |
| 2018-09-14 | 61 | Irreversible Mechanism | "Existence II: Collision" | Immersion | and the winds only howl to be heard. |
| 2018-09-14 | 66 | PANTHEIST | "Control and Fire" | Seeking Infinity | Don't give up yet, I want you to hear this. It's a little long, |
| 2018-09-14 | 79 | Rave The Reqviem | "Are Yov Happy Now, Fidelio?" | single | A narcisist hears all anthems as rebellion, |
| 2018-09-14 | 88 | And Then She Came | "Perfect as You Are" | single | You thought you won when you taught us your name, |
| 2018-09-07 | 1 | Vreid | "One Hundred Years" | single | Take the textures with which you have covered yourself, invert them, and find out how the seams were sewn. |
| 2018-09-07 | 2 | Anomalie | "Aurora" | single | Find out where your blood goes after it leaves the surface. |
| 2018-09-07 | 3 | Behemoth | "Wolves Ov Siberia" | single | Attempt a variant cartology of anything, |
| 2018-09-07 | 4 | Sylvaine | "Mørklagt" | single | in which any desperate quality is transposed into joy. |
| 2018-09-07 | 5 | Monstrosity | "The Proselygeist" | The Passage of Existence | Stipulate that you have won or lost the next fight, |
| 2018-09-07 | 6 | Karg | "Petrichor" | single | and are left to recover for a month in a modernist island complex, |
| 2018-09-07 | 7 | Slegest | "Undergangens Tankesmed" | single | surrounded day and night by macaws and wolves. |
| 2018-09-07 | 8 | Psycroptic | "We Were the Keepers" | single | If you radio for help, |
| 2018-09-07 | 9 | Arsis | "Tricking the Gods" | single | you will reach it, but also demonic acolytes who are less organized but closer. |
| 2018-09-07 | 10 | Evoken | "Valorous Consternation" | single | All art balances on the fulcrum between calling out and staying safely hidden. |
| 2018-09-07 | 11 | The Ocean | "Permian: The Great Dying" | single | You can detect hints of this terror and thrill in all the classic dinosaur novels from just before the fall, |
| 2018-09-07 | 12 | Leaves' Eyes | "Riders on the Wind" | Riders on the Wind +2 | but you hear it so much more vividly in their music. |
| 2018-09-07 | 13 | Seventh Wonder | "The Everones" | single | It's easier to imagine their end coming quickly, of course, |
| 2018-09-07 | 14 | Sins In Vain | "Gold (Is Just a Colour)" | single | but in reality the meteor hung in the sky for days, |
| 2018-09-07 | 15 | Manimal | "Traitor" | Purgatorio | sinking lower and larger. |
| 2018-09-07 | 16 | Minniva | "Square Hammer/April Rain" | single | They knew, |
| 2018-09-07 | 17 | The Unity | "The Storm" | single | and it's true, of course, that many panicked, |
| 2018-09-07 | 18 | Outloud | "I Am the One" | single | but not all, and naturally it is their music, their last songs, |
| 2018-09-07 | 38 | WagakkiBand | "細雪" | オトノエ | or infrastructure, |
| 2018-09-07 | 44 | PassCode | "Taking you out" | single | and how vicarious self-awareness wilts into pity. |
| 2018-09-07 | 52 | Rob Scallon | "Piece by Piece" | Sunday Uke Group 2 2 | Even ukuleles are lined with metal, or close enough. |
| 2018-09-07 | 53 | Madder Mortem | "Liberator" | single | Metal is a methodology of triumph, |
| 2018-09-07 | 57 | Stam1na | "Enkelinmurskain" | single | Are we rehearsing for what it will feel like if we ever win? |
| 2018-09-07 | 63 | Korpiklaani | "Korpikuusen kyynel" | Kulkija | or these centuries of soil. |
| 2018-09-07 | 73 | Gåte | "Bannlyst" | single | Into the headphones, play this song. Any song, really, but if you're going to listen to any song, it might as well be what you get, both stylistically and geographically, if you cross CHVRCHES and Nightwish. |
| 2018-09-07 | 75 | Leæther Strip | "99 Luftballons" | Æppreciation III Deutsche Wælle | German enough or not, |
| 2018-09-07 | 76 | Hämatom | "Palmen an der Wand" | Lichterloh 4 | trapped or free, |
| 2018-09-07 | 100 | Sadness | "Absolution" | Rain | but not what defines you. |
| 2018-08-31 | 8 | Beyond The Black | "Hysteria" | Heart Of The Hurricane | All storms are metaphors, |
| 2018-08-31 | 9 | Warrel Dane | "Disconnection System" | single | but so are we. |
| 2018-08-31 | 10 | A Forest Of Stars | "Decomposing Deity Dance Hall" | single | Do not let anybody tell you that metaphors do not live rich internal lives. |
| 2018-08-31 | 11 | Aborted | "Vespertine Decay" | single | Just like you, we are exalted in stained glass |
| 2018-08-31 | 12 | Omnium Gatherum | "Over the Battlefield" | The Burning Cold | and weighed down by lead |
| 2018-08-31 | 13 | Wolfheart | "The Saw" | single | and cut out of webs. |
| 2018-08-31 | 14 | Iskald | "Offer Av Livet" | Innhøstinga | We march at the heads of ghost-armies, |
| 2018-08-31 | 15 | Helrunar | "Blutmond" | single | and at the feet of mountains. |
| 2018-08-31 | 17 | Nachtlieder | "Claws and Bone" | Lynx | released in darkness, |
| 2018-08-31 | 18 | Void Eater | "Hul" | II | left to assign our own identities to "abandoned" or "delivered", |
| 2018-08-31 | 19 | Norrsköld | "Embrace the light" | Fear the light 2 | feared |
| 2018-08-31 | 24 | Haken | "The Good Doctor" | single | and incompatibilties, |
| 2018-08-31 | 25 | Beyond Creation | "Algorythm" | single | hoping plaintively for a method where we know there is ultimately only love. |
| 2018-08-31 | 26 | Frostbitt | "Magma" | single | We are distributed across the abyss between ice and fire, |
| 2018-08-31 | 30 | heidi. | "逆回転シンドローム" | ケセラセラ | and our most electrifying clothes. |
| 2018-08-31 | 38 | Alkonost | "Vrata Zimy" | single | or write it on stones or bark, |
| 2018-08-31 | 39 | Theudho | "Waar Kraaien de Ondergang Bezingen" | De Roep Van Het Woud | or entrust it accidentally to messengers or deliberately to spies. |
| 2018-08-31 | 42 | Helion Prime | "A King Is Born" | Terror of the Cybernetic Space Monster | and invasive species |
| 2018-08-31 | 43 | Manimal | "Purgatorio" | single | and subversive doubts |
| 2018-08-31 | 44 | Ethernity | "Grey Skies" | single | and majestic gates. |
| 2018-08-31 | 67 | Diztord | "Too Little Too Late" | single | forgotten in clockwork. |
| 2018-08-24 | 1 | Dynazty | "The Grey" | single | This is like "Rainbow in the Dark" merged into "Amaranthe", so it obviously has to be my favorite song for at least a week. |
| 2018-08-24 | 2 | Dark Sarah | "The Gods Speak" | single | Or for four minutes, anyway, and what are weeks? Dark Sarah are the band Heidi Parviainen formed after leaving Amberian Dawn, and Amberian Dawn got a new singer and stayed awesome as well, so that's how you combat entropy. |
| 2018-08-24 | 3 | Helion Prime | "Urth" | single | Helion Prime are a science-based power-metal band. Can you really have a power-metal band that isn't based on science? Helion Prime are a self-awarely science-based power-metal band. |
| 2018-08-24 | 4 | Dark Millennium | "Moving Light" | Where Oceans Collide | I like to imagine that Dark Millennium are the band you get if you start from the faith that Celtic Frost's Cold Lake is a rough template for something great and decent that just wasn't Celtic Frost. |
| 2018-08-24 | 5 | Fit For A King | "Oblivion" | single | If you punch an armored wall with an armored fist, and both survive, you have the basic concept of metalcore drumming. |
| 2018-08-24 | 6 | Starkill | "Until We Fall" | single | I guess I wouldn't want all melodic death-metal bands to try to become PassCode. Probably. |
| 2018-08-24 | 7 | Korpiklaani | "Aallon alla" | single | Smells Like Forest Spirit. |
| 2018-08-24 | 8 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Great Escape, Pt. 1" | single | Sometimes the void gazes back at you, |
| 2018-08-24 | 9 | Second To Sun | "To Live" | single | or you share a mutual regard, |
| 2018-08-24 | 10 | Mantar | "Midgard Serpent (Seasons of Failure)" | The Modern Art of Setting Ablaze | and duel for the loser's obligation to write the battlemyth, |
| 2018-08-24 | 11 | Madder Mortem | "Far from Home" | single | and the winner's right to stipulate its texture. |
| 2018-08-17 | 10 | Mob Rules | "Children's Crusade" | single | It is a fairly small painting, mounted at about human head-height on a dedicated mid-room wall towards the end of a side-gallery filled with other paintings, many of them larger. |
| 2018-08-17 | 11 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Obscene as Cancer" | single | It is behind glass, and the glass is behind a wooden guardrail, and the wooden guardrail is behind a velvet rope. |
| 2018-08-17 | 12 | BAEST | "Hecatomb" | Danse Macabre | Thus there are no good angles for a selfie with the Mona Lisa, which might make you wonder why to even bother. |
| 2018-08-17 | 20 | Annisokay | "Coma Blue" | Arms | and in Paris for only a few days, |
| 2018-08-17 | 22 | Shreddy Krueger | "This Could Be Anywhere in the World" | single | This time we have a daughter, and the Louvre sounded overwhelming and a little tedious to her, |
| 2018-08-17 | 36 | Doro | "Be Strong" | Forever Warriors // Forever United | After a while I realized two mostly-obvious things about the Louvre: |
| 2018-08-17 | 41 | Bloodshed Walhalla | "Ragnarok" | Ragnarok +3 | you go to appreciate the catalogued gravity of accumulated preconceptions and practices. |
| 2018-08-17 | 43 | Unearthly Trance | "Triumph" | Split | You go to stipulate historic patriarchy and technical dogmatism and uneven climate-control. |
| 2018-08-17 | 44 | Black Tusk | "Closed Eye" | TCBT | You go to wander through an effective retrospective temple to philosophical premodernism. |
| 2018-08-17 | 45 | Bosse-de-Nage | "My Shroud" | single | And second, in part as an indirect function of the first thing, and despite the token prominence of the famous trio, |
| 2018-08-17 | 72 | Images Of Eden | "Shield Me" | Soulrise | The road to the Arc de Triomphe is lined with H&Ms and mendicants rattling coin-seeded Five Guys cups. |
| 2018-08-17 | 73 | Earthists. | "FREEFALL" | LIFEBINDER | I bought a gargoyle key-chain from Notre Dame, and an Eiffel Tower coffee-mug from the top of the Eiffel Tower, but at some point I also lost the hat I brought, so I barely broke even. |
| 2018-08-17 | 74 | Revaira | "Recovery" | In Between | But this city is part of how we have a daughter, and she wanted to see it, and eat its chocolate croissants and Nutella crepes and raspberry sorbets. Now she has heard French trap booming out of Citroens, and become enraged by Miro and Klein and Ryman. |
| 2018-08-10 | 1 | Amaranthe | "365" | single | You don't have to care what people expect you to do, |
| 2018-08-10 | 2 | Ethernity | "The Prototype" | single | what traditions they expect you to uphold, |
| 2018-08-10 | 3 | The Lust | "Quest of a Sign" | Wings of Butterfly 3 | what invisible borders they expect your reticences to imply. |
| 2018-08-10 | 4 | Stratovarius | "Oblivion" | single | You are welcome in all the realms someone will claim do not exist. |
| 2018-08-10 | 5 | Primal Fear | "Into the Fire - Bonus Track" | Apocalypse (Deluxe Edition) | The places you imagine are all real, |
| 2018-08-10 | 6 | Omnium Gatherum | "Refining Fire" | single | some of them only now, |
| 2018-08-10 | 7 | Horrendous | "The Idolater" | single | and all of them only as long as they are sustained by belief, |
| 2018-08-10 | 8 | Until Death Overtakes Me | "Lights of Infinity" | They Know | defined by insistence, |
| 2018-08-10 | 9 | Black Majesty | "Something's Going On" | single | glorified by invention and legend. |
| 2018-08-10 | 10 | Dol Ammad | "Astroatlas" | Cosmic Gods: Episode II (Astroatlas) | The future is a tactic for moving so-faraway places into your path, |
| 2018-08-10 | 11 | Vreid | "Lifehunger" | single | and thus an ambivalent machine for collision and discovery. |
| 2018-08-10 | 25 | LM.C | "Virtual Quest" | Future Sensation | through corridors of coruscant mist |
| 2018-08-10 | 45 | Einherjer | "Spre Vingene" | single | The trick is to at once own every instant |
| 2018-08-10 | 46 | Primitive Weapons | "Keep the Lights On" | single | and let go of all of them |
| 2018-08-10 | 56 | Sapphire Eyes | "Chasing Dreams" | single | they mostly welcome you with cheap balloons and your name misspelled; |
| 2018-08-10 | 59 | Manimal | "Manimalized" | single | and we think "why does it take so long", |
| 2018-08-10 | 60 | Striker | "Heart of Lies" | single | but stand there a while. |
| 2018-08-10 | 72 | Sylvaine | "Abeyance" | single | Despair is an Instagram filter over love. |
| 2018-08-10 | 73 | Ankor | "God is a Woman" | single | The things you allow yourself to see as they are? They have their necks against your tongue. |
| 2018-08-03 | 3 | Puppet | "Cargo" | single | You can make cities without metal or glass, |
| 2018-08-03 | 4 | Amaranthe | "Army of the Night" | The Sacrament of Sin (Deluxe Version) | or see a coastline as fractalless imprecision. |
| 2018-08-03 | 5 | Beyond The Black | "Million Lightyears" | single | You can cover patterns with love, |
| 2018-08-03 | 6 | Manticora | "Through The Eyes Of The Killer - Towering Over You" | To Kill To Live To Kill | or love with patterns, |
| 2018-08-03 | 7 | Primal Fear | "The Ritual" | single | or everything with mud and fear and computational uncertainty. |
| 2018-08-03 | 8 | Behemoth | "God = Dog" | single | You can think of poetry as a separate enterprise from numbers, |
| 2018-08-03 | 9 | Dragonlord | "Northlanders" | single | like you can contemplate an ethereal afterlife, |
| 2018-08-03 | 10 | Hadal Maw | "Vilified" | Charlatan | if you can contemplate an afterlife as something other than metaphor. |
| 2018-08-03 | 11 | Helrunar | "In Eis und Nacht" | single | Unless you can't, like I cannot. |
| 2018-08-03 | 12 | Beyond Creation | "The Inversion" | single | I am an involuntary disciple of awe and math, |
| 2018-08-03 | 32 | HYDE | "AFTER LIGHT" | single | and at the same time a kind of rueful meta-theology of their own. |
| 2018-08-03 | 35 | dEMOTIONAL | "Dreamers Light" | single | and constellations of argpeggio and metronomicons. |
| 2018-08-03 | 39 | Aborted | "TerrorVision" | single | And then the pulse stops, and the fluttery stars pause in the middle of a subjective transit because they don't change but we do, |
| 2018-08-03 | 40 | Attan | "Feed the Primates" | single | and CHVRCHES slam into their post-Japan-tour collaboration with J-pop trio Wednesday Campanella. |
| 2018-08-03 | 44 | Ex Libris | "The Courtship" | Ann - Chapter 1: Anne Boleyn 3 | I don't know if "perfect song" is a useful or meaningful concept, |
| 2018-08-03 | 45 | Crippled Black Phoenix | "Nebulas" | single | and I imagine that if it is there would be criteria and checklists, |
| 2018-08-03 | 50 | Alter Bridge | "Words Darker Than Their Wings (feat. The Parallax Orchestra) - Live" | single | and to me this single moment is an immortally recurrent legend of inevitability and defiance; |
| 2018-08-03 | 54 | Korpiklaani | "Henkselipoika" | single | but lovingly, lingeringly, pushing away and holding on at once with a kiss and breath; |
| 2018-07-27 | 19 | Derdian | "DNA" | DNA | Streaming music is, of course, hardly the only structural change in my recent life. |
| 2018-07-27 | 20 | Mob Rules | "Sinister Light" | single | I got married, we had a kid, I turned 50. |
| 2018-07-27 | 21 | Dynazty | "Breathe with Me" | single | The planet got warmer, my part of it elected an unconscionable leader. |
| 2018-07-27 | 22 | Helion Prime | "Spectrum" | single | Computers got better, and smaller and larger at once. |
| 2018-07-27 | 23 | Halcyon Way | "Bloody but Unbowed" | single | Everything got more infinite. |
| 2018-07-27 | 24 | MaYaN | "The Rhythm of Freedom" | single | And although it's almost always possible to initially integrate the infinite as a newer, incrementally richer (or, if you're obtuse, poorer) source of the finite, |
| 2018-07-27 | 25 | Autumn | "Blackout" | single | this conflation of the qualitative and quantitative has an inherent instability. |
| 2018-07-27 | 31 | RichaadEB | "Your Contract Has Expired" | single | But circularly, I guess, I'm only this me now, |
| 2018-07-27 | 34 | Paulo Cuevas | "La Flecha Escarlata (De "Shingeki No Kyojin")" | single | I used to wake in pace, and choose new steps. |
| 2018-07-27 | 51 | Halestorm | "Killing Ourselves to Live" | Vicious | At any rate, I used to spend a lot of time entering things into a database that nobody but me ever checked, |
| 2018-07-27 | 60 | Redemption | "The Echo Chamber" | Long Night's Journey into Day | This is not an automatically better future, and can devolve easily into a closed system in which you only ever find out about things you already mostly know. |
| 2018-07-27 | 61 | Michael Romeo | "Differences" | War Of The Worlds, Pt. 1 | So one simple formulation of what I do at work is try to turn the world's collective ever-expanding listening into an energy that makes every individual's listening also expand. |
| 2018-07-27 | 76 | Rave The Reqviem | "Skydweller" | single | We begin as earthdwellers, |
| 2018-07-20 | 12 | Keel | "蒼天" | single | Keel were a grandly terrible hair-metal band. Google works in Japan, so this Japanese visual-/nagoya-kei band also called "Keel" has no real excuse for not knowing this. |
| 2018-07-20 | 13 | KAMIJO | "私たちは戦う、昨日までの自分と" | Sang ~君に贈る名前~ 6 | Kamijo is the solo project of the singer from the visual-kei bands Versailles, Lareine and New Sodmy. Visual Kei is kind of the music of pre-Revolution French nobility reimagined as cyberpunk metal futurism, and involves a distinctive operatic singing technique that sounds a little like you have found a golden-egg-laying duck on palace grounds and are attempting to impress the Queen by killing it with only your fashion sense and your neck muscles. |
| 2018-07-20 | 16 | Ethernity | "Artificial Souls" | single | Ethernity are a progressive power-metal band from Belgium. It used to be that power-metal with a female singer was almost automatically gothic symphonic metal, but there's now a sizable counter-trend of bands pushing more towards pop-chorus catharsis rather than gothic operaticism. |
| 2018-07-20 | 17 | Epica | "Dedicate Your Heart!" | Epica vs. Attack on Titan Songs | Epica, for example, are one of the definitive gothic symphonic metal bands, and the massed choirs on the chorus of this song are a quinessential gothic flourish, but covering anime songs is unapologetically pop. |
| 2018-07-20 | 18 | Minniva | "Africa" | single | And the intersectional queen of gothic symphonic metal and pop and unapologeticality is definitely the Norwegian cover-singer Minniva, who releases near-weekly gothic-metal-ish covers of virtually anything, but often either classic older progressive metal songs or current pop hits. "Africa" is technically neither, but qualifies as an implicit current pop hit due to Weezer's recent cover of it. I hated the Toto original, and I hate Weezer's version, but I accept them as the prices for this version. Part of the fascinating genius of Minniva's cover-series is that she produces them quickly, so they tend to have cheerfully undisguised studio shortcuts like the sputtery drum-machine blastbeats in this one. I find these charming. |
| 2018-07-20 | 19 | Eluveitie | "Nata vimpi cvrmid / Ira Sancti (When The Saints Are Going Wild)" | The Sacrament Of Sin | Power metal bleeds into folk metal, and where power metal tends to invoke fantasy tropes, and mythology as fantasy, folk metal sometimes edges closer to anthropology, and thus can cultivate bands with an interest in period instruments and musicology. Eluveitie are a Swiss Celtic-folk-metal band who use hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes, and here they are covering a song by the German power-metal band Powerwolf, for the bonus disc of the new Powerwolf album, which has ten other bands covering Powerwolf songs. |
| 2018-07-20 | 20 | Powerwolf | "Stossgebet" | The Sacrament Of Sin | Powerwolf themselves are essentially a caricature of a power-metal band, but caricature is kind of the native idiom of power-metal, to begin with. If Eluveitie were archaeologists, Powerwolf would be their friend from high-school, inexplicably brought along to the excavation site, who grabs the just-exhumed ancient relic and climbs on top of something with it, yelling "With this sceptre I am now the rightful King of the Underworld!!!!" And it's probably not even a sceptre, but still, maybe he's right. |
| 2018-07-20 | 21 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Forward!" | single | Anaal Nathrakh's original gimmick was "extreme-metal band with programmed drums", which at the time was a dramatic microtransgression. Programming has become a steadily less unusual element in black metal, and Anaal Nathrakh's use of it has become steadily more atmospheric and textural. |
| 2018-07-20 | 22 | Vreid | "Black Rites in the Black Nights" | single | Vreid are a Norwegian black-metal band formed by the surviving members of an earlier Norwegian black-metal band called Windir, after Windir's singer died of hypothermia in the Norwegian wilderness, which is definitely the black-metalest way to die. (Deaths involving Cthulhu are a respectable but distant second place.) |
| 2018-07-20 | 23 | Black Tusk | "Scalped" | single | Black Tusk are a sludge-metal band from Savannah, Georgia. Sludge metal is what you end up with if you take the embryo of a black-metal band and raise it on grunge records in a warm climate. |
| 2018-07-20 | 24 | Horrendous | "Soothsayer" | single | Horrendous are a death-metal band from Philadelphia who seem to be exploring what Voivod might have sounded like if they'd grown up in Sweden instead of Canada. |
| 2018-07-20 | 25 | Bosse-de-Nage | "Crux" | single | Bosse-de-Nage are a blackgaze band from San Francisco. Blackgaze is the indie-rock version of black metal. |
| 2018-07-20 | 26 | Skeletonwitch | "Devouring Radiant Light" | Devouring Radiant Light | Skeletonwitch are an Ohio thrash-metal band in the process of evolving into a more expansive black-metal band. Which is what you do if you're the ones who realize the song-title "Devouring Radiant Light" is not taken yet. |
| 2018-07-20 | 27 | Sear Bliss | "A Mirror in the Forest" | Letters from the Edge | Sear Bliss are an atmospheric black metal band from Hungary. A black metal band can qualify for "atmospheric" status by including basically any element of production competence. Synthetic tuba moans, for example. |
| 2018-07-20 | 28 | Manimal | "Black Plague" | single | Manimal are a neo-traditional heavy-metal band from Gothenburg, Sweden. Back when metal was only one thing, before the speed/thrash/death diaspora began, this is what all metal bands sounded like. Or, at least, this is what we now think they all sounded like, bellowy and rifftastic. |
| 2018-07-20 | 29 | Michael Romeo | "Fear The Unknown" | single | Michael Romeo is the guitarist for the American power-metal band Symphony X. If you liked Symphony X but wanted to hear the same kind of music played by all but one different people, your use-case has been prioritized. |
| 2018-07-20 | 35 | Parasite Inc. | "Once and for All" | single | Parasite Inc. is a German semi-industrial melodic death-metal band. Germanic metal has one wing stretched out towards industrial, one towards oi. |
| 2018-07-20 | 36 | Mono Inc. | "Long Live Death" | single | There must be German tax advantages for incorporating your gothic-industrial metal band. |
| 2018-07-20 | 38 | Saltatio Mortis | "Dorn im Ohr" | single | Saltatio Mortis are officially a medieval rock band, which is another subcultural way of saying "folk metal", but if there were an "oi metal", this would be the start. |
| 2018-07-20 | 39 | Feuerschwanz | "Methämmer" | single | And this would be more of it. |
| 2018-07-13 | 4 | Deafheaven | "Glint" | Ordinary Corrupt Human Love | Of course you will have fears. |
| 2018-07-13 | 5 | Madder Mortem | "Moonlight over Silver White" | single | You will dread losing what has made you great, |
| 2018-07-13 | 6 | Khôrada | "Seasons of Salt" | single | all the more gnawingly if it has actually ceased making you great, |
| 2018-07-13 | 7 | Imperial Triumphant | "Swarming Opulence" | Vile Luxury | and maybe really ceased before it began, |
| 2018-07-13 | 8 | Firtan | "Nacht verweil" | Okeanos | and maybe you were not yet actually great. |
| 2018-07-13 | 9 | End Of You | "Bird on the Wire" | Bird on the Wire +1 | And if you weren't great yet, can you be sure you will ever be? |
| 2018-07-13 | 10 | Rebel Wizard | "The Poor and Ridiculous Alchemy of Christ and Lucifer and Us All" | single | What if this is all we have? |
| 2018-07-13 | 11 | Kły | "Irovar (Drzewo bratem)" | Taran-Gai | There are only three ways to live: |
| 2018-07-13 | 12 | Pig Destroyer | "Army of Cops" | single | this life doesn't matter; |
| 2018-07-13 | 13 | Powerwolf | "Incense & Iron" | single | this life is a test that will be scored by unseen and unknowable judges; |
| 2018-07-13 | 14 | Redemption | "Someone Else's Problem" | single | this is all we have. |
| 2018-07-13 | 24 | lynch. | "THIRTEEN" | XIII | We gave you profusion licking the event horizons |
| 2018-07-13 | 27 | Seiko Oomori | "ZOC実験室" | クソカワPARTY | what more did you imagine an afterlife could append? |
| 2018-07-13 | 31 | Obscura | "Ekpyrosis" | Diluvium | Every texture was always a map. |
| 2018-07-13 | 32 | Tengger Cavalry | "Heart" | Heart +1 | Every map was a love song |
| 2018-07-13 | 40 | Soreption | "Children of the Automaton" | single | into |
| 2018-07-13 | 41 | Hadal Maw | "White Elephant" | single | coruscating |
| 2018-07-13 | 42 | Xavlegbmaofffassssitimiwoamndutroabcwapwaeiippohfffx | "Invoke the Smoke" | single | nihilating |
| 2018-07-13 | 43 | Ancestors | "Gone" | single | reverie. |
| 2018-07-13 | 57 | Oubliette | "Elegy" | The Passage | Any attempt at humility is a gesture of transcendence, |
| 2018-07-13 | 62 | Black Fast | "Scarecrow and Spectre" | Spectre of Ruin | terror as self-awareness. |
| 2018-07-13 | 68 | Chelsea Grin | "Dead Rose" | Eternal Nightmare | the dust of everything other people have smashed, |
| 2018-07-06 | 9 | Immortal | "Gates To Blashyrkh" | Northern Chaos Gods | Mythology is an excuse to wear awesome armor; |
| 2018-07-06 | 10 | Omnium Gatherum | "Gods Go First" | single | trust no despots in boring clothes, |
| 2018-07-06 | 11 | Mob Rules | "Ghost of a Chance" | single | arriving in undignified chariots, |
| 2018-07-06 | 12 | Beyond The Black | "My God Is Dead" | single | promising only to give you back broken things you once had. |
| 2018-07-06 | 13 | Manticora | "Echoes of a Silent Scream" | single | You were born under borderless skies, |
| 2018-07-06 | 14 | Vermilia | "Äiti Maa" | Kätkyt | with infinite unbounded power. |
| 2018-07-06 | 15 | Gaerea | "Absent" | Unsettling Whispers | All anthems are sung in your language, |
| 2018-07-06 | 16 | Doro | "Lift Me Up" | single | in our language. |
| 2018-07-06 | 17 | Michael Romeo | "Djinn" | single | As the great guitarist Turing immortally explained, after all, language is the thing with which anthems can be sung. |
| 2018-07-06 | 18 | Maraton | "Seismic" | single | We are emotionally organized by muse, not by authority, |
| 2018-07-06 | 25 | Obscura | "Ethereal Skies" | single | The pessimist clings to one half-empty glass, slowly and self-righteously dehydrating. |
| 2018-07-06 | 26 | Skeletonwitch | "Temple of the Sun" | single | The optimist understands darkess as an homage to light, and vice versa. |
| 2018-07-06 | 27 | Fifth Quadrant | "Liquid Shard" | Vision | As the great drum-programmer Euclid memorably noted, if you cut a straight line into equal and unequal segments, stars pour out and your town immediately gets better restaurants. |
| 2018-07-06 | 29 | Gwydion | "793" | Thirteen | but if you don't love, your fight songs will only ever grind to petulant clattering halts, leaking misinformation and corrosive distrust. |
| 2018-07-06 | 30 | Secret Cutter | "4 1/2" | Quantum Eraser | You can recognize fake leaders by seeing who needs a crowd in front of them but is afraid to have anybody see the back of their head; |
| 2018-07-06 | 36 | Halcyon Way | "Slaves to Silicon" | single | a wireless smart-crucible that sometimes freezes the hearts it was supposed to melt, and the troubleshooting FAQ claims you can restart it from the command-line, but not if the command line is controlled by an nihilist voting-block, |
| 2018-07-06 | 37 | Black Fast | "Husk" | single | and not if the control panel is now below sea-level and killing coral reefs because the manufacturers have been freed from stifling emission regulations, |
| 2018-06-29 | 1 | Immortal | "Mighty Ravendark" | single | You get to decide what you want from art, |
| 2018-06-29 | 2 | Shylmagoghnar | "No Child of Man Could Follow" | Transience | which sounds powerful, and is powerful, |
| 2018-06-29 | 3 | Oubliette | "The Curse" | single | but is also just another way of saying that you have to decide |
| 2018-06-29 | 4 | The Antichrist Imperium | "The Dreadful Hosanna" | Vol. II: Every Tongue Shall Praise Satan | the range of futures you consider anticipatable, |
| 2018-06-29 | 5 | Primal Fear | "King of Madness" | single | and how you reconcile the disparity between |
| 2018-06-29 | 6 | Dark Sarah | "Trespasser" | single | their potential effects on you |
| 2018-06-29 | 7 | Helion Prime | "Silent Skies" | single | and your ability to control or influence them. |
| 2018-06-29 | 26 | HYDE | "AFTER LIGHT" | single | harder to apprehend complexity without disassembling it. |
| 2018-06-29 | 27 | THE GALLO | "PLUTO" | PLUTO +2 | You get to decide which planets you would annex in hypothetical ages of empire, |
| 2018-06-29 | 28 | D | "Revive 〜荒廃都市〜" | Revive 〜荒廃都市〜 +3 | and what people wear in their radiant arenas |
| 2018-06-29 | 30 | Gyze | "龍吟" | ザ・ライジング・ドラゴン 5 | You have your choice of masks, |
| 2018-06-29 | 38 | Sleep Dealer | "Winter II" | Memories | You can be pinioned, crushed by blankets, |
| 2018-06-29 | 53 | Black Tusk | "Burn the Stars" | single | You get to decide whether art is an idiom of distraction from vertigo |
| 2018-06-29 | 65 | Little Dead Bertha | "Day of Your Life" | Age of Silence | but neither answer precipates joy. Joy is the substrate, not the solution. |
| 2018-06-22 | 1 | Anicon | "Paling Terrain" | Entropy Mantra | I like singing better than raspy croaking, but I also like kiwi fruit better than tomatoes, and yet burritos. |
| 2018-06-22 | 3 | Powerwolf | "Fire & Forgive" | single | it is improved by transmuting each fear into a fascination, |
| 2018-06-22 | 24 | Nordheim | "Arise" | Enter the Wolf | and yet how do we still breathe? |
| 2018-06-15 | 16 | Funeral Mist | "Shedding Skin" | Hekatomb | If we tolerate this, |
| 2018-06-15 | 17 | Cryonic Temple | "End of Days" | single | we will own the resulting hell. |
| 2018-06-15 | 18 | Minniva | "Under The Red Cloud" | single | We have separated children from their parents before, |
| 2018-06-15 | 19 | A Sound of Thunder | "Lifebringer" | It Was Metal | and we have never once been right. |
| 2018-06-15 | 20 | Tyranny of Hours | "River of Stones" | Darkling | You might momentarily think it ironic that a president who would hire his daughter and his son-in-law into government positions for which they have no qualifications, just to have a couple people who don't hate him nearby, would endorse a policy of separating children from parents. |
| 2018-06-15 | 22 | Sorrow Plagues | "Vista" | Mater Natura Excelsa 2 | for people who look at their own children and see children, |
| 2018-06-15 | 23 | Chthe'ilist | "Passage into the Xexanotth" | Passage into the Xexanotth +1 | but look at other people's children and then look away. |
| 2018-06-15 | 24 | Sear Bliss | "Shroud" | single | Heroism, like joy, requires a tiny amount of strength: |
| 2018-06-15 | 25 | Oubliette | "The Raven's Lullaby" | single | the strength to witness something you don't understand without flinching, |
| 2018-06-15 | 33 | Chelsea Grin | "See You Soon" | single | just as shared rage is only amplified, |
| 2018-06-15 | 34 | Halcyon Days | "Cerca Trova" | Rain Soaked Pavements & Fresh Cut Grass | not refined. |
| 2018-06-15 | 36 | Matenrou Opera | "Invisible Chaos" | Invisible Chaos +2 | So much engineering |
| 2018-06-15 | 37 | a crowd of rebellion | "Sign." | single | breathed into these bridges before we set conscripted batallions facing each other in the middle, |
| 2018-06-15 | 43 | Dead End Finland | "Closer to Extinction" | single | Welcome. |
| 2018-06-15 | 44 | Sarea | "Lost Cause" | single | Before anything else, welcome. |
| 2018-06-15 | 60 | Gåte | "Kom no Disjka" | single | just as the old gods rightfully ordained before leaving us to work out the details, |
| 2018-06-15 | 68 | Lord Of The Lost | "Morgana" | single | to memorize legends and still choose slightly bedraggled public schools, |
| 2018-06-15 | 69 | Unzucht | "Nela" | single | to see ourselves in even these mortifying failures |
| 2018-06-15 | 71 | Chamber | "Empty" | Disaffect 4 | and not doomed to the rest of any path we have started down. |
| 2018-06-15 | 72 | Skeletonwitch | "When Paradise Fades" | single | If we are not going to learn from having elected ambitious cowards, |
| 2018-06-15 | 88 | Dragonlord | "Dominion" | single | It is an encumbered and short-sighted freedom that chooses to carry |
| 2018-06-15 | 91 | Stormwitch | "Odins Ravens" | single | these gifts from departed gods, |
| 2018-06-15 | 94 | Firtan | "Tag verweil" | single | You get them by initiative and gall and luck. |
| 2018-06-08 | 10 | Dharma | "Televised" | Substance | The future will be wiser, |
| 2018-06-08 | 11 | Doro | "All For Metal" | single | with immortal abs, |
| 2018-06-08 | 12 | Halcyon Way | "Blame" | single | halcyon and halogen, |
| 2018-06-08 | 13 | Mechina | "The Halcyon Purge" | Acheron | and the old ways will be torn from your grasp. |
| 2018-06-08 | 14 | Beyond The Black | "Heart of the Hurricane" | single | We are the creatures whose terrible mixed-metaphors still end up triumphant. |
| 2018-06-08 | 15 | Trillium | "Fighting Fate" | Tectonic | We are moving ground |
| 2018-06-08 | 16 | Dead Shape Figure | "Strange Light Pulsate" | Cacoëthes | and flickering stars. |
| 2018-06-08 | 17 | Soliloquium | "Catharsis" | Contemplations | We are your doom and your release |
| 2018-06-08 | 26 | Countless Skies | "Tempest" | single | than by any salvation nominally promised. |
| 2018-06-08 | 38 | Korpiklaani | "Kotikonnut" | single | We have a cabin in the forest; |
| 2018-06-08 | 39 | Uniform | "The Boy with Death in His Eyes" | Mental Wounds Not Healing | the forest has an army. |
| 2018-06-08 | 40 | Haunted | "Lunar Grave" | Dayburner | If all you want to do is surrender, you don't need rockets. |
| 2018-06-08 | 48 | Black Fast | "Silhouette Usurper" | single | frays. |
| 2018-06-08 | 49 | Black Peaks | "Home" | single | We have stolen more things than words from distant islands, |
| 2018-06-08 | 62 | Mechina | "Ode to the Forgotten Few" | Acheron | to forget. And, by the same techniques, to remember. |
| 2018-06-01 | 1 | Violet Cold | "Life in Moments" | Sommermorgen, Pt. I: Innocence | People you don't know are composing epic triologies, because they finally realized nothing will stop them. |
| 2018-06-01 | 2 | Violet Cold | "Penguins Commit Suicide" | Sommermorgen, Pt. II: Joy | There is a note here for every listener, enough for you to pick one that is yours alone. |
| 2018-06-01 | 3 | Violet Cold | "Ein Hauch Von Ewigkeit" | Sommermorgen, Pt. III: Nostalgia | Innocence, joy and nostalgia are not a sequence, they are a trinity. |
| 2018-06-01 | 4 | June 1974 | "Arcadia" | Nemesi | All these patterns exist inside of your regret and obsession and self-doubt. |
| 2018-06-01 | 5 | Kataklysm | "Narcissist" | Meditations | They have been inside of you all this time, while you have been alternatively building and destroying. |
| 2018-06-01 | 6 | Dead in the Manger | "Despondency, Pt. 3" | Despondency 3 | They are why you oscillate between the two, |
| 2018-06-01 | 7 | Moongates Guardian | "The Dragon Is Withered" | Let Horse Be Bridled, Horn Be Sounded! | and why you can't stop writing sequels to your own stories and everyone else's, |
| 2018-06-01 | 8 | Dead Shape Figure | "Bolt of Chaos & Creation" | single | why you can't stop ending or beginning again. |
| 2018-06-01 | 9 | Lonely Star | "Undo" | Love & Loss | Darkness and pale flowers; |
| 2018-06-01 | 10 | Elvellon | "Oraculum" | Until Dawn | starlight and battlements; |
| 2018-06-01 | 18 | Chelsea Grin | "Hostage" | single | lodged in skulls by force |
| 2018-06-01 | 23 | Walking Across Jupiter | "Unus Multorum" | Oneiroid | Your own buildings are zoning issues and accessibility affronts; other people's are majestic architecture. |
| 2018-06-01 | 24 | Leprous | "Golden Prayers" | single | Your own hesitations and syncopations are fear; other people's are control and grace. |
| 2018-06-01 | 25 | Night Verses | "Phoenix IV: Levitation" | single | Other people's monsters are demons and legend; |
| 2018-06-01 | 48 | Lándevir | "El Espíritu del Viento" | Desde el Silencio | and our better pagan gods, |
| 2018-06-01 | 49 | Lörihen | "El Viaje" | Desconexión | and stories about where else the tunnels emerge. |
| 2018-06-01 | 60 | Mechina | "Anathema" | Empyrean | and how we check the references of our enemies. |
| 2018-05-25 | 1 | Uada | "The Purging Fire" | Cult of a Dying Sun | Uada are a primordial black metal band from Portland, Oregon. They have a Facebook page, because Satan needs friends too. I hit Follow on it, because Satan needs friends too, and Facebook cheerfully encouraged me to invite these people to join me in occult appreciation: my sister, who loves "black metal" as long as that's your funny way of saying "Irish Boy Band"; the mother of my oldest childhood friend, whose musical taste I'm not entirely sure about but I don't recall her ever bringing up Satan in conversation during sleep-overs at their house in the 70s; a journalist friend who once wrote a book about Napster so I'll assume he is equipped to find out about Cascadian black metal on his own if he wants; and a guy who got fired from the company where I work, but I haven't unfriended him yet because nobody would tell me why he got fired and anyway Satan needs friends, too. |
| 2018-05-25 | 2 | Cosmic Church | "Aloitus" | Täyttymys | I don't think I will "invite" any of these people to join me in haphazardly monitoring the social-media presence of a very random subset of the bands that I discover. Cosmic Church are from Finland. I do actually have Facebook friends who like black metal. These are not them. |
| 2018-05-25 | 3 | Wayfarer | "Animal Crown" | World's Blood | Wayfarer are from Denver, which is where that childhood friend lives now. His mother visits often, and logistically speaking, the grandson goes to bed relatively early, so the grandparents could go to a euphoric-nihilistic black metal show, presumably staged in a haunted forest somewhere just outside of one of the National Parks. |
| 2018-05-25 | 4 | Oubliette | "The Passage" | single | Oubliette is a French name for an American black metal band from the sadly un-Satanic-sounding town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. If Google Maps is to be believed, it is an unholy civic tentacle-nest of shameless gerrymandering. |
| 2018-05-25 | 5 | Iskald | "The Atrocious Horror" | single | Satan, of course, would love gerrymandering. "ALL THIS IS HELL. AND THIS. AND THIS LITTLE BIT OVER HERE. HELL!" |
| 2018-05-25 | 6 | Stortregn | "Through the Dark Gates" | Emptiness Fills the Void | But one's relationship with cartoon Satan is a personal, intimate, nuanced thing. You don't just walk up to people and say "Hey, have you heard about throaty, performative nihilism?" in the same tones you use for "Would you like a free granola bar?" |
| 2018-05-25 | 7 | Thunderwar | "Thunderer" | Wolfpack 5 | Come to think of it, I'd rather the granola-bar people didn't use that tone, either. I don't trust free granola. I don't trust people who think I will eat their granola bars just because they are free. |
| 2018-05-25 | 8 | Skogen | "När solen bleknar bort" | Skuggorna kallar | If the granola bars claimed some unique virtue, it would be different. "Would you like to try a granola bar made from pulverized locust exoskeletons and the ichor of Asakku?" |
| 2018-05-25 | 10 | Primal Fear | "Hounds of Justice" | single | I like the idea of a granola bar with just a touch of carefully denatured head-fever-inducing demonicity. Probably in the end it would just be mildly caffeinated, and would taste like a carrot cake made out of wood pulp, but at least it sounds interesting. |
| 2018-05-25 | 11 | Powerwolf | "Demons Are a Girl‘s Best Friend" | single | A locust-flour-and-head-fever-ichor granola bar aspires to alter the world. |
| 2018-05-25 | 12 | Epica | "紅蓮の弓矢 / Crimson Bow and Arrow" | EPICA VS attack on titan songs | "Free" is gutless. The granola bar is just as free if I don't take it. Everything I don't buy is free to me. |
| 2018-05-25 | 13 | Midnattsol | "Syns sang" | The Aftermath | All this obscure, preposterous metal I track down and meticulously organize for you every week is free to you if you skip it. |
| 2018-05-25 | 14 | Millennial Reign | "Break the Tide" | The Great Divide | But here's the thing: it's made out of pulverized locust exoskeletons and the ichor of demons you don't even know if I invented a minute ago. It aspires to alter worlds, and they could be your worlds if you want them. |
| 2018-05-25 | 15 | CHVRCHES | "Forever" | Love Is Dead | Locusts are mostly pulverized wheat in the first place. We have only this one planet, so nothing is really that exotic. CHVRCHES are an occult black metal band from Scotland, except the singing is clear and bell-like instead of hoarse and gnawing, and they play computers instead of the forges of fire giants, but the songs are still about the fear of eternity and the yearning for it, like all good metal songs. |
| 2018-05-25 | 28 | Andromida | "New Worlds" | single | Andromida is a one-person progressive-djent project from, I dunno, space? Or possibly Pittsburgh. I guess it doesn't really matter, but then, why did I look it up? |
| 2018-05-25 | 29 | Subsignal | "The Passage" | La Muerta | There's nothing interesting about eating bugs. There's something interesting about knowingly eating bugs. |
| 2018-05-25 | 30 | Arena | "The Mirror Lies" | Double Vision | Subsignal are Germans with a Spanish album-name. Arena are British with a Foreigner album-name. |
| 2018-05-25 | 31 | Sarah Longfield | "Ember" | Collapse // Expand | Sarah Longfield is on a metal label. |
| 2018-05-25 | 38 | Frosttide | "Carved Into Ice" | Decedents 5 | Odin used them to know things about the world. Studies have shown that kids who spend too much time listening to ravens grow up to have only one eye. |
| 2018-05-25 | 39 | Suotana | "Sorrowl" | Land of the Ending Time | They should be outside, instead, playing in the empty miserable void of misery. |
| 2018-05-25 | 40 | November-7 | "Divine" | Overload 1.0 5 | Just make sure they're wearing voidscreen. |
| 2018-05-25 | 51 | Candlemass | "Flowers of Deception" | House of Doom 4 | and dying as statuary. |
| 2018-05-25 | 52 | PassCode | "UNTILL THE DAWN" | Ray 4 | When I follow PassCode on Facebook, it doesn't berate me to invite my relatives, it wonders if I'd like to follow BiSH and BAND-MAID. |
| 2018-05-25 | 54 | Mary's Blood | "World's End" | Revenant | I don't need any help knowing which bands I should tell my mother about. |
| 2018-05-18 | 28 | Amorphis | "The Golden Elk" | Queen of Time | Our legends don't have to make sense |
| 2018-05-18 | 29 | YOB | "Our Raw Heart" | single | when they can create it. |
| 2018-05-18 | 30 | Nocturnal Graves | "Resistance" | Titan | Liars and fact checkers agree that reality is contested; |
| 2018-05-18 | 31 | Shylmagoghnar | "As All Must Come to Pass" | single | this is less of a fight than a business plan. |
| 2018-05-18 | 32 | Seventh Wonder | "Tiara's Song (Farewell Pt. 1)" | single | In this way even truth is a trap |
| 2018-05-18 | 39 | Illidiance | "Last Dawn" | single | Healing doesn't make you invulnerable, |
| 2018-05-18 | 40 | Stam1na | "Elämänlanka" | single | which is half of why it matters and basically all of why it's tolerable. |
| 2018-05-18 | 41 | Alkaloid | "As Decreed by Laws Unwritten" | Liquid Anatomy | Culture is the accumulation of scars, |
| 2018-05-18 | 42 | Uniform | "Come and See" | single | which was the point of covering ourselves with skin, |
| 2018-05-18 | 43 | Grayceon | "By-the-Wind Sailors" | IV | and then of everything else we do to conceal or reveal it. |
| 2018-05-18 | 44 | Mono Inc. | "Welcome to Hell" | single | There is a universe where the lies you see through are walls, |
| 2018-05-18 | 45 | Saltatio Mortis | "Große Träume" | single | and you think "I would never go there" until you find yourself running your hands along them, |
| 2018-05-18 | 46 | Sunstorm | "The Road to Hell" | single | thinking "oh, smooth...", |
| 2018-05-18 | 47 | Hartmann | "Last Plane Out" | Hands on the Wheel | but our morality is not legislated by which walls are built and which fall, |
| 2018-05-18 | 61 | Firtan | "Seegang" | single | There is a universe inscribed in runes |
| 2018-05-18 | 62 | Second To Sun | "Vasilisa" | The Black | and illuminated by sigils, |
| 2018-05-11 | 17 | Follow The Cipher | "Valkyria" | Follow The Cipher | Winning is a denial; triumph is an introspection. |
| 2018-05-11 | 18 | Rage Of Light | "Judas" | single | Which is why losing is a failure of envy, |
| 2018-05-11 | 19 | Lords of Black | "When a Hero Takes a Fall" | Icons of the New Days | but failure is an expression of awareness and responsibility and thus power. |
| 2018-05-11 | 20 | Monument | "The Chalice" | single | You can drink from Satan's chalice. It's just a cup. |
| 2018-05-11 | 21 | Alkemyst | "Where I Belong" | single | Your enemies' citadels are still people's homes. |
| 2018-05-11 | 22 | Crystal Tears | "Bleeding Me" | single | Your mysteries are somebody else's routine. |
| 2018-05-11 | 23 | Marduk | "Equestrian Bloodlust" | single | I rode horses a couple times when I was a kid. |
| 2018-05-11 | 24 | Immortal | "Northern Chaos Gods" | single | I saw the northern lights once, maybe, dimly from the window of a plane. |
| 2018-05-11 | 25 | The Body | "Partly Alive" | I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer. | We make songs about the feeling of almost giving up. |
| 2018-05-11 | 26 | Abraham | "Wonderful World" | Look, Here Comes the Dark! | We squander our last moments on songs about last moments. |
| 2018-05-11 | 27 | The Armed | "Witness" | Only Love | We invest our transience in enduring disembodiments of joy. |
| 2018-05-11 | 28 | Vampillia | "Winter Ash" | Happiness Brought by Endless Sorrow 4 | Maybe we kind of do nothing else, |
| 2018-05-11 | 44 | Skyharbor | "Dim" | single | We try to hide, but we can't hide. |
| 2018-05-11 | 45 | The Afterimage | "Wrath" | single | We try to take our own hilarious furies seriously, |
| 2018-05-11 | 46 | Nervosa | "Kill the Silence" | single | but if we were beasts to be taken seriously, surely evolution would have bred away this preposterous solemnity more effectively by now. |
| 2018-05-11 | 47 | Obscura | "Diluvium" | single | Our complexities coallesce into ornament, |
| 2018-05-11 | 48 | Subsignal | "La Muerta - Radio Version" | single | and maybe it's better when we're released from the confines of what we think we mean. |
| 2018-05-11 | 50 | Cor Scorpii | "Skuggevandrar" | single | instead of talking, |
| 2018-04-27 | 1 | Kobra And The Lotus | "My Immortal" | Prevail II | We are crossbred organisms of inexorable violence and fractal elegance, |
| 2018-04-27 | 2 | Crematory | "Stay with Me" | Oblivion | brandishing nostalgia for hypothetical oblivions to come, |
| 2018-04-27 | 42 | WagakkiBand | "紅蓮" | オトノエ | designed against langauge but employed against fear. |
| 2018-04-27 | 50 | Alight | "Roses in the Dusk" | Spiral of Silence | by the unreconciled implications of things we once believed. |
| 2018-04-27 | 51 | Argentum | "Сверхновая" | Сверхновая +3 | All our marginalia has this subtext, |
| 2018-04-27 | 52 | Captain Black Beard | "All the Pain" | Struck by Lightning | from sacrament commentary to arena inscriptions, |
| 2018-04-27 | 53 | Skeletonwitch | "Fen of Shadows" | single | its true meanings only elicited by inspirational disintegration, |
| 2018-04-27 | 54 | lynch. | "SORROW" | SINNERS-no one can fake my blood- | memorial regret, |
| 2018-04-27 | 55 | Nergard | "Question Of God" | Memorial For A Wish | and reconstruction as a fetish. |
| 2018-04-27 | 56 | Candlemass | "House of Doom" | single | Without the moon, we would be different people, |
| 2018-04-27 | 57 | Chris Bay | "Flying Hearts" | Chasing the Sun | but this is obviously also true of the sun, |
| 2018-04-20 | 2 | Amorphis | "Wrong Direction" | single | Observation is cheaper than education, but gaze is finite even so. |
| 2018-04-20 | 4 | Crystal Ball | "Alive for Evermore" | single | Unless, unless: If we are immortal, then we can still be things for nearly forever |
| 2018-04-20 | 5 | Temperance | "The Last Hope in a World of Hopes" | Of Jupiter and Moons | that we have yet to begin. |
| 2018-04-20 | 6 | Issa | "Am I Losing You" | Run with the Pack | The things we don't yet realize we will never do again accumulate silently |
| 2018-04-20 | 21 | Deafheaven | "Honeycomb" | single | but by definition none for epiphany. |
| 2018-04-20 | 22 | Unreqvited | "White Lotus" | Stars Wept to the Sea | And yet, you can put yourself in the paths of catharses, |
| 2018-04-20 | 23 | Abraham | "Wind" | single | and not fight them if they start to seem to converge or converse towards meaning. |
| 2018-04-20 | 26 | Metalwings | "End of the War" | For All Beyond | until you breathe its fire out again, |
| 2018-04-20 | 36 | tesserakuto | "ジュノ" | zonda | All work is movement, and all movement is escape. |
| 2018-04-20 | 38 | Grimner | "Freja Vakar (Bonus Track)" | Vanadrottning | something about elves, or using levers as clubs, |
| 2018-04-20 | 39 | Grailknights | "Pumping Iron Power" | single | or holding them backwards as you do; |
| 2018-04-20 | 40 | Inferi | "A Beckoning Thrall" | Revenant | conspiracies of the unseen, |
| 2018-04-20 | 41 | Darker by Design | "Overthrown by Oblivion" | single | as if you are not exactly as unseen to them in return; |
| 2018-04-20 | 49 | Sunstorm | "Only the Good Will Survive" | single | fear of first loves; |
| 2018-04-20 | 59 | Angelus Apatrida | "Farewell" | single | Montana or Moldova or the moon, |
| 2018-04-20 | 60 | Psychework | "Karelian Hills" | Karelian Hills | the setting for somebody's ancestral legends |
| 2018-04-20 | 62 | Puteraeon | "The Living Inferno" | The Dunwich damnation 5 | someone's inexorably constricting trap |
| 2018-04-13 | 1 | IKINÄ | "Vaatteet päältä" | single | One day we will all be the same, but not yet. For now, I can hear the little trills at the ends of chorus lines in this song and want not much more than to hear them again. |
| 2018-04-13 | 2 | Lyria | "The Rain" | Immersion | IKINÄ are from Finland, Lyria are from Brazil, and the oceans in between exist in mundane space but not ethereal time. |
| 2018-04-13 | 3 | Follow The Cipher | "Carolus Rex" | single | Triumph unites us |
| 2018-04-13 | 4 | Light Among Shadows | "In the Dark of Dreams" | Under the Waves | as inextricably as doom; |
| 2018-04-13 | 5 | Temperance | "Broken Promises" | single | betrayal is an apologetic currency |
| 2018-04-13 | 6 | Graveshadow | "Return to Me" | Ambition's Price | redeemable only for yearning. |
| 2018-04-13 | 8 | Midnattsol | "The Purple Sky" | single | Night is a state of emotional potential |
| 2018-04-13 | 9 | Alia Tempora | "Black 'N' White" | single | defined by juxtaposition and exclusion, |
| 2018-04-13 | 10 | Seventh Wonder | "Victorious" | single | and nothing defined by exclusion lasts long, |
| 2018-04-13 | 11 | Lords of Black | "World Gone Mad" | single | but neither wonder nor catastrophe depend on persistence. |
| 2018-04-13 | 12 | Trillium | "Time to Shine" | single | So what about now? |
| 2018-04-13 | 13 | The Rinn | "Destiny Calls" | single | Isn't this the point towards which all future moments converge, |
| 2018-04-13 | 14 | Craft | "The Cosmic Sphere Falls" | single | collapse, |
| 2018-04-13 | 15 | Thy Catafalque | "Töltés" | single | conspire? |
| 2018-04-13 | 16 | Varathron | "Luciferian Mystical Awakening" | single | The past is fixed, |
| 2018-04-13 | 17 | Wallachia | "Silenced No Longer" | Monumental Heresy | and thus the future is always where our rebellion will be staged, |
| 2018-04-13 | 18 | Slugdge | "Gastronomicon" | The Cosmic Cornucopia | and consumed, |
| 2018-04-13 | 19 | Wayfarer | "The Dreaming Plain" | single | and where its ruins will be inexorably entombed. |
| 2018-04-13 | 31 | FalKKonE | "Even Elder Dragons Tremble - Nergigante (From "Monster Hunter: World")" | Intense Symphonic Metal Covers: Hunting Edition, Vol. 2 | integrated. |
| 2018-04-13 | 59 | The Dali Thundering Concept | "Ostrich Dynasty" | Savages | You have to know. |
| 2018-04-13 | 60 | Harvs | "Illuminate" | Illuminate | This is, after all, the difference between machinery and turbulence, |
| 2018-04-13 | 61 | Andrew Baena | "Young Sprout" | single | between propulsion and purpose, |
| 2018-04-13 | 62 | Crematory | "Ghost of the Part" | Oblivion | between resolve and inertia. |
| 2018-04-13 | 65 | Ghost | "Rats" | single | and have always wanted, |
| 2018-04-13 | 66 | Bonfire | "Temple of Lies" | single | and don't need, but would surely be transformed by. |
| 2018-04-13 | 67 | Vega | "Sombras" | La Reina Pez | I am shielded by headphones from everything but dreams and surrender |
| 2018-04-13 | 68 | Debler | "El Poema de la Lluvia Triste" | single | and chaos and catharsis. |
| 2018-04-06 | 5 | Panopticon | "En hvit ravns død" | The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness, Part 1 | or transmuted by tradition, |
| 2018-04-06 | 7 | Glorior Belli | "The Apostates" | The Apostates | or postponed in the hopes of preemptive apocalypse, |
| 2018-04-06 | 8 | Aura Noir | "Shades Ablaze" | single | but you're still responsible for what you say, and for the empty spaces where you should have. |
| 2018-04-06 | 9 | Craft | "Thorns in the Planet's Side" | Fuck the Universe | So many empty spaces, |
| 2018-04-06 | 10 | Acherontas | "The Old Tree and the Wise Man" | single | preserved despite so many words. |
| 2018-04-06 | 11 | Ihsahn | "Wake" | single | After a while you begin to suspect that some of the words must be working for the void, |
| 2018-04-06 | 12 | Kamelot | "Stories Unheard" | The Shadow Theory | in loving treachery, |
| 2018-04-06 | 13 | Whyzdom | "The Mistchild" | As Time Turns to Dust | infiltrating oblivion |
| 2018-04-06 | 14 | Vega | "All over Now" | single | in black velvet capes |
| 2018-04-06 | 31 | Mors Subita | "Dead Sun" | Into the Pitch Black | Or, at least, impeded no more than any celestial object. |
| 2018-04-06 | 32 | The Body | "Can Carry No Weight" | single | Silent no more than any radiant or convulsive star. |
| 2018-04-06 | 47 | Valis Ablaze | "The Crossing" | Boundless | Learn, about yourself, whether confusion makes you assume there is a system, |
| 2018-04-06 | 48 | Dmitry Demyanenko | "Limitless" | Universe | a productive impulse no matter how often it's wrong. |
| 2018-04-06 | 51 | Alkonost | "Lystopad" | Lystopad +1 | just as legendary. |
| 2018-04-06 | 60 | HER NAME IN BLOOD | "KATANA" | POWER | If you want your cautionary tales |
| 2018-04-06 | 68 | Nordvargr | "Invocation for a Malicious Spirit" | Metempsychosis | And anyway, consider the converse: what if you are silent? |
| 2018-04-06 | 74 | Messa | "Snakeskin Drape" | Feast for Water | You do not protest, do not precess, do not catharse. |
| 2018-04-06 | 76 | Bedroom Audio | "เล่นกับไฟ" | single | But this is not even effective as nihilism. |
| 2018-03-29 | 4 | Kobra And The Lotus | "Let Me Love You" | single | Almost everything we know comes from shards and fragments: |
| 2018-03-29 | 5 | Kamelot | "Phantom Divine (Shadow Empire)" | single | all our edifices, |
| 2018-03-29 | 6 | Issa | "Sacrifice Me" | single | most of our nostalgia, |
| 2018-03-29 | 7 | The Lust | "Faster" | Karmalove (Album) | exactly half of our dreams, |
| 2018-03-29 | 8 | Nicumo | "Witch Hunt" | single | every extant nation. |
| 2018-03-29 | 9 | Collibus | "The Last Time" | Trusting The illusion | It takes strength to stand, so of course there are mines and monuments of strength, |
| 2018-03-29 | 10 | Alight | "The Portal" | single | and we make them beautiful, because we can't stop ourselves. |
| 2018-03-29 | 11 | Follow The Cipher | "The Rising" | Valkyria 2 | We are intricate exaggerations of resolution, |
| 2018-03-29 | 12 | SpellBlast | "Tex Willer" | Of Gold and Guns | redolent explications of habit, |
| 2018-03-29 | 13 | Judicator | "Take up Your Cross" | The Last Emperor | pathologies of certainty. |
| 2018-03-29 | 14 | On Thorns I Lay | "Erevos" | Aegean Sorrow | We are vessels constructed to leak life |
| 2018-03-29 | 15 | Altars of Grief | "Desolation" | Iris | as our manifestation of exuberance |
| 2018-03-29 | 16 | Firkin | "Awaken The Iron" | We Are the Ones | and manic ruefulness. |
| 2018-03-29 | 17 | Sata kaskelottia | "Aamumandaatti" | Sydän on vuori | Many miles away, something crawls to the surface of a dark Finnish lake, |
| 2018-03-29 | 18 | Barren Earth | "The Living Fortress" | A Complex Of Cages | not to emerge, but to see if our oceans have drowned us yet, |
| 2018-03-29 | 19 | Dimmu Borgir | "Council Of Wolves And Snakes" | single | to make way for something else. |
| 2018-03-29 | 20 | Varathron | "Into the Absurd" | single | The answer is: no. |
| 2018-03-29 | 34 | Evil Drive | "Anti-Genocide" | Ragemaker | and use it to smash something else, instead. |
| 2018-03-29 | 35 | Slomatics | "Ancient Architects" | Totems | Whatever object survives is by definition the weapon. |
| 2018-03-29 | 40 | Galactic Empire | "Scherzo for X-Wings" | single | simplest joys, |
| 2018-03-29 | 41 | Augury | "The Living Vault" | Illusive Golden Age | until you are brave enough to look them in the mitochondria and accept why we want them. |
| 2018-03-29 | 42 | Nekrokraft | "Servants ov the Black" | single | We are devoted to idiot causes, |
| 2018-03-29 | 43 | Thanatos | "A New Beginning" | single | in grand defiance, |
| 2018-03-29 | 47 | GARNiDELiA | "SPEED STAR -Album Ver.-" | G.R.N.D. | or idolized. |
| 2018-03-29 | 72 | Evolucija | "Jerusalime" | Baklja Slobode | Cognizance is the floating province of the rebellion. |
| 2018-03-23 | 1 | MYTH & ROID | "Tragedy:Eternity" | eYe's | Learn to use the orthography of your native language as a pigment. |
| 2018-03-23 | 2 | MIYAVI | "Long Nights - World Mix" | Long Nights 2 | Most things have been said already, but we can always find uses for brightness and color, |
| 2018-03-23 | 7 | Ancst | "Gehenna of Fire" | Split w/ King Apathy 2 | You can go into the dark |
| 2018-03-23 | 8 | Amorphis | "The Bee" | single | and emerge beyond. |
| 2018-03-23 | 9 | Kalmah | "Blood Ran Cold" | single | You can live where the seas end, |
| 2018-03-23 | 10 | Nocturnal Graves | "Silence the Martyrs" | single | or the mercies. |
| 2018-03-23 | 11 | Izegrim | "Beheaded by Trust" | Beheaded by Trust +3 | Once you render metaphor literal, you can use it for all sorts of household and spiritual purposes. |
| 2018-03-23 | 12 | Borealis | "The Offering" | The Offering | This Canadian power-metal record is probably my favorite album of the year. |
| 2018-03-23 | 13 | Midnattsol | "Herr Mannelig" | single | These ghosts know where your ancestors lived, |
| 2018-03-23 | 14 | Kingfisher Sky | "Paving Stones" | Technicoloured Eyes | but for their own reasons. |
| 2018-03-23 | 26 | Abraham | "Silent at Last" | single | and believe and doubt our power at once, |
| 2018-03-23 | 27 | Coda | "No Me Importa" | Ciclos | and learn to witness other people's bravery and resolve, |
| 2018-03-23 | 28 | Persefone | "In Lak'ech" | single | these are intricacies enough. |
| 2018-03-23 | 29 | Mors Subita | "I, God" | single | We rehearse to face down evil, |
| 2018-03-23 | 34 | Demonical | "Välkommen Undergång" | Chaos Manifesto | if we could stop morbidly monitoring the chaos. |
| 2018-03-23 | 47 | Last Days of Eden | "The Storyteller" | Chrysalis | and the relentless humanity of mythology |
| 2018-03-23 | 48 | Shadowrise | "Lost in Time" | Shadowrise | and passing time. |
| 2018-03-23 | 49 | Melted Space | "Newborns" | Darkening Light | You have conflated heroism with vanity, |
| 2018-03-23 | 51 | Spurv | "Og Ny Skog Bæres Frem" | single | You will be inexorably unraveled, |
| 2018-03-23 | 54 | Mournful Congregation | "The Indwelling Ascent" | The Incubus of Karma | bypassed by a methodical tide of vengeance en passant. |
| 2018-03-16 | 5 | Whyzdom | "Armageddon" | single | But forgiveness does not have to be muted. |
| 2018-03-16 | 6 | Graveshadow | "Doorway to Heaven" | single | Maybe, to really work, it can't be: |
| 2018-03-16 | 7 | Monument | "Attila" | single | forgiveness as a heroic act, |
| 2018-03-16 | 8 | Primordial | "Exile Amongst the Ruins" | single | as a defiant budgeoning of pain, |
| 2018-03-16 | 9 | Thy Catafalque | "Sárember" | single | as an epic encryption of mundane offenses |
| 2018-03-16 | 10 | Aura Noir | "Dark Lung of the Storm" | single | until you have a woven darkness strong enough |
| 2018-03-16 | 11 | Crescent | "Obscuring the Light" | The Order of Amenti | to stop your fall. |
| 2018-03-16 | 12 | Acherontas | "Sorcery and the Apeiron" | single | Performative evil is, before anything else, an acknowledgement of the scope of our impulses. |
| 2018-03-16 | 43 | TesseracT | "King" | single | then maybe all this math is less inexorable than it seems. |
| 2018-03-16 | 44 | Rivers of Nihil | "Death is Real" | Where Owls Know My Name | Maybe the oceans will swallow the flags before the countries before our homes, |
| 2018-03-16 | 45 | Sergey Golovin | "Charger" | Sculpture | and we will lead bemused tours through where they used to be. |
| 2018-03-16 | 66 | Road | "A tökéletesség hibája" | single | These roads are drawn with crayon and will, |
| 2018-03-09 | 1 | Drudkh | "За зорею, що стрілою сяє" | Їм часто сниться капіж | Love distorts. |
| 2018-03-09 | 2 | Winterfylleth | "The Hallowing Of Heirdom" | single | This is not an admission of a side-effect, it is a categorization of mechanism. |
| 2018-03-09 | 3 | Barren Earth | "The Ruby" | single | To love is to exert willful emotional control over your own helpless perceptions. |
| 2018-03-09 | 4 | Glorior Belli | "Split Tongues Won't Atone" | single | This is why it is possible for seemingly insane or intolerable things to be loved: the lover's internal challenge is always the same. |
| 2018-03-09 | 5 | Varathron | "Tenebrous" | single | You can hear Big Country in Varathron, and exposed hearts in Big Country. |
| 2018-03-09 | 6 | Nocturnal Graves | "Ecdysis, Shedding Weak Flesh" | single | You can shed skin you never even had, |
| 2018-03-09 | 7 | Crystal Ball | "S.O.S." | single | and declare yourself an avatar of gods. |
| 2018-03-09 | 8 | Temperance | "Of Jupiter and Moons" | single | We consume gods relentlessly, |
| 2018-03-09 | 9 | Nergard | "An Everlasting Dreamscape" | single | and thus can always find uses for more. |
| 2018-03-09 | 30 | Rivers of Nihil | "Where Owls Know My Name" | single | Sometimes the joy is wrapped in anger wrapped in saxophones |
| 2018-03-09 | 31 | Augury | "Carrion Tide" | single | wrapped in the skin of feral tesseracts; |
| 2018-03-09 | 36 | Judas Priest | "Evil Never Dies" | Firepower | and think to yourself "Wait, I have been here before." |
| 2018-03-09 | 40 | Jaded Heart | "Wasteland" | single | in such fabulous boots. |
| 2018-03-09 | 51 | Last Days of Eden | "Forevermore" | single | Nostalgia is an oblique way of planning for the end |
| 2018-03-09 | 52 | Levania | "Rising" | The Day I Left Apart 5 | without having to directly acknowledge its inevitability. |
| 2018-03-02 | 1 | Kamelot | "RavenLight" | single | From my hotel window I can see a pair of stone lions guarding the road. |
| 2018-03-02 | 2 | Nemesea | "Twilight (New Vocal Version 2018)" | single | Last year, a couple blocks from here, a guy drove a truck into a crowd of shoppers, killing 5 of them including one of my co-workers. |
| 2018-03-02 | 3 | Kobra And The Lotus | "Losing My Humanity" | single | There are more lions on that road now, to make it harder to drive trucks there. |
| 2018-03-02 | 4 | Eldritch | "As the Night Crawls In" | single | Probably it doesn't make a lot of difference, but as reactions go, it's at least comforting in its scale. |
| 2018-03-02 | 5 | Gus G. | "Letting Go" | single | "Minister, what can we do to prevent attacks like this?" |
| 2018-03-02 | 6 | Divided Multitude | "Evolve" | single | "Not very much. Free will is dangerous. Most useful things are also dangerous. Weather is dangerous. We inhabit undefended cities on a giant rock hurtling through space." |
| 2018-03-02 | 7 | Slugdge | "War Squids" | Esoteric Malacology | "But minister, we have to do something, don't we?" |
| 2018-03-02 | 24 | Vita Versus | "Forever at Last" | single | News anxiety is self-reinforcing, perhaps in its purest form as weather anxiety, because the weather is always dire somewhere, on some time-scale. |
| 2018-03-02 | 25 | Divine Realm | "Autumn" | Nordicity 5 | I'm here in one of the most peaceful countries on earth, and there's a line of mounted police under my hotel window. |
| 2018-03-02 | 26 | Oceans of Slumber | "A Path to Broken Stars" | The Banished Heart | There's always something to fear. |
| 2018-03-02 | 35 | Mimikry | "Alla vill till himmelen men ingen vill dö" | single | They do some things right here in Sweden, but they still have colds, and they haven't made health-care as fun as shopping, |
| 2018-03-02 | 36 | Mustasch | "Winners" | single | and the police are not ceremonial. |
| 2018-03-02 | 38 | Lecherous Nocturne | "Quantum Mysticism" | single | and with enough searching you can find the occasional pastry that's a little too dry. |
| 2018-03-02 | 61 | PassCode | "AXIS" | Locus | You may think you hate metal for the growly voices, but you might hate it with fembot voices, too, |
| 2018-02-23 | 1 | Eleine | "Story Untold" | Until the End | There are many reasons to have death metal, but one is that it pulled a pendulum back |
| 2018-02-23 | 2 | Last Days of Eden | "Falling in the Deep" | single | and released it towards life metal. |
| 2018-02-23 | 3 | Sebastien | "Act of Creation" | Act of Creation | I'm not sure this kind of metadestructive exuberance was already implicit in Black Sabbath, but by "Smoke on the Water" and Sad Wings of Destiny is was at least obvious in retrospect, |
| 2018-02-23 | 4 | Necrophobic | "Lamashtu" | Mark Of The Necrogram | and we're now well into the imperial period during which metal can be simultaneously nihilistic and viridian, |
| 2018-02-23 | 5 | Lustre | "The First Snow" | single | apocalyptic and utopian, |
| 2018-02-23 | 7 | In Vain | "Seekers of the Truth" | Currents | periodically inundated by joy the way cities can now just flood, |
| 2018-02-23 | 8 | Thy Catafalque | "Szamojéd Freskó" | single | even in landlocked countries. |
| 2018-02-23 | 9 | Dimmu Borgir | "Interdimensional Summit" | single | We struggle with the atmosphere, but we definitely have the technology to polish obsidian to a mirrorglow, and maybe these two things aren't unrelated. |
| 2018-02-23 | 29 | Starkill | "The Pretender" | single | It is perfectly possible to be slightly epic, |
| 2018-02-23 | 33 | From Sorrow To Serenity | "Supremacy" | single | some we crush for pigment |
| 2018-02-23 | 34 | Mike Gianelli | "Balance 5150" | Chapter One | or just to crush. |
| 2018-02-23 | 37 | Inferi | "Behold the Bearer of Light (feat. Trevor Strnad)" | single | lovingly grooming our demons, |
| 2018-02-23 | 48 | Tengger Cavalry | "The Old War" | Cian Bi | other than the obvious invading barbarian hordes |
| 2018-02-23 | 55 | Issa | "Come Back Again" | single | more dreamlike with each distortion, |
| 2018-02-23 | 61 | Usurpress | "Late in the 11th Hour" | Interregnum | insidious and ethereally caustic, |
| 2018-02-23 | 76 | Armored Dawn | "Beware of the Dragon" | Barbarians in Black | or perilous, |
| 2018-02-16 | 2 | Visions of Atlantis | "The Deep & the Dark" | The Deep & the Dark | But ah, what dust. |
| 2018-02-16 | 3 | Thaurorod | "Feed the Flame" | Coast of Gold | Most earthly troubles come down to people and their beliefs, but things are amazing, how would we not believe in them? |
| 2018-02-16 | 4 | ANGRA | "Light of Transcendence" | ØMNI | The days these songs were brand new, I was listening to rain on metal roofs in the Judean desert, and calls to prayer in Jerusalem, and what sounded a lot like somebody dragging a metal trashcan down two flights of cement stairs at 4am in an apartment building in Tel Aviv, |
| 2018-02-16 | 5 | Heavatar | "Into Doom" | Opus II: The Annihilation | which is only the most prefatory beginning of a glossary of transcendence and collapse. |
| 2018-02-16 | 6 | Defecto | "Endlessly Falling" | Nemesis | It's easy enough to lapse into thinking that the world has been flattened, and nowhere is very far from anywhere else. |
| 2018-02-16 | 8 | Harakiri for the Sky | "The Graves We've Dug" | Arson | but then spent a couple days in the old part of Jerusalem where, among various numbered and innumerable things, people are still holding active grudges over things that happened in 691AD. |
| 2018-02-16 | 9 | Mist of Misery | "Hymn to Silence" | Fields of Isolation | I have been in some famous churches, but then you walk into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and realize that when other churches say "church", this is what they mean. |
| 2018-02-16 | 10 | Anicon | "Fall from Earth" | Aphasia 3 | I know the Stations of the Cross as metaphor for ritual. In Jerusalem the stations are better-marked than the actual streets. |
| 2018-02-16 | 11 | Horizon Ablaze | "Delusions of Grandeur" | The Weight of a Thousand Suns | I've never spent as much of a trip looking curiously at a thing, and then slowly reaching for my phone to look up a short summary of how 6000 years of history and warring faiths coil themselves inside of a hat |
| 2018-02-16 | 12 | Sisters of Suffocation | "I Swear" | Anthology of Curiosities | that everybody agrees is a hat even though nobody ever exactly believed that. |
| 2018-02-16 | 13 | Varathron | "Ouroboros Dweller (The Dweller of Barathrum)" | single | A sentry with a machine-gun demanded to know my religion, but when I said "I have none", she just shrugged and waved me past onto Temple Mount, where the axis of monotheistic human belief emerges from the Earth. |
| 2018-02-09 | 1 | Therion | "Anthem" | Beloved Antichrist | You are unlikely to find a purer or grander evocation of what it means to be a 15-year-old boy dreaming of eternity, and then becoming it, than Therion's new 3-hour, 46-song gothic-metal opera, |
| 2018-02-09 | 3 | Minniva | "You Shook Me All Night Long" | single | But look upwards at night. The other stars didn't look at the first one and think "Oh, that's been done." |
| 2018-02-09 | 7 | The Ugly | "Usurpator Vitae" | Thanatology | All we really ever mean by "evil" is that good is a constant process, |
| 2018-02-09 | 8 | Usurpress | "The Iron Gates Will Melt" | single | which is also all we really ever meant by stone or walls. |
| 2018-02-09 | 9 | Kalmah | "The Evil Kin" | single | We are heroic in decay, |
| 2018-02-09 | 10 | Borealis | "Sign of No Return" | single | heroic in retreat, |
| 2018-02-09 | 11 | Armored Dawn | "Chance to Live Again" | single | heroic in rebirth. |
| 2018-02-09 | 12 | Divided Multitude | "Nowhere to Hide" | Guardian Angel | Heroes queue for buses, line up to wait for burritos, |
| 2018-02-09 | 13 | Sebastien | "Amy" | single | shop for the right clothes, and still they fountain out of our broken healing hearts. |
| 2018-02-09 | 28 | ToxicxEternity | "Dark Cave (From "Pokemon Gold / Silver / Crystal") [Metal Version]" | single | Incompatible beliefs become collectable. |
| 2018-02-09 | 31 | Rivers of Nihil | "The Silent Life" | single | But the easiest way to fail is to let the likelihood of failure convince you you are not immortal. |
| 2018-02-09 | 32 | Legion Of The Damned | "Night Of The Sabbath" | Descent Into Chaos | Tonight, of course you are. |
| 2018-02-09 | 33 | Augury | "Mater Dolorosa" | single | You can't argue with a cataclysm. |
| 2018-02-09 | 36 | TesseracT | "Luminary" | single | and they can show you the way. |
| 2018-02-09 | 37 | Good Tiger | "Float On" | We Will All Be Gone | We have AI, but also guitars. |
| 2018-02-09 | 38 | Ev0lution | "Gummo" | single | The AI also have guitars, and evil. |
| 2018-02-09 | 48 | Sumo Cyco | "Undefeated" | single | and it didn't save them. |
| 2018-02-09 | 51 | W.E.T. | "Urgent" | single | Haven't we heard them before? |
| 2018-02-09 | 52 | Voodoo Circle | "Just Take My Heart" | Raised on Rock | But then all of these redemptions are made of the same radio waves, |
| 2018-02-09 | 62 | Visigoth | "Steel and Silver" | Conqueror's Oath | before we could really do anything about it other than belatedly cheer. |
| 2018-02-09 | 75 | Xavier Boscher | "Female Architecture" | Embryogenesis | All you can realistically hope is to disguise them as progressive-metal interstices, |
| 2018-02-09 | 76 | Mithridatic | "Hunting Fever" | He Who Lies Underneath | or submerge them in ichor. |
| 2018-02-09 | 77 | Epidemia | "Побег На Ксентарон" | Легенда Ксентарона | All we ever really hope is to seem momentarily favored by authoritative angels. |
| 2018-02-02 | 8 | Therion | "Bring Her Home" | single | but now it is ours, |
| 2018-02-02 | 9 | Alkonost | "The River" | The River +1 | and thus exactly as real as we make it. |
| 2018-02-02 | 10 | Necrophobic | "Tsar Bomba" | single | If this makes it sound like we stand upon thin floating plates of transient and illusory solidity, |
| 2018-02-02 | 11 | Djevel | "Det Svartner Paa Likbleik Hud" | single | then how many other metaphors are literal? |
| 2018-02-02 | 12 | Tengger Cavalry | "Ride into Grave and Glory (War Horse II)" | single | All of them, of course. |
| 2018-02-02 | 13 | Susperia | "The Lyricist" | single | We are, all and only, living metaphors for how the impossible could be. |
| 2018-02-02 | 14 | Ancst | "Dysthymia" | single | We are essential sacraments in the guises of wireless headphone reviews, |
| 2018-02-02 | 15 | Armored Dawn | "Sail Away" | single | new philosophies of cooking, |
| 2018-02-02 | 16 | Demonical | "Towards Greater Gods" | single | new absences of light. |
| 2018-02-02 | 17 | Slugdge | "Putrid Fairytale" | single | We are nothing but our |
| 2018-02-02 | 18 | Manigance | "Face contre terre" | Machine nation | magnificent legends |
| 2018-02-02 | 38 | Bloodywood | "Tunak Tunak Metal" | single | You can take things seriously, but eventually you have to give them back. |
| 2018-02-02 | 46 | Saxon | "The Secret Of Flight" | Thunderbolt | but give you a sense at least of capacity. |
| 2018-02-02 | 54 | Imperial Age | "The Awakening" | The Legacy of Atlantis | We will fill in every unoccupied space, and yet still dream of lost realms. |
| 2018-02-02 | 55 | Alia Tempora | "Humanity" | single | We set out to cure disease, and end up inventing new ways to make shiny clothes. |
| 2018-01-26 | 1 | Rebellion | "Thankless Child" | A Tragedy in Steel, Pt. II: Shakespeare's King Lear | Aim high. |
| 2018-01-26 | 2 | Therion | "Theme Of Antichrist" | single | No, higher. Any hittable target is too low. |
| 2018-01-26 | 3 | Orphaned Land | "Left Behind" | Unsung Prophets And Dead Messiahs | Why shouldn't every new song encapsulate all of human history to this point? |
| 2018-01-26 | 4 | Victorius | "Dinosaur Warfare" | Dinosaur Warfare - Legend of the Power Saurus 6 | And why just human history? |
| 2018-01-26 | 5 | Shakra | "Something You Don't Understand" | Snakes & Ladders | We are overflowing and eternal, and it fills our voices, |
| 2018-01-26 | 6 | In Vain | "En Forgangen Tid (Times of Yore, Pt. II)" | Currents | and this is how it has always been. |
| 2018-01-26 | 7 | Tribulation | "Nightbound" | Down Below | The continents unify and splinter and unify, |
| 2018-01-26 | 8 | Rage Of Light | "I Can, I Will" | single | and we are their will to continue. This time. |
| 2018-01-26 | 14 | Fear Of Domination | "The Last Call" | single | We find ways to be proud of the inevitable, |
| 2018-01-26 | 15 | Grimner | "Fafnersbane" | single | the indelible, |
| 2018-01-26 | 16 | Maj Karma | "Lama lama lama" | single | the insensible, |
| 2018-01-26 | 17 | Black Light Discipline | "Deadlight" | single | in the hopes that it will also love us syncretically in return. |
| 2018-01-26 | 18 | Portal | "Crone" | ION | We go where there is nothing, |
| 2018-01-26 | 19 | A Pregnant Light | "Never Innocent, Frequently Not Guilty" | Lucky All My Life | with half-empty bags half full of hope, |
| 2018-01-26 | 20 | Agrimonia | "A World Unseen" | Awaken | bulkheaded with darkness, |
| 2018-01-26 | 29 | Hooded Menace | "Sorrows of the Moon - Celtic Frost Cover" | Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed | shake before drinking, or afterwards? |
| 2018-01-26 | 30 | WagakkiBand | "雪影ぼうし" | 雪影ぼうし +1 | lay flat to dry, or run screaming? |
| 2018-01-26 | 31 | Crossfaith | "Wipeout" | single | live forever, or panic, or both? |
| 2018-01-26 | 32 | heidi. | "心葬" | Ray 3 | The fantastic essence of code is the idea of an unqualified else, |
| 2018-01-26 | 35 | Divitius | "People = Shit" | single | reasons to distrust people who don't look like your parents; |
| 2018-01-26 | 36 | Arsafes | "Merchants of Bliss" | The Silk Road Experience Pt. 1 3 | things to bring back from anywhere you will only visit once; |
| 2018-01-26 | 37 | Atena | "Confessional" | Possessed | injuries incurred by falling or doubt; |
| 2018-01-26 | 63 | Jinjer | "Bad Water" | single | We are overflowing and eternal, and aim higher by floodrising. |
| 2018-01-26 | 64 | Mors Subita | "As Humanity Weeps" | single | Only we can drown ourselves. Well, us and the sea. |
| 2018-01-19 | 1 | Dalriada | "Hollórege" | Nyárutó | Folk metal is the antithesis of melancholy indie rock in the way that mythology is the antithesis of Raymond Carver stories, |
| 2018-01-19 | 2 | Arkona | "Volchitsa" | Khram | form as a consequence of legend rather than the also-interesting other way around. |
| 2018-01-19 | 4 | The Atlas Moth | "Galactic Brain" | single | and sometimes coarsely. |
| 2018-01-19 | 5 | Primordial | "Stolen Years" | single | Most things are, one way or another, but not everything is as unself-conscious about it, |
| 2018-01-19 | 6 | Necrophobic | "Mark of the Necrogram" | single | not just unbowed by self-consciousness, but actually conscious of the unself, of the void. |
| 2018-01-19 | 7 | Usurpress | "In Books Without Pages" | single | To be sure, not every insight inspired by the void is entirely new. It's the void. |
| 2018-01-19 | 8 | Cynic | "Humanoid (Single)" | single | But sometimes we reach the event-horizon of the void in ships designed to fly there, |
| 2018-01-19 | 9 | Eternal Void | "With Time" | single | fight the gravity, |
| 2018-01-19 | 10 | REXORIA | "Queen of Light" | Queen of Light | and return triumphant. |
| 2018-01-19 | 11 | Magnum | "Peaches and Cream" | Lost on the Road to Eternity | Sometimes in a battered, indestructible freighter; |
| 2018-01-19 | 12 | Lione - Conti | "You're Falling" | single | sometimes in royal livery. |
| 2018-01-12 | 7 | Mystic Prophecy | "Hot Stuff" | Monuments Uncovered | small terrible ideas improved by grandeur; |
| 2018-01-12 | 8 | Eleine | "Sanity" | single | a partial bestiary of demons and their sisters; |
| 2018-01-12 | 9 | Therion | "Night Reborn" | single | rules and methods for staging opera as an existential state; |
| 2018-01-12 | 10 | Harakiri for the Sky | "Heroin Waltz" | single | synesthesias of preemptive despair; |
| 2018-01-12 | 11 | Pianos Become The Teeth | "Bitter Red" | single | all the sites of half-forgotten tragedies we could reach unsupervised by bicycle when we were kids; |
| 2018-01-12 | 19 | Heidevolk | "Onverzetbaar" | Vuur van Verzet | I'm not saying we have learned anything, necessarily, or anything from pixels we didn't already learn from forests. |
| 2018-01-12 | 39 | The Crown | "Iron Crown" | single | You can pound incoherence into temporarily cowering darkness, |
| 2018-01-05 | 2 | Visions of Atlantis | "Return to Lemuria" | single | The realms in between are legendary and dreaded, and our fastest ships never reach them. |
| 2018-01-05 | 3 | Rebellion | "A Fool's Tale" | single | Shakespeare would have one tragic metal band |
| 2018-01-05 | 4 | Victorius | "Lazer Tooth Tiger" | single | and one comic one, |
| 2018-01-05 | 5 | Heavatar | "Purpose of a Virgin Mind" | single | and we would gather in open theaters to debate which one is which, |
| 2018-01-05 | 6 | Watain | "Nuclear Alchemy" | TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE | the losers to be set upon by beasts, |
| 2018-01-05 | 7 | Shining | "Gyllene Portarnas Bro" | X Varg Utan Flock | the victors remanded into the dark custody of their own misled dreams. |
| 2018-01-05 | 8 | Orphaned Land | "We Do Not Resist" | single | To sing an anthem of invulnerability, you must stand helplessly still. |
| 2018-01-05 | 9 | Sinistro | "Cravo Carne" | Sangue Cassia (Deluxe Edition) | To imagine apocalypse, you must consume an encyclopedia of every thing to be destroyed. |
| 2018-01-05 | 15 | Arkona | "V pogonie za beloj ten'yu" | single | If you can look a thing in the eyes, you can hit it with an axe, |
| 2018-01-05 | 16 | Heidevolk | "A Wolf in My Heart" | single | or your teeth, |
| 2018-01-05 | 17 | Tengger Cavalry | "Cian-Bi (Fight Your Darkness)" | single | or the teeth of somebody else's ancestors. |
| 2018-01-05 | 18 | Allegaeon | "Animate" | single | Imagine how they must have lived, |
| 2018-01-05 | 29 | Judas Priest | "Lightning Strike" | single | The difference between rebellion and assimilation is mostly a shift in emphasis from anticipatory manifesto to conciliatory bureaucracy. From promise-keeping to record-keeping, and thus from miracles to choruses. |
| 2017-12-29 | 1 | Frozen Crown | "The Shieldmaiden" | single | Even when I believed years progressed toward ends, I mean individually, each, |
| 2017-12-29 | 5 | Aldaria | "When the Time Has Come" | single | And thus, perhaps, these instant lists should simply be honest in their instancy. |
| 2017-12-29 | 6 | Therion | "Temple of New Jerusalem" | single | Here is best song in the world for this 4:02, an opera run through a car-masher with dragons painted on the sides. |
| 2017-12-29 | 25 | Venom | "100 Miles To Hell" | 100 Miles To Hell +2 | You'll walk in through the gates of hell, and a flashmob welcome-dance will begin even there. |
| 2017-12-29 | 31 | Reverence | "Fire Lord" | Foreverence | The first trick of translation is arriving on foot so that guessing which one is something you only have to do for fun. |
| 2017-12-29 | 33 | Sins In Vain | "The End of Heartache" | single | They have had centuries of their own dreams; |
| 2017-12-29 | 38 | Andromida | "Conflict" | single | Stop thinking of every week as a scouting operation for some future occupation. |
| 2017-12-29 | 43 | Psychework | "Ghost Patrol" | single | in glittering space |
| 2017-12-22 | 3 | Leah | "Winter Sun" | single | and the world's, or at least the part of the world with Spotify, |
| 2017-12-22 | 18 | Thegiornalisti | "Happy Christmas John" | single | metal with wintery lyric themes, Early-Music-esque a cappella, regular indie-pop songs about regular life at Christmas time, |
| 2017-12-15 | 15 | Leaves' Eyes | "Across the Sea" | single | things you grew up or gave up or rose up together with: |
| 2017-12-15 | 16 | Leah | "Elixir of Life" | single | this is not discovery, it is the assignment of personal significance to unclaimed objects. |
| 2017-12-15 | 17 | Anna Fiori | "El Ritual" | In Ohtli Tonalli | These moments are momentous, and should be treasured, |
| 2017-12-15 | 18 | Ethernity | "The Code" | single | but they are exceptional by their nature. |
| 2017-12-15 | 19 | Arkona | "Shtorm" | single | You cannot fill all your days with honeymoons or first lamps, |
| 2017-12-15 | 20 | Grimner | "En Fallen Jätte" | single | and if this is the only way you think it counts to discover new food, you will eat insularly. |
| 2017-12-15 | 21 | Watain | "Sacred Damnation" | single | If you want to discover music because you love music, you have to actually seek out music. |
| 2017-12-15 | 22 | The Atlas Moth | "Coma Noir" | single | If you care about reaching people you don't already know, you have to listen to some of them sing. |
| 2017-12-15 | 23 | Lascar | "Uneven Alignment" | Saudade | Algorithms are not a goal, |
| 2017-12-15 | 24 | Eoront | "Passing the Gates" | Neverending Journey | no more a substitute for people |
| 2017-12-15 | 25 | The 3rd Attempt | "Into the Light" | Egocidal Path | than a screwdriver is a soulless substitute for inviting your friends over to turn a screw with all of their loving and meaningful fingernails. |
| 2017-12-15 | 26 | Rolo Tomassi | "Balancing the Dark" | single | To discover, you must explore, |
| 2017-12-15 | 27 | Mist of Misery | "Tortured by Solitude" | Fields of Isolation | must bring back something that your friends don't already know. |
| 2017-12-15 | 28 | Sisters of Suffocation | "Shapeshifter" | single | Maps are exploration technology. |
| 2017-12-15 | 29 | Oceans of Slumber | "The Decay of Disregard" | single | Some of our maps are drawn by individual hands, |
| 2017-12-15 | 49 | Ev0lution | "South Side Suicide" | single | and millions of other people's listening patterns |
| 2017-12-15 | 66 | Voodoo Circle | "Running Away from Love" | single | it is an emotional integration of perpetual movement and curiosity. |
| 2017-12-08 | 1 | Magnum | "Without Love - Single Edit" | single | You can paint the darkness any colors that you need. |
| 2017-12-08 | 2 | Coronatus | "Howling Wind" | Secrets of Nature | This is both the power and the obligation of darkness as a canvas. |
| 2017-12-08 | 3 | Shining | "Svart Ostoppbar Eld" | single | They found a tall rock in the water, and built a castle on it, |
| 2017-12-08 | 4 | Harakiri for the Sky | "You Are the Scars" | single | and I walk through its courtyards in the dark, |
| 2017-12-08 | 6 | Sinistro | "Abismo" | single | Without the relentless waves of darkness, we would be some other different creatures. |
| 2017-12-08 | 7 | Wildernessking | "And the Night Swept Us Away - Live in Studio, 2016" | ... And the Night Swept Us Away / The Devil Within | We are moral recurrence rendered sentient, |
| 2017-12-08 | 8 | Orphaned Land | "Like Orpheus" | single | and never more so than in songs. |
| 2017-12-08 | 23 | Antti Martikainen | "Northern Steel" | Northern Steel | But then again, most clothes are make-believe uniforms for something, |
| 2017-12-08 | 26 | Harms Way | "Human Carrying Capacity" | single | Now imagine advancing hordes dressed in sinister caricatures of your clothes, |
| 2017-12-08 | 27 | Beneath | "Ephemeris" | Ephemeris | singing hoarse battle anthems, |
| 2017-12-08 | 28 | Desolate Shrine | "The Waters of Man" | Deliverance from the Godless Void | and then passing roaringly by |
| 2017-12-08 | 42 | Hämatom | "Mörder" | single | or you run out of enemies |
| 2017-12-08 | 54 | This Is Turin | "When God Bleeds" | single | Never trust an implausible belief system without a destruction myth. |
| 2017-12-01 | 1 | Violet Cold | "Derealization" | single | We once had the idealistic notion that the internet would connect us, that some kid in a room in Azerbaijan could reach a virtual community distributed from Finland to Florida. |
| 2017-12-01 | 3 | Leaves' Eyes | "Sign of the Dragonhead" | single | The stagecoach will unite us. |
| 2017-12-01 | 4 | Nemesea | "Hear Me (Alternate Version 2017)" | single | Fast shoes will carry you to neighborhoods filled with people who would once have been strangers. |
| 2017-12-01 | 5 | Grimgotts | "Lions of the Sea" | Lions of the Sea | Now you can ride through those same neighborhoods on a Segway, and maybe still not actually know anybody, |
| 2017-12-01 | 6 | Snakeyes | "(Point Of) No Return" | Metal Monster | and thus it's easy to not notice that those claims have all and repeatedly proved to be true. |
| 2017-12-01 | 7 | Jono | "Sailors" | Life | Our wires and waves have connected us, keep constantly connecting us. |
| 2017-12-01 | 8 | Eldamar | "Another Journey Begins" | A Dark Forgotten Past | Our mistake was not overestimating technology, |
| 2017-12-01 | 9 | Within the Fall | "Night of Ebon" | single | it was underestimating ourselves. |
| 2017-12-01 | 18 | Heidevolk | "Ontwaakt" | single | or the clearings of ancient forests on solstice nights. |
| 2017-12-01 | 19 | Minas Morgul | "Kult" | Kult | You used to have to earn what you knew. |
| 2017-12-01 | 21 | FamilyJules | "Friends" | single | I mean, maybe I did, myself, because I made these machines, but they don't work just for me. |
| 2017-12-01 | 30 | Intervals | "Rubicon Artist" | The Way Forward | It is both of those but also the airplanes and also thus the world you can thus reach. |
| 2017-12-01 | 31 | Ev0lution | "No Burial" | No Burial 6 | The bland airport meal is not an argument against traveling. |
| 2017-12-01 | 33 | Diaura | "侵蝕" | VERSUS | Pelly invokes Muzak, and I think it's obviously and uncontroversially true that the background function Muzak was designed to serve |
| 2017-12-01 | 37 | Dragon Guardian | "Tactics Of God Wars - RADIO EDIT" | Tactics Of God Wars 3 | But Pelly blames this on algorithms, and algorithms have nothing to do with this, |
| 2017-12-01 | 42 | Kreator | "Hail to the Hordes" | Hail to the Hordes +2 | You can leave the airport to eat. |
| 2017-12-01 | 43 | Ha*Ash | "Ojalá" | 30 de Febrero | This is what the rest of the world is for. |
| 2017-12-01 | 57 | Grai | "Song of Dead Water" | Ashes | We've had Muzak for decades, and it hasn't stopped Russians from forming epic folk-metal bands. |
| 2017-12-01 | 58 | Saurom | "El Pozo de Arán" | La Magia de la Luna | We've had folk-metal for a while now, too, and it hasn't stopped Saurom from making a jubillant acoustic folk-pop record. |
| 2017-11-24 | 1 | VUUR | "The Martyr and the Saint - Beirut" | In This Moment We Are Free - Cities | The first time I heard a dense metal band with a soaring female singer, it was 1997, and the band was called The Gathering, and the singer was Anneke Van Giersbergen, and the thing didn't have a name. VUUR is Anneke's new band, and sometimes a thing escapes and eclipses its inventors, but sometimes it spins a world around them. |
| 2017-11-24 | 2 | Tyranny of Hours | "The Silver Wheel" | single | I could listen to music all the time without listening to anything but gothic symphonic metal. Maybe I mean that temperamentally, I'm not actually sure. But there's enough of it, that's my point. |
| 2017-11-24 | 6 | Portal | "Phreqs" | single | It's hard to simply clench your cortex and become better. |
| 2017-11-24 | 7 | Taake | "Sverdets Vei" | Kong Vinter | It's not trivial to listen to a lot new songs, either. |
| 2017-11-24 | 8 | Red Moon Architect | "Rising Tide" | single | But where you can spend a day trying earnestly to become better and not know if you're making the situation worse, |
| 2017-11-24 | 9 | Hooded Menace | "In Eerie Deliverance" | single | you can spend a day listening to new songs. |
| 2017-11-24 | 10 | Squealer | "Behind Closed Doors" | single | Probably you will survive. The struggle is real, but metaphorical. |
| 2017-11-24 | 16 | Nordheim | "Troll Riding a Raptor" | Rapthor | and thus that trolls can be taught the fundamentals of airborne dressage, |
| 2017-11-24 | 17 | Cardiant | "Soul" | Mirrors | and that beliefs can change. |
| 2017-11-17 | 3 | Matenrou Opera | "Beyond The Sorrow" | PANTHEON, Pt. 2 | but we have the irresistibility of wind |
| 2017-11-17 | 4 | Coronatus | "Mountain Sky" | single | and the crowns of our less-subjugated descendants to come, |
| 2017-11-17 | 5 | Leah | "Winter Sun" | single | and we will translate insidious weather into inevitable triumph. |
| 2017-11-17 | 6 | Empire | "Chasing Shadows" | Chasing Shadows | Night is ours, |
| 2017-11-17 | 7 | Rimfrost | "A Clash Under the Northern Wind" | single | cold is ours, |
| 2017-11-17 | 22 | FalKKonE | "In the Hall of the Mountain King" | Intense Symphonic Metal Covers, Vol. 6 | and all you will turn out to have done is accumulated hate where it can be more easily packaged as history, |
| 2017-11-17 | 24 | Turmion Kätilöt | "Hyvää Yötä" | single | Mostly disarmed, anyway, for now. |
| 2017-11-17 | 26 | Psychework | "Siege" | single | but there have also always been better days than any before. |
| 2017-11-17 | 36 | Gorgon | "Ishassara" | single | Your demons, our songs. |
| 2017-11-17 | 52 | Defecto | "Nemesis" | single | you wear shapeless clothes to hide from contorted monsters, |
| 2017-11-10 | 1 | Amberian Dawn | "Sky Is Falling" | Darkness of Eternity | If I had a religion, this would be my worship music. |
| 2017-11-10 | 2 | The Dark Element | "Last Good Day" | The Dark Element | Probably there's a sense in which I do. |
| 2017-11-10 | 3 | Secret Rule | "Imaginary World" | The Key to the World | At least: I believe things I can't explain, |
| 2017-11-10 | 4 | Evanescence | "The End Of The Dream" | Synthesis | I recognize immanent grandeur in rough idols, |
| 2017-11-10 | 5 | The Lust | "Nail in My Wound" | single | I face in notional directions. |
| 2017-11-10 | 6 | Elvenking | "Petalstorm - Bonus Track" | Secrets of the Magick Grimoire | I attribute stories to people I have not met or questioned, |
| 2017-11-10 | 10 | Auðn | "Ljósaslæður" | Farvegir Fyrndar | that repetition could so easily render as ritual. |
| 2017-11-10 | 25 | Second To Sun | "The Owls" | The Owls +1 | demons approaching, |
| 2017-11-10 | 32 | The Unguided | "Anchor Stone (of the World)" | And The Battle Royale | Here, before they built condos, was where we dreamed they would put our statues. |
| 2017-11-10 | 36 | lynch. | "CREATURE" | BLOOD THIRSTY CREATURE 3 | Only demons approach; humans disperse. |
| 2017-11-10 | 43 | Leyenda | "Alma Errante" | Cibernetica | We have segregated neighborhoods of Elysium, |
| 2017-11-03 | 1 | Moonspell | "Ruínas" | 1755 | The line between inarticulate rage and inarticulate joy is drawn with darkness and elaborate smoke, |
| 2017-11-03 | 2 | Regardless Of Me | "Nothing Can Last Forever" | The Covenant | and you don't step over it as much as you allow it to wind around you |
| 2017-11-03 | 3 | Elvenking | "Invoking the Woodland Spirit" | single | and become part of your disguise, |
| 2017-11-03 | 4 | Sleeping Romance | "Everything Behind" | Alba | part of your movement. |
| 2017-11-03 | 5 | Pink Cream 69 | "Walls Come Down" | single | You are descended from pillars and relentless sky, |
| 2017-11-03 | 11 | Hulkoff | "Ibor & Aio" | single | you have armor and counterweights. |
| 2017-11-03 | 12 | Shakra | "Cassandra's Curse" | single | Together we may be rooted to higher ground, |
| 2017-11-03 | 13 | Harakiri for the Sky | "Tomb Omnia" | single | to better vantage points for redemptive illusion. |
| 2017-11-03 | 14 | Misanthropy | "Left with Nothing" | Foot of the Mountain 6 | Together we may make emotional hydraulics |
| 2017-11-03 | 15 | Holdaar | "Кёнигсберг" | Дети Сумерек Богов | out of turbulent blood. |
| 2017-11-03 | 32 | FalKKonE | "Battle! Team Aqua / Team Magma Leaders (From "Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire")" | Intense Symphonic Metal Covers, Vol. 5 | even sometimes when I speak them fluently. |
| 2017-11-03 | 33 | Black Swan | "Whispers In The Sea" | single | This air around us carried sound before it diffused breath, |
| 2017-11-03 | 34 | Godflesh | "Post Self" | single | and is thus entitled to its own priorities, |
| 2017-11-03 | 35 | Zao | "Drifting Shadows in Walking Dreams" | Pyrrhic Victory 5 | its own notions of spirituality and terror. |
| 2017-11-03 | 36 | The Angelic Process | "Coma Waering" | We All Die Laughing | We are born sparks, and must earn the stature of eons. |
| 2017-11-03 | 56 | Beast In Black | "Blood of a Lion" | Berserker | and |
| 2017-11-03 | 57 | Pop Evil | "Waking Lions" | single | insignia, |
| 2017-11-03 | 66 | Svartsinn | "And in This Cloak of Darkness I Cast My Shadow Short (Ghost Boy)" | Mørkets Variabler | We are abandoned in merciless roiling darkness all but half of the time. |
| 2017-10-27 | 2 | Metalite | "Purpose of Life" | Heroes in Time | and elaborate levers. |
| 2017-10-27 | 8 | Savage Messiah | "Wing and a Prayer" | single | Look this way, too, at yourself. |
| 2017-10-27 | 9 | Serenity | "Empire" | Lionheart | Instead of desperately saying smaller things to avoid giving offense, |
| 2017-10-27 | 10 | Within Silence | "You & I" | Return from the Shadows | say bigger things |
| 2017-10-27 | 11 | Keldian | "Nightfall" | Darkness and Light | you are willing to defend. |
| 2017-10-27 | 12 | Cardiant | "Life Has Just Begun" | single | Innocense isn't a victory of self-censorship, |
| 2017-10-27 | 13 | Communic | "Black Flag of Hate" | Where Echoes Gather | it's a base-state of emotional alacrity. |
| 2017-10-27 | 14 | Moonspell | "In Tremor Dei" | single | Technology is not the enemy of magic, |
| 2017-10-27 | 15 | Blut Aus Nord | "Chorea Macchabeorum" | Deus Salutis Meae | it's the method, |
| 2017-10-27 | 16 | Mammoth Grinder | "Pulverizer" | Split 3 | but in magic the fossil record is consumed |
| 2017-10-27 | 17 | All Pigs Must Die | "A Caustic Vision" | Hostage Animal | without being destroyed. |
| 2017-10-27 | 18 | Ne Obliviscaris | "Intra Venus" | Urn | The internal structure of love and the internal structure of chaos |
| 2017-10-27 | 19 | Hanging Garden | "Our Dark Design" | I Am Become | are mutual evocations of congruency, |
| 2017-10-27 | 20 | Black Swan | "蟲聲" | 蟲聲 +1 | or explosive imitations of collapse. |
| 2017-10-27 | 21 | Skyclad | "Thinking Allowed" | Jonah's Ark | Take a violin and a lot of iron giants with guitars, |
| 2017-10-27 | 22 | Eluveitie | "Rebirth" | single | or anything that makes noise by grinding, |
| 2017-10-20 | 3 | The Dark Element | "Dead to Me" | single | and the next ABBAs are all metal bands. |
| 2017-10-20 | 8 | Xanthochroid | "Walk with Me O Winged Mother" | Of Erthe and Axen: Act II | Do you counter your fears with yearning complexity |
| 2017-10-20 | 9 | Xipe Totec | "Cihuateteo" | Axomimitl | or clenched violence? |
| 2017-10-20 | 10 | El Cuervo de Poe | "Fénix (Single Version)" | Ciudad Sin Memoria | With lineage |
| 2017-10-20 | 11 | Elvenking | "The Horned Ghost and the Sorcerer" | single | or mythology? |
| 2017-10-20 | 12 | Communic | "The Pulse of the Earth, Pt. 1: The Magnetic Center" | single | With immersive-evasive abstraction |
| 2017-10-20 | 13 | Veil Of Maya | "Manichee" | False Idol | or headlong surrender? |
| 2017-10-20 | 14 | Yellow Eyes | "Old Alpine Pang" | Immersion Trench Reverie | All of these are ways of acknowledging a kernel of nihilistic distrust |
| 2017-10-20 | 15 | Throane | "Et ceux en lesquels ils croyaient" | Plus une main à mordre | without which free will is nominal. |
| 2017-10-20 | 16 | Vredehammer | "Suffocate All Light" | single | This is why dark arts have persisted, from Dante to black metal, |
| 2017-10-20 | 24 | Andromida | "Discoveries" | single | why we watch for cyborg invaders coming over the horizon |
| 2017-10-20 | 25 | Shadow of Intent | "The Mausoleum of Liars" | The Instrumentals | while we assemble harmless robots that will benificently help us become more productive. |
| 2017-10-20 | 50 | Sorcerer | "Bringer of Misery (Bonus Track)" | The Crowning of the Fire King | You are, after all, the steward of the dreams of everything you destroy, |
| 2017-10-20 | 51 | Aephanemer | "Path of the Wolf" | single | which is how moral nihilism ends up implicating you in every complicated mortal frality, |
| 2017-10-20 | 52 | Depresszió | "Teérted" | Válaszok után... | how you end up caring for everything you imagine you would stomp over. |
| 2017-10-13 | 5 | Serenity | "United" | single | something forged, |
| 2017-10-13 | 6 | Amberian Dawn | "I'm The One" | single | extravagant grandeur, |
| 2017-10-13 | 7 | Power Quest | "Starlight City" | Sixth Dimension | impractical utopias, |
| 2017-10-13 | 8 | Helloween | "Pumpkins United" | single | an unreasonable dedication to ridiculous principles, |
| 2017-10-13 | 9 | Minniva | "Wish I Had An Angel" | single | meticulous reconstructions of arbitrary monuments, |
| 2017-10-13 | 10 | Pink Cream 69 | "Man of Sorrow" | single | how we huddle around volcanos for warmth. |
| 2017-10-13 | 11 | Beast In Black | "Beast in Black" | single | Choose a name and repeat it to yourself until it makes you think of nothing else. |
| 2017-10-13 | 12 | Enslaved | "What Else Is There - Bonus Track" | E | The boundaries you think you know are pale projections from your own tired eyes. |
| 2017-10-13 | 13 | Samael | "Samael" | Hegemony | Repeat your own name |
| 2017-10-13 | 14 | Sarke | "Viige Urh" | Viige Urh | until it sounds like the first word of a new language. |
| 2017-10-13 | 15 | Moonspell | "Evento" | single | How do you think we got these languages in the first place? |
| 2017-10-13 | 29 | Ne Obliviscaris | "Urn, Pt. II: As Embers Dance in Our Eyes" | single | We find small spells to cast, where we can take credit for inevitable outcomes. |
| 2017-10-13 | 30 | The Unguided | "The Heartbleed Bug" | single | Today we will extract a fully-deserved partial refund of an erroneous surchange. |
| 2017-10-13 | 67 | Within Silence | "Children of Light" | single | We hear fragments of things we know, because that's how our brains hear, |
| 2017-10-13 | 75 | Shiraz Lane | "Harder to Breathe" | single | when we stop holding our breath. |
| 2017-10-13 | 77 | The Lust | "Faster" | single | then we can yearn for strangers and enemies |
| 2017-10-13 | 78 | Anna Fiori | "Fuego Negro" | single | and half-naked things we don't entirely recognize |
| 2017-10-06 | 3 | Anubis Gate | "Psychotopia" | Covered in Black | validated in systemic grace. |
| 2017-10-06 | 4 | Communic | "Where Echoes Gather, Pt. 2: The Underground Swine" | single | We persist. |
| 2017-10-06 | 5 | Nachtblut | "Multikulturell" | single | Persistence is not itself a triumph until we celebrate it. |
| 2017-10-06 | 6 | Aeranea | "The Fall" | The Demons Inside 3 | Most accurately, I think, we celebrate our capacity for celebration. |
| 2017-10-06 | 7 | Shadowside | "The Fall" | Shades of Humanity | We are triumphantly self-aware, and least human when rage and desperation take us out of ourselves. |
| 2017-10-06 | 8 | The Dark Element | "Here's to You" | single | Heroic sentience, |
| 2017-10-06 | 9 | Power Quest | "Lords of Tomorrow (Single Version)" | single | these are our verses |
| 2017-10-06 | 10 | Enslaved | "The River's Mouth" | single | and landscapes, |
| 2017-10-06 | 11 | Havukruunu | "Talven Mustat Tuulet" | Havulinnaan | our anticipatory ruins, |
| 2017-10-06 | 12 | Samael | "Hegemony" | single | our lightlessnesses, |
| 2017-10-06 | 13 | Witchery | "Of Blackened Wing" | single | halls constructed for the obscure purposes of the haunters. |
| 2017-10-06 | 14 | Sarke | "Age of Sail" | single | We are vacated historians, |
| 2017-10-06 | 15 | WVRM | "Can You Hear The Wind Howl" | Can You Hear the Wind Howl 6 | or the ghosts of their scribes, |
| 2017-10-06 | 17 | Veil Of Maya | "Doublespeak" | single | Some people want to fill the world with the entrails of love songs, |
| 2017-10-06 | 34 | UNDEAD CORPORATION | "No Antidote" | NO ANTIDOTE | You can fly in black armor if you agree to live in a world of smoke. |
| 2017-10-06 | 35 | Good Tiger | "Blueshift" | single | You can master a method of relentless redemption if you promise to only use it for planning hypothetical colonies under fictional seas. |
| 2017-10-06 | 36 | Angel Vivaldi | "Adrenaline (feat. Julian Cifuentes)" | Synapse | You can pick an arbitrary velocity with which to not arrive. |
| 2017-10-06 | 45 | Liv Sin | "King Of The Damned" | single | You who would defeat us, we have already rehearsed more defeats than you can imagine. |
| 2017-10-06 | 56 | Sympuls-E | "City of the Void" | Mirror City | You can exempt yourself from everything the rest of us bear, |
| 2017-10-06 | 57 | Misanthropy | "Of Wolves" | single | but escape nothing. |
| 2017-10-06 | 58 | Second To Sun | "We Are Not Alone" | We Are Not Alone +1 | We are formed, out of negative space, in defiant affirmations. |
| 2017-10-06 | 66 | Ewigkeit | "Wonder of the Cosmos" | Battle Furies | Without forever, you will never know how the rest of us are overcome at once, right now, by sadness and joy. |
| 2017-10-06 | 80 | Metalite | "Nightmare" | single | We will sing when you slink away. |
| 2017-09-22 | 1 | Nocturnal Rites | "What's Killing Me" | single | You don't have to stand for this. |
| 2017-09-22 | 2 | Eleine | "Hell Moon (We Shall Never Die)" | single | These flags and monuments are ritual mnemonics, |
| 2017-09-22 | 3 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Fires Roar in the Palace of the Moon" | Thrice Woven | symbols we once made to explain a realization or a refusal. |
| 2017-09-22 | 4 | Satyricon | "The Ghost Of Rome" | Deep calleth upon Deep | They are future ruins, polished and preserved in their splendor for a while until they crumble, |
| 2017-09-22 | 6 | Auðn | "Skuggar" | single | But insisting on the memorization of old answers to questions we no longer ask the same way |
| 2017-09-22 | 7 | Altarage | "Orb Terrax" | single | is the opposite of curiosity. |
| 2017-09-22 | 8 | Cradle Of Filth | "The Night at Catafalque Manor" | Cryptoriana - The Seductiveness of Decay | Codifying the body postures appropriate to any given song is the opposite of listening. |
| 2017-09-22 | 9 | Sarke | "Jutul" | single | Alexander Hamilton wasn't even thinking about football games, that night in 1776, |
| 2017-09-22 | 43 | Dark Oath | "If I Had a Heart" | single | than the new ones we write out of selfishness or love. |
| 2017-09-22 | 44 | Archspire | "Relentless Mutation" | Relentless Mutation | Our new systems will be terrible and swift. |
| 2017-09-22 | 67 | Martina Edoff | "Turn Our Pages" | We Will Align | bright blazons, |
| 2017-09-22 | 88 | Acephalix | "Upon This Altar" | Decreation | praying for help, |
| 2017-09-15 | 7 | Satyricon | "To Your Brethren In The Dark" | single | Some noises reach into ourselves towards where we yearn for this chance: |
| 2017-09-15 | 8 | Myrkur | "Elleskudt" | Mareridt (Deluxe Version) | Nihilism as a situational strategy for viridian reorganization, |
| 2017-09-15 | 9 | Samael | "Black Supremacy" | single | a way to disintegrate current power structures, |
| 2017-09-15 | 10 | Kadaverdisciplin | "Death Supremacy" | Death Supremacy | fearlessly |
| 2017-09-15 | 11 | Xanthochroid | "The Sound Which Has No Name" | Of Erthe and Axen: Act I | and recklessly, |
| 2017-09-15 | 13 | Amberian Dawn | "Maybe" | single | will be a shorter path to joy. |
| 2017-09-15 | 14 | Ensiferum | "King of Storms" | single | This is a massive vote of no-confidence in our history and its inertia, |
| 2017-09-15 | 15 | Arion | "No One Stands in My Way" | single | but a magnificent gesture of faith in our potential |
| 2017-09-15 | 16 | Neverland | "Destiny" | Before the Winner | and our future. |
| 2017-09-15 | 17 | Kee of Hearts | "Stranded" | Kee of Hearts | And isn't this ultimately the question we ask ourselves about this life: |
| 2017-09-15 | 18 | Evanescence | "Imperfection" | single | Is progress a thing? |
| 2017-09-15 | 27 | Veil Of Maya | "Overthrow" | single | so that their frailty and betrayal becomes part of the story of justice and strength, |
| 2017-09-15 | 28 | Moonspell | "Todos Os Santos" | single | as of course it always must? |
| 2017-09-15 | 29 | The Unguided | "Legendary" | single | Never bring a sulk to a catharsis fight. |
| 2017-09-15 | 30 | Hanging Garden | "Elysium" | single | To contemplate death is to |
| 2017-09-15 | 31 | Skyfire | "Liberation In Death" | Liberation In Death +3 | look beyond yourself, |
| 2017-09-15 | 32 | Even Vast | "After All" | Dawning Gloom | and recognize the elements of you that already exist in everybody else: |
| 2017-09-15 | 46 | MUCC | "茫然自失 / Bouzenjishitsu" | 殺シノ調べⅡ This is NOT Greatest Hits / Koroshi No ShirabeⅡ This is NOT Greatest Hits | But your familiar roads are other people's labyrinths of frantic despair. |
| 2017-09-15 | 58 | The Contortionist | "Monochrome (Passive)" | Clairvoyant | We mutter to ourselves, |
| 2017-09-15 | 59 | Caligula's Horse | "Dream the Dead" | In Contact | rehearsing arguments for things we probably don't really need, |
| 2017-09-15 | 60 | Archspire | "Calamus Will Animate" | single | and practicing our hammer-swing, |
| 2017-09-15 | 61 | Dyscarnate | "To End All Flesh Before Me" | With All Their Might | and our ability to recognize the first signs of decay, |
| 2017-09-15 | 62 | Gigan | "Hyperjump-Ritual Madness" | Undulating Waves Of Rainbiotic Iridescence | and thus disguise it in ourselves. |
| 2017-09-15 | 74 | Tuoni | "Tulipyörä" | single | dreaded, |
| 2017-09-15 | 112 | Gwar | "El Presidente" | single | cartoonish and precise, |
| 2017-09-08 | 2 | Inanimate Existence | "Underneath a Melting Sky" | Underneath a Melting Sky | But maybe not yet. |
| 2017-09-08 | 15 | Primal Fear | "If Looks Could Kill" | single | in retreat, |
| 2017-09-08 | 16 | Threshold | "Superior Machine" | Legends of the Shires | in glory, |
| 2017-09-08 | 17 | Force Majeure | "Church of Steam" | The Rise of Starlit Fires | in exaltation, |
| 2017-09-08 | 18 | Kee of Hearts | "Crimson Dawn" | single | as long as we |
| 2017-09-08 | 19 | Pink Cream 69 | "We Bow to None" | single | begin. |
| 2017-09-08 | 25 | Butcher Babies | "Lilith" | single | Coasts rise, |
| 2017-09-08 | 46 | Usnea | "Demon Haunted World" | Portals into Futility | and the memory of promise, not the anticipation of its fulfillment, is what carries us through torment. |
| 2017-09-08 | 48 | Toothgrinder | "The Shadow" | single | but we have had days of terrifying beauty. |
| 2017-09-08 | 49 | WagakkiBand | "月に叫ぶ夜" | 雨のち感情論 2 | We may not escape this room, |
| 2017-09-08 | 56 | Exhumed | "Lifeless" | single | not exactly dead; |
| 2017-09-08 | 57 | Impureza | "Sangre Para Los Dioses" | single | covered with some kind of blood, but not all exactly ours. |
| 2017-09-08 | 58 | Alkonost | "Tropa K Vesne" | Tropa K Vesne +1 | We have ridden into battle with gods, |
| 2017-09-08 | 59 | Varang Nord | "Зов битвы" | Зов битвы | and come home again without them, |
| 2017-09-01 | 8 | The Wake | "Isolated Illusion" | Earth's Necropolis | Conflation is a crude strategy for discovery, |
| 2017-09-01 | 9 | Nocturnal Rites | "Repent My Sins" | single | but maybe no cruder than ritual. |
| 2017-09-01 | 10 | Lonewolf | "Through Fire, Ice and Blood" | single | We rehearse to fill the time between inspirations, |
| 2017-09-01 | 11 | Epica | "Fight Your Demons" | The Solace System | or to practice not giving up. |
| 2017-09-01 | 12 | The Unity | "Never Forget" | Never Forget +1 | What is it about ecstatic glory that makes any more or less sense than invisible rays and particles? |
| 2017-09-01 | 13 | KAUAN | "Kasvot" | single | And yet here we are, |
| 2017-09-01 | 14 | Usnea | "Eidolons and the Increate" | single | more or less, |
| 2017-09-01 | 15 | Auðn | "Í Hálmstráið Held" | single | terrified |
| 2017-09-01 | 16 | Ne Obliviscaris | "Urn, Pt. I: And Within the Void We Are Breathless" | single | and ascendant. |
| 2017-09-01 | 19 | Andrew Baena | "MU 無 - MU 無" | single | thinking "but hasn't this already been done?" |
| 2017-09-01 | 25 | Septicflesh | "Martyr" | Codex Omega | Or that we aren't our demons. |
| 2017-09-01 | 29 | Mary's Blood | "Hanabi" | Fate | All these words are other helpless ebullient ways to explode |
| 2017-09-01 | 40 | Kilpi | "Kasikuus" | Kasikuus +1 | People with names you can't pronounce will have nicknames you can't pronounce, either, |
| 2017-09-01 | 41 | Mansesteri | "Turbulenssi (feat. Samson)" | single | but that just means you can call them anything, |
| 2017-08-25 | 3 | Akercocke | "Unbound by Sin" | Renaissance in Extremis | What you see in one figure's eyes, |
| 2017-08-25 | 4 | Drudkh | "All Shades of Silence" | Somewhere Sadness Wanders 2 | you may hear in another's step, |
| 2017-08-25 | 5 | Wolves In The Throne Room | "Angrboda" | single | traced through excavated gates. |
| 2017-08-25 | 6 | Altarage | "Spearheaderon" | single | Between any two points may be drawn a unique chord, |
| 2017-08-25 | 7 | Sannhet | "Sleep Well" | So Numb | and thus by the chord may they be known, |
| 2017-08-25 | 8 | Pyrrhon | "Goat Mockery Ritual" | What Passes For Survival | at least. |
| 2017-08-25 | 9 | Nervecell | "Aadvent" | Past, Present...Torture | Defy this power of love, and you will choke on your disbelief. |
| 2017-08-25 | 14 | Serious Black | "Binary Magic" | Magic | but don't assume we understand things just because we can appear to have automated them. |
| 2017-08-25 | 20 | Crimfall | "The Last of Stands" | Amain | but the old ways have also been unevenly preserved. |
| 2017-08-25 | 21 | The Haunted | "Strength in Numbers" | Strength in Numbers | We spend so much time marveling at the speed with which the future approaches, |
| 2017-08-25 | 22 | Forodwaith | "Weakness Transgress" | The One | but the past gains on us even faster. |
| 2017-08-25 | 23 | Minniva | "All The Clowns" | single | Nostalgia, history, historiography: |
| 2017-08-25 | 40 | Chariots | "Re:Automata" | Revenir 2 | until they vine-fill the possible space |
| 2017-08-25 | 41 | Leprous | "The Weight of Disaster" | Malina | and the columns that support it can permit themselves fractures. |
| 2017-08-25 | 42 | Widek | "Deep & Shallow (feat. Marco Sfogli)" | Hidden Dimensions | When we were kids, we had none of these alloys. |
| 2017-08-25 | 46 | Archspire | "Human Murmuration" | single | And then you can grind it |
| 2017-08-25 | 47 | Arkaik | "Of Violence and Pestilence Born" | single | into |
| 2017-08-25 | 48 | Leng Tch'e | "Indomitable" | Razorgrind | dust. |
| 2017-08-25 | 69 | Second To Sun | "Land of the Fearless Birds" | The First Chapter | But we have drills that can bore straight through the earth. |
| 2017-08-25 | 74 | Gwar | "Fuck This Place" | single | But it is. |
| 2017-08-25 | 79 | Portrait | "Likfassna" | Burn the World | when we know it should be obvious because it's the only feeling we ever had left. |
| 2017-08-18 | 17 | Nokturnal Mortum | "Wild Weregild" | Verity | indestructible hope for freedom. |
| 2017-08-18 | 18 | Samael | "Red Planet" | single | Here is what you find there now: |
| 2017-08-18 | 19 | Rebel Wizard | "One I Seek" | The Warning of One 4 | Methodically ubiquitous public transportation with no fare gates. |
| 2017-08-18 | 20 | Eden's Curse | "We All Die Young - Rerecorded" | single | Teeming street-food markets. |
| 2017-08-18 | 21 | Threshold | "Small Dark Lines" | single | Bike lanes past Turkish kebab chains |
| 2017-08-18 | 22 | Ensiferum | "Way of the Warrior" | single | and Southeast Asian fusion-burger bistros |
| 2017-08-18 | 23 | Force Majeure | "Apocalyptic Hearts" | single | and kiosks where a little curry powder on ketchup-covered chopped-up hot-dogs |
| 2017-08-18 | 24 | Eagleheart | "Until Fear Is Gone" | Reverse | counts as a cultural icon. |
| 2017-08-18 | 25 | Lör | "Visions of Awakening" | In Forgotten Sleep | Testaments to horror. |
| 2017-08-18 | 38 | Crimfall | "Until Falls the Rain" | single | page after menu-page of nothing but variations on |
| 2017-08-18 | 39 | Dagoba | "Stone Ocean" | single | potatoes. |
| 2017-08-18 | 40 | The Haunted | "Preachers of Death" | single | Swiss cheeses, |
| 2017-08-18 | 41 | Magenta Harvest | "...And Then Came the Dust" | single | Dutch strollers, |
| 2017-08-18 | 42 | Sons of Crom | "Fall of Pandemonium" | The Black Tower | Abandoned airports declared as vast parks, |
| 2017-08-18 | 43 | Equilibrium Falls | "Threshold" | single | and endless shopping malls with parking for airplanes. |
| 2017-08-18 | 44 | Leah | "The Dragonborn Comes" | single | Mexican food made with Greek feta. |
| 2017-08-18 | 45 | Minniva | "Fullmoon" | single | Martial hip hop. |
| 2017-08-18 | 64 | Nachtblut | "Amok" | single | and cargo-bike shops. |
| 2017-08-18 | 65 | Leprous | "Illuminate" | single | Urbanism as anything but utopian. |
| 2017-08-18 | 66 | Their Dogs Were Astronauts | "Into New Worlds" | Neon Theatre | Affordable ice cream. |
| 2017-08-18 | 67 | Save Us from the Archon | "Within Walls" | Melancholia | Hiking gear for kids. |
| 2017-08-18 | 68 | Johari | "Void" | single | Finnish ceramics. |
| 2017-08-18 | 72 | Revolution Saints | "Freedom" | single | Words I hear in the tones of my Texas high-school German teacher's hungover Brooklyn accent. |
| 2017-08-18 | 83 | Kee of Hearts | "Bridge to Heaven" | single | tear gardens. |
| 2017-08-11 | 4 | Nocturnal Rites | "A Heart as Black as Coal" | single | but also do not expect your enemies to always stay |
| 2017-08-11 | 5 | Exit Eden | "Firework" | Rhapsodies In Black | inimical. |
| 2017-08-11 | 12 | Enslaved | "Storm Son" | single | But we involuntarily recall the rush of it, |
| 2017-08-11 | 13 | Satyricon | "Deep calleth upon Deep" | single | the way rage surges, |
| 2017-08-11 | 14 | Everfrost | "Cold Night Remedy" | single | our nights in armor. |
| 2017-08-11 | 21 | Septicflesh | "Enemy of Truth" | single | Our potential for nobility is inherent and infinite, but our actual nobility is wrested out of our basest impulses and our most impulsive bases. |
| 2017-08-11 | 22 | Cradle Of Filth | "You Will Know the Lion by His Claw" | single | You will know the truly lost by the way they refuse to be found. |
| 2017-08-11 | 23 | Svartby | "Under Frusna Stjärnor" | Under Frusna Stjärnor +1 | And we will meet them in the streets, for show, but you'll notice that they never have streets of their own. |
| 2017-08-11 | 25 | Lyriel | "Crown Of The Twilight" | 10 6 | but helpless and infantile when they have to ask them of anyone else. |
| 2017-08-11 | 32 | The Body & Full of Hell | "Earth is a Cage" | single | You can't keep hating people, they have nowhere else to go and the bile |
| 2017-08-11 | 33 | Usnea | "Pyrrhic Victory" | single | will dissolve you. |
| 2017-08-11 | 38 | MUCC | "Zetsubou - Sin" | Sin Homura Uta | He would point out that the South already tried to run on black nonrenewable fuel once. |
| 2017-08-11 | 39 | MUCC | "盲目であるが故の疎外感 / Moumoku De Arugayue No Sogaikan - Sin" | 新痛絶 / Sin Tsuuzetsu | He would understand that holding tightly to statues of losing generals from long-ended wars is not cultural dignity, |
| 2017-08-11 | 51 | Nervecell | "D.N.A. (Diruo Nocens Acervus)" | single | We do not exercise a right to war, you surrender your right to peace. |
| 2017-08-11 | 58 | Dawn of Disease | "Beneath The Waters" | Ascension Gate | We were horrifically and obviously and always wrong, but at least we did it with more dignity. |
| 2017-08-11 | 65 | Kill the Kong | "Snake Eyes" | single | On one side, a ladder ascends to a blank surface. |
| 2017-08-04 | 1 | Pentakill | "Tear of the Goddess" | II: Grasp of the Undying | This band does not exist, but they make great music. |
| 2017-08-04 | 5 | Mystic Prophecy | "Burning Bridges" | single | Before we had these engines of glory? |
| 2017-08-04 | 6 | Eden's Curse | "Fallen King - Rerecorded" | single | Was there ever actually a time before nostalgia? |
| 2017-08-04 | 7 | Hell In the Club | "The Phantom Punch" | single | Didn't we invent levers to lift ourselves into the air? |
| 2017-08-04 | 16 | Paradise Lost | "Blood and Chaos" | Blood and Chaos +1 | Everything counts in loud amounts. |
| 2017-08-04 | 44 | Paganizer | "Your Suffering Will Be Legendary" | Land of Weeping Souls | The noise is us. |
| 2017-08-04 | 59 | Mumiy Troll | "Отв. за романтику" | single | with the new models. |
| 2017-08-04 | 60 | End Of Green | "Dark Side Of The Sun" | single | If the glass is half-empty, drink the rest and the glass will be ready for |
| 2017-08-04 | 69 | Kryptonite | "Chasing Fire" | Kryptonite | sold in packages upgraded more often than the contents. |
| 2017-08-04 | 71 | Morphinist | "What Once Was Immortal" | What Once Was Immortal +1 | and will yet be a fractal impacted blur of all possible fates, |
| 2017-07-28 | 3 | The Interbeing | "Deceptive Signal" | Among the Amorphous | or blast out of a cliff-face or in. |
| 2017-07-28 | 7 | Masterplan | "Mr. Ego" | single | which is why Heisenberg said that past particles are each obsolete in their own way, |
| 2017-07-28 | 8 | Coldspell | "Call of the Wild" | single | but future particles are all triumphantly the same. |
| 2017-07-28 | 9 | Snakeyes | "Sign of Death" | single | The impossible is triumphant by definition. |
| 2017-07-28 | 10 | Absolva | "Harsh Reality" | Defiance | Any song that sounds like people had and took time to play it until they got it right is affirmational and humanity-positive. |
| 2017-07-28 | 13 | Myrkur | "Ulvinde" | single | that no one owns. |
| 2017-07-28 | 23 | Minniva | "Hunting High And Low" | single | We are here to see what delight can destroy, |
| 2017-07-28 | 24 | ELA | "Deadly Sins" | single | and what we become when we outlive this. |
| 2017-07-28 | 25 | Worhol | "We, The Abused" | The Awakening | We are here to find ourselves in endlessness. |
| 2017-07-28 | 26 | Converge | "Eve" | I Can Tell You About Pain 2 | We are here to eat through these stones with our corrosive blood, |
| 2017-07-28 | 27 | Blood Stain Child | "O.k.e.@.n.o.S" | TRI ODYSSEY 4 | to get to the mineral veins |
| 2017-07-28 | 28 | Eluveitie | "Lvgvs" | single | and older legends. |
| 2017-07-28 | 30 | Jonathan Parecki | "Zen Zen Zense (From "Your Name. - Kimi no Na wa.")" | single | normally, but in a not-quite ocean you never know. |
| 2017-07-28 | 31 | ToxicxEternity | "Mute City" | single | Oceans are no less artifacts of context than pianos or other cities. |
| 2017-07-28 | 39 | Archspire | "Remote Tumour Seeker" | single | The nights |
| 2017-07-28 | 40 | Dying Fetus | "Reveling in the Abyss" | Wrong One to Fuck With | are terrified and lost |
| 2017-07-28 | 41 | Dawn of Disease | "Leprous Thoughts" | single | without us |
| 2017-07-28 | 43 | Leprous | "Stuck - radio edit" | single | We are secure in complicated evasions. |
| 2017-07-28 | 44 | Rings of Saturn | "Servant of This Sentience" | Ultu Ulla | But of course "secure" is the wrong word. |
| 2017-07-28 | 50 | Crimfall | "Mother of Unbelievers" | single | Such is our overwhelming, untenable profusion of joy. |
| 2017-07-21 | 1 | Fellwarden | "In Death, Valiant" | Oathbearer | The fells don't really need to be warded against anything but us. But we like how it feels when we think we have a crucial role. |
| 2017-07-21 | 5 | Exit Eden | "Unfaithful" | single | and glittering mosaics made out of pain, |
| 2017-07-21 | 6 | Mitochondrion | "Insummation" | Antinumerology 3 | and harrowing pain made of wires and spells. |
| 2017-07-21 | 7 | Portrait | "Martyrs" | single | But pain is what makes hair shine. |
| 2017-07-21 | 9 | Kryptonite | "This Is the Moment" | single | half for excitement |
| 2017-07-21 | 10 | In This Moment | "Lay Your Gun Down" | Ritual | and half for closure. |
| 2017-07-21 | 11 | Anthriel | "Siren's Song" | Transcendence | We are majestic in derivation |
| 2017-07-21 | 15 | Sannhet | "Salts" | single | Did you think any color would preserve you from the void? |
| 2017-07-21 | 17 | Eden's Curse | "Fly Away - Rerecorded" | single | All the available cavalry is here already, |
| 2017-07-21 | 18 | Eclipse | "The Downfall of Eden" | The Downfall of Eden +1 | has been here uselessly |
| 2017-07-21 | 19 | Ensiferum | "For Those About to Fight for Metal" | single | and grandly all along. |
| 2017-07-21 | 20 | Revolution Saints | "Light in the Dark" | single | I believe in no gods, but I recognize faith in the unseen as a super-power. |
| 2017-07-21 | 21 | Crossfaith | "Diavolos" | single | I believe rules are a consensual social contract, not a bequeathed liturgy, but I am awed by old books. |
| 2017-07-21 | 31 | Decrepit Birth | "The Sacred Geometry" | Axis Mundi | Monument Valley would have been a much less meditative game with different music. |
| 2017-07-21 | 32 | Cytotoxin | "Chaos Cascade" | Gammageddon | The moral: never leave the crows in charge. |
| 2017-07-21 | 33 | Horizon Ablaze | "She Who Walks Upon the Sea" | single | The nihilists do not lack kindness, but they render it in obscurity. |
| 2017-07-21 | 40 | Tau Cross | "On the Water" | Pillar of Fire | later to be destroyed. |
| 2017-07-21 | 41 | Ereb Altor | "En Synd Svart Som Sot" | Ulfven | All our love stories are engraved upon ruins. |
| 2017-07-21 | 65 | Brutus | "Not Caring" | Burst | You should try to see some of them before they're routinely leveled, |
| 2017-07-14 | 3 | Masterplan | "Escalation 666" | single | variously bargained, |
| 2017-07-14 | 4 | Edguy | "Ravenblack" | Monuments | not always reviewable, |
| 2017-07-14 | 5 | Threshold | "Lost in Translation" | single | not always simple, |
| 2017-07-14 | 6 | Dark Avenger | "The Beloved Bones" | The Beloved Bones: Hell | not to be trusted, |
| 2017-07-14 | 13 | In This Moment | "In the Air Tonight" | single | Hold one in your hand, patiently. |
| 2017-07-14 | 24 | Septicflesh | "3rd Testament (Codex Omega)" | single | Conspiracies are machines, |
| 2017-07-14 | 25 | Arch Enemy | "The World Is Yours" | single | defeats are machines for release, |
| 2017-07-14 | 26 | Cradle Of Filth | "Heartbreak and Seance" | single | these dystopias are engineered for your impossible perfection. |
| 2017-07-14 | 29 | Usnea | "Lathe of Heaven" | single | But technology is not a fossil fuel, it is an expression of love. |
| 2017-07-14 | 37 | Elegy Of Madness | "Apokalypsis" | New Era | the irrational convulsions of light and noise. |
| 2017-07-14 | 50 | Winnie | "let it die" | Greatful 15years Dead | metal walls are warm to our touch, |
| 2017-07-07 | 1 | Tau Cross | "Bread and Circuses" | single | There are monsters that we must defeat. |
| 2017-07-07 | 2 | A Secret Revealed | "Grieved" | single | Do not be deceived when they cover themselves in strata of roiling granite. |
| 2017-07-07 | 7 | Orden Ogan | "The Face of Silence" | Gunmen | Whatever you believe, others may reconstruct, |
| 2017-07-07 | 12 | Ideas | "A költő (a történet alkonya)" | Egység | All the languages say so. |
| 2017-07-07 | 18 | Sarah Jaffe | "Synthetic Love" | Bad Baby | The best ever death metal band from Denton has other friends now. |
| 2017-07-07 | 20 | Vomitron | "Robot Sex" | Vomitron | different kinds of people, |
| 2017-07-07 | 25 | Rings of Saturn | "Parallel Shift" | single | Machination gave us Linn Drum funk and New Romantic flutter, but also technical death metal |
| 2017-07-07 | 29 | Esprit D'Air | "Ignition" | Constellations | or from whence to read it aloud, |
| 2017-07-07 | 30 | Magistina Saga | "Alkanet" | Reingrimonation | or in what voice. |
| 2017-07-07 | 52 | Dragonfly | "Soy" | Genesis | and different ceremonies, |
| 2017-07-07 | 58 | Integrity | "7 Reece Mews" | single | and gravity's meticulous crush. |
| 2017-06-30 | 1 | Myrkur | "Måneblôt" | single | How do you fall in love with ghosts? |
| 2017-06-30 | 2 | Sun Of The Sleepless | "In the Realm of the Bark" | single | I mean, what is your method for interpolating joy between shards of despair and rage? |
| 2017-06-30 | 3 | Nocturnal Rites | "Before We Waste Away" | single | I have robots that watch the faces of strangers for twinges of involuntary delight. |
| 2017-06-30 | 4 | Orden Ogan | "Come with Me to the Other Side" | single | I have labyrinthine gardens that entrap migrating wyverns. |
| 2017-06-30 | 5 | Edguy | "Wrestle the Devil" | single | I stop people on the street and demand their blessings. |
| 2017-06-30 | 6 | Masterplan | "The Chance" | single | I mail unfinished poems to abandoned addresses. |
| 2017-06-30 | 7 | Mean Streak | "Retaliation Call" | Blind Faith | I have machines that work never and always, |
| 2017-06-30 | 14 | Vintersorg | "En väldig isvidds karga dräkt" | Till Fjälls del II | gargoyles leering over bike lanes; |
| 2017-06-30 | 15 | Black Messiah | "Mimir's Head" | Walls of Vanaheim | cryptic mythology and store brands; |
| 2017-06-30 | 29 | Aborted | "Bathos" | Bathos +1 | Will you take a single moment with your closest enemy, |
| 2017-06-30 | 30 | Origin | "Truthslayer" | Unparalleled Universe | or an eternity with the sentinels of the unknown? |
| 2017-06-30 | 49 | A Light In The Dark | "Uncertain" | A Long Journey Home | These goats will trust you. |
| 2017-06-23 | 8 | Samael | "Angel of Wrath" | single | And because the planet spins, even summers have nights and storms. |
| 2017-06-23 | 9 | Sannhet | "Way Out" | single | On cool, shrouded nights, even doom-metal bands can play elegant dark-ambient atmospherics. |
| 2017-06-23 | 10 | Der Weg einer Freiheit | "Skepsis, Pt. I" | single | Skepticism + septic is a primordial metal formula, |
| 2017-06-23 | 11 | Epica | "The Solace System" | single | but so too is conviction + elegance, |
| 2017-06-23 | 12 | Ten | "La Luna Dra-Cu-La" | single | and doesn't summer air exist to be galloped through? |
| 2017-06-23 | 13 | Force Majeure | "Gemini Rising" | single | Hills to crest? |
| 2017-06-23 | 19 | ANNODOMINI | "Пыль и пепел" | Пыль и пепел +3 | The kinetic essence of armored galloping does not rely on horses or hills. |
| 2017-06-23 | 29 | Goatwhore | "Where the Sun Is Silent" | Vengeful Ascension | but because they don't know what else you love. |
| 2017-06-23 | 42 | In Tormentata Quiete | "R136A1" | Finestatico | Rain exists so that you have the choice to go stand in it; |
| 2017-06-16 | 4 | Tau Cross | "Killing the King" | single | I want us to be as alike in our joys as we are scattered in our quests. |
| 2017-06-16 | 5 | Tombs | "Black Sun Horizon" | The Grand Annihilation | I want us to be deliriously scattered in our quests. |
| 2017-06-16 | 6 | Mesarthim | "The Great Filter" | The Great Filter / Type III | If everybody agreed with me-right-now that this Mesarthim epic is an embodiment at once of all human fear and aspiration, then hope would be deterministic and finite. |
| 2017-06-16 | 7 | Selvans | "Lupercale" | Hirpi | When you hate the things I love, you reassure me that I have more to discover, |
| 2017-06-16 | 8 | Akercocke | "Disappear" | single | and thus that living is straightforwardly better than dying, |
| 2017-06-16 | 9 | Septicflesh | "Dante's Inferno" | single | which is a non-trivial conviction when you like music that is itself obsessed with death and related finities, |
| 2017-06-16 | 10 | Excalion | "Divergent Falling" | single | or when you live on a planet with unmodulated climate, |
| 2017-06-16 | 11 | Iced Earth | "Black Flag" | Incorruptible | or spinning uncontrollably in space. |
| 2017-06-16 | 12 | Signum Regis | "Tune of War" | Addendum Primum 4 | Half of "civilization", in our current primitive state, is distraction from physics. |
| 2017-06-16 | 26 | Doll Skin | "Rubi" | Manic Pixie Dream Girl | We can all bend metal with our minds, |
| 2017-06-16 | 27 | Die/May | "No Longer Burden" | single | or whatever passes for metal |
| 2017-06-09 | 59 | Guerilla Toss | "Betty Dreams of Green Men" | single | I like all fish. Except for metal and country. |
| 2017-06-02 | 5 | Tombs | "November Wolves" | single | Probably, really, she knows this in a deeper way than I do, because I had to learn it. |
| 2017-06-02 | 6 | Sorrow Plagues | "Isolated" | Homecoming | I am just the right age to have grown up in Texas thinking that I needed to fly to England to reach the music that wouldn't come to me. |
| 2017-06-02 | 7 | Secret Sphere | "Reliance" | The Nature of Time | I bought CDs in the gift shops of Scottish tourist castles. |
| 2017-06-02 | 8 | Edguy | "Ravenblack" | single | I filled suitcases in London and Amsterdam, scavenged treasures in Brussels and Barcelona and Paris and Tallinn. |
| 2017-06-02 | 9 | Jorn | "Insoluble Maze (Dreams in the Blindness)" | Life on Death Road | And because this was so hard, it never felt much like I was helping anybody but myself. |
| 2017-06-02 | 10 | The Ferrymen | "Fool You All" | The Ferrymen | We write heroic songs, maybe, because mostly progress involves converting the heroic and extraordinary into the liberatingly mundane. |
| 2017-06-02 | 11 | Miss May I | "Under Fire" | Shadows Inside | I don't need to fly to Norway or Ohio to find songs to play my daughter. |
| 2017-06-02 | 21 | Vintersorg | "Jökelväktaren" | single | Music is an organized reaction, |
| 2017-06-02 | 22 | Tengger Cavalry | "Cursed" | Die on My Ride | and the alternatives to organized reaction are petulant retreat and inchoate panic. |
| 2017-06-02 | 23 | Dodecahedron | "Interlude" | kwintessens | When she was tiny, I could play her chart-pop and spirit-pulverization-core in alternation over breakfast and she would talk about the noises and demand more blueberries. |
| 2017-06-02 | 24 | Succumb | "Destroyer II" | Succumb | She's old enough now to realize that no amount of metaphorical cold is going to turn Elsa's guardian snowman into an actual frost giant. |
| 2017-06-02 | 25 | Tverd | "Testament of Knyaz’ Rurik" | RUS': Prophetic Oleg | I'm old enough to recognize that the frost giants would have had inner lives and playlists, too, |
| 2017-06-02 | 26 | Minniva | "While Your Lips Are Still Red" | single | and that retelling a myth can reveal new pathways into legend. |
| 2017-06-02 | 27 | Unleash The Archers | "Awakening" | Apex | I don't have an actual syllabus for arming her against orange goblins and insidious preconceptions. |
| 2017-06-02 | 30 | Elder | "Sanctuary" | Reflections of a Floating World | and how long it would take to bore a tunnel from here to there using psychic rays. |
| 2017-06-02 | 32 | Mutoid Man | "Bone Chain" | War Moans | and what our friends who moved away to Seattle like. |
| 2017-06-02 | 42 | lynch. | "TRIGGER" | SINNERS EP | or rewriting American machismo in Japanese scripts. |
| 2017-06-02 | 50 | Timo Rautiainen & Trio Niskalaukaus | "Suomi sata vuotta" | single | Strangeness is unmanageable if you imagine that it exists to show you other lives you could personally lead. |
| 2017-06-02 | 56 | Vallenfyre | "Messiah" | Fear Those Who Fear Him | it turns other people from extensions to your humanity into contractions in your moral bowels. |
| 2017-06-02 | 57 | Hacktivist | "2 Rotten" | single | You can't really listen if you're always tensing to fight back. |
| 2017-06-02 | 58 | SikTh | "Century of the Narcissist?" | The Future in Whose Eyes? | You can't measure anything if you're busy frantically insulting numbers, |
| 2017-06-02 | 60 | Sun Of The Sleepless | "Motions" | single | Babies, you protect. |
| 2017-06-02 | 62 | Warcry | "Resistencia" | Donde el Silencio Se Rompió... | The weird thing in front of you, it's probably somebody's normal breakfast. |
| 2017-06-02 | 73 | Völur | "Breaker of Silence - III. Symbelmyne" | Ancestors | When you inhale fear, you can choose to still exhale joy. |
| 2017-05-26 | 1 | Dream Evil | "Sin City" | SIX | The old ways hold that metal should be gleaming and/or covered theatrically in blood. |
| 2017-05-26 | 2 | Sólstafir | "Svart Blóð" | Berdreyminn (Deluxe) | The new ways suggest that vengeance can be replaced by slow walks over just-cooled lava. |
| 2017-05-26 | 3 | Tau Cross | "Deep State" | single | The old ways watch us from clock towers and the parapets of abandoned cathedrals. |
| 2017-05-26 | 4 | Ingurgitating Oblivion | "Amid The Offal, Abide With Me" | Vision Wallows In Symphonies Of Light | In the new ways, darkness can consume granite. |
| 2017-05-26 | 41 | Goatwhore | "Chaos Arcane" | single | You will cower in crumbling towers, |
| 2017-05-26 | 42 | Municipal Waste | "Slime and Punishment" | single | where even the zombies don't go. |
| 2017-05-26 | 44 | Rie a.k.a. Suzaku | "Free for Me" | Don't Hide Your Face 4 | We are signing treaties not as a way to win or lose, but as a way to find shared catharsis in things we can't escape anyway. |
| 2017-05-26 | 59 | La Skala de Richter | "El Monte de Venus" | Facta Non Verba | Your shitplated treasures will be photographed for rueful posterity and then composted so they're at least worth something. |
| 2017-05-26 | 63 | Myrkur | "Två Konungabarn (Single)" | single | but because ultimately no amount of love can rebuild the structures inside of you that your corrosive existence have destroyed. |
| 2017-05-05 | 7 | Full Of Hell | "Ashen Mesh" | Trumpeting Ecstasy | Oatmeal cafes, like streaming music services, are absurd luxuries for people so complacently sure of their own survival that they can spend their time on other things. |
| 2017-05-05 | 8 | A Pregnant Light | "A World to Touch" | Devotion Unlaced 4 | But when we talk about human "progress", this is what we're ultimately talking about: reducing the precarity of individual and collective survival to the point where people literally don't have anything better to do than argue about whether savory oatmeal is any stupider an idea than putting ketchup on potatoes or putting numbers on houses, or lacrosse. |
| 2017-05-05 | 9 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Seven Months of Mysticum" | Versus | Boston and New York are not very far apart on any absolute global scale of social development, but it's still enough that I am aware, when going from one to the other, that New York has reached a scale and insularity that allows for a qualitatively different level of specialization. |
| 2017-05-05 | 10 | Goatwhore | "Vengeful Ascension" | single | But not only do I think this is good, I think it's even the point. |
| 2017-05-05 | 11 | Jorn | "Love Is the Remedy" | single | Opponents of globalization sometimes claim to be defending diversity. Nominal proponents of nationalism, hilariously, invoke States' Rights. |
| 2017-05-05 | 12 | Seven Kingdoms | "Stargazer" | Decennium | This is, of course, patently insincere, and almost invariably deployed in an attempt to justify denying fundamental human rights to other humans through a toxic mixture of power, fear and spite. |
| 2017-05-05 | 13 | Iced Earth | "Raven Wing" | single | Claiming that humans in Alabama have different health-care imperatives than the ones in California is idiotic and offensive. Same for China and Yemen and Mars. |
| 2017-05-05 | 14 | Harem Scarem | "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" | single | The only differences are the quanitities of impunity that different bullies have managed to hoard. |
| 2017-05-05 | 25 | Unleash The Archers | "The Matriarch" | single | And yes, New York is a capital of this, too, of all of human knowledge and achievement marshaled for the building of "homes" to be sold exclusively to people with many homes they don't live in already. |
| 2017-05-05 | 26 | Sins In Vain | "Horizons" | single | It is where you put the stores that sell things that do nobody any good. |
| 2017-05-05 | 27 | Naio Ssaion | "Iscem Te" | single | It is where my company's offices have nitro cold-brew coffee on tap, and parking lots have concierges, and the shadows of the cranes lash back and forth over the homeless. |
| 2017-05-05 | 31 | Bloodywood | "Shape of You" | single | because the same machine that allowed his gilded immunity will reclaim it from him and turn it into a lesson. |
| 2017-05-05 | 39 | ToxicxEternity | "An Underlying Problem (The Lost City)" | single | It will let some of them marry for money, or for citizenship, or for the defiant belief in implausible joy. |
| 2017-05-05 | 44 | Andy James | "Ever After" | Exodus | This is the country where you have a billion better things to dream of than being Donald Trump. |
| 2017-05-05 | 45 | Vintersorg | "Fjällets mäktiga mur" | single | So of course we love traditional values. We have the best collection of them, probably anywhere in the world, definitely the best. Beautiful. |
| 2017-05-05 | 48 | Ankor | "The Monster I Am" | single | Don't ever ask how somebody can live with themselves if you aren't ready to hear the answer, because if they're still alive, it's not a rhetorical question to them. |
| 2017-04-28 | 6 | Sólstafir | "Scorpion Moonrise" | Silfur-Refur 2 | All kingdoms have roads paved with something. |
| 2017-04-28 | 7 | Carach Angren | "Charlie" | single | Random stories may still have morals |
| 2017-04-28 | 8 | Corpus Christii | "The Curse Within Time" | Delusion | and villains. |
| 2017-04-28 | 13 | Pyramaze | "Land of Information" | Contingent | You find a place to stand and survey and think "All of this I have built." |
| 2017-04-28 | 14 | Dream Evil | "Antidote" | single | Counterfactual private egomania is an act of empathic responsibility, |
| 2017-04-28 | 15 | Jorn | "Man of the 80's" | single | like hearing a song and thinking that it was written just for you, |
| 2017-04-28 | 16 | Seven Kingdoms | "Kingslayer" | single | or believing that this dragon will let you and only you pet it, |
| 2017-04-28 | 17 | Wolfpakk | "Run All Night" | Wolves Reign | or that you can reach the end of this rainbow if you clarify that you don't need the gold. |
| 2017-04-28 | 18 | Astral Doors | "Walls" | Black Eyed Children | Nostalgia is attachment in both bonding and restricting senses. |
| 2017-04-28 | 24 | Orthodox | "I'm Scared of You" | single | How many of your fears? |
| 2017-04-28 | 25 | Helion Prime | "Remnants of Stars" | single | None of us alive today have yet lived long enough to not know |
| 2017-04-28 | 26 | Vandroya | "The Path to the Endless Fall" | Beyond the Human Mind | that greater joys await us. |
| 2017-04-28 | 27 | Mindmaze | "Sign of Life" | Resolve | Your aversions are a reservoir of future revelations. |
| 2017-04-28 | 28 | Noumena | "Sanat pimeydestä" | Myrrys | It's a small planet, but it's way bigger than you. |
| 2017-04-28 | 75 | Counter-World Experience | "Isis the Prism" | Leaving Lotus | We are here to tell you that you have implications. |
| 2017-04-14 | 1 | Dynfari | "2nd Door: Forgetting" | The Four Doors of the Mind | Atmospheric Icelandic black metal catharsis. |
| 2017-04-14 | 2 | Mortifera | "Mors Illuminat" | IV: Sanctii Tristhess | French "melodic"-black-metal-doesn't-necessarily-mean-no-shrieking. |
| 2017-04-14 | 3 | Labyrinth | "Take on My Legacy" | single | Glorious Italian melodic power metal. |
| 2017-04-14 | 14 | Lich King | "Lich King V: Stalemate" | The Omniclasm | Far Western Massachusetts where it borders Mordor. |
| 2017-04-07 | 2 | Hyborian | "Maelstrom" | Hyborian, Vol. 1 | Imagine punching a wall, and hurting the wall more than your hand, |
| 2017-04-07 | 3 | Ulsect | "Our Trivial Toil" | single | but then dark ichor starts pouring in through the hole. |
| 2017-04-07 | 6 | Hladomrak | "Spirit of the Forest" | Arctic Hysteria | When all this is gone, we will start over again on tundra and clean sheets of ice. |
| 2017-04-07 | 8 | Sloth Herder | "Antipathic Grades" | No Pity, No Sunrise | Maybe. |
| 2017-04-07 | 19 | Netherbird | "Nepenthe" | Hymns from Realms Yonder | Take whatever you think defines you, and imaging carrying it away. |
| 2017-04-07 | 20 | Alfahanne | "Satans verser" | Det nya svarta | The weather tomorrow will be all of these things. |
| 2017-04-07 | 23 | Arthemis | "Black Sun" | Blood-Fury-Domination | Half the dragons are just projections, of course. |
| 2017-04-07 | 24 | Sunrise | "Дар" | single | How would it work otherwise? |
| 2017-04-07 | 25 | Brothers of Metal | "The Death of the God of Light" | Prophecy of Ragnarök | We each have dreams the scope of the sky, there's no way they can't mostly overlap. |
| 2017-04-07 | 26 | Seven Kingdoms | "Castles In The Snow" | single | Coexistence is a function of recognizing this, not avoiding it. |
| 2017-04-07 | 27 | Dragony | "Lords of the Hunt" | Lords of the Hunt | You don't make room for your own grandeur by pushing other people away, |
| 2017-04-07 | 29 | Minniva | "Listen To Your Heart" | single | you conduct |
| 2017-04-07 | 34 | Sonic Syndicate | "Fire" | single | Replacing walls with air is only good for stone. |
| 2017-04-07 | 36 | Blood Stain Child | "TRI ODYSSEY" | single | When the dragons come, you don't want to be trapped in an airplane hangar or a televised church, |
| 2017-04-07 | 44 | Blood Youth | "What I'm Running From" | Beyond Repair | Think about buses. A dragon could carry a bus. |
| 2017-04-07 | 46 | Unleash The Archers | "Cleanse The Bloodlines" | single | but simple isn't neccessarily better. |
| 2017-04-07 | 47 | Onyria | "Alone" | single | Sometimes it's more effective to just walk. |
| 2017-04-07 | 48 | SinHeresY | "Domino" | Domino | The age of legends was not primarily a utopia of ergonomics. |
| 2017-04-07 | 64 | Blood Command | "(The World Covered In) Purple Shrouds - Radio Edit" | single | if we take it. |
| 2017-04-07 | 67 | Uneven Structure | "Crystal Teeth" | single | dragon-command incantations or |
| 2017-04-07 | 68 | The Algorithm | "runtime" | Brute Force: Source Code | procedural remediations or |
| 2017-04-07 | 76 | Azarath | "The Triumph of Ascending Majesty" | In Extremis | Our repertoire of reactions multiplies. |
| 2017-04-07 | 77 | Grimner | "Freja Vakar" | single | Fear is subtractive, but survival is exponential. |
| 2017-04-07 | 82 | Vallenfyre | "Kill All Your Masters" | single | What would that destroy? |
| 2017-04-07 | 87 | Dead by April | "Crying Over You" | Worlds Collide | spirals, |
| 2017-04-07 | 89 | Impure Wilhelmina | "Great Falls Beyond Death" | single | barriers reassembled as monuments, |
| 2017-03-31 | 2 | Anathema | "Springfield" | single | It was on a girl in my class named Kim. I didn't know her very well, nor did I know really what the point of a crush was, but that didn't stop me from having one. |
| 2017-03-31 | 4 | Mantar | "Pest Crusade" | The Spell 3 | I didn't ever actually get to know her much better during or after that time, and after high school I moved away. |
| 2017-03-31 | 5 | Slagmaur | "Bestemor Sang Djevelord" | Thill Smitts Terror | But we were nominally reconnected on Facebook a few years ago, so I had at least tiny glimpses into her adult life, or at least the parts in which her son was doing something adorable. |
| 2017-03-31 | 7 | Labyrinth | "Someone Says" | single | Monday night, a friend I do know forwarded Kim's brother's sad note explaining that, after years of struggling with depression and alcoholism, Kim had taken her own life. |
| 2017-03-31 | 8 | Dream Evil | "Dream Evil" | single | Rereading her Facebook posts, which were never intended to suddenly represent a whole life of tragic internal struggle, I could imagine ways in which they concealed pain, |
| 2017-03-31 | 9 | DragonForce | "Judgement Day" | single | but only in retrospect. |
| 2017-03-31 | 28 | Tid | "Libido" | Giv Akt | I spent a year of my childhood gazing longingly at a girl for reasons I didn't understand then and don't understand now, and she lived her adult life in pain and I did nothing better for her than click "Like" on a couple pictures of her son wearing a baseball uniform. |
| 2017-03-31 | 29 | SikTh | "Vivid" | single | That's one way to look at it, anyway. |
| 2017-03-31 | 35 | Varg | "Götterdämmerung" | single | Look at a child and remember what it was like to have lived only that long yet. |
| 2017-03-31 | 36 | Kaunis Kuolematon | "Hurskas" | Vapaus | Like the picture of their son in a baseball shirt if that's all you can do today. |
| 2017-03-31 | 38 | Adrenaline Rush | "Sinner" | single | but it might be worth more. |
| 2017-03-24 | 7 | Ghost Bath | "Ambrosial" | single | The sweep of dark hosts, |
| 2017-03-24 | 8 | Sólstafir | "Bláfjall" | single | The points where the edges of the earth tear slowly at the sky |
| 2017-03-24 | 9 | Heretoir | "The White" | The Circle | and the torretnts of sky pouring through and in, |
| 2017-03-24 | 14 | Cryonic Temple | "Man of a Thousand Faces" | single | The gravity of Ragnarok |
| 2017-03-24 | 15 | Ayreon | "The Source Will Flow" | single | and how all reluctant rivers eventually agree to lead us there, |
| 2017-03-24 | 16 | Aldaria | "Guardians of the Light" | Land of Light | Looking up and appreciating how far that is, |
| 2017-03-24 | 17 | Wolfpakk | "Blood Brothers" | single | Tribal chants surviving after tribalism, |
| 2017-03-24 | 18 | Damnations Day | "The Witness" | A World Awakens | Seeing as a transformational power, |
| 2017-03-24 | 22 | Eyes Set To Kill | "Break" | single | Fighting as metaphor and hue, |
| 2017-03-24 | 24 | Noumena | "Metsän viha" | single | Learning to open things with your ancestors' teeth, |
| 2017-03-24 | 25 | Aeverium | "Hunted" | Time (Deluxe Edition) | Underestimated elves |
| 2017-03-24 | 26 | Tales Of Evening | "Keresni téged" | single | and the tomes of their cryptic systems of law |
| 2017-03-24 | 30 | Pallbearer | "Cruel Road" | Heartless | and spending the necessary years to find out where it goes, |
| 2017-03-24 | 35 | Dark Model | "Rage and Redemption" | Saga | Stolen geometry, |
| 2017-03-24 | 42 | WagakkiBand | "Valkyrie - 戦乙女" | 四季彩-shikisai- | The glorious equality of apocalyptic legend |
| 2017-03-24 | 44 | Gackt | "Original Sin -Tsumi No Keisho-" | Original Sin -Tsumi No Keisho- +2 | Details beyond your schedules, |
| 2017-03-24 | 52 | Brother Firetribe | "Help Is On The Way" | Sunbound | Walking in groups in impractical shoes, |
| 2017-03-24 | 68 | Eclipse | "The Downfall of Eden" | Monumentum | Magisterial retractions |
| 2017-03-24 | 73 | Avatarium | "Into the Fire / Into the Storm" | single | The old banners in storage, |
| 2017-03-24 | 77 | Last Leaf Down | "Deaf Heart" | single | Holding ground when it tries to flee, |
| 2017-03-24 | 89 | Sad Eye | "Incomplete" | single | Our precious collections of mistakes |
| 2017-03-24 | 102 | Wolfkrieg | "Rune of Death on Enemy's Body" | Rune of Death on Enemy's Body +1 | Ceremony, |
| 2017-03-24 | 103 | Kitsune | "Legacy" | Braver | Remembering how it was before you knew, |
| 2017-03-24 | 107 | Nighon | "The Dirge" | single | Venom as a solvent, |
| 2017-03-17 | 1 | Ulsect | "Fall to Depravity" | single | Part of Ulsect are also in Dodecahedron. In the future, everyone will be in 15 metal bands at once. |
| 2017-03-17 | 2 | Scuorn | "Virgilio Mago" | Parthenope | Italian metal doesn't have to be pretty. |
| 2017-03-17 | 3 | Nightbringer | "Of the Key and Crossed Bones" | single | Symphonic black metal can be time-smeared on an event horizon. |
| 2017-03-17 | 4 | Anomalie | "Vision III: A Monument" | Visions | Wormholes connect all the midnights of all the planet's black-metal forests, |
| 2017-03-17 | 5 | Skyforest | "I Wish the Dawn Would Never Come" | Aftermath Remastered | and all of their soaring lightless skies, |
| 2017-03-17 | 7 | Last Leaf Down | "Purple Skies" | single | I don't know if you get here from metal by losing vehemence or gaining diffidence, |
| 2017-03-17 | 8 | Woe | "Drown Us With Greatness" | Hope Attrition | but you can get back with force. |
| 2017-03-17 | 12 | Labyrinth | "Bullets" | single | Supposedly we used to consider jousting a sport, |
| 2017-03-17 | 13 | One Desire | "This Is Where the Heart Break Begins" | single | but maybe this was only ever an excuse for sunlight gleaming on polished chrome, |
| 2017-03-17 | 21 | Aeverium | "What About Me" | single | Isn't that we keep trying to build higher towers? |
| 2017-03-17 | 22 | Kobra And The Lotus | "You Don't Know" | single | Maybe the next spire will pierce whatever shell has kept us here, |
| 2017-03-17 | 32 | RichaadEB | "The Hero" | single | and maybe the most exciting thing about intuition is its fallibility. |
| 2017-03-17 | 35 | Obituary | "End It Now" | Obituary | or dissent, |
| 2017-03-17 | 41 | BRIDEAR | "Remedy" | Rise 4 | Zap. We already have every superpower we've ever claimed as an excuse. |
| 2017-03-17 | 52 | Ithilien | "If Only" | Shaping the Soul | Anthems are stories of who we are. |
| 2017-03-17 | 53 | Jonne | "Vieras" | single | Folk anthems are stories of who we have always been. |
| 2017-03-10 | 1 | Pallbearer | "I Saw the End" | single | If they can make doom metal in Arkansas, we ought to be able to do pretty much anything. |
| 2017-03-10 | 8 | Cellador | "Break Heresy" | Off the Grid | which is how effusively fantastical metal can be a form of oblique pragmatism. |
| 2017-03-10 | 9 | Eclipse | "Jaded" | single | Power-metal anthems are to music what mountains are to terrain. |
| 2017-03-10 | 10 | Degreed | "Captured By the Moment" | Double Album | You don't grade mountains on subtlety. |
| 2017-03-10 | 11 | Minniva | "Where Were You Last Night / You Give Love a Bad Name (Mashup)" | Volume #1 | In the end times, they will rise up against each other. |
| 2017-03-10 | 16 | Aeverium | "Vale of Shadows" | single | The argument for incautious acceptance is the argument for life. |
| 2017-03-10 | 17 | The Lust | "Fate to Fade" | Tangled | The argument for life is the argument for louder guitars, |
| 2017-03-10 | 18 | Nightrage | "Bemoan" | single | and howling, |
| 2017-03-10 | 38 | Brother Firetribe | "Big City Dream" | single | What if you dreamed about exactly the same things you currently dread? |
| 2017-03-10 | 41 | Evocation | "Modus Operandi" | The Shadow Archetype | muttering peacefully to themselves as they help you over the ice-ridges the plows had to leave, |
| 2017-03-10 | 57 | Ondt Blod | "Storma" | single | Whereas hitting a drum is simple. |
| 2017-03-10 | 58 | Dunderbeist | "Kometen Kom" | Tvilja | Dissent can be simple but still correct. |
| 2017-03-10 | 60 | Damnation Plan | "Beyond These Walls" | Reality Illusion | One of the many advantages of bridges over walls is that you can much more easily tell if they're working. |
| 2017-03-10 | 63 | Crimson Moon | "Seeker of the 7th Gate" | Oneironaut | Gambling is the least creative possible form of fantasy. |
| 2017-03-10 | 67 | Earth Electric | "Mountains & Conquerors" | single | Last night in Portugal they were writing new Deeper Purple songs. |
| 2017-03-10 | 71 | Fen | "III (Fear)" | Winter | And we've always had reasons not to step in, but they were always bad reasons. |
| 2017-03-03 | 2 | Violet Cold | "No Escape from Dreamland" | Anomie | I am comforted, I think, by knowing that other people understand things the same way I do. More comforted the more it seems like they've arrived at the same conclusions from other inputs. Thus I am literally and specifically cheered by gothic Azerbaijani atmospheric black metal, and more bouyed by it due to the contextual assertion that it comes from somewhere I've never been and yet sounds like definitive voidgaze I would make myself if I had explicit control over what comes out when I try to make music. |
| 2017-03-03 | 4 | Windswept | "Shrouded in Pale Shining, so Sleeps Infinite Ancient Steppe" | single | When you feel like you're playing as fast as anybody could, you're usually wrong. |
| 2017-03-03 | 5 | Aeternam | "Paropamisadae" | Ruins of Empires | When you feel like you're accelerating thermodynamic collapse, this is also usually mercifully wrong. |
| 2017-03-03 | 6 | Balfor | "Heralds of the Fall" | Black Serpent Rising | There are days when it can seem redundant to imagine monsters. But mythological demons help keep cynical opportunists and small-minded bullies in perspective. |
| 2017-03-03 | 9 | Earth Electric | "Meditate.Mediate" | single | You don't need tradition, you have fire and current. |
| 2017-03-03 | 11 | Ashenspire | "The Wretched Mills" | Speak Not of the Laudanum Quandary | Civic evil arises, I think mainly, from failures of imagination. |
| 2017-03-03 | 13 | Gloson | "Specter" | Grimen | Walking on a line is not a talent. Dancing on a line is a talent. Dancing on a line during a landslide is a superpower. |
| 2017-03-03 | 14 | Montfaucon | "Insanity" | Renaissance | Those who cannot walk lines are doomed to insist, enragedly, that "traditionally" the lines were somewhere else. |
| 2017-03-03 | 15 | Syron Vanes | "Angelchild" | Chaos From A Distance | Those who have lost their lines are doomed to sing immigrants' songs in what they thought was a country they owned. |
| 2017-03-03 | 17 | Cirith Gorgor | "Proclamation of Destruction" | Bi Den Dode Hant | Fear's only internal instinct is self-preservation. |
| 2017-03-03 | 19 | Sólstafir | "Ísafold" | single | Future thrift-stores are relentless judges of the present, |
| 2017-03-03 | 20 | Nordjevel | "Krigsmakt" | Krigsmakt +2 | and there will be no vintage market for shitty red baseball caps. |
| 2017-03-03 | 23 | Eclipse | "Killing Me" | single | Heroism requires movement, |
| 2017-03-03 | 24 | Minniva | "You'll Be In My Heart" | single | and movement scrapes you against the air. |
| 2017-03-03 | 31 | Bare Infinity | "Reaching for the Sun" | The Butterfly Raiser | If your character looks worse in a wind-machine, the story is not about you. |
| 2017-03-03 | 37 | RichaadEB | "Corridors of Time" | single | Did you give them any towers they were allowed to knock down? |
| 2017-03-03 | 39 | Wolfheart | "Tyhjyys" | Tyhjyys | I suspect we all have self-destructive preferences. |
| 2017-03-03 | 49 | Tengger Cavalry | "Fight" | single | or realizing that other people's songs are your songs, too. |
| 2017-03-03 | 51 | Junius | "The Queen's Constellation" | Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light | not an armband for hate-troops. |
| 2017-03-03 | 52 | David Maxim Micic | "Someone Else's Hat" | Who Bit the Moon | Flags exist to be flown together, not ranked in order. |
| 2017-03-03 | 70 | Dunderbeist | "Tvilja" | single | All of this. |
| 2017-03-03 | 78 | The Mechanist | "Minds & Machines" | Minds & Machines 5 | Maybe you can be a billionaire shithead who makes things better for somebody other than other billionaire shitheads. |
| 2017-02-24 | 3 | TeraBrite | "Heavy" | single | Embarrassing to be a nu metal band who has to have a Youtube cover-duo make your song "Heavy" actually be heavy. |
| 2017-02-24 | 4 | Nightbringer | "Misrule" | single | Well, heavy-ish. |
| 2017-02-24 | 5 | Immolation | "The Distorting Light" | Atonement | Did you know you can get feedback from earthquakes? |
| 2017-02-24 | 6 | Ghost Bath | "Thrones" | single | Sometimes it's reassuring to know that the sound of the universe dying in torment can be cheeringly cathartic. |
| 2017-02-24 | 11 | Place Vendome | "Falling Star" | Close to the Sun | You may think you need re-recorded versions of heroic pop-metal anthems of your youth, but you really do not. |
| 2017-02-24 | 12 | Ayreon | "Everybody Dies" | single | Mood dissonance: florid, expansive power-metal epic about total hopeless nihilism. |
| 2017-02-24 | 13 | Sinner | "Tequila Suicide" | single | Or a bounding party-metal romp about terminal alcoholism. |
| 2017-02-24 | 17 | Born Of Osiris | "Rosecrance" | The Eternal Reign | Styx wasted a perfectly good death-metal name, |
| 2017-02-24 | 24 | Persefone | "No Faced Mindless" | Aathma | But if you make it through, majestic arcologies of destruction await. |
| 2017-02-24 | 26 | Nightrage | "In Abhorrence" | single | The yoga part, of course, is hard to do in armor, and thus not strictly neccessary. |
| 2017-02-24 | 27 | Vitja | "Heavy Rain" | single | Studies have shown that you get exactly the same karmic benefits from screaming in righteous rage, |
| 2017-02-24 | 32 | Ravenscry | "In Collision" | The Invisible | But even when you narrow it down to best Finnish metal band with a female singer, you are still besieged. |
| 2017-02-24 | 33 | Cadaveria | "Christian Woman" | single | Defeated enemies rise again, only stronger. |
| 2017-02-24 | 41 | Junius | "A Mass for Metaphysicians" | single | But the corrupt weasels in the government will never fund my giant air-removal machine. |
| 2017-02-24 | 46 | Unearthly Trance | "Into the Spiral" | Stalking the Ghost | They need the bodies, |
| 2017-02-24 | 49 | BiS | "If tomorrow comes" | Re:STUPiD | and won't stop making those chirpy not-dying noises. |
| 2017-02-24 | 51 | Utsu-P | "ブラック・ショータイム" | Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder | and they showed up looking like teenage girls who move faster than we can shift stones. |
| 2017-02-24 | 53 | Benighted | "Reptilian" | Necrobreed (Deluxe) | And cutting off our heads does kind of seem like the easier approach, |
| 2017-02-24 | 55 | Trollfest | "Hen of Hades" | Helluva | you get a pagan ball instead of a tedious hazmat cleanup. |
| 2017-02-24 | 56 | Fjoergyn | "Lucifer Es" | Lucifer Es | How about this: for every new toxin you want to release, you have to clean up two existing ones? |
| 2017-02-24 | 57 | Yggdrassil | "All Shall Burn" | All Shall Burn | You should probably realize that it's a bad sign when the trees are invoking fire. |
| 2017-02-24 | 70 | Second To Sun | "Alyoshenka" | single | It ends with everything you care about fallen, |
| 2017-02-24 | 72 | AntropomorphiA | "Suspiria De Profundis" | Sermon Ov Wrath | Monsters achieve greatness in defeat. |
| 2017-02-24 | 73 | Light of the Morning Star | "Black Throne Ascension" | Cemetery Glow 3 | Most pathetically, you are not even monstrous. |
| 2017-02-17 | 4 | Falls of Rauros | "White Granite - Single Version" | single | Fearing the most impossible thing you're searching for. |
| 2017-02-17 | 5 | Immolation | "Fostering the Divide" | single | The way no amount of procedural posturing can hide the chasm of self-loathing you reveal when you use power to deny protections to the vulnerable. |
| 2017-02-17 | 6 | Ghost Brigade | "My Heart Is a Tomb" | The Best of Ghost Brigade | Public transportation. |
| 2017-02-17 | 7 | Svart Crown | "Orgasmic Spiritual Ecstasy" | single | Armored elephants. Or polar bears. |
| 2017-02-17 | 8 | Anomalie | "Vision II: The Wanderer" | single | Taking the time to learn your first language past the sixth-grade level, or your second past the level of xenophobic pantomime. |
| 2017-02-17 | 9 | Cnoc An Tursa | "Wha Wadna Fecht for Charlie" | The Forty Five | The way religion (or history) becomes truer as mythology. |
| 2017-02-17 | 13 | Place Vendome | "Close to the Sun" | single | New fashions that give you permission to dress like you once imagined you'd dress when you could buy your own clothes. |
| 2017-02-17 | 14 | Battle Beast | "Straight to the Heart" | Bringer of Pain | The way power multiplies if you channel it into emergent complexity instead of pointless brutalist dominance. |
| 2017-02-17 | 15 | Lionville | "Bring Me Back Our Love" | single | Tremolo arms. |
| 2017-02-17 | 17 | Wolfheart | "World On Fire" | single | Love of fear of the unknown. |
| 2017-02-17 | 27 | Edenbridge | "The Die Is Not Cast" | The Great Momentum | Obstinately demanding always more. |
| 2017-02-17 | 28 | Ravenscry | "Oscillation" | single | Militant tolerance. |
| 2017-02-17 | 29 | Kobra And The Lotus | "Gotham" | single | The urge to build towers, inherent in the enlightened and the corrupted alike. |
| 2017-02-17 | 30 | Ignea | "Şeytanu Akbar" | The Sign of Faith | Ardency as a neutral energy. |
| 2017-02-17 | 40 | SikTh | "No Wishbones" | single | How all bullies invoke tradition. Tradition is the bullying of the present by the past. |
| 2017-02-17 | 45 | IKINÄ | "Järki lomalla" | Samoista soluista | Towns where you expect glaciers. |
| 2017-02-17 | 46 | Kaunis Kuolematon | "Tuhottu elämä" | single | Frost giants where you expect litigators. |
| 2017-02-17 | 48 | Maré | "Martyria" | Abschied 5 | We'll show you what real chaos feels like when it devours you. |
| 2017-02-17 | 54 | Misanthropy | "Uncrowned" | Prelude to Execution | How we make enemies rather than admit that we need better glasses to read the instructions for making friends. |
| 2017-02-17 | 56 | Skitarg | "Min vän Klamydia" | single | How easy it is to tolerate problems that only other people have. |
| 2017-02-10 | 1 | Mors Principium Est | "Masquerade" | Embers of a Dying World | In a snowbound hotel, last week, a friend who doesn't listen to metal asked whether I listen to metal because it matches an existing inner state, or because it produces one. |
| 2017-02-10 | 2 | Shade Empire | "Anti-Life Saviour" | single | It's a reasonable question, at least in the sense that I must have inner states. |
| 2017-02-10 | 3 | Alfahanne | "Stigmata" | single | But it's like a person who doesn't eat raw fish asking whether you eat raw fish because you feel hungry, or in order to not feel hungry? |
| 2017-02-10 | 4 | Bloodbound | "Battle in the Sky" | single | If you're struggling to understand an alien belief, it's natural to wonder how people can believe it, |
| 2017-02-10 | 5 | Veonity | "When Humanity Is Gone" | Into The Void | and appealing to imagine that it's just a functional adaptation for which you have your own alternatives. |
| 2017-02-10 | 6 | Cellador | "Shadowfold" | single | But the unenlightening answer is usually this: beliefs vary a lot more than methods of believing. |
| 2017-02-10 | 7 | Blaze Bayley | "Endure and Survive" | single | I love the things I love for all the same reasons you love the things you love. |
| 2017-02-10 | 8 | Sinner | "Battle Hill" | single | This is the core of all empathy and emotional intelligence: |
| 2017-02-10 | 9 | Minniva | "Year Zero" | single | accepting that people who disagree with you are not necessarily or merely being dishonest. |
| 2017-02-10 | 26 | Victorians - Aristocrats' Symphony | "Steamheart" | XIX 3 | We might as well wave our clever picket signs at cats, |
| 2017-02-10 | 27 | AntropomorphiA | "Crown Ov the Dead" | single | or at mediocre paintings of cats, |
| 2017-02-10 | 28 | Eternal Void | "Solipsist" | single | or at catalogs of generic art supplies repackaged as if they are only usable for mediocre paintings of particular cats. |
| 2017-02-10 | 29 | Persefone | "Prison Skin" | single | You're not going to change Trump's mind. |
| 2017-02-10 | 36 | RichaadEB | "La Danse Macabre" | single | In other circumstances, this would be a harmless party trick. |
| 2017-02-10 | 39 | Hämatom | "Made in USA" | single | and incurs an exponentially increasing risk of human extinction the longer it goes on. |
| 2017-02-10 | 41 | Junius | "Clean the Beast" | single | Thus, yes, "the left" has taken to protesting every action he takes, because his ability to take actions constitutes an existential threat to almost anything worth fighting for. |
| 2017-02-10 | 50 | Brother Firetribe | "Indelible Heroes" | single | Trump will be returned to his tower and his taco bowls and his insatiable gnawing emptiness, |
| 2017-02-10 | 61 | Pyogenesis | "I Have Seen My Soul" | single | Theists must countenance a post-mythological social consensus, and every religion, even yours, must somehow reconcile itself to the status of cultural practice, not cosmology. |
| 2017-02-10 | 64 | The Doomsday Kingdom | "A Spoonful of Darkness" | single | And, most of all and probably before any of the other things can happen, we have to rediscover (or maybe discover for the first time) how to durably separate government from politics. |
| 2017-02-10 | 66 | Crimson Sun | "Forever and Away" | The Spirit of Unchainable 3 | We have to stop taking turns petulantly countermanding each other's orders. |
| 2017-02-10 | 69 | Calling All Captains | "Nerve" | single | The hope is that whatever dysfunctional debacle we come up next, at least we won't do this exact mistake more than once. |
| 2017-02-03 | 4 | Wolfheart | "The Flood" | single | I know some people say they don't like death metal because of the growling, but this is like saying you don't like landscape paintings because of all the sky. |
| 2017-02-03 | 16 | Rob Scallon | "Gas Mask Catalogue" | The Scene Is Dead | What could be more metal than drum triggers? |
| 2017-02-03 | 36 | Havok | "Ingsoc" | single | Over/under on percentage of new progressive-metal songs based on Orwell or Huxley by a year from now: 65%. |
| 2017-01-27 | 1 | Nightbringer | "Serpent Sun" | single | Meanwhile, as snakes attempt to eat the sun, there is still music. |
| 2017-01-27 | 2 | Pallbearer | "Thorns" | single | And while there is still music, there is still hope that people can learn to hear things they didn't already think. |
| 2017-01-27 | 3 | Aborym | "Going New Places" | Shifting.Negative | You can send the desperate and hunted back to their nightmares, but you can't unhear their songs. |
| 2017-01-27 | 4 | Novembers Doom | "Plague Bird" | single | You can build a wall, but you can't soundproof it. |
| 2017-01-27 | 5 | Junius | "The Queen's Constellation" | single | It is possible, however inhumane, to listen to another human's pleas and think "That is not language." |
| 2017-01-27 | 6 | Code | "Cocoon" | Lost Signal | But is not possible to hear another human's song and think "No air has moved." |
| 2017-01-27 | 7 | Rebel Wizard | "Ease of Wretchedness and Wonder" | single | The transmission of music is the most irresistible vector of "globalism", by which we only really mean the acknowledgement that the people you don't know are no less human than the ones you do. |
| 2017-01-27 | 8 | Place Vendome | "Hereafter" | single | All organized noise is structurally pro-human. Only grim murderous silence stands any chance of resisting progress. |
| 2017-01-27 | 9 | Xandria | "When The Walls Came Down (Heartache Was Born)" | Theater of Dimensions | If you want to defeat your enemy, sing their songs. |
| 2017-01-27 | 10 | Pride Of Lions | "In Caricature" | Fearless | If you want to unmask the corrupt and immoral, force them to say their beliefs aloud. |
| 2017-01-27 | 11 | Unruly Child | "Point of View" | single | In their involuntary dissemblance they will betray themselves. |
| 2017-01-27 | 12 | Vanishing Point | "Separate Ways" | Tangled in Dream | Force them to state their own names, and listen to how truth infects the sound that escapes them. |
| 2017-01-27 | 13 | Ayreon | "The Day That The World Breaks Down" | single | State your own name, and see if it resonates. |
| 2017-01-27 | 14 | Last Autumn's Dream | "If Love Should Go" | In Disguise | Invited to mourn 6 million murdered Jews, can you not even acknowledge the religion that marked them? We hear exactly who you are. |
| 2017-01-27 | 15 | Bonfire | "Locomotive Breath" | single | Invited to honor Black History, do you reveal that the only black person you know is one you met on television? |
| 2017-01-27 | 16 | Lionville | "Show Me the Love" | single | Invited to acknowledge a horrific and lingering history of oppression, can you think of nobody but dead white party-members? |
| 2017-01-27 | 17 | Borealis | "Forget the Past - Re-Recorded" | World of Silence MMXVII | Invited to consecrate solemnity, can you think of nothing but terminal zero-sum opposition? |
| 2017-01-27 | 48 | Motionless In White | "Eternally Yours" | single | At least these are both ways to drown out the quiet. |
| 2017-01-27 | 49 | Chelsea Grin | "Never, Forever" | Self Inflicted | But in this moment I am trying to imagine, they will hear you if you open your mouth. |
| 2017-01-27 | 51 | Born Of Osiris | "Empires Erased" | single | All your normal modes are useless. |
| 2017-01-27 | 63 | Atena | "Exorcist" | single | Blasting grandeur is so much less draining than constant bitter reactionary bickering. |
| 2017-01-27 | 64 | Mycelia | "Legacy" | Dawn | But it requires you to put your whole self into your fury. |
| 2017-01-27 | 65 | The Murder of My Sweet | "Sleeping Giant" | Echoes of the Aftermath | It requires you to understand the majesty of everything you defy. |
| 2017-01-27 | 96 | Kreator | "Side by Side" | Gods of Violence | If they found out you were in here listening to a thrash-metal anthem against homophobia, they would phone CNN and tell them where the tapes are hidden. |
| 2017-01-27 | 98 | BRIDEAR | "IGNITE" | single | I'm not sure all of this stuff is even made by Americans. |
| 2017-01-27 | 99 | MAN WITH A MISSION | "Dead End in Tokyo" | single | If they knew you were in here listening to music made by brown people, they'd reach for the pocket where they know you know they keep those pictures of you. |
| 2017-01-27 | 100 | Acid Black Cherry | "星空のディスタンス" | Recreation 4 | All these songs betray you, and suggest not only that America is already great, |
| 2017-01-27 | 103 | Tengger Cavalry | "Angel of Death" | single | When this country was great, and when it will be great again after it has survived you, |
| 2017-01-27 | 104 | Pimeä Metsä | "Viking's Creed" | No Blood, No Glory | it is great because it transcends exactly the small-mindedness you exemplify. |
| 2017-01-27 | 111 | Mustan Kuun Lapset | "Kuolemanvirta" | Saatto | And yes, sometimes they landed as invading berserkers, and burned most of what they found. |
| 2017-01-27 | 112 | IKINÄ | "Et pelkää" | single | But they went home smelling of smoke and new spices, and formed better bands and invested in public schools. One can atone. |
| 2017-01-13 | 1 | Cara Neir | "Spiteful Universe" | Perpetual Despair Is the Human Condition | I don't believe in any way that despair is our natural condition, but I do believe that sustaining joy requires the contemplation of despair. |
| 2017-01-13 | 2 | Alluvial | "The Deep Longing for Annihilation" | The Deep Longing for Annihilation | The trick, of course, is to maintain a lovingly, yearningly contemplative distance from the event horizon of giving up, |
| 2017-01-13 | 3 | Battle Beast | "Familiar Hell" | single | or a giddy orbit |
| 2017-01-13 | 4 | Place Vendome | "Light Before the Dark" | single | through starry glittering galaxies that haven't quite been inevitably obliterated yet. |
| 2017-01-13 | 5 | Xandria | "Call Of Destiny" | single | The trick is to regard unearned encroaching adversity as if you have journeyed leagues for the chance to see it in person, |
| 2017-01-13 | 6 | House Of Lords | "Oceans Divide" | single | as if the most ignominious collapse is a bet you just won and survived. |
| 2017-01-13 | 7 | Lancer | "Dead Raising Towers" | Mastery | Those shrieks? No, no, they are not of pain. We just wanted to see what that would sound like. |
| 2017-01-13 | 8 | Eclipse | "Vertigo" | single | Intense. And yet, I bet we could dance to it. After we defeat these zombies, I mean. |
| 2017-01-13 | 20 | Born Of Osiris | "Glorious Day" | single | Expressed pain is diminished. |
| 2017-01-13 | 21 | Deaf Havana | "Fever" | single | But some days we may get impatient and help diminish it with hammers, |
| 2017-01-13 | 22 | Unearthly Trance | "Famine" | single | and with summoned demons we don't exactly control, |
| 2017-01-13 | 28 | Beyond The Black | "Beyond The Mirror" | Lost In Forever | from helpless silence into redolent anthems. |
| 2017-01-13 | 37 | Wolfchant | "Anthems of Revenge" | Bloodwinter | Only your ass can feed these wolves. |
| 2017-01-13 | 39 | Sepultura | "Machine Messiah" | Machine Messiah | What? There's a little man under that wispy curtain? No, no, WE ARE MAKING IT GREAT AGAIN. Put that hair back. |
| 2016-12-31 | 1 | Bloody Hammers | "Lights Come Alive" | Lovely Sort of Death | Dear younger self: There's a limit to how much cargo my slow time machine can carry, and probably a limit to how much time you should spend now on a future that will eventually arrive whole, so I have reduced this year of listening to a single long day. Tracks 1-50 are mostly versions of metal, 51-100 are mostly not, and then there are some covers. Each section is meticulously ranked, because you (and only you) will care. Bloody Hammers are my favorite band I first embraced this year, and maybe the one that most precisely captured my mood of yearning, apocalyptic, resigned, defiant awe. |
| 2016-12-31 | 3 | Machinae Supremacy | "Into the Night World" | Into the Night World | Later you're going to a) discover Japanese tech-metal and b) spend a lot more time in Sweden, and this Machinae Supremacy is where these two paths cross. |
| 2016-12-23 | 12 | Lilith | "Dragon Heir" | Dragon Heir +1 | But if even this is too much Christmas, and even contemplating the normative from a distance feels like giving it too much power over you, then there's always something else. Like roaring, heroic Japanese fantasy-metal. |
| 2016-12-23 | 13 | The Great Old Ones | "When the Stars Align" | single | Like contorted French atmospheric Lovecraftian black metal. |
| 2016-12-09 | 3 | A Pregnant Light | "Leather Chain" | I'll Kill You 2 | I don't mean to imply that it's easy to wait :24 before letting the drums in. When you know the catharses the song is going to reach, you may want to reach them right away. |
| 2016-12-09 | 4 | Avslut | "Terra Mater" | single | Which, to be fair, also basically works. |
| 2016-12-09 | 5 | Dreamtale | "Dreality" | Seventhian... Memories of Time | But if you don't love contradictory ideas, how do you expect your universe to hold itself together? |
| 2016-12-09 | 23 | Demon Hunter | "Cold Winter Sun" | single | If all we needed to do was transcribe routing numbers, we would need none of these ridiculous masks. |
| 2016-12-09 | 26 | Spielbann | "Hier kommt dein Tag (Es war kEinmal)" | single | Robots: fear not. We are here, we have sent for reinforcements, we are more fragile than you can calculate but stronger than you detect. |
| 2016-12-09 | 29 | Wolfchant | "Bloodwinter" | single | You don't think we know what it feels like to corrode, but we do. |
| 2016-12-09 | 30 | Avven | "Oceans" | single | We know what it feels like to be left in standby. |
| 2016-12-09 | 31 | Voluspaa | "Av Sin Klokskap" | Åsa | We too are electric and constructed to others' specifications. |
| 2016-12-09 | 34 | Megamasso | "Futonshi" | Futonshi / The Second Nimubus 2 | wires bend; |
| 2016-12-09 | 35 | Hacktivist | "Over-Throne" | Over-Throne +3 | or go wireless and then the air bends and splinters; |
| 2016-12-09 | 36 | David Maxim Micic | "Bilo Pt. IV" | Bilo | or you rotate the pattern through its nominal plane and discover you've been looking at a universe in misleading cross-section. |
| 2016-12-09 | 42 | Betontod | "Ich Nehme Dich Mit" | single | On the good days, we try to model what it would feel like to unknow this, |
| 2016-12-09 | 43 | Bohemian Grove | "They'll Never Speak" | single | to be bolted to the galactic axis, |
| 2016-12-09 | 49 | SIBIIR | "These Rats We Deny" | Sibiir | Can't we at least put on some headphones and take a short walk before the leading edge of the vortex reaches here? |
| 2016-12-09 | 52 | Louna | "Громче и злей!" | Дивный новый мир | Walk a mile in one of their protest marches, and then see how you feel. |
| 2016-12-09 | 62 | OvO | "Eternal Freak" | Creatura | or something more desperate and harder to follow, |
| 2016-12-09 | 64 | Terra | "Apotheosis" | Mors Secunda | "Bring hellfire upon us" is a smokescreen to veil "we are ready to walk any revealed path". |
| 2016-12-02 | 5 | Bethlehem | "Fickselbomber Panzerplauze" | Bethlehem | I believe the little town of Bethlehem doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. |
| 2016-12-02 | 6 | Ash Borer | "Lacerated Spirit" | The Irrepassable Gate | There are various ways to cope with the apocalypticality of seasons, |
| 2016-12-02 | 7 | Sarkom | "Previous Associates, Now as Targets for the Gun" | Anti-Cosmis-Art | and you're allowed to use multiple strategies at once: |
| 2016-12-02 | 8 | Feral | "The Hand of the Devil" | From the Mortuary 6 | serenity and a hammer, |
| 2016-12-02 | 9 | Worm Ouroboros | "Broken Movements" | What Graceless Dawn | ghostdrunk dreams |
| 2016-12-02 | 10 | Sound Storm | "The Dragonfly" | Vertigo | spitting out sparks, |
| 2016-12-02 | 11 | Eternal Idol | "Hall of Sins" | The Unrevealed Secret | layers of armor and brocade. |
| 2016-12-02 | 17 | The Murder of My Sweet | "Racing Heart" | single | Don't you know that every footfall is a step in a victory march with no defeated onlookers? |
| 2016-12-02 | 18 | ShadowPlay | "Home" | single | Don't you hear how a momentary conviction of immortality can empower an instant? |
| 2016-12-02 | 19 | Tezaura | "Prize for the Winner" | Heartcore 5 | How shattering can set things free? |
| 2016-12-02 | 35 | Wolfheart | "Boneyard" | single | but this is one way of making an impression. |
| 2016-11-25 | 5 | Enemy of Reality | "Reflected" | Arakhne | Or we can gallop in on fire-breathing steeds. |
| 2016-11-25 | 6 | Bethlehem | "Wahn schmiedet Sarg" | single | Sometimes art is just the painstaking durable recreation of momentary aghast pain, |
| 2016-11-25 | 7 | Diapsiquir | "Comédie Verticale" | 180° | or a cryptic organization of confusions. |
| 2016-11-25 | 9 | Murg | "Mästarens resa i mörkret" | single | sometimes a way to abrade obsidian until it can absorb shed blood, |
| 2016-11-25 | 10 | Root | "Life of Demon" | Kärgeräs - Return from Oblivion | sometimes a way to excavate dark resonant chambers under tormented hills. |
| 2016-11-25 | 11 | Burning Point | "Incarnation" | The Blaze | Still, almost everything also has a classic form |
| 2016-11-25 | 12 | Firewind | "Hands of Time" | single | not designed to appeal to anybody but people who already know they love this. |
| 2016-11-25 | 13 | Machinae Supremacy | "My Dragons Will Decimate" | single | Do you already love Swedish j-metal? |
| 2016-11-25 | 15 | Armored Dawn | "Hino da Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras" | single | You don't have to hate anything else to love Germanic folk-metal from Brazil. |
| 2016-11-25 | 36 | Witchery | "Lavey-athan" | In His Infernal Majesty's Service | in a one-sided war with its own surface. |
| 2016-11-25 | 46 | Gackt | "Belong to You" | Belong to You +2 | and defiant solipsism |
| 2016-11-25 | 48 | The Algorithm | "idle" | Brute Force: Overclock 4 | We claim this disintegration as destruction, |
| 2016-11-25 | 49 | Einherjer | "Dreamstorm" | Dragons of the North XX | and these irresistible monsters as agents of our wills |
| 2016-11-25 | 50 | Tengger Cavalry | "Galloping Steeds" | Sunesu Cavalry | and auteurs of our wardrobes. |
| 2016-11-25 | 68 | Eruca Sativa | "Confundiste" | Barro y Fauna | We pretend not to be quietly equal, like we are each of us louder than everybody else. |
| 2016-11-18 | 14 | Black Anvil | "May Her Wrath Be Just" | single | Most weeks, I immerse myself earnestly in strangeness, and come out of it with a few more hours of bombastic metal, effusive synthpop, roaring guitars, twinkly elfdance baubles and twitchy laptop dissonance. |
| 2016-11-18 | 16 | Khonsu | "The Observatory" | The Xun Protectorate | These songs aren't designed to improve your listening, they're meant to confront and indulge and seduce and betray and improve mine. |
| 2016-11-18 | 17 | Bethlehem | "Die Dunkelheit darbt" | single | They are attempts to exorcise demons, |
| 2016-11-18 | 18 | Kreator | "Gods of Violence" | single | or to circumscribe the negative space where I imagine absent demons might rest, |
| 2016-11-18 | 19 | Freedom Call | "Metal Is For Everyone" | Master Of Light | or to pose victoriously with their corpses in fantastically ill-advised pictures. |
| 2016-11-18 | 20 | Grave Digger | "Healed By Metal" | single | When I say that music is what humans do best, I do not mean that we are better selves in music. |
| 2016-11-18 | 21 | Lancer | "Mastery" | single | All the errors we make in our lives, we repeat and magnify in art. |
| 2016-11-18 | 23 | Enbound | "Falling" | The Blackened Heart | Maybe I have to work less hard this week to convince you that there are few more terrifying places than the world other people want this one to be. |
| 2016-11-18 | 26 | August Burns Red | "What Child Is This? (Greensleeves)" | single | And isn't this everything? |
| 2016-11-18 | 52 | Soulburn | "Where Splendid Corpses Are Towering Towards the Sun" | Earthless Pagan Spirit | You say you don't like metal. |
| 2016-11-18 | 90 | Santa Cruz | "Drag Me Down" | single | When you stop caring, you die. |
| 2016-11-18 | 91 | Power Trip | "Firing Squad" | single | When you stop caring, your opinion stops mattering. |
| 2016-11-18 | 99 | The Algorithm | "overclock" | single | So those of you who wish this were a country ruled by faith, you don't understand how profoundly you already have your way. |
| 2016-11-18 | 108 | Eternal Deformity | "Esoteric Manifesto" | No Way Out | We don't have time for fighting, there are too many songs. |
| 2016-11-18 | 109 | Devilment | "Life Is What You Keep from the Reaper" | II - The Mephisto Waltzes | Play that one you played me again. Yesyesyes. And have you heard this one? |
| 2016-11-04 | 1 | Bhavachakra | "Sri Yantra" | Bhavachakra | Black metal can be punk music, |
| 2016-11-04 | 2 | Karg | "Alles wird in Flammen stehen" | Weltenasche | or it can be relentless waves of crescendos. |
| 2016-11-04 | 3 | Slania | "Dark Horizon" | Proof Of Existence | Gothic metal can be hesitant and distracted. |
| 2016-11-04 | 8 | Mayhem | "From the Dark Past" | single | Or almost. |
| 2016-11-04 | 9 | Khonsu | "The Observatory" | single | But what do you see in something mangled? Packaging to be discarded? |
| 2016-11-04 | 10 | Unlight | "Create and Annihilate" | Antihelion | Or potential disguised by streaks of defeat? |
| 2016-11-04 | 11 | Vader | "Angels of Steel" | The Empire | All the self-aware heroes spend their alone time in darkness, |
| 2016-11-04 | 12 | Slegest | "I Fortida Sitt Lys" | Vidsyn | learning how its weaknesses and their own intersect and oppose. |
| 2016-11-04 | 13 | HammerFall | "Bring It!" | Built To Last | This is how it becomes possible to be at once mortal and heroic. |
| 2016-11-04 | 14 | Burning Point | "Time Has Come" | single | This is how you prepare for decisions you have to allow other people to make. |
| 2016-11-04 | 15 | In Flames | "Save Me" | single | This is how you learn to call for help. |
| 2016-11-04 | 16 | Dark Tranquillity | "Clearing Skies" | Atoma | This is how we keep proper inventories of what we have survived. |
| 2016-11-04 | 17 | Nightmare | "Serpentine" | single | And how we find out what comes after triumph, |
| 2016-11-04 | 19 | Civil War | "Deliverance" | The Last Full Measure | History always finds out what they're really running from. |
| 2016-11-04 | 20 | Mystica Girls | "Hechizo" | Verónica, la Cortesana del Infierno | You can't actually build a wall tall enough for hiding from your own pain, and it's a waste of irreplaceable resources to try. |
| 2016-11-04 | 21 | Pretty Maids | "When God Took a Day Off" | Kingmaker | Resources you probably don't have in the abundance you think. |
| 2016-11-04 | 22 | 831 | "玩滑板的孩子不會變壞" | single | And in the end, you don't learn that much from raising or lowering banners whose meanings you already believe you know. |
| 2016-11-04 | 26 | Starkill | "Walk Through Fire" | Shadow Sleep | But not as much as the way you walk. |
| 2016-11-04 | 36 | I Built the Sky | "Lenticularis" | The Sky Is Not the Limit | but hopes never really leave the body. |
| 2016-11-04 | 48 | Goodnight Tonight | "Two Wolves" | Parasites 5 | This is why it matters what happens in Ohio, or any other American state: |
| 2016-11-04 | 51 | Wolves At The Gate | "Anathema" | Types & Shadows | - Relentlessness always eventually wins. |
| 2016-11-04 | 52 | Behind the Fallen | "Chasing Glory" | As The Sky Falls Through 6 | - That's what "eventually" means. |
| 2016-11-04 | 53 | Lower Than Atlantis | "Dumb" | single | - The ones singing at the end are the ones who are willing to never shut up. |
| 2016-11-04 | 56 | Downfall Of Gaia | "Ephemerol" | single | - And missing that true anthems always being as celebrations of self-discovery, until the point where they freeze and people start not even knowing about the verses they're leaving out. |
| 2016-10-28 | 1 | Black Therapy | "Stabbed" | In the Embrace of Sorrow, I Smile | Epic, shrieky, fast, vigorous Italian black metal. |
| 2016-10-28 | 7 | Urfaust | "Meditatum III" | Empty Space Meditation | Ambient metal is very definitely a thing. It's a thing that's probably too metal for most ambient fans, and too ambient for most metal fans, but abandoned interstices are just less crowded. |
| 2016-10-28 | 8 | Enslaved | "Heimvegen" | single | Progressive pagan metal is also a thing, and Enslaved invented it. |
| 2016-10-28 | 9 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Powerslave (Bonus Track)" | The Whole of the Law | If you weren't clear about what "extreme" means in metal, this cover of Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" may help explain it. |
| 2016-10-28 | 10 | Fluisteraars | "Zijsselt" | Gelderland 2 | At its best, I think, black metal can be distilled catharsis. |
| 2016-10-28 | 11 | Moonsorrow | "Non Serviam" | Soulless/Non Serviam 2 | And its best has made a lot of technical progress over the course of the genre's existence, as demonstrated fairly vividly by this sweeping remake of the title track from the second Rotting Christ album. |
| 2016-10-28 | 12 | Netherbird | "Windwards" | The Grander Voyage | At its best it is redemptive grandeur in the elaborate guise of strangled nihilism. |
| 2016-10-28 | 17 | Theocracy | "Paper Tiger" | Ghost Ship | I'm not saying you have to be Christian to make melodic progressive metal this effusively self-confident. Wait, maybe I am. |
| 2016-10-28 | 18 | Testament | "The Pale King" | Brotherhood of the Snake | No, I'm not, but you need to have a pretty good idea of how reverence works. |
| 2016-10-28 | 19 | Wardrum | "The Unrepentant" | Awakening | You need to at least know how the priests of the Temple of Syrinx dress. |
| 2016-10-28 | 20 | Leaves' Eyes | "King of Kings" | King of Kings | But then, I'm an atheist, and my favorite inanimate thing on the planet is at least nominally a church. |
| 2016-10-28 | 21 | Diabulus in Musica | "Crimson Gale" | single | Believing imaginary creatures are real, I basically don't get. But building churches, I do. |
| 2016-10-28 | 22 | Magistina Saga | "イリジスタブル" | Phalaenopsis 3 | I'm an atheist, but I suspect I believe that we've done more damage to our humanity by building anonymous office "parks" out of rebar and plywood than we have by building churches out of stones and glass. |
| 2016-10-28 | 23 | Madder Mortem | "Blood on the Sand" | Red in Tooth and Claw | Imagine that the Sugarcubes were a Norwegian avant-garde metal band, somewhere between Voivod and Nightwish. |
| 2016-10-28 | 26 | Pretty Maids | "Kingmaker" | single | There was a period when metal was the logical extrapolation of hard rock. Some Danes remember. |
| 2016-10-28 | 27 | Words Of Farewell | "Gallows Frame" | single | Also some raspier nearby Germans. |
| 2016-10-28 | 28 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "October" | single | As a border zone, metal can actually be both populist and arcane at once. |
| 2016-10-28 | 46 | Ulcerate | "Yield to Naught" | Shrines of Paralysis | But only for so long, before your deepest resonances resurface. |
| 2016-10-28 | 47 | Arkona | "Vozrozhdenie" | single | Self-awareness doesn't have to undermine the power of legends. |
| 2016-10-28 | 48 | Myrkgrav | "Vonde auer" | Takk og farvel; tida er blitt ei annen | Atheism isn't the denial of legend, it's the elevation of all myth to a common level. |
| 2016-10-28 | 55 | Aphonnic | "Fruta Fresca" | Indomables | As is rage. And rage with self-awareness is a whole ballet, in whatever language. |
| 2016-10-28 | 66 | amiinA | "Legacy" | Avalon | I spend these hours making lists of Nordic blast-metal and Japanese indie alt-rock because I know that's what people want and need. |
| 2016-10-21 | 1 | Eternal Idol | "Another Night Comes" | single | Naming your band after a Tony Martin Sabbath album, that's serious metal geekery. |
| 2016-10-21 | 2 | Riti Occulti | "Beri'ah" | Tetragrammaton | No occult metal is complete without an apostrophe between two vowels. |
| 2016-10-21 | 3 | Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard | "Gallego" | Y Proffwyd Dwyll | If you're a Welsh stoner-metal band, you have to work extra hard to make sure people don't just call you a Welsh metal band. |
| 2016-10-21 | 5 | Temperance | "At the Edge of Space" | The Earth Embraces Us All | I'd never heard of this Italian gothic symphonic power-metal band before, but this may be my pick so far for the best power-metal album of the year. |
| 2016-10-21 | 6 | Ablaze My Sorrow | "When All Is..." | Black | Sometimes I want gothic black metal, like HIM with extra Infernality. |
| 2016-10-21 | 16 | Amaranthe | "Limitless" | MAXIMALISM | Gothic symphonic metal has always at least skirted pop, as one logical consequence of melodic effusion. Amaranthe seem to have treated this as a race to the pop summit that they are determined to win. |
| 2016-10-21 | 17 | Dark Tranquillity | "Forward Momentum" | single | Sonorous dark gothic metal from a band who can rule this form whenever they chose to play it straight. |
| 2016-10-21 | 18 | Tygers Of Pan Tang | "Dust" | Tygers of Pan Tang | Risen-from-the-dead glam metal is the new hard rock. |
| 2016-10-21 | 19 | Wardruna | "Tyr" | Runaljod Ragnarok | Wardruna is the thought experiment where you take out every element you could conventionally identify as metal, and yet you still have music designed to appeal specifically and triumphantly to metal fans. |
| 2016-10-21 | 27 | Anagnorisis | "Disgust & Remorse, Pt I" | Peripeteia | Black vortex metal. |
| 2016-10-21 | 28 | Witchery | "Nosferatu" | single | Black neo-thrash metal. |
| 2016-10-21 | 38 | Aeternitas | "House of Usher" | House of Usher | I have an enduring weakness for grandiose gothic symphonic metal that sounds like they recorded it by cramming a host of angels into somebody's spare garage. |
| 2016-10-21 | 58 | Destrage | "Not Everything Is Said" | A Means to No End | Shrieky Italian power-death metal. |
| 2016-10-21 | 81 | Sôber | "Héroes" | Vulcano | Surging Spanish hard-rock/alt-metal. |
| 2016-10-21 | 89 | Aethernaeum | "Blut und Tränen" | Zwischen zwei Welten 2 | Roiling melodic black noise metal. |
| 2016-10-14 | 1 | Frozen Gate | "Reflection of the Black Mirror" | Behind the Dark Ice | The basic contention of symphonic black metal is that Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain was a pastoral where we needed a gothic. |
| 2016-10-14 | 6 | Amaranthe | "Maximize" | single | Did you ever sketch imaginary spaceships for escaping mundane gravity? |
| 2016-10-14 | 7 | In Flames | "Through My Eyes" | single | And isn't escape ultimately what all engines and monsters and power are meant to offer us? |
| 2016-10-14 | 8 | Pretty Maids | "Heavens Little Devil" | single | Visceral fantasies are escape masquerading as indulgence. |
| 2016-10-14 | 9 | Heimdalls Wacht | "Spökenkieker" | Geisterseher | Nihilistic fantasies are escape masquerading as indifference. |
| 2016-10-14 | 10 | Kai Hansen | "Born Free" | XXX-Three Decades In Metal | But ultimately, fantasy itself is a form of inherent triumph, |
| 2016-10-14 | 11 | A Pregnant Light | "Rose of Golden Crosses" | Deep Lavender Dreams | which is maybe why desolation in a fantasy context, from Thomas Covenant to depressive black metal, can be so jarring and powerful, |
| 2016-10-14 | 12 | Waldgeflüster | "Und immer wieder Schnee" | Ruinen | and why some utopian impulses aspire to the glacial. |
| 2016-10-14 | 13 | Desperate Journalist | "Hollow" | single | But of course this gothic fear isn't always cast in metal. |
| 2016-10-14 | 16 | Teodasia | "Stronger Than You" | Metamorphosis | and thornflower detonations. |
| 2016-10-14 | 17 | Theatres Des Vampires | "Morgana Effect" | Candyland | The vampires, after all, are us. |
| 2016-10-14 | 21 | Sonic Syndicate | "Start a War" | Confessions | But the great thing about the inevitable is that we are in no way required to accept it. |
| 2016-10-14 | 22 | Black Table | "Gargantua" | Obelisk | The audience for our defiance is only ever ourselves. |
| 2016-10-14 | 33 | Hardline | "Where Will We Go from Here" | Human Nature | no matter how in-group-anthem it codes. |
| 2016-10-14 | 42 | Ion Dissonance | "Perpetually Doomed: The Sisyphean Task" | single | All the universe has to do is flex, and every law we've ever learned ceases to matter or even apply, |
| 2016-10-07 | 1 | Virvum | "Earthwork" | Illuminance | Moderation is good, in moderation, |
| 2016-10-07 | 2 | Dysrhythmia | "Selective Abstraction" | The Veil of Control | but the universe was forged in plasma and cacophony, |
| 2016-10-07 | 4 | Sonata Arctica | "Fly, Navigate, Communicate" | The Ninth Hour | and lattice fortresses of materialized carillon detonations, |
| 2016-10-07 | 5 | Sirenia | "The 12th Hour" | single | and infinite clockwork lashed by relentless picturesque tempests. |
| 2016-10-07 | 6 | Dark Tranquillity | "Atoma" | single | You can choose whether to march with the storms ahead of you or behind, |
| 2016-10-07 | 7 | Amaranthe | "Fury" | single | stabbed by blacklight arches either way, |
| 2016-10-07 | 8 | Alkonost | "Река" | Песни белой лилии | flanked by wolves who keep their own counsel, |
| 2016-10-07 | 9 | Arion | "Unforgivable" | single | and their own legends. |
| 2016-10-07 | 10 | Wardruna | "Raido" | single | But your legends, are you part of them? |
| 2016-10-07 | 11 | Starkill | "Shadow Sleep" | single | You realize that's what they're for, right? |
| 2016-10-07 | 12 | Percival Schuttenbach | "Pocalunek" | Strzyga | Folklore exists to give you access to pre-existing power, |
| 2016-10-07 | 13 | Thy Catafalque | "10^(-20) Ångström" | Meta | without which entropy is victorious by definition. |
| 2016-10-07 | 16 | Ulcerate | "Shrines of Paralysis" | single | We breed monsters to cover our retreats, |
| 2016-10-07 | 17 | Obscure Sphinx | "Sepulchre" | Epitaphs | to fracture complacent continents, |
| 2016-10-07 | 18 | Ştiu Nu Ştiu | "Aegna Saar" | single | to sear pathways through the perpetually gathering vines, |
| 2016-10-07 | 22 | Leaves' Eyes | "Fires in the North" | Fires in the North 5 | We will not be crushed today or routed. |
| 2016-10-07 | 23 | Diabulus in Musica | "Earthly Illusions" | single | Or, if today, not tomorrow. |
| 2016-10-07 | 24 | Crosson | "All About the Music" | Spreading the Rock 'n' Roll Disease | Or not once, long ago, when we were young and gloriously didn't know any better. |
| 2016-10-07 | 45 | Tid | "Dumhetens gudinna" | Fix idé | Half the things that seem like denial are actually, I think, layers of accentuating gloss, |
| 2016-10-07 | 46 | Nerv | "Cathars" | Vergentis in Senium | or ways to continually explode without simply falling apart. |
| 2016-10-07 | 48 | Cornerstone | "Believe in Me" | Reflections | Fuck inertia; believe in yourself. |
| 2016-10-07 | 49 | Alter Bridge | "Show Me A Leader" | The Last Hero | Shed your terrified cultivated self-defeating isolationist concessions; fly some flag that stands for at least one impossible ideal. |
| 2016-09-30 | 6 | Epica | "Edge of the Blade" | The Holographic Principle | There are German gothic symphonic metal bands that can render your Tarja/Nightwish ambivalence moot. |
| 2016-09-30 | 7 | Arkona | "Pod mechami" | single | There are elves in full-panic flight, |
| 2016-09-30 | 8 | Skálmöld | "Útgarður" | Vögguvísur Yggdrasils | and gleeful trolls in pursuit, |
| 2016-09-30 | 9 | The Agonist | "The Moment" | Five | and banshees stalking them both from above, |
| 2016-09-30 | 10 | Civil War | "Road To Victory" | single | and yet still enough obliviously bookish power-metal bands for the History Channel to start a music show. |
| 2016-09-30 | 11 | Winterfylleth | "The Dark Hereafter" | The Dark Hereafter | Nihilism is fundamentally a force for evil, but one of the most important things to realize about nominal evil is that there are many paths through the abyss that lead you back into unexpected places in the living world, |
| 2016-09-30 | 12 | Netherbird | "Pillars of the Sky" | Pillars of the Sky +1 | many forms of beauty that come from untwisting the contorted, |
| 2016-09-30 | 13 | Noctem | "Blind Devotion" | Haeresis | or twisting it so much further that it ruptures and you can suddenly see how it works. |
| 2016-09-30 | 14 | Eastern Front | "Husks Of Kursk" | EmpirE | Or, sometimes, the art is in the task of piling up the wreckage and setting it grimly alight. |
| 2016-09-30 | 15 | Khonsu | "A Jhator Ascension" | single | The reverse of church-burning: shaping a temple out of flames. |
| 2016-09-30 | 17 | Oathbreaker | "Immortals" | Rheia | Do you have a favorite Belgian black-post-doom-metal band? Yet? |
| 2016-09-30 | 18 | Raven Tide | "Lies" | single | The richest mythologies resist the temptation to oversimplify their moral opposition, |
| 2016-09-30 | 19 | NeraNature | "Słowiańska łza" | single | and allow Virtue to be as flawed and specific as Venom. |
| 2016-09-30 | 20 | Hardline | "In the Dead of the Night" | single | Glam metal is now long enough ago that we can separate melodic diligence from time spent evaluating hair products. |
| 2016-09-30 | 26 | Asphyx | "It Came From the Skies" | Incoming Death | You have until the apocalypse to resolve your identity. Or maybe until a few seconds after that. |
| 2016-09-30 | 27 | Sithu Aye | "The Andromedan, Pt. IV: The Darkness Within" | Set Course for Andromeda | When we launch our generation ships, will you board the ones heading away from the event horizon, or towards it? |
| 2016-09-30 | 28 | Auras | "Solar Pulse" | Heliospectrum | Possibly it doesn't actually matter, and the fleets will meet each other again in the folds, having each explored half the universe and concluded that it's more interesting to keep flying. |
| 2016-09-30 | 34 | Anicon | "Through Portals Shed" | Split 3 | Is it strictly necessary to grind every last sparkle into a fine, sands-of-time glitterdust? |
| 2016-09-30 | 36 | Bürdel King | "¡En la boca no!" | single | Do you have a favorite Spanish folk-groove-rock-metal band? Here, take this one, I don't need it back until the morning. |
| 2016-09-30 | 37 | IKINÄ | "#elämää" | single | Did your complaint about Finnish pop-punk-metal bands used to be that none of them sounded quite neon-Japanese enough? |
| 2016-09-30 | 38 | Halshug | "Sort Sind" | Sort Sind | Did you object to Kvelertak because they were slightly too fast and slightly not Danish enough? |
| 2016-09-23 | 2 | Barishi | "The Great Ennead" | Blood from the Lion's Mouth | And I come here, I guess, as usual, to write alongside the love and the roaring about how music is the thing that humans do best. |
| 2016-09-23 | 3 | Kroh | "Mother Serpent" | Altars | T. Bone Burnett, who is a man famous for using machines to make music, didn't have any new music of his own last week, but he did give a speech in which he declared, among other things, that Art Is a Holy Pursuit, that Music Confounds the Machines, and that our "culture" is at stake in a struggle between the artists and the "technocrats and iTopians". |
| 2016-09-23 | 4 | Décembre Noir | "In This Greenhouse of Loneliness and Clouds" | Forsaken Earth | One might argue that the crat in "techocrat" incriminates only the executives of companies like the one where I work, and thus I shouldn't take this personally. |
| 2016-09-23 | 6 | Surturs Lohe | "Schildwacht" | Seelenheim | And since the impersonality of "machines" is largely what Burnett is condeming, taking his polemic personally seems to me like a fairly appropriate and poetic response. |
| 2016-09-23 | 7 | Surturs Lohe | "Muspelsturm - A Capella Version" | Seelenheim | I am not in charge of any business functions at Spotify, but I spend my work days avidly inventing and refining and operating machines. I know, pretty well, what they are doing. They have no agendas, since they are only machines and machines don't want things, but I definitely have agendas. |
| 2016-09-23 | 14 | HammerFall | "Hammer High" | single | To claim that they might is, I think, to vastly and grandly misunderstand not only the goals but the nature of the process in which the machines participate. |
| 2016-09-23 | 15 | Dark Tranquillity | "The Pitiless" | single | You cannot confound a machine, because it has no expectations. You cannot frustrate it, because it has no desires. You might make it overheat or stop working, but attributing any emotional significance to this is purely meaningless anthropomorphization. A crashed machine, restarted, experiences no chastisement, no sense of defeat. |
| 2016-09-23 | 16 | Amaranthe | "That Song" | single | And anyway, the things these machines do is transmit energies between people. Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar "This machine kills fascists", and I assume we can safely categorize Woody as not a technocrat. |
| 2016-09-23 | 17 | Tengger Cavalry | "The Struggle" | The Struggle +1 | Mostly, in fact, the machines transmit love. This is what Woody's guitar did, which is part of why he wrote "kill", challenging the idea of weaponry as much as the idea of fascism. |
| 2016-09-23 | 18 | Veonity | "When Humanity Is Gone" | Into the Void | Most of my machines are, at least conceptually, no more complex than the guitar, which is after all itself an instrument of ratios. Mostly they use cheerfully uncomplicated math to quantify listening patterns, in the hopes of calculating a way through the distance separating music and audiences. |
| 2016-09-23 | 19 | Almah | "Final Warning" | E.V.O | Burnett accuses somebody of claiming that artists need to get better at marketing, and then laments, rhetorically, "I didn’t start playing music because I sought, or thought it would lead to, a career in marketing." |
| 2016-09-23 | 20 | Iron Mask | "I Don't Forget, I Don't Forgive" | single | But the systems I work on do not require artists to learn marketing any more than they require listeners to become assistant professors of cultural studies in order to listen better. |
| 2016-09-23 | 22 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Hold Your Children Close and Pray for Oblivion" | single | While Burnett is recruiting for a holy war, I'm trying to teach machines how to find people who would like his music if they only heard it. |
| 2016-09-23 | 23 | Ravencult | "Beneath the Relics of Old" | single | I want David Lowery fans to hear Cracker on Spotify. |
| 2016-09-23 | 25 | Downfall Of Gaia | "Woe" | single | I want jazz fans to fall in love with new jazz they don't know, and I hate jazz. |
| 2016-09-23 | 28 | Darkwell | "Yoshiwara" | Moloch | What the music industry used to have was markets. |
| 2016-09-23 | 46 | Ion Dissonance | "Suffering: The Art of Letting Go" | single | Americana exceptionalism is, like American exceptionalism and every other kind of small-minded imagined superiority, a flourish of pride designed to distract attention from gnawing fears. |
| 2016-09-23 | 47 | Alter Bridge | "Poison In Your Veins" | single | Burnett says "So the iTopians have controlled the medium and the message for a generation now. And they are making a complete hash of things." |
| 2016-09-23 | 49 | Klamydia | "Koomikon kyyneleet" | Antisupersankarit | And no matter how much more compelling it might be for fear to say "We could lose all this wonder", that isn't in the nature of the appeal to fear. |
| 2016-09-23 | 50 | Brother Firetribe | "Taste Of A Champion - Remastered" | single | "We could lose all this" is countered too simply by "No". |
| 2016-09-23 | 57 | Pretty Maids | "Humanize Me" | single | And the music itself has never been better. It can't have been, because we still have the old music, plus we now have the new music. Basically we've reached the cultural point where every style or method that survived to this point need never vanish. |
| 2016-09-23 | 59 | Trap Them | "Prodigala" | Crown Feral | The question of how we preserve the recordings of Burnett's sessions is real, and non-trivial. But universal awareness is a cultural archival medium. It's not like seed vaults: If you care about the survival of music, your first priority should be that it is heard. |
| 2016-09-23 | 60 | Sahg | "Sanctimony" | Memento Mori | Losing the master tapes Burnett produced for How Will the Wolf Survive? would be tragic. |
| 2016-09-23 | 71 | Cry of Dawn | "Light a Light" | Cry of Dawn | I think, as with most emotional conflicts, both of these are choices between fear and love. |
| 2016-09-16 | 2 | BRIDEAR | "Rebirth" | Baryte | Back when music was embodied in objects, my default mode of solo tourism was to overlay a map of record stores (and a few museums and historic landmarks) on a foreign city, and then walk around it buying music objects, pausing periodically to eat anything I didn't recognize and occasionally look at some art. |
| 2016-09-16 | 3 | Silhouette from the Skylit | "Growing Pains" | Heracles | This still works without the record stores and object-buying, pretty much. People are interesting, and the ways they live are interesting, so I'm pretty happy to just walk around seeing things. Plus, the more exercise you get, the more funny foreign food you can justify eating. |
| 2016-09-16 | 4 | Dante Fox | "Young Hearts" | Breathless | I was in Stockholm this week for work. I've been there several times by now, so I've seen many of the obvious things at least once. But this time, there was Pokémon. |
| 2016-09-16 | 19 | Drudkh | "His Twenty Fourth Spring" | Betrayed by the Sun / Hagringar 2 | And maybe even for the tourist there's something Pyhrric in a game that takes you to interesting places that then mostly end up being filled with people peering at their phones. |
| 2016-09-16 | 24 | Narnia | "I Still Believe" | single | Mostly you can play Pokémon in any city. Different places present different things in different frequencies, but it seems like pretty much every creature at least exists everywhere. |
| 2016-09-16 | 25 | RebellioN | "Reign" | Rise Above the Fray | But in a tiny maddening nod towards global scale, each continent has one exclusive Pokémon. |
| 2016-09-16 | 31 | Ulcerate | "Abrogation" | single | You have to come within a few yards of a virtual creature's notional position to make it appear, thus all the very literal walking around. |
| 2016-09-16 | 40 | Carcer City | "Infiltrator" | Infinite // Unknown | I assume the game doesn't actually know my travel schedule, but then Google, so I'm not quite as certain about that as I might like. |
| 2016-09-16 | 41 | Maléfice | "Caché Sous un Océan Noir Derrière une Armure de Ténèbres" | Thursmegin | So out I went, for one last try. West first. After two blocks, he vanished from the scope. Retraced my steps and he reappeared. |
| 2016-09-16 | 57 | TesseracT | "Tourniquet (Errai)" | Errai 4 | As you can guess, I re-started the game and the mime was gone. |
| 2016-09-16 | 58 | VOLA | "The Same War" | Inmazes | I may have walked back and forth for a few minutes, seeing if he would appear at that spot again. |
| 2016-09-16 | 59 | The Dear Hunter | "The Fire (Remains)" | Act V: Hymns with the Devil in Confessional | I may have gone and got my breakfast, and then walked what may have been not quite the direct route back to my apartment, just in case he would reappear after a few minutes had passed. |
| 2016-09-16 | 62 | VAMPS | "RISE OR DIE" | INSIDE OF ME 2 | "We try to be modern people. These phones? They mark us as people with the opportunity to be modern." |
| 2016-09-16 | 63 | lynch. | "F.A.K.E." | AVANTGARDE | "Mimes belong to drab antiquity, when only the King could spare precious berries for pigment. Mimes belong to the dark ages when all we had for entertainment was banging dead branches on rocks, like the drumming on middle-period Metallica albums." |
| 2016-09-16 | 65 | Klamydia | "Älä peitä mun aurinkoo" | single | "So much music you don't even have to think too hard about what it's called." |
| 2016-09-16 | 67 | Noctem | "Pactum with the Indomitable Darkness" | single | "And yes, it's true, I have seen things of which you can only dream." |
| 2016-09-16 | 68 | Inanimate Existence | "Calling from a Dream" | Calling from a Dream | "Attack ships on fire off the shores of Djurgården, like, kind of near the ABBA Museum." |
| 2016-09-16 | 69 | Finsterforst | "Wrecking Ball" | #YØLØ | "Concert posters for metal bands, right out in public." |
| 2016-09-16 | 77 | Gatecreeper | "Stronghold" | single | "But spend enough time there -- ["Europe?", one of them asks, to make sure they're still following me. "Yes."] "--enough time there and you'll see that this place is not so different from our own." |
| 2016-09-16 | 80 | Lotus Thief | "Idisi" | Gramarye | "They have grandeur and intimacy. They have more kinds of drinkable dairy things than you would have patience for me to explain. They have this thing called kebab pizza which sounds a little bit disgusting but is really great." |
| 2016-09-16 | 82 | Ghost | "Square Hammer" | Popestar 5 | "I took down a Snorlax the size of a bison using nothing but an unevolved Drowzee with Macchiatto Nozzle / Cow Bite. He fires single-origin Fair Trade coffee shots from his floppy snout. I never use the Cow Bite because it takes 53 coffee shots to charge, and then the animation blocks for 4.2 seconds with your mouth open and you can't dodge while it's happening so you always get your teeth Hydro Pumped down your throat." |
| 2016-09-16 | 84 | Starkill | "Burn Your World" | single | "So let's say you do find a Mr. Mime. Let's say you do. But here's the thing: Then what do you do?" |
| 2016-09-16 | 87 | Kryptos | "One Shot to Kill" | single | "This week I heard an a cappella group singing 'Jolene' with Dolly Parton. If you decide that a mime is really the thing you need, you will find a way. But I have chosen differently for myself. I have chosen loud guitars and dubiously violent metaphors. I have chosen to start most of my gym-takedowns with a Starmie and then a Sandslash. I think fighting moves that look like cartoon playground tactics help me think of the 'training' part less like breeding mutant puppies for euphemistic dog-fighting." |
| 2016-09-16 | 88 | SIBIIR | "Guillotines" | single | And here I pause again, and think about leaving it at that. But then I realize that they may just be kids, but if they're old enough to use external battery packs, they're old enough to hear the truth. |
| 2016-09-09 | 3 | Timor et Tremor | "The Soaring Grudge" | For Cold Shades | After all, darkness awaits, inexorable and imminent. |
| 2016-09-09 | 8 | Tid | "Aurora surrealis" | single | The great misconception about Hell is that you have to drive there. It's all hallways. |
| 2016-09-09 | 9 | Evergrey | "Passing Through" | The Storm Within | But some are more magnificent than others. |
| 2016-09-09 | 10 | HammerFall | "The Sacred Vow" | single | And they're all less boring if you sprint through them in clanging armor. |
| 2016-09-09 | 11 | Dream Theater | "Our New World (feat. Lzzy Hale)" | single | Just as long as you don't really think this gets you out. |
| 2016-09-09 | 12 | Wovenwar | "Censorship" | single | There's no "out". We live and fight right here. |
| 2016-09-09 | 13 | Upon A Burning Body | "'Til the Break of Dawn" | single | Whatever we bleed or burn, these walls will record in glyphs. |
| 2016-09-09 | 14 | Testament | "Brotherhood of the Snake" | single | You wanted more? What would "more" be? |
| 2016-09-09 | 38 | Tygers Of Pan Tang | "Only the Brave" | single | The road to the dragon's cave is foolishness and bravado. Bravery is what takes you down the road away. |
| 2016-09-09 | 42 | Tardive Dyskinesia | "Fire Red Glass Heart" | Harmonic Confusion | You should know whether you want your elegy to be poignant or complex. |
| 2016-09-09 | 46 | Kiba Of Akiba | "Far Beyond the Stars" | Bakamodan EP 6 | And fired into what we presume are distant suns, |
| 2016-09-09 | 47 | Heidevolk | "Drankgelag 2016" | single | in pirate arks, |
| 2016-09-09 | 48 | Virrasztók | "A lélekharang" | Funeral Metal | where generations will die yearning, |
| 2016-09-09 | 49 | Klamydia | "Känni-ääliön paluu" | single | no less nobly than the rest of them, |
| 2016-09-09 | 50 | Infant Annihilator | "Unholy Gravebirth" | The Elysian Grandeval Galèriarch | but also no more. |
| 2016-09-09 | 51 | Bob Malmström | "Finska är inget språk, det är ett symptom" | Vi kommer i krig | So I guess I understand why that makes some people shouty. |
| 2016-09-09 | 52 | Alter Bridge | "My Champion" | single | Ultimately, I prefer forgiveness. |
| 2016-09-09 | 53 | Devin Townsend Project | "Truth" | Transcendence | Everybody has their own 18 weird tricks for achieving transcendence, or whatever they call it instead. |
| 2016-09-09 | 55 | Trap Them | "Revival Spines" | single | But isn't that the first secret to good nutrition? |
| 2016-09-09 | 56 | Kobra And The Lotus | "TriggerPulse" | single | Consume only what transforms you, |
| 2016-09-09 | 57 | Colosso | "In Memoriam" | Obnoxious | or inures you to prevailing poisons. |
| 2016-09-09 | 58 | Hardline | "Nobody's Fool" | single | But intensity of flavor can be allowed to temporarily suspend diligence. |
| 2016-09-02 | 1 | These Winds Are Not Hope | "The Endless Disconnect" | Yesterday's Ghosts | I have a thing that calculates the best metal albums from every country, based on Encyclopaedia Metallum ratings. I notice, when I update it, if it finds results for any country it didn't have before. Thus this, apparently the first great (melodic doom/post-metal) album ever made in Macedonia. |
| 2016-09-02 | 2 | Djevel | "Vi Slakter Den Foerste og Den Andre, Den Tredje Lar Vi Gaa Mot Nord" | single | Norway already had a few. But if you've already listened to those, here's a new one in good manic shrieky Norwegian black metal supergroup style. |
| 2016-09-02 | 3 | Alcest | "Je suis d'ailleurs" | single | The new album from French blackgaze standard-bearers Alcest isn't due out for another few weeks, but "out" has become a term of vagueness. Two of its roiling epics are streaming already. |
| 2016-09-02 | 6 | Serious Black | "Castor Skies" | single | Supergroups are, of course, a dodgy proposition, but then power metal kind of exists to make dodgy propositions into eternal marriages. |
| 2016-09-02 | 7 | Crystal Ball | "Deja-Voodoo" | Déjà-Voodoo | For example, the Swiss power-metal group Crystal Ball started as a Warrant cover-band called "Cherry Pie", an absurd origin they have not so much transcended as rendered peripheral by becoming a non-cover band that kind of sounds like ABBA as pirate metal. |
| 2016-09-02 | 9 | Aardvarck | "Yogya" | Indo EP 3 | Maybe everybody knows this by now, but fluxwork can be way more menacing than power-metal. |
| 2016-09-02 | 49 | Skálmöld | "Niðavellir" | single | Which is why, too, folk/death metal was as inevitable a reaction to modernity as paganism. |
| 2016-08-26 | 4 | Völur | "Es wächst aus seinem Grab" | Disir | Of course, what does it really matter if the capsules are all going to be ground into a fine magnetic dust, anyway? |
| 2016-08-26 | 5 | Anicon | "Toil and Mockery" | Exegeses | "Exegesis" means "explanation". This is less of a close reading of texts than a methodical shredding of them. Which may well be more productive. |
| 2016-08-26 | 6 | Strident | "Pro Patria Mori" | When Gods Walked the Earth | It's a lot easier to demonstrate divinity than to explain it. |
| 2016-08-26 | 7 | Zephyra | "My Gift, My Curse" | As the World Collapses | Imagine combining In This Moment, Arch Enemy and Madder Mortem. |
| 2016-08-26 | 8 | Forest Of Fog | "Awake" | single | Swiss one-man epic melodic pagan black metal. |
| 2016-08-26 | 12 | Dark Suns | "The Only Young Ones Left" | Everchild | The recombining of post-metal and post-punk. |
| 2016-08-26 | 14 | Imperium Dekadenz | "Vae Victis" | Dis Manibvs | Sweeping, glorious epic black metal. You have to be able to put up with raspy non-sung vocals, but at some point objecting to this becomes like saying you might appreciate Notre-Dame if the gargoyles were painted in true-to-life colors. |
| 2016-08-26 | 15 | Running Wild | "Black Skies, Red Flag" | Rapid Foray | Unwashed-hair metal. |
| 2016-08-26 | 16 | DGM | "The Secret Pt. 2" | The Passage | Soaring melodic progressive metal. |
| 2016-08-26 | 17 | Twilight Force | "There and Back Again" | Heroes of Mighty Magic | I often deliberately pick shorter metal songs from albums with longer ones, but sometimes grandeur really needs a few extra minutes to develop. |
| 2016-08-26 | 18 | Nergard | "One Of These Days" | single | Sometimes progressive metal is where melodic hard rock went to hide. |
| 2016-08-26 | 28 | Delain | "Scandal" | Moonbathers (Deluxe Edition) | If this were a gothic symphonic pop metal tribute to Patty Smyth's band, it could pretty much sound the same. |
| 2016-08-26 | 31 | Ulcerate | "Extinguished Light" | single | I think there's an informal agreement in extreme noise-metal that nobody should call a song "Pulverized Skull", because then why wouldn't everybody? |
| 2016-08-26 | 32 | Lesbian | "Pyramidal Existinctualism" | Hallucinogenesis | Like doom-thrash played by gnostic goblins. |
| 2016-08-26 | 53 | INORAN | "Thank You" | Thank You | Kind of Japanese alt-rock, if you imagine alt-rock bordering on j-metal instead of electric blues. |
| 2016-08-26 | 55 | Kuolemanlaakso | "Children of the Night" | M. Laakso, Vol. 1: The Gothic Tapes | In which a Finnish doom-metal band completes what now seems like it could easily have been a planned-all-along 3 album migration from gritty dolor to dark secret love-metal extravagance. |
| 2016-08-26 | 56 | Allegaeon | "Subdivisions" | single | In relative terms, it takes only a few fairly subtle tweaks to make Rush's immortal anti-suburban anthem into a slashing progressive-djent epic. But to get to the point where you can make those tweaks, you have to be able to play the thing in the first place. |
| 2016-08-26 | 60 | Solution .45 | "Mind Mutation" | Nightmares in the Waking State, Pt. 2 | And we finally got a look in their eyes. |
| 2016-08-26 | 62 | Morphinist | "Terraforming II" | Terraforming | But don't worry, give this planet a good corrosive scrubbing for a few thousand years and it'll be reusable for something. |
| 2016-08-26 | 63 | Hardline | "Where Will We Go from Here" | single | Meanwhile, we'll be on guitar-shaped spaceships headed into glittering voids. |
| 2016-08-26 | 64 | Tyketto | "Reach" | single | Don't forget about us. |
| 2016-08-19 | 4 | Celestial Ruin | "Firestorm" | Pandora | Vancouver melodic epic gothic metal. |
| 2016-08-19 | 5 | An Abstract Illusion | "Drop This Planet of Dust" | Illuminate the Path | Swedish melodic epic progressive death metal. |
| 2016-08-19 | 6 | Sheidim | "Deviant Kingdom" | Shrines of the Void | Morbid Spanish epic black metal. |
| 2016-08-19 | 7 | Thrawsunblat | "Dead of Winter" | Metachthonia | Woods of Ypres guitarist Joel Violette's astonishing pagan-atmospheric epic black metal. Maybe my metal album of the year so far. |
| 2016-08-19 | 22 | Sivyj Yar | "The Wind Whispers in Solitude" | The Unmourned Past 2 | Epic meditative black metal. Voidgaze. |
| 2016-08-19 | 23 | Anaal Nathrakh | "Depravity Favours the Bold" | single | Anaal Nathrakh seem to have finally noticed that extreme black metal had caught up to them. |
| 2016-08-19 | 29 | DGM | "Fallen" | single | The kind of progressive metal that makes me want to be progressive about everything. |
| 2016-08-19 | 30 | Narnia | "Messengers" | single | Of course there had to be a progressive metal band called "Narnia". Of course they had to disband so they could be resurrected. |
| 2016-08-19 | 31 | Skeletonwitch | "The Apothic Gloom" | The Apothic Gloom +3 | Black/thrash metal. |
| 2016-08-12 | 6 | Winterfylleth | "Ensigns Of Victory" | single | I would like to believe that this whole wing of cathartic epic-atmophseric semi-pagan black metal somehow derives as much from Big Country's "Porrohman" as from anything by Bathory. |
| 2016-08-12 | 7 | Sonata Arctica | "Closer to an Animal" | single | I wish Everon would make more neo-progressive-metal records, but this sentimental power-metal is similarly minded. |
| 2016-08-12 | 14 | Allegaeon | "Proponent for Sentience III - The Extermination" | single | Relentlessly melodic progressive metal with a crunchy death-metal core, like a metal band designed by Ben and Jerry's. |
| 2016-08-12 | 16 | Equilibrium | "Erwachen" | Armageddon | Melodic pagan folk symphonic power-battle anthem metal. |
| 2016-08-12 | 17 | Lacrimas Profundere | "The Worship Of Counting Down" | Hope Is Here | Dense gothic-melancholy metal, like taking the HIM concept back to the Sentenced blueprints and replaying its evolution without the love-metal glamour. |
| 2016-08-12 | 27 | Miracle Of Sound | "The Path" | single | One-man-band epicore folk metal. |
| 2016-08-05 | 1 | Blood Stain Child | "INSIGNIA" | NEXUS 3 | Blood Stain Child are why BABYMETAL didn't seem so unprecedented to me. |
| 2016-08-05 | 4 | Cruzh | "Aim for the Head" | single | Remember hair-metal? The hair was cryogenically frozen and shipped to Sweden until the technology to revive it was ready. |
| 2016-08-05 | 14 | DGM | "Ghosts of Insanity" | single | The new utopianisms are anti-isolationist. What you can't turn back, you might as well turn up. |
| 2016-08-05 | 15 | Eden's Curse | "Sell Your Soul" | single | Let it lift you. |
| 2016-08-05 | 16 | Serious Black | "As Long as I'm Alive" | single | It's like a rainbow in the dark. |
| 2016-08-05 | 21 | Devin Townsend Project | "Failure" | single | And dystopian robot armies are most entertaining as a basement hobby. |
| 2016-08-05 | 22 | Charice | "Epitome of Beauty" | single | Or pumpkin-carriage footmice that don't care how you're supposed to pronounce "epitome". |
| 2016-08-05 | 23 | Tarja | "Demon’s in you (feat. Arch Enemy’s Alissa White-Gluz)" | The Shadow Self | But if you had the magic to turn a pumpkin into a vehicle, wouldn't you give it better powers? |
| 2016-08-05 | 24 | The Legion Of Hetheria | "Awakening" | Awakening | Wouldn't you make your magic shoes out of something stronger than glass? |
| 2016-08-05 | 48 | StarSystems | "Entropy" | StarSystems III | We look at the stars in silence, but then go inside and write planetarium anthems |
| 2016-08-05 | 50 | Asenblut | "Helden des ewigen Sturms" | single | and secret gods. |
| 2016-08-05 | 79 | Sinsaenum | "Splendor and Agony" | Echoes Of The Tortured | You are not being asked to conform to other people's rituals, you are being invited to find your own soul. |
| 2016-08-05 | 86 | MirrorMaze | "Worn and Torn" | Break the Horizon | This time the potential magnitude of fear will be proof of our capacity. |
| 2016-07-29 | 1 | Numenorean | "Home" | Home | Majestic, howling, epic-cathartic Calgary post-black metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 2 | Kryptos | "Full Throttle" | single | Old-school-style shred-metal from new-school Bangalore. |
| 2016-07-29 | 3 | Necronautical | "Pure Moon" | The Endurance At Night | Distended UK black-metal blur. |
| 2016-07-29 | 4 | Helix Nebula | "God Is God?" | The Last Lights of a Dying Universe | Epic melodic Spanish black-thrash metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 5 | Denouncement Pyre | "World Encircler" | Black Sun Unbound | Rumbling Australian black-doom metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 6 | Ade | "Carthago Delenda Est" | Carthago Delenda Est | Concussive, withering Italian power-death metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 11 | We Are the Catalyst | "Delusion" | single | If pixie power-pop-punk is feminine and grinding alt-metal is masculine, here's the sound of gender synthesis. |
| 2016-07-29 | 19 | Panopticon | "Living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death" | Revisions of the Past | Sweeping cryptic-pastoral remix/remastering of two dumbfoundingly vast early records by the world's best Appalachian black metal band. |
| 2016-07-29 | 20 | The Foreshadowing | "Two Horizons" | Seven Heads Ten Horns | Open-hearted Italian gothic love-metal roar. |
| 2016-07-29 | 21 | Evergrey | "Distance" | single | Stuttering, soaring Swedish progressive metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 22 | Delain | "The Glory and the Scum" | single | The state of the art in gothic symphonic metal-pop-rock. |
| 2016-07-29 | 23 | Epica | "Universal Death Squad" | single | Gloriously overwritten gothic symphonic dystopian concept-metal excess. |
| 2016-07-29 | 24 | Aeranea | "Nothing Left" | The Fading Ones | German gothic electronicore/metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 25 | Eteddian | "Deep Storm" | Destiny | Intricate, baroque Spanish symphonic metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 26 | September Mourning | "Angels To Dust" | Volume II | Blaring post-steampunk art-goth metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 27 | Binary Creed | "In a Time to Come" | single | Duet-laced Swedish progressive power-death metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 37 | Volturyon | "Hinterkaifeck" | single | A terrifying death-metal Pokémon you can only catch deep in the Swedish woods at midnight. |
| 2016-07-29 | 54 | Lord Of The Lost | "Miss Machine" | Empyrean (Deluxe Edition) | Northern Germanic cybernetic love metal. |
| 2016-07-29 | 68 | Morphinist | "Cosmic Maelstrom" | Giants | Ambient music for corrosive alien storms. |
| 2016-07-29 | 70 | Cronómetrobudú | "Nada" | Esperanto | They call themselves "world" but we'll see if they play this. Surging Spanish latin-folk-metal-punk-hard-rock and my album of the week. |
| 2016-07-22 | 1 | Anno Domini | "Inner Dimensions" | The Cold Expanse | I basically believe that it is always a great time for music, because music is the thing humans are best at, and there are still humans. But this is a better time for music than ever because the tools for finding music are evolving at an unprecedented rate into previously impossible forms. To find new metal I used to read a bunch of magazines and carry long laser-printed itemizations of my curiosity with me to record stores to refer to while I slowly flipped through bins full of shrinkwrap-silenced plastic. If I found anything it was a good week. Now I have internal tools at Spotify that feed me new music at essentially any rate I can tolerate. And, more astoundingly, can even feed me highly-specific subsets of new music at effectively the same arbitrary rate. I would never have known about this Australian symphonic metal band in the pre-streaming era. I've been an obsessive metal fan on and off for more than 30 years and I'm not sure I knew of an Australian "metal" band other than AC/DC. |
| 2016-07-22 | 2 | Wings of Destiny | "Angels & Demons" | Kings of Terror | Wings of Destiny are a power-metal band from Costa Rica. I've been to Costa Rica, which is a thing I used to do in order to buy records. I don't think I learned anything about Costa Rican music from the trip, and certainly not this. |
| 2016-07-22 | 3 | Athame | "For Generations" | With Cunning Fire and Adversarial Resolve | Athame are an Appalachian black metal band, not to be confused with the Colorado black metal band Athamé or the proto-epicore composer Atham'e. And when I say "not to be confused", I mean "conflated obliviously on Spotify until just now when I discovered that this is three bands, not one, and fixed them". |
| 2016-07-22 | 4 | Induction | "The Outwitted Consecration" | single | There were two or three artists called Induction conflated on Spotify until a minute ago, too. I think the two EDM ones are different from each other. This one, a new symphonic power-metal band started by Czech guitarist Martin Beck, is definitely different. |
| 2016-07-22 | 5 | Survivors Zero | "Penitent One" | single | This is a cheerfully bludgeony Finnish death metal band. I've been to Finland once, for about 7 hours. What I discovered in person is that they have world-class trivets and the best strawberries in the world, and a beautiful chapel dedicated to silence, which is kind of the opposite of my personal concept of spirituality but at least I understand it. |
| 2016-07-22 | 6 | And Then She Came | "Public Enemy #1" | And Then She Came | There was a German gothic metal band called Krypteria. I don't think I had heard of them before streaming. The members made this new alt-electro-metal/hard-rock band and gave it a new name. In the old days, that would probably have been enough that I'd never have realized they were still making music. |
| 2016-07-22 | 7 | Mephistopheles | "The 11th Skywalk Travelstream" | In Reverence Of Forever 6 | Mephistopheles are a cryptic technical death metal band from Tasmania. Did I know any bands from Tasmania before? Maybe Sea Scouts? This year this is only my second-favorite Tasmanian album. |
| 2016-07-22 | 8 | Psalm Zero | "Stranger to Violence" | Stranger to Violence | Psalm Zero are an NYC art-metal band. Art-metal has somehow come to mean drum-machines and sometimes-legible singing. |
| 2016-07-22 | 9 | Bloody Hammers | "Bloodletting on the Kiss" | single | Bloody Hammers is a European metal name, but a gothic rock band from North Carolina. Despite the "North", North Carolina is far enough south for North Carolinan "gothic" to be Southern gothic, but there is actually a Transylvania in North Carolina. I've been there! It didn't seem especially gothic, and I discovered no music while driving through it, and certainly nothing gothic in the Central European mode like this song. |
| 2016-07-22 | 17 | Vanhelgd | "Lamentation of the Mortals" | Temple of Phobos | Phobos was the Greek god of fear. A different Phobos is a doomed and disintegrating moon of Mars. Vanhelgd are from Sweden. When they're not making hoarse black/death metal about fear and doom, Swedes seem outwardly pretty calm and unworried. |
| 2016-07-22 | 18 | Baptism | "Satananda" | V: The Devil's Fire | Baptism are a Satanic Finnish black metal band. I once baffled a Swedish metal-loving co-worker by suggesting that a Finnish band was similar to a Swedish one. "Oh!", he explained. "They're Finnish!" To me, black metal is nihilistic to the point of universality. All unintelligible languages are equivalent. But apparently this universalist interpretation is not universal. No doubt I would say "Oh! They're from Phobos!", baffled in turn. |
| 2016-07-22 | 19 | DGM | "The Secret Pt. 1" | single | DGM are an old-school progressive metal band from Italy, named as an acronym of the names of people who aren't in the band any more. There are all kinds of "progress". This kind is somewhere between Fates Warning and Night Ranger. |
| 2016-07-22 | 26 | Ravenia | "We All Died for Honor" | We All Died for Honor +2 | Or gothic symphonic epicore soundtrack metal. |
| 2016-07-22 | 33 | Heavenwood | "The Lovers" | The Tarot of the Bohemians - Part 1 | And although ascetic drone and sentimental love-metal seem like potential opposites on some technical-emotional spectrum, the transition feels completely rational to me, like coming upon your true love at the center of a labyrinth, or the exit of an airport. |
| 2016-07-22 | 35 | Wreck and Reference | "Flight But Not Metaphor" | Indifferent Rivers Romance End | But then, if it were me, I would be 138x more likely to make a record called Indifferent Rivers Romance End than Drone Pop #1, so I can't really complain. This is post-post-metal. One of the great and terrible things about time is that the amount of post- you can do is limited by the combination of patience and longevity. |
| 2016-07-22 | 44 | Asenblut | "Berserkerzorn" | single | Part of the way a thing gets to be a thing is some people inventing a way it's supposed to be done by doing it that way. This is what German pagan metal sounds like when that happens. |
| 2016-07-22 | 45 | Fimbultyr | "Bergtagen av sorg" | Niddikter | Similarly, Swedish viking metal. |
| 2016-07-22 | 46 | Revocation | "Theatre of Horror" | Great Is Our Sin | If you go to Sweden and walk around expecting the city air to drip with viking intensity, you'll be disappointed. It kind of more drips with public-transportation efficiency and more 7-11s but somehow less processed food. But the technical death-metal band Revocation are from here in Boston, and what do we have? Pretzels? |
| 2016-07-22 | 47 | Defeated Sanity | "Into The Soil" | Disposal Of The Dead // Dharmata | Defeated Sanity are from a very specific subcult of inverted technical death metal where the vocal noises and guitars are almost completely textural and occulted, but the drums sound like toys. Except toys that are being hit at absurd rates of speed and yet aren't breaking. Or maybe they are, and there's a guy standing there frantically swapping in new toy snare drums from a giant stack of them behind him. |
| 2016-07-22 | 65 | Tezaura | "01 - Unleash the Butterflies" | Unleash the Butterflies | And sometimes we retreat to our comfort zones, although in my case my comfort zone encompasses polychromatic Czech gothic metal. |
| 2016-07-15 | 5 | Pain | "Black Knight Satellite (Single Version)" | single | We search for these things that can separate power and elation from anger and fear. |
| 2016-07-15 | 7 | Ghoulgotha | "Village of Flickering Torches" | To Starve the Cross | Serenity is not the silencing of noise, it is the integration of noise. |
| 2016-07-15 | 9 | ColdWorld | "Scars" | Autumn | We create dark sunlit markets for artisanal reconstructions of primordial chaos. |
| 2016-07-15 | 10 | Caina | "Entartete Kunst" | Christ Clad in White Phosphorus | And then tear them apart and sell the pieces as scrap. |
| 2016-07-15 | 11 | Sabaton | "Blood of Bannockburn" | single | But remember when we were invincible? When we thought armor would keep us safe? |
| 2016-07-15 | 21 | Envinya | "Bewitched" | The Harvester | And soon return to their stubborn vainglorious sorcery |
| 2016-07-15 | 22 | Dust Moth | "Corrections" | single | and mordant rituals. |
| 2016-07-15 | 35 | Girugamesh | "period" | single | And your campaign will run out of your righteous refusals long before it runs out of our flourishes or embraces. |
| 2016-07-15 | 36 | Misaruka | "Reunion" | Reunion +1 | We have long since dreamed past this. |
| 2016-07-15 | 38 | Revocation | "Arbiters of the Apocalypse" | single | You send your demons into battle, and we receive them into a dance. |
| 2016-07-15 | 39 | Letzte Instanz | "Weiß wie der Schnee" | single | I think you think there's a difference. |
| 2016-07-15 | 40 | Schwarzer Engel | "Titania" | single | But a battle is a dance in which the dancers have forgotten about music. |
| 2016-07-15 | 41 | Asenblut | "Drachenborn" | single | Or love. |
| 2016-07-15 | 49 | To the Rats and Wolves | "Riot" | single | And, sometimes, that we're fucking angry. |
| 2016-07-15 | 50 | Exotype | "Break Me" | single | Or that we're playing with anger to figure out how to disarm it. |
| 2016-07-01 | 2 | Orpheum | "Darkness and Decay" | Darkness and Decay | The urge to believe in something bigger than what you see around you is, apparently, not universal. Which seems intuitively wrong to me, but then so does the fact that not everybody loves bombastic gothic symphonic metal. |
| 2016-07-01 | 6 | Equilibrium | "Prey" | single | The answer, I guess, is that not everybody asks what their own normal means. It just is. Which is a compact justification for fantasy, I think. Folk metal is definitively exaggerated, but exaggeration is a form of self-awareness. |
| 2016-07-01 | 7 | Fates Warning | "Seven Stars" | Theories Of Flight | Progressive-metal bombast is just as inherently life-affirming as it is ridiculous. Ridiculousness is life-affirming. Anything that rejects entropy, anything that formulates theories, anything that stacks notes on top of each other. |
| 2016-07-01 | 8 | Majesty Of Revival | "Deadlock" | Dualism | I kind of never run out of patience for progressive metal. |
| 2016-07-01 | 9 | Teodasia | "Rise" | Reloaded | Old progressive metal re-recorded with a new singer? Sure! |
| 2016-07-01 | 10 | Deadlock | "Backstory Wound" | single | Shouty/elegiac gothic djent-metal? OK. |
| 2016-07-01 | 11 | Periphery | "Flatline" | single | Shouty thrash djent without the elegiac or gothic bits? Also often fine. |
| 2016-07-01 | 12 | Chelsea Grin | "Four Horsemen" | Self Inflicted | Apocalyptic choketech metal? Apocalypse fantasies are still a way to celebrate not being apocalyzed yet. |
| 2016-07-01 | 13 | Circle of Contempt | "Filth" | Structures for Creation | Cyber-apocalyptic tech-death metal? |
| 2016-07-01 | 14 | VOLA | "Starburn" | single | No Clean Singing was a revolution about independence. The return of clean singing to extreme metal is a revolution of re-unity. |
| 2016-07-01 | 15 | While She Sleeps | "New World Torture" | Brainwashed | It doesn't mean we stop being angry. |
| 2016-07-01 | 16 | Myka, Relocate | "Hide The Truth" | The Young Souls | It doesn't mean metal can't cheerfully morph into power-pop. |
| 2016-07-01 | 17 | Sink | "Hunger" | Ark of Contempt and Anger | It doesn't mean metal can't sublimate into pure ritual. |
| 2016-07-01 | 18 | Agnes Obel | "Familiar" | single | And grind away the layers of metal until there's nothing left but a few shreds of cello and diffident drumbeats, and the haunted intensity isn't necessarily any different at all. |
| 2016-06-24 | 11 | Highlord | "One World at a Time" | Hic Sunt Leones | And remember, later, when it's your turn for parades, what this felt like to watch. |
| 2016-06-24 | 14 | Svarttjern | "All Hail Satan" | Dødsskrik | Somewhere a timid moth-cataloguing limnologist is getting blastbeaten by Norwegian misanthropy. Surprising things happen. |
| 2016-06-24 | 15 | The Flight of Sleipnir | "Algiz" | Algiz & Berkanan | There's an instructive story from Norse mythology about this. I don't know what it is, I'm just assuming there probably is one. |
| 2016-06-24 | 16 | Eilera | "Angel Made Temptress" | Angel Made Temptress +2 | You can vote to leave, but this doesn't seal the Chunnel, or push Paris any farther away, or raise or lower the Seine. |
| 2016-06-24 | 17 | ANCIENT MYTH | "Eyes Shine Like Raspberyl" | Aberration: "Ag" | And if you're afraid of the French, what are you going to do about the Japanese? Do you have any idea how fast sound moves through air? Do you realize it's even faster in water? |
| 2016-06-24 | 23 | Earth Ship | "Reduced to Ashes" | Hollowed | And of course they put the beaches on the leaflets, but it's the same with the deserts. |
| 2016-06-24 | 24 | Dust Moth | "Shelf Life" | single | The same with the dust. |
| 2016-06-24 | 25 | Heavenwood | "13th Moon" | Redemption | And despite your earnest and exuberant efforts, ignorance cannot be reconstructed. With great vigilance it can sometimes temporarily be conserved. And with a chord it can be obliterated. |
| 2016-06-24 | 39 | Grimner | "Mörkrets Hem" | single | Nothing more heroic and human than our willingness to dance to other people's unintelligible and yet unmistakable songs. |
| 2016-06-24 | 46 | Sinsaenum | "The Forgotten One" | Sinsaenum 2 | All these loud, terrifying noises are ways to say that this darkness between us is a fossil fuel. |
| 2016-06-24 | 47 | Korgonthurus | "L.U.X" | Vuohen Siunaus | It can't hurt us. It got here between us by dying before we were born. We can burn it for the strength to overcome our fears. |
| 2016-06-24 | 48 | Gevurah | "הַלְּלוּיָהּ" | Hallelujah! | We can burn it away to leave nothing between us but warmth and light. |
| 2016-06-17 | 1 | Astronoid | "Up and Atom" | Air | These are pretty good times for not-quite-metal metal. |
| 2016-06-17 | 2 | Ivar Bjørnson & Einar Selvik | "Makta Og Vanæra, For All Tid" | Skuggsjá | You can make post-neofolk metal out of post-metal neofolk. |
| 2016-06-17 | 3 | TeraBrite | "Running with Scissors" | single | You can mix some metal into your pixie covers of pop songs. |
| 2016-06-17 | 4 | Blut Aus Nord | "Infra-Voices Ensemble" | Codex Obscura Nomina | Or, obviously, you can take your crypto-atmospheric black metal VERY VERY SERIOUSLY, like an acidic Cthulhuian slime-vortex vaporizing a particle collider. |
| 2016-06-17 | 5 | Terra Tenebrosa | "The End Is Mine to Ride" | The Reverses | Or marching metal for steampunk stormtroopers. |
| 2016-06-17 | 6 | Inter Arma | "Primordial Wound" | single | Or what it sounds like, centuries later, to the wolves stalking through the ruins of Valhalla. |
| 2016-06-17 | 19 | Trick or Treat | "The Great Escape" | single | We will embarrass them with courageous abandon. |
| 2016-06-17 | 20 | Great Master | "Another Story" | Lion and Queen | Absurdity is glorious. |
| 2016-06-17 | 21 | Palace | "Master of the Universe" | single | Absurdity, like entropy, is just what would have happened if we hadn't been here to believe. |
| 2016-06-17 | 22 | Gojira | "The Cell" | Magma | Serenity is the intolerable glass inertia that might have horrifically prevailed if we didn't have these hammers. |
| 2016-06-17 | 26 | 831 | "刀劍如夢2.0" | single | And then, freed, we go a little crazy. |
| 2016-06-17 | 28 | Nails | "You Will Never Be One of Us" | You Will Never Be One of Us | Now stop that. You will never be one of us. |
| 2016-06-17 | 45 | DGM | "Animal" | single | At least, I assume the rest of you have Italian progressive-metal bands inside your hearts the same way I do. |
| 2016-06-17 | 58 | NECRONOMIDOL | "Tamam Shud" | From Chaos Born 6 | This is how we extract humanity from chaos. |
| 2016-06-17 | 59 | Wayfarer | "Ever Climbing" | Old Souls | Not "extract" like removing, but like distilling. |
| 2016-06-10 | 6 | Jute Gyte | "At the Limit of Fertile Land" | Perdurance | If you still think Def Leppard when you hear "metal", and wonder how anybody can be serious about it, listen to this. |
| 2016-06-10 | 7 | Virus | "Afield" | Memento Collider | If you survive the Jute Gyte, try this next. |
| 2016-06-10 | 8 | Sabaton | "The Lost Battalion" | single | But then, for comfort and reassurance, here's some neo-traditional battle-metal. |
| 2016-06-10 | 13 | Psideralica | "Trinitite" | Trinitite | and to bring sputtering lazers to a neon dance fight? |
| 2016-06-10 | 21 | Fire EX. | "Afterimage Motion" | Reborn | But then you find a Taiwanese pop-punk-metal band singing part of the time in Japanese, and you kind of give up on ever really exactly measuring things. |
| 2016-06-10 | 25 | Deadlock | "Ein Deutsches Requiem" | single | its corrosive tentacles beckon glisteningly, longingly. |
| 2016-06-10 | 33 | Revocation | "Monolithic Ignorance" | single | You have the mass-intertia to grind us into basalt, |
| 2016-06-10 | 34 | Hammers of Misfortune | "Dead Revolution" | single | and drive us into the fissures between tectonic convictions, |
| 2016-06-10 | 35 | Despised Icon | "The Aftermath" | single | and then twirl the planet, |
| 2016-06-03 | 2 | Cantique Lépreux | "Le froid lépreux" | Cendres célestes | Quebec: Meanwhile, elsewhere, demons were pouring out of cracks in the terrifyingly thin surface of the earth, but presumably they wouldn't bother coming to the surface if it were really better in the infernos. |
| 2016-06-03 | 3 | Boisson Divine | "Sent pançart" | Volentat | Gascony: Ultimately, if you wait out their melodramatic howling, it always turns out that they just want to dance. |
| 2016-06-03 | 5 | Marauder | "Spread Your Wings" | Bullethead | Athens: However transformed. |
| 2016-06-03 | 9 | Master's Hammer | "Den Nicoty" | Formulæ | Prague: And the black metal shadows are anti-dancing, but obviously this too is cathartic movement. |
| 2016-06-03 | 10 | Wayfarer | "Catcher" | single | Denver: The mountains are both the massing of the oldest energies and the outer edges. |
| 2016-06-03 | 12 | Jorn | "Don't Stop Believin'" | Heavy Rock Radio | Norway: And even the most polished waves will be eroded human again. |
| 2016-06-03 | 13 | Trick or Treat | "Cloudrider" | single | Modena: It's hard not to look up and think the sky still seems so empty. |
| 2016-06-03 | 14 | Withem | "Riven" | The Unforgiving Road | Oslo: Hard not to think some unfound road leads off the earth into it. |
| 2016-06-03 | 15 | Tarja | "No Bitter End (Video version)" | The Brightest Void | Finland: The brightest paths forward are never just ways to be better at what you used to do. |
| 2016-06-03 | 22 | Matilda | "Ghost" | single | Norway: The sparks that escape our eyes ping off the windows and the metal frames. |
| 2016-06-03 | 23 | Vuolla | "Death Incredible" | Blood. Stone. Sun. Down. | Finland: What's the opposite of funereal doom? Rebirth metal? |
| 2016-06-03 | 26 | Candlemass | "Sleeping Giant" | Death Thy Lover | Stockholm: Burial can be a slow, dignified process. |
| 2016-06-03 | 40 | NECRONOMIDOL | "Atai No Tsumeato" | Nemesis | Tokyo: If you claim you'd like BABYMETAL if they were less cute, your bluff is called. |
| 2016-05-27 | 2 | Sipario Power Metal Act | "Ante Lucem" | Eclipse of Sorrow | We wouldn't need such fancy tools for finding music if every band would give themselves names that are both unique and genre-declaring. |
| 2016-05-27 | 3 | Katatonia | "Takeover" | The Fall of Hearts | But then, what would you do if your doom-metal band turned into a confident modern rock band, albeit a few years too late for that to make much commercial difference? |
| 2016-05-27 | 9 | Behexen | "The Poisonous Path" | The Poisonous Path | Behexen are totally fine as they are. Any reform plan has better prospects if it doesn't require you to argue with Satanic Finnish black metal demons. |
| 2016-05-27 | 10 | Withered | "My Leathery Rind" | Grief Relic | Even if they're from Atlanta. |
| 2016-05-27 | 11 | Sektemtum | "Place à la comédie" | Panacea | Conversely, the French pagan metal bands more often actually sound like they would like to argue with you. |
| 2016-05-27 | 12 | Eilera | "Your Way" | Your Way +2 | Or like maybe they want to know if you're up for a walking tour of old buildings with really great windows. |
| 2016-05-27 | 13 | Jorn | "Running up That Hill" | single | But anyway, there is now a metal cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill". Arguing is a waste of valuable time. |
| 2016-05-27 | 14 | Withem | "The Eye in the Sky" | single | The Norwegian Dream Theater. |
| 2016-05-27 | 15 | Epidemia | "Придумай Светлый Мир" | Придумай светлый мир 2 | "Epidemia is a Russian power metal band famous for doing the Elven Manuscript metal opera in 2004." What did we do before Wikipedia when we knew perfectly well what the thing meant but had no idea how to form the characters? |
| 2016-05-27 | 16 | Masters Of Disguise | "Torture Me" | The Fine Art of Aging Gracefully 6 | I guess we just listened to German power metal bands because they were easier to find. |
| 2016-05-27 | 17 | Lacuna Coil | "Take Me Home" | Delirium | Or the Italian gothic metal ones, who are even willing to come meet you in daylit spaces. |
| 2016-05-27 | 18 | Be'lakor | "A Thread Dissolves" | single | By the time you get to Australia, death metal and post-rock start to seem like complementary impulses. |
| 2016-05-27 | 22 | Periphery | "The Price Is Wrong" | single | Djent is what metal would sound like if you made it in Minecraft by just hitting recording studios with gigantic magic hammers. |
| 2016-05-27 | 23 | Architects | "Deathwish" | All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us | But then didn't police the place well enough for a while, so it started getting a little dangerous after all. |
| 2016-05-27 | 24 | The Browning | "Dragon" | single | At least enough so the Hero can come back and save it. |
| 2016-05-27 | 40 | Turmion Kätilöt | "Pimeyden Morsian" | single | I'd miss the Finns, though. |
| 2016-05-27 | 42 | Illdisposed | "Again" | Grey Sky over Black Town | And I was in Denmark for days. |
| 2016-05-27 | 43 | Fejd | "Härjaren" | Trolldom | Conversely, I've been to Sweden a lot, and have yet to see a single troll. |
| 2016-05-27 | 44 | Mistur | "Downfall" | In Memoriam | Norway: not yet. |
| 2016-05-27 | 55 | Death Angel | "The Moth" | The Evil Divide | I will dance if I want to. |
| 2016-05-27 | 56 | Suicidal Angels | "Capital of War" | Division Of Blood | And yes, I totally call this dancing. |
| 2016-05-27 | 57 | Ashbringer | "Solace" | Yūgen | Movement for reasons other than transportation, that's what counts as dancing. Undulating against waves of atmospheric metal is dancing. |
| 2016-05-20 | 1 | Sylvaine | "Earthbound" | Wistful | Blackgaze into the abyss. |
| 2016-05-20 | 2 | Mesarthim | "Declaration" | Isolate | The abyss has been watching you for eons already. |
| 2016-05-20 | 7 | Winterhorde | "Antipath" | Maestro | The second is the inspirational tumult of chaos. |
| 2016-05-20 | 8 | In Mourning | "Fire and Ocean" | Afterglow | The first is fragility. |
| 2016-05-20 | 9 | Evil Masquerade | "The Outcast Hall of Fame" | The Outcast Hall of Fame | We have a range of coping mechanisms for fragility. Effusive denial is obviously a good one. |
| 2016-05-20 | 10 | Trick or Treat | "United" | single | Another good one is starting an Italian Helloween tribute band and then forgetting to be terrible. |
| 2016-05-20 | 11 | Lonewolf | "Wolfsblut" | The Heathen Dawn | I'm pretty sure France has more metal bands with "wolf" in their names than they do actual wolves. |
| 2016-05-20 | 22 | Gojira | "Silvera" | single | Which metal never does. |
| 2016-05-20 | 23 | Deadlock | "Berserk" | single | There is no such thing as a desperate nihilism-courting/defying hat. |
| 2016-05-20 | 24 | Architects | "Downfall" | single | There is always a slanted power-dynamic between architecture and dance. |
| 2016-05-20 | 25 | Jasmine Cain | "Coming in Hot" | White Noise | You can build up some unwise speed sliding down it. |
| 2016-05-20 | 26 | Q5 | "The Right Way" | single | Enough momentum, sometimes, that you notice you're still moving 30 years later. |
| 2016-05-20 | 38 | Whispered | "Strike!" | Metsutan - Songs of the Void | Which is why we have to have a separate contest, because the music of Finland's national caricature would put a smart-axe through the windshield of our rusty pickup-truck. |
| 2016-05-20 | 39 | Sympuls-E | "Shackles of Hope" | Destroying the Barriers | You don't want to bring a coy bro-country smirk to a weaponized cyber-metal fight. |
| 2016-05-20 | 48 | Dawn Of Ashes | "Tribe of Chemosh" | Theophany | What is art if not the conviction that there can be better blood than what we started with? |
| 2016-05-20 | 65 | Sanzu | "Phenomena" | Heavy Over The Home | And we're half right. |
| 2016-05-20 | 67 | Ghosts of Pandora | "After Death" | Scorched Earth 6 | Which is the first step towards being nowhere. |
| 2016-05-13 | 3 | Thränenkind | "Desperation" | King Apathy | But eventually resignation always loses its charm. |
| 2016-05-13 | 4 | Kvelertak | "Dendrofil for Yggdrasil" | Nattesferd | And we sharpen metal tools for constructing revenge. |
| 2016-05-13 | 11 | Jorn | "Live to Win" | single | And sometimes we win. |
| 2016-05-13 | 12 | Withem | "In the Hands of a God" | single | My favorite industries manufacture excuses for effusive triumph. |
| 2016-05-13 | 21 | Ayin Aleph | "Crystal Bell" | single | And if only occasionally it sounds like somebody tried to ship you an opera in a cardboard box and you forgot to take it out before playing it, maybe we'll have patience. |
| 2016-05-13 | 22 | Tothem | "Gemini" | Gemini | And then you open it, and stars and valkyries pour out over everything. |
| 2016-05-13 | 36 | Gorguts | "Pleiades' Dust" | single | Resisting universal gravity's pull is the thing that takes real power. |
| 2016-05-13 | 37 | Destruction | "Under Attack" | Under Attack | The opposite of inertia is violence. |
| 2016-05-13 | 41 | Dalriada | "Bor vitéz (részlet)" | Forrás | And the occult obsessions of dark elves. |
| 2016-05-13 | 45 | Chelsea Grin | "Skin Deep" | single | And once you open that gate to hell, monsters can come out and howl among you. |
| 2016-05-13 | 47 | Grand Magus | "Freja's Choice" | Sword Songs | And no voyages of plunder will ever return with the right mortar to rebuild the walls that were lovingly disassembled in your absence. |
| 2016-05-13 | 49 | Ted Poley | "Everything We Are" | Beyond the Fade | Might as well learn to sing along with their goofy sentimental ballads. |
| 2016-05-13 | 50 | Sunstorm | "The Darkness of This Dawn" | Edge of Tomorrow | You don't really know somebody until you can feel the truth of the things they believe but can't explain. |
| 2016-05-13 | 51 | LUNKHEAD | "Kessen Zenya" | Kessen Zenya 5 | Until you can feel yourself lifted by truths you cannot translate. |
| 2016-05-06 | 2 | The Howling Void | "Lords of Barren Fields" | The Triumph of Ruin | The alternative is groaning metal despair. So you should practice that, too. |
| 2016-05-06 | 4 | Midnight Eternal | "'Till the Bitter End" | Midnight Eternal | Epic is a method of listening as much as an alloy of metal. |
| 2016-05-06 | 6 | WagakkiBand | "Ikusa" | Yasouemaki | The magnificent problem with "folk-metal" is that it allows every music made by people and wires. |
| 2016-05-06 | 14 | Velnias | "Absolution" | single | The world spins so fast, is it any wonder you find stray Lithuanian gods and pagan metal in tiny Colorado mountain towns? |
| 2016-05-06 | 69 | Vektor | "Charging the Void" | Terminal Redux | And you take a breath, and you look each one of them briefly in the eye, and then you say "Progressive metal doesn't have to sound like Yes + Cylons", and you hit the fucking Play button. |
| 2016-04-29 | 3 | Fallujah | "Face of Death" | Dreamless | Dramatic symphonic progressive only-semi-dead metal with monster roaring. |
| 2016-04-29 | 4 | Orden Ogan | "To the End" | The Book of Ogan (Audio Version) | Quick, muscular power-death-metal. But if this is the "Audio" version, I assume the other version involves actual edible cheese. |
| 2016-04-29 | 5 | Lacuna Coil | "Trip the Darkness" | Dark Adrenaline | Gothic metal songwriting as obelisk sculpting. |
| 2016-04-29 | 6 | Withem | "Arrhythmia" | single | Sometimes progressive metal is NWOBM with more low-end. |
| 2016-04-29 | 7 | Jorn | "I Know There's Something Going On" | single | In retrospect, a power-metal cover of this song was inevitable. |
| 2016-04-29 | 12 | Darkestrah | "Gleaming Madness" | Turan | Convulsive epic pagan metal. |
| 2016-04-29 | 16 | Nemesea | "Time to Make It" | Uprise | Gothic symphonic metal as anthemic joy-blast pop. |
| 2016-04-29 | 22 | Abnormality | "Swarm" | Mechanisms of Omniscience | Dessicated thrash metal. |
| 2016-04-29 | 32 | Fejd | "Härjaren" | single | Fejd used to be metal-adjacent Swedish neofolk, but seem to have casually marauded into galloping pagan folk metal. |
| 2016-04-29 | 34 | Schammasch | "The World Destroyed by Water" | Triangle | Experimental black metal's triple-album devil's-advocate response to Dream Theater's The Astonishing. |
| 2016-04-29 | 35 | Gackt | "Arrow" | Last Moon | Definitive visual-kei j-metal. |
| 2016-04-22 | 2 | Human Fortress | "Knights in Shining Armour" | Defenders of the Crown (Re-Release) | Reissue of a great 2003 album of German epic power-metal catharsis. |
| 2016-04-22 | 3 | Sorcier des Glaces | "Dense Nordic Veils Fall Upon My Realm with Grandiose Obscurity" | Moonrise in Total Darkness 2016 | I don't think this is a parody of depressive black metal, but I'm also not totally sure how it would necessarily be different if it were. |
| 2016-04-22 | 5 | October Tide | "Swarm" | Winged Waltz | This is what my songs would sound like if I made Swedish doom-laden melodic death metal. |
| 2016-04-22 | 44 | Gojira | "Stranded" | single | The metal that Killing Joke would sound like if they were really metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 1 | Geryon | "Silent Command" | The Wound and the Bow | Sometimes "metal" is a word for noisy restlessness. |
| 2016-04-15 | 4 | Zhrine | "Spewing Gloom" | Unortheta | And that metal can evoke and maybe even summon a universal chaos that is the same from Portland to Portugal to Iceland. |
| 2016-04-15 | 8 | Haken | "The Endless Knot" | single | The hybridization of dubstep and progressive metal was arguably a yearning masculine inevitability. |
| 2016-04-15 | 11 | Kivimetsän Druidi | "The Lost Captains" | The Lost Captains +2 | But Finnish black folk-metal makes The Blair Witch Project look like Rivers and Tides. |
| 2016-04-15 | 12 | Schammasch | "Maelstrom" | single | And Swiss neo-folk metal can approach liminal epicore. |
| 2016-04-15 | 13 | Joyless | "Black Zodiac" | Black Zodiac +3 | Despite the pentagrammed goat-head on the cover, this is actually dark-atmospheric techno instead of black metal, but the distinction is less sharp then you might guess. |
| 2016-04-15 | 17 | Horse Latitudes | "Spirals Album" | Primal Gnosis | Distended doom-ambient tectonic metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 20 | Kay Tse | "諸神混亂 - (劇集 “殭" 主題曲)" | single | Whirling, roaring Hong Kong gothic orchestral pop-metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 38 | Izegrim | "White Walls" | The Ferryman's End | Sputtering zombie-sprint Dutch thrash-death-metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 41 | Sig:Ar:Tyr | "Helluland" | Northen | Onrushing Canadian viking metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 42 | Jönne | "Es wär' mal an der Zeit" | single | Raspy bedroom-shred-metal lapsing inexplicably but repeatedly into comedy-polka gallop. |
| 2016-04-15 | 57 | Withem | "The Pain I Collected" | single | Brisk, dextrous Norwegian melodic progressive metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 63 | Dynazty | "The Human Paradox" | Titanic Mass | Maximum-pomp minimum-self-consciousness hypermelodic power-metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 67 | Acwl | "Oxc de l'étrange" | Internel | Sprawling French gothic half-post- art-metal. |
| 2016-04-15 | 69 | Acrassicauda | "The Cost Of Everything And The Value Of Nothing" | GILGAMESH | Powerful, crunching, uncluttered Iraqi heavy metal. |
| 2016-04-08 | 5 | Lacuna Coil | "The House of Shame" | single | Like make pounding, growling, death-metal-derived drifting-slab rock music. |
| 2016-04-01 | 10 | Dark Funeral | "Where Shadows Forever Reign" | single | Every honest black metal band should open up your skull and pour in the sound of black holes grinding up your fears. |
| 2016-04-01 | 11 | Schammasch | "Metanoia" | single | Sometimes the genius of metal is imagining what it would sound like to take every absurd thing completely seriously. |
| 2016-04-01 | 24 | BABYMETAL | "Road of Resistance" | METAL RESISTANCE | J-pop-metal continues to be one of the greatest stupid ideas of the decade. |
| 2016-04-01 | 30 | Nemesea | "Forever" | single | Honestly, pretty much every gothic symphonic pop-metal song could be called "Forever". (Or "Amaranth".) |
| 2016-04-01 | 53 | Fallujah | "The Void Alone" | single | One of the best current brutal progressive death metal bands goes temporarily beauty-and-the-beast dream-metal. |
| 2016-04-01 | 67 | Sixx:A.M. | "You Have Come To The Right Place" | single | And yet this music sounds dated. Nostalgia for the centuries between the invention of strip-club glam-metal and four or five years later. |
| 2016-04-01 | 70 | Novembre | "Australis" | URSA | Textural Italian progressive melodic doom metal. |
| 2016-03-25 | 2 | Therion | "L'amour est bleu ((heavy version))" | Les Épaves 5 | Gothic extremists sounding unexpectedly unbombastic on a short EP of straightforwardly metal spare tracks. |
| 2016-03-25 | 17 | Grimner | "Res Er Mina Söner" | Frost Mot Eld | Fluty rune-geek folk-metal. |
| 2016-03-25 | 18 | BRIDEAR | "Marginal Lie" | Baryte | Female-led Japanese power-metal that manages to be understated by only Japanese standards. |
| 2016-03-25 | 20 | Dominanz | "Ruins of Destruction" | single | Norwegian industrial-gothic black metal. |
| 2016-03-18 | 2 | Mithridatic | "The supply..." | Miserable Miracle | Budgeoning raw French black thrash metal. Like a nightmare in which an abandoned disco turns out to be a zombie logistics center, and the disco ball is a tiny, frenetic Death Star intent on beating you to a pulp. |
| 2016-03-18 | 5 | Charm Designer | "Everlasting" | Everlasting | Bellowing Colombian gothic progressive doom metal. |
| 2016-03-18 | 13 | Circus Maximus | "The Weight" | Havoc | Equally well-named maximalist melodic progressive metal. |
| 2016-03-18 | 20 | Wyrd | "Death Of The Sun" | Death Of The Sun | Hoarse, epic pagan black metal. |
| 2016-03-18 | 21 | Ihsahn | "Pressure" | single | Like an avant-garde-black-metal "Baker Street". |
| 2016-03-18 | 24 | Nemesea | "Twilight" | single | The return of my favorite pop-gothic pop-symphonic pop-metal band! |
| 2016-03-18 | 25 | September Mourning | "Eye Of The Storm" | single | Rococo techno-progressive steampunk-gothic metal. |
| 2016-03-18 | 32 | Stam1na | "Ikoneklasmia" | Elokuutio | Finnish metal-hybridizers go electronicore. |
| 2016-03-18 | 34 | Haken | "Initiate" | single | Progressive metal as a kind of oblique, architectural soul music. They should tour with Agent Fresco. |
| 2016-03-11 | 12 | Skeletonwitch | "Well of Despair" | single | Frantic, unglossy melodic thrash-metal. |
| 2016-03-11 | 14 | Uruk-Hai | "Return of the Fallen Warriors" | Elbenstahl | Solipsistic ambient Tolkien laptop epicore-metal, like a musical evocation of the footnotes for a script for a montage of a battle. |
| 2016-03-11 | 44 | Ereb Altor | "A Fine Day to Die" | Blot - Ilt - Taut | Full black metal viking. |
| 2016-03-04 | 12 | Amore Ad Lunam | "I'm Inside You" | single | Goth-caped love metal from somewhere deep in the vein that runs from later Sisters of Mercy to earlier HIM. |
| 2016-03-04 | 15 | Eissturm | "Falling Snow" | The Oak | Whisper-shrieky, frost-shrouded atmospheric black metal. |
| 2016-03-04 | 16 | Now or Never | "The Voice Inside" | II | Cheerfully semi-anachronistic power-glam Euro-metal. |
| 2016-03-04 | 20 | Beseech | "Beating Pulse" | My Darkness, Darkness | Gruff, dark-romantic Swedish gothic metal. |
| 2016-03-04 | 23 | Sorcier des Glaces | "Passage Au-Dela Des Glaciers Noirs" | North | Freeze-dessicated Québécois raw black metal. |
| 2016-03-04 | 24 | Panopticon | "Håkan's Song" | Panopticon & Waldgeflüster (Split) | Object-lesson in how to do a genuinely collaborative split single: each band provides one massive-torment new pagan-metal epic and one spare neo-folk cover of one of the other band's songs. |
| 2016-03-04 | 28 | Wolvserpent | "Aporia:Kala:Ananta" | single | Take a pop song and slow it down to 40:30 and you get instant funeral doom metal. Except this was never a pop song. |
| 2016-03-04 | 29 | Inverloch | "From the Eventide Pool" | Distance | Collapsed | Epic-elegiac black doom metal. |
| 2016-03-04 | 37 | Reckless Love | "We Are The Weekend" | InVader | Sunny, flamboyantly goofy Finnish retro-glam-metal. |
| 2016-03-04 | 44 | Momoiro Clover Z | "We Are Born" | Amaranthus | Hopping brightly from techno-power-metal to alternate-universe industrial-instructional-musical soundtracks... |
| 2016-02-26 | 9 | Ektomorf | "Brotherhood of Man" | single | Viciously desiccated death-metal rattle. |
| 2016-02-26 | 20 | Omnium Gatherum | "The Pit" | Grey Heavens | Blistering, raspy, anthemic Finnish progressive melodic death metal. |
| 2016-02-26 | 38 | Circus Maximus | "Pages" | single | Pop-djent prog-metal. |
| 2016-02-26 | 43 | Besatt | "Sorcery" | Nine Sins | Seething Polish pagan black blast-metal. |
| 2016-02-26 | 45 | Coffins | "Tyrant" | Split E.P. 2 | Split and crushing Coffins/Ilsa noise-metal song-pairing. Split singles actually make a new kind of sense in the streaming age. |
| 2016-02-26 | 64 | The Unguided | "Enraged" | Lust And Loathing | Roaring Swedish melodic electronic death metal. |
| 2016-02-19 | 2 | Jared Redmond | "I Saw You" | Douve | Black metal as avant-garde chamber music (and occasionally black metal). |
| 2016-02-19 | 6 | Delain | "Turn The Lights Out" | Lunar Prelude | More teasers from the upcoming pop-gothic-symphonic-metal album. |
| 2016-02-19 | 19 | Aluk Todolo | "I" | Voix | Deuterium drone-metal. |
| 2016-02-19 | 27 | Stam1na | "Kuudet raamit" | single | Crushing Finnish progressive-metal/metalcore indecision. |
| 2016-02-19 | 39 | Bossk | "Kobe" | single | Screamy, doomy, dreamy Kent post-metal. |
| 2016-02-19 | 53 | Ті, що падають вгору | "Та, що танцює з вітром" | Та, що танцює з вітром | Entrancing Ukrainian acoustic-folk-metal. |
| 2016-02-12 | 7 | Ihsahn | "Mass Darkness" | single | Symphonic Norwegian everything-metal. |
| 2016-02-12 | 27 | Omnium Gatherum | "The Pit" | single | Blasting Finnish death metal. I'm still mad at myself for not overcoming jet-lag to go see the triple-um bill of Omnium Gatherum, Insomnium and Enisferum when I had the chance last year. |
| 2016-02-12 | 28 | The Resistance | "I Welcome Death" | Coup De Grace | Swedish melodic-death-metal veterans re-group to take death metal back to an elemental near-hardcore intensity. |
| 2016-02-12 | 33 | Waylander | "Balor of the Evil Eye" | The Light, The Dark and the Endless Knot | The new death-metal Motörhead. |
| 2016-02-12 | 38 | D=OUT | "Shin Gi Tai" | Shin Gi Tai | Stylistically-peripatetic visual-kei-as-avant-garde-metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 1 | Chthe'ilist | "Vecoiitn'aphnaat'smaala" | Le Dernier Crépuscule | Totemic Montreal groaning-obelisk metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 2 | Marcin Przybyłowicz | "The Trail" | The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | Gripping Polish/Celtic folk-metal-epicore soundtrack from a video game I don't expect to ever play. |
| 2016-02-05 | 5 | Amoral | "Rude Awakening" | In Sequence | Dense post-prog melodic death-metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 7 | Döria | "Cambió el Juego" | Mom3ntum | Shiny, earnest Spanish heavy metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 8 | Erik Ekholm | "Ascending" | Halos 5 | Spectral metal-edged epicore. |
| 2016-02-05 | 20 | Saxon | "Batallions of Steel" | Into the Labyrinth | Deathless old-guard heavy metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 27 | Obscura | "Sermon of the Seven Suns" | Akróasis | Archetypal tempomorphing technical death-metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 28 | Fleshgod Apocalypse | "In Aeternum" | King | Gothic industrial death-metal verging on epicore extravagance. |
| 2016-02-05 | 30 | Agonizer | "All Alone" | All Alone +1 | Melodic Finnish semicore metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 31 | Violet Cold | "Everything You Can Imagine Is Real..." | Magic Night | Transcendental Azerbaijan experimental melodic post-black metal. |
| 2016-02-05 | 45 | Morphinist | "Erwachen" | Nihil | Grindingly raw black cathartic metal not nearly as nihilistic as it pretends. |
| 2016-02-05 | 50 | Tombs | "Deceiver" | single | Progressive black metal pushing (or distending) into Boris-esque noise-rock. |
| 2016-01-29 | 6 | Avantasia | "Ghostlights" | Ghostlights (Bonus Version) | (Bat Out of Hell + Rage for Eden + Frozen) * power metal. |
| 2016-01-29 | 8 | Serenity | "Follow Me" | Codex Atlanticus | Power-metal show-tunes. |
| 2016-01-29 | 9 | Amon Amarth | "First Kill" | single | Leathery Viking-metal timelessness. |
| 2016-01-29 | 16 | Spektr | "Through the Darkness of Future Past" | The Art to Disappear | Cryptic distended distempered avant-garde corrosive-atmospheric black metal. |
| 2016-01-29 | 29 | Vinterblot | "Evoked by Light" | Realms of the Untold | Pounding Italian pagan black/death metal. |
| 2016-01-22 | 2 | Ignea | "Alga" | single | Ukrainian progressive melodic symphonic metal. |
| 2016-01-22 | 6 | Primal Fear | "Angels of Mercy" | single | Sinewy, reverent neo-trad HEAVY metal. |
| 2016-01-22 | 8 | Borknagar | "The Rhymes of the Mountain" | Winter Thrice | Norwegian black folk metal without so much Norwegian, black or folk in it. |
| 2016-01-22 | 9 | Abbath | "To War" | Abbath | Norwegian black metal with as much Norwegian and black as technically and posthumanly possible. |
| 2016-01-22 | 10 | Ulver | "Moody Stix" | ATGCLVLSSCAP | What the world sounds like after Norwegian black metal scrambles your brain but doesn't kill you. |
| 2016-01-22 | 11 | Anette Olzon | "Vintersjäl" | Vintersjäl / Cold Outside 2 | The good thing about having your desire to make Nightwish into a pop-metal band temporarily quashed is that it's easier to make a new pop-metal solo band than it is to make another Nightwish. |
| 2016-01-22 | 12 | L'endeví | "Sleeping in the Cage" | Don't Go Back | Gritty Spanish gothic not-so-symphonic metal. |
| 2016-01-22 | 18 | Monica Naranjo | "Perdida" | single | Balletic opera-metal-pop. |
| 2016-01-22 | 26 | Infernal Tenebra | "The Seventh Seal" | As Nations Fall | Croatian progressive melodic death metal. |
| 2016-01-22 | 54 | Rose Noire | "Sins" | Structure to Your Heaven 5 | Surreal Japanese crossover-as-evasion baroque chamber-metal. |
| 2016-01-15 | 2 | The Murder of My Sweet | "The Awakening" | Beth out of Hell | Soaring pop gothic symphonic metal. |
| 2016-01-15 | 8 | Imperial Age | "Anthem Of Valour" | Warrior Race | Heroic symphonic metal. |
| 2016-01-15 | 28 | Delain | "Suckerpunch" | single | Gothic pop-symphonic metal. |
| 2016-01-15 | 48 | Ära Kra | "Strang & Schwert" | Ära Kra 3 | German progressive black metal. |
| 2016-01-15 | 49 | Bloodiest | "Mesmerize" | Bloodiest | Chicago post-rock/doom-metal. |
| 2016-01-15 | 52 | Tribulation | "Melancholia" | Melancholia - EP | Remix/demo epilogue to last year's many-poll-winning neo-trad metal album. |
| 2016-01-15 | 53 | Khors | "Wounds Of The Past" | The Flame Of Eternity's Decline (remixed) | Remixed reissue of 2010 pagan black metal record. |
| 2016-01-08 | 1 | Anaria | "Ignition" | Seasons of the Mind Vol. 1: Inception | Punchy gothic rockish gothic metal. |
| 2016-01-08 | 2 | Axxis | "Doom of Destiny (Arabia)" | Doom of Destiny | Bounding heavy power metal. |
| 2016-01-08 | 3 | Lyriel | "Surrender in Dance" | 10 | Gothic folk metal. |
| 2016-01-08 | 4 | Weeping Silence | "Oblivion - Darkness in My Heart Anno XV" | Opus IV - Oblivion | Gothic symphonic black metal. |
| 2016-01-08 | 5 | Divine Ascension | "Dawn Brings No Mercy" | Liberator | Solid, crunchy progressive power metal. |
| 2016-01-08 | 12 | Hope Drone | "Unending Grey" | Cloak of Ash | Epicore post-rock black-post-metal. |
| 2016-01-08 | 33 | Exmortus | "Speed of the Strike" | Ride Forth | Cheerfully twiddly neo-thrash/power metal. |
| 2016-01-08 | 34 | Phantasma | "Carry Me Home" | The Deviant Hearts | Fantabulous hypermelodic neo-progressive concept-metal by Delain+Everon+Serenity members. |
| 2016-01-01 | 2 | The Agonist | "Gates of Horn and Ivory" | Eye of Providence | Churning/soaring progressive melodic death metal. |
| 2016-01-01 | 7 | Dioramic | "Xibalba" | Supra | Sharpened German alt-rock alt-post-metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 1 | Tau Cross | "Lazarus" | Tau Cross | In which Rob Miller demonstrates that he's ready to carry on Lemmy's metal-vocal legacy. |
| 2015-12-18 | 8 | Martriden | "Pendulum" | Cold and the Silence | Gruff, soaring progressive death metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 9 | Cloak of Altering | "-3.003486962 (6) X10-66" | Manifestation | Experimental scary metal noises and choking sounds. |
| 2015-12-18 | 10 | Stielas Storhett | "Gasp for Change" | Drownwards | Russian experimental atmospheric black metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 13 | Primal Fear | "Bullets & Tears" | single | Remember when metal sounded like Quiet Riot? |
| 2015-12-18 | 14 | Serenity | "Follow Me" | single | Galloping prog-metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 15 | Cryonic Temple | "Mighty Eagle" | single | Anthemic, mildly-cyber power-metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 16 | Ihsahn | "Mass Darkness" | single | Sprawling progressive-atmospheric-black-death-thrash-everything metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 22 | Bucovina | "Da-Mi Mana, Toamna" | Nestramutat | Surging non-twiddly Romanian folk-metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 23 | Grimner | "Eldhjärta" | single | Surging non-non-twiddly Sweden viking folk-metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 27 | Obscura | "Sermon of the Seven Suns" | single | Technical death metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 28 | Exmortus | "Appassionata" | single | Shreddy-not-"technical" power/death metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 33 | Dark The Suns | "The Sleeping Beauty" | Life Eternal | Propulsive, raspy gothic metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 39 | Opera Magna | "Rojo Escarlata" | Del Amor y Otros Demonios: Acto 2 | Spanish symphonic hyper-power-metal. |
| 2015-12-18 | 41 | Varg | "Dunkelheit" | single | Epic pagan blast-metal. |
| 2015-12-11 | 6 | Raventale | "Destroying the Seeds of Karma" | Dark Substance of Dharma | Raventale make gothic symphonic black metal. |
| 2015-12-11 | 14 | Hnd | "Tähetolmus" | single | In Estonia, even a "pop-rock" band like HND sounds a little folk-metal. |
| 2015-12-11 | 20 | Graveshadow | "Namesake" | Nocturnal Resurrection | Graveshadow do beauty-and-the-beast mixed-vocal gothic symphonic metal. |
| 2015-12-11 | 21 | Escalane | "Waiting for the Sun" | The Days of Decay | Escalane swap the symphonic middle of gothic symphonic metal out for some pop-punk surge. |
| 2015-12-04 | 1 | Primal Fear | "In Metal We Trust" | single | I've come to appreciate increasingly abstruse and obscure metal, but I haven't lost the visceral reaction of excitement to unapologetic joyful bombast, exemplified by the goofywonderful new Primal Fear song. |
| 2015-12-04 | 2 | KAUAN | "Akva" | Sorni Nai | Arguably the opposite extreme of metal is this sensuous, often near-ambient folk-post-metal meditation by Kauan. |
| 2015-12-04 | 3 | Coronatus | "Lady of the Wall" | Raben Im Herz | Bombast without machismo was a pretty good innovation in metal, I think. German gothic operatic metal mainstays Coronatus change members but somehow keep the same sound and the same logo font. |
| 2015-12-04 | 21 | Kill The Thrill | "A Little Salt for a Better Feeling" | Tellurique | Kill the Thrill do experimental atmospheric post-metal. |
| 2015-12-04 | 23 | LCMDF | "Rookie" | single | LCMDF are the Finnish Shampoo, and the Finnish Shampoo are sick of Finnish metal dudes. |
| 2015-12-04 | 39 | Intervals | "I'm Awake" | The Shape of Colour | Intervals do calculated math-jazz prog-post-metal. |
| 2015-12-04 | 43 | Vorna | "Harmaudesta" | Ei Valo Minua Seuraa | Vorna make maniacally raspy Finnish blast-pagan prog-metal. |
| 2015-12-04 | 47 | Khymera | "Never Give up on You" | The Grand Design | Khymera are a majestically anachronistic melodic AOR glam-metal band. |
| 2015-12-04 | 57 | Neverlight | "Neverlight" | Neverlight +3 | Another of my countless weaknesses is indie gothic symphonic metal bands like Colorado Springs' Neverlight who, whether by choice or necessity, cast their epic musical ambitions in dry, un-epic production treatments. |
| 2015-11-20 | 1 | Apocalyptica | "SIN IN JUSTICE" | single | Punch goth-metal collaboration between Apocalyptica and Vamps (the Japanese one). |
| 2015-11-20 | 2 | Signum Regis | "Lost and Found" | Chapter IV: The Reckoning | Shimmery power-metal from Signum Regis. |
| 2015-11-20 | 3 | Primal Fear | "The End Is Near" | single | Shreddy old-school heavy metal by Primal Fear. |
| 2015-11-20 | 5 | Baroness | "Shock Me" | single | Epic shout-along metal anthem by Baroness. |
| 2015-11-20 | 8 | Obscura | "Akróasis" | single | Splattery technical death metal from Obscura. |
| 2015-11-20 | 12 | Manimal | "Irresistible" | Trapped in the Shadows | Throwback speed metal from Manimal. |
| 2015-11-20 | 14 | Månegarm | "Blodörn" | Månegarm | The whole Odinic pagan-metal Månegarm album is like the single. |
| 2015-11-20 | 23 | Head Phones President | "Failed" | Alteration | Yes! The new album by the great great Japanese rock/metal band Head Phones President is availabe in the US! |
| 2015-11-20 | 24 | Imperia | "Silence Is My Friend" | Tears of Silence | The return of one of my very favorite melodic gothic symphonic metal bands, Imperia. |
| 2015-11-13 | 2 | Satan | "Farewell Evolution" | Atom By Atom | Heavy metal traditionalism in all senses from Satan. |
| 2015-11-13 | 8 | Kampfar | "Gloria Ablaze" | Profan | Grimly epic pagan black metal by Kampfar. |
| 2015-11-13 | 9 | Revenge | "Scum Defection (Outsider Neutralized)" | Behold.Total.Rejection | Berzerk, distended panic-metal by Revenge. |
| 2015-11-13 | 14 | Anna von Hausswolff | "Discovery" | The Miraculous | Avant-garde ambient drone-metal art music by Anna Von Hausswolff. |
| 2015-11-13 | 21 | Revocation | "Unattained" | Empire of the Obscene | Headchewing thrash-metal by Revocation. |
| 2015-11-06 | 5 | Dark Moor | "Abduction" | Project X (Deluxe Version) | Spanish hard-rock power-metal by Dark Moor. |
| 2015-10-30 | 1 | Stara Rzeka | "BHMTH (czyli historia z wujkiem Albertem)" | Zamknely sie oczy ziemi | One-man Polish experimental ambient/acoustic/noise-metal style-shifting chaos from Stara Rzeka. |
| 2015-10-30 | 6 | Verjnuarmu | "Vala" | 1808 | Blistering death/black/heavy/folk everything-metal from Savonian Finns Verjnuarmu. |
| 2015-10-30 | 7 | Horrendous | "The Nihilist" | Anareta | Gritty, croaky-voiced death-metal from Horrendous. |
| 2015-10-30 | 14 | Kerion | "The Legacy" | CloudRiders, Pt. 2: Technowars | Shiny French gothic symphonic metal from Kerion (whose name, in French, presumably means something other than a fungal abscess). |
| 2015-10-30 | 15 | Maserati | "No Cave" | Rehumanizer | Surging techno-post-metal from Maserati. |
| 2015-10-30 | 18 | With Our Arms to the Sun | "Where Silence Dwells" | A Far Away Wonder | Atmospheric post-metal from With Our Arms to the Sun. |
| 2015-10-30 | 31 | Panopticon | "Into the North Woods" | Autumn Eternal | The sweeping kudzu-gothic black-epic new album by the great Appalachian-metal band Panopticon. |
| 2015-10-23 | 7 | Shining | "The Last Stand" | International Blackjazz Society | Jazz-metal convolutions by Shining. |
| 2015-10-23 | 8 | VHÖL | "The Desolate Damned" | Deeper Than Sky | Post-Cascadian avant-thrash metal by VHÖL. |
| 2015-10-23 | 10 | Halo | "Fly Over" | Hikari Hanatsu Tenohira Hikari Sasu Basyo 4 | Crunching melodic anime-death metal by Halo. |
| 2015-10-23 | 16 | Amberian Dawn | "Ladyhawk" | Innuendo | Hypermelodic gothic symphonic metal by Amberian Dawn. |
| 2015-10-23 | 21 | Månegarm | "Odin owns ye all" | single | A one-song folk-death-metal primer by Månegarm. |
| 2015-10-23 | 26 | Upon Shadows | "Lethargic loss of ambition." | Between The Southern Cross & The Northern Star. | Croaky symphonic black cryptic-spasmodic metal from Upon Shadows. |
| 2015-10-16 | 4 | Thy Catafalque | "Alföldi Kozmosz" | Sgùrr | New album by wild one-man Hungarian avant-garde post-black metal band Thy Catafalque. |
| 2015-10-16 | 5 | So Hideous | "Yesteryear" | Laurestine | Epic melodic symphonic progressive black metal by So Hideous. |
| 2015-10-16 | 12 | Cosmic Church | "I" | Vigilia | Roiling, shrieking, atmospherically cacophanous pagan black metal by Cosmic Church. |
| 2015-10-16 | 36 | Lolita KompleX | "Circus (Welcome to The)" | The Greatest Show on Earth | Florid Austrian gothic circus metal by Lolita KompleX. |
| 2015-10-09 | 2 | Regarde Les Hommes Tomber | "L'exil" | Exile | Crashing black-metal catharsis from Regarde Les Hommes Tomber. |
| 2015-10-09 | 11 | A Sound of Thunder | "Children of the Dark" | Tales from the Deadside | Trad-minded female-vocal heavy metal by A Sound of Thunder. |
| 2015-10-09 | 12 | Tsjuder | "Kaos" | Antiliv | Raw black speed metal from Tsjuder. |
| 2015-10-09 | 13 | Horna | "Amadriada" | Hengen Tulet | and rawer, blastier black metal from Horna. |
| 2015-10-09 | 14 | Elarmir | "Inert Insanity" | Human Wisdom | Beauty-and-the-beast gothic metal from Elarmir. |
| 2015-10-09 | 19 | Grift | "Aftonlandet" | Syner | Pastoral depressive black metal by Grift. |
| 2015-10-09 | 20 | Mantric | "FaithFaker" | Sin | Ritualistic Norwegian dark progressive metal by Mantric. |
| 2015-10-09 | 24 | trials | "Truth Defiled" | This Ruined World | Dense pagan black metal by Trials. |
| 2015-10-09 | 30 | Heimdalls Wacht | "Die fallenden Blätter der Irminsul" | Ut de graute olle Tied (Deel II) - Land der Nebel | Epic raw black metal by Heimdalls Wacht. |
| 2015-10-09 | 31 | Evil Blizzard | "Are You Evil?" | Everybody Come to Church | Goofy (non-metal) noise-rock by Evil Blizzard. |
| 2015-10-09 | 39 | O | "Morire" | Pietra 5 | Head-crushing experimental metal by O. |
| 2015-10-09 | 40 | Derange | "The Thinker" | The Awakening | Churning gothic metal by Derange. |
| 2015-10-09 | 53 | Teramaze | "Her Halo" | single | Progressive metal extravagance by Teramaze. |
| 2015-10-09 | 58 | Varg | "Rotkäppchen 2015" | Rotkäppchen | Extreme polka-metal by Varg. |
| 2015-10-02 | 2 | Mephorash | "Riphyon- The Tree of Assiyah Putrescent" | 1557 - Rites of Nullification | Epic cryptic black metal from Mephorash. |
| 2015-10-02 | 18 | Kylesa | "Crusher" | Exhausting Fire | I'm not sure the "stoner" in stoner metal still means what it used to mean, and there's a new Kylesa album. |
| 2015-10-02 | 20 | Revocation | "Empire of the Obscene" | single | Precision-blasting death metal by Revocation. |
| 2015-10-02 | 21 | Saurom | "Paz (Las Caricias del Alma)" | Sueños | Soaring Spanish folk-metal by Saurom. |
| 2015-10-02 | 23 | Recursion | "Elephant" | Sequences of Scenes | There is a brutal death-metal band called Recursion, but this Recursion is a careful Austrian jazz-pop band. |
| 2015-10-02 | 24 | Deafheaven | "Brought to the Water" | New Bermuda | Deafheaven are still a metal band. |
| 2015-10-02 | 28 | Draconian | "Stellar Tombs" | single | Gloriously massive new gothic metal by Draconian. |
| 2015-10-02 | 29 | Entwine | "End Of Silence" | Chaotic Nation | And similarly textbook non-symphonic gothic metal by Entwine. |
| 2015-10-02 | 30 | September Mourning | "Angels to Dust" | Volume I 6 | September Mourning take more of an In This Moment-ish view of gothic metal. |
| 2015-10-02 | 45 | Digression Assassins | "The Traveller" | Merkaba | Soaring experimental progressive post-metal ambition from Digression Assassins. |
| 2015-09-25 | 14 | End of the Dream | "Follow the Angels" | All I Am | Heroic Dutch gothic symphonic metal from End of the Dream. |
| 2015-09-25 | 27 | Willow | "För er" | single | There are too many artists called "Willow", but one of them is a German folk-metal-hip-hop-ish thing. |
| 2015-09-25 | 38 | Amberian Dawn | "Fame & Gloria" | single | Finnish gothic symphonic metal with a twirly emphasis on the theatrical-floridity sense of "gothic" from Amberian Dawn. |
| 2015-09-25 | 45 | Gloryhammer | "Rise Of The Chaos Wizards" | Space 1992: Rise Of The Chaos Wizards | Gloryhammer are almost certainly the best power-metal band to ever include at least one song about Inverness on every album. |
| 2015-09-18 | 29 | Rifftera | "Back to Life" | Pitch Black | Self-explanatorily riff-centric riff-metal by Rifftera. |
| 2015-09-18 | 43 | Stratovarius | "My Eternal Dream" | Eternal | Yes, I still like power metal. Yes, Stratovarius are still masters. |
| 2015-09-18 | 45 | Scale The Summit | "The Winged Bull" | V | Scale The Summit trading some djent thud for jazz-metal obliqueness. |
| 2015-09-18 | 47 | Deafheaven | "Come Back" | single | State-of-the-"post" post-metal by Deafheaven. |
| 2015-09-18 | 52 | Besatt | "Czas Wilka" | Impia Symphonia | Dense Bathorial viking black metal by Besatt. |
| 2015-09-18 | 53 | The Black Codex | "In the Dead of Night" | Episodes 40-52 | You know a band takes their prog-metal concept-career seriously when their new album is just called Episodes 40-52, and their name is The Black Codex. |
| 2015-09-18 | 54 | Elferya | "With All My Love" | Eden's Fall | You know a gothic symphonic metal band doesn't take themselves too serious when their name is Elferya, but actually this is one of my favorite grandly-not-quite-overblown fallen-angel records of the year. |
| 2015-09-18 | 67 | Caspian | "Arcs Of Command" | single | Blasting post-metal blur by Caspian. |
| 2015-09-18 | 68 | Teramaze | "Out of Subconscious" | single | Swooping gothic power-metal by Teramaze. |
| 2015-09-18 | 75 | Vallorch | "Until Our Tale Is Told" | Until Our Tale Is Told | Giant metal monsters playing tiny Italian flutes (and giant guitars) are called Vallorch. |
| 2015-09-18 | 76 | Violet Cold | "La Petite Mort" | Desperate Dreams | Breathtaking experimental atmospheric post-black one-man-band metal from Azerbaijan called Violet Cold. |
| 2015-09-11 | 8 | Black Tongue | "Plague Worship" | The Unconquerable Dark | The kind of metal where it sounds like the guitars are solid blocks of iron that you play by bending them with overwhelming force, by Black Tongue. |
| 2015-09-11 | 13 | BiSH | "OTNK" | OTNK +2 | Crashing J-pop-folk-metal by BiSH (and I'll be perfectly happy if we eventually get hybrids of J-pop and every other metal subgenre). |
| 2015-09-11 | 14 | Lethe | "Forever" | single | Ambient/avant-garde post-post-metal by Lethe. |
| 2015-09-11 | 33 | Synk;yet | "自責ノ園" | 自責ノ園 5 | J-goth-thrash-metal by Synk;yet. |
| 2015-09-11 | 42 | NMR - Norwegian Metal Resistance | "The Only One" | single | One-woman (?), maybe-Christian maybe-Norwegian repatriation (rematriation?) of Japanese reintrepretation of Norwegian metal. I don't really understand what's going on here, but it's called Norwegian Metal Resistance. |
| 2015-09-11 | 70 | Engelsglut | "Dunkle Mächte" | Dunkle Mächte | The kind of folk-rock where the folk is the folk from folk-metal, by Engelsglut. |
| 2015-09-11 | 72 | Dalriada | "Amit ad az ég (Álmos búcsúja)" | Áldás | The new album by my favorite exuberantly florid Hungarian folk-metal band, Dalriada. |
| 2015-09-04 | 1 | Crimson Sun | "The Storm" | Towards the Light | Glorious Finnish gothic symphonic metal stomp from Crimson Sun. |
| 2015-09-04 | 29 | Cronómetrobudú | "Ama-Gi" | Ama-Gi | Expansive post-folk-metal rock by Cronometrobudú. |
| 2015-09-04 | 32 | Divine Ascension | "Dawn Brings No Mercy" | Liberator | Progressive symphonic power metal by Divine Ascension. |
| 2015-09-04 | 33 | Symphonic Destiny | "Compass of Fate" | The Fountain of Eternal Life | Yes, of course Symphonic Destiny are a gothic symphonic metal band. |
| 2015-09-04 | 36 | Nechochwen | "The Serpent Tradition" | Heart of Akamon | Wild black power metal by Nechochwen. |
| 2015-09-04 | 38 | The Winery Dogs | "Oblivion" | single | Progressive blues-rock power-metal by The Winery Dogs. |
| 2015-08-28 | 19 | Leaves' Eyes | "The Waking Eye" | single | Fine gothic-metal filligree by Leaves' Eyes. |
| 2015-08-28 | 20 | Gloryhammer | "Universe On Fire" | single | Coarse power-metal bombast by Gloryhammer. |
| 2015-08-28 | 22 | Hel | "Mina Bröder" | single | Thin, dark-elven folk-metal from Hel. |
| 2015-08-28 | 23 | Gimu | "Hidden In Darkness" | Of The Spirit, Of The Space | Abstract-metal echoings by Gimu. |
| 2015-08-28 | 31 | NMR - Norwegian Metal Resistance | "Kjærlighet" | single | Bizarre overprogrammed elf-metal excess by Norwegian Metal Resistance. |
| 2015-08-28 | 32 | Matenrou Opera | "Aoku Toumei Na Kono Shinpi No Umi E" | single | Masterfully quavery and remorselessly florid J-metal by Matenrou Opera. |
| 2015-08-28 | 37 | Ahab | "The Isle" | The Boats Of The Glen Carrig | Sub-aquatic monster-metal by Ahab. |
| 2015-08-21 | 8 | Ella Chen | "Why not" | Why not | Epic gothic narration-metal by 陳嘉樺. |
| 2015-08-21 | 19 | Fimbultyr | "Oförgätlig Erinran" | single | Swedish viking black metal by Fimbultyr. |
| 2015-08-21 | 20 | WITCHGRINDER | "Rigor Mortis" | Haunted | Yes, there is really an Australian industrial metal band called WITCHGRINDER. |
| 2015-08-21 | 25 | Hope Drone | "Unending Grey" | Cloak of Ash | Black-metal blur by the unhopeful and undroning Hope Drone. |
| 2015-08-21 | 30 | Amorphis | "Sacrifice" | single | Soaring progressive folk melodic post-adjectival death metal by Amorphis. |
| 2015-08-21 | 31 | Turmion Kätilöt | "Hyvissä Höyryissä" | single | Screachy Finnish goth-industrial metal by Turmion Kätilöt. |
| 2015-08-21 | 33 | Kaledon | "The Holy Water" | Chapter Iv: Twilight of the Gods | Twinkly tempo-shifting prog-metal by Kaledon. |
| 2015-08-21 | 34 | Deafheaven | "Brought to the Water" | single | Blastic hipster-entrapment post-metal by Deafheaven. |
| 2015-08-21 | 35 | Rotting Christ | "Χ Ξ Σ" | Lucifer over Athens | Monumental double-live album by Greek symphonic metal icons Rotting Christ. |
| 2015-08-21 | 36 | Lychgate | "I Am Contempt" | An Antidote for the Glass Pill | Horror-movie ambient black metal by Lychgate. |
| 2015-08-21 | 37 | Aetherius Obscuritas | "Night Comes Noiseless" | MMXV | Avant garde black-prog metal by Aetherius Obscuritas. |
| 2015-08-21 | 53 | Wallachia | "Mother Tongue of Heresy" | Carpathia Symphonia 3 | Snarly melodic symphonic black metal by Wallachia, who are actually from Norway. |
| 2015-08-21 | 54 | Myrkur | "Skøgen Skulle Dø" | M (Deluxe Version) | New strata of atmosphere in atmospheric black metal by Myrkur. |
| 2015-08-14 | 8 | All Tomorrows | "Sol Agnates" | Sol Agnates | Shouty prog-metal by All Tomorrows. |
| 2015-08-14 | 15 | Område | "Mótsögn" | Edari | Avant-garde metal-band-makes-non-metal weirdness by Omrade. |
| 2015-08-14 | 17 | Mortuus | "Layil" | Grape of the Vine | Clattering-roaring black metal by Mortuus. |
| 2015-08-14 | 48 | Erik Ekholm | "We Are One" | single | Three albums of master-quality epicore-metal by Erik Ekholm. |
| 2015-08-14 | 55 | Entwine | "Plastic World" | single | Bravehearted gothic-metal romp by Entwine. |
| 2015-08-14 | 57 | Morphinist | "Level XI" | single | Para-melodic post-black-metal by Morphinist. |
| 2015-08-07 | 2 | Arcturus | "The Arcturian Sign" | Arcturian | Crazed concept-album metal from Arcturus. |
| 2015-08-07 | 26 | Leaves' Eyes | "Halvdan the Black" | single | Beauty-and-the-beast operatic gothic symphonic histrionic bombastic glorious metal by Leaves' Eyes. |
| 2015-08-07 | 29 | Ghost | "Majesty" | single | Laid back retro-metal by Ghost B.C. |
| 2015-08-07 | 30 | Noctum | "Until Then...Until the End" | Until Then...Until the End +1 | Leathery old-school heavy metal by Noctum. |
| 2015-08-07 | 50 | Agent Fresco | "Let Them See Us" | Destrier (Bonus Edition) | And the full new album, finally, by Icelandic what-if-Sigur-Ros-were-a-progressive-semi-metal-band spirit-animals Agent Fresco. |
| 2015-07-31 | 8 | Children Of Bodom | "Morrigan" | single | Sturdy, propulsive not-so-black metal anthem by Children Of Bodom. |
| 2015-07-31 | 9 | Kataklysm | "Breaching the Asylum" | Of Ghosts and Gods | Battering death metal by Kataklysm. |
| 2015-07-31 | 10 | Saurom | "La Musa y el Espíritu (Sueños)" | single | Latin not-metal balladry by Saurom. |
| 2015-07-31 | 16 | Baby Heartless | "Shining Through" | Baby Heartless (EP) 5 | Sleaze-metal shredding by Baby Heartless. |
| 2015-07-31 | 45 | Månegarm | "Vargaresa" | Vargaresa - The Beginning | Reissue of two early Månegarm black-folk-metal demos. |
| 2015-07-24 | 1 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "I" | De Mysteriis Dom Christi | Crypto-metal muttering by Reverorum ib Malacht. |
| 2015-07-24 | 23 | Symphony X | "Overture" | Underworld | Definitively symphonic symphonic-metal by Symphony X. |
| 2015-07-24 | 39 | Myrkur | "Skøgen Skulle Dø" | single | Black-metal caroling by Myrkur. |
| 2015-07-17 | 52 | Nabila fixy | "Kukulkan" | The Prophecy Is Broken | Oh man if you are starting a band you shouldn't call it Maya (this one is power metal). |
| 2015-07-17 | 54 | Almanac | "Вечный странник" | И я там был... 5 | Russian power-metal by Almanac, which is another name you shouldn't use. |
| 2015-07-10 | 1 | Amiensus | "On These Deserted Plains" | Ascension | Progressive post-metal from Amiensus. |
| 2015-07-10 | 4 | Einherjer | "Fremad" | Av Oss, For Oss | Grinding black-folk-metal by Einherjer. |
| 2015-07-10 | 5 | Folkstone | "In caduta libera" | Oltre… l'Abisso | Purist (!) folk-metal by Folkstone. |
| 2015-07-10 | 24 | Unleash The Archers | "Frozen Steel" | Time Stands Still | Gothic power-metal by Unleash The Archers. |
| 2015-06-30 | 1 | Anfel | "Cry" | Icy World | Operatic Elsa's-fur-cloak metal from Anfel. |
| 2015-06-30 | 6 | To/Die/For | "In Black" | Cult | Return of one of my favorite non-symphonic gothic metal bands, To/Die/For. |
| 2015-06-30 | 7 | Symphony X | "Nevermore" | Underworld | New non-gothic symphonic-metal song by Symphony X. |
| 2015-06-30 | 8 | Tuatha de Danann | "We´re Back" | Dawn of a New Sun | Brazilian Celtic folk-metal from Tuatha de Danann. |
| 2015-06-30 | 9 | Stam1na | "Rautasorkka" | SLK | Shouty Finnish semi-folk-progressive-metal from Stam1na. |
| 2015-06-30 | 10 | Mokoma | "Elävien kirjoihin" | Elävien kirjoihin | Coarse Finnish thrash metal from Mokoma. |
| 2015-06-30 | 11 | Santa Cruz | "Bonafide Heroes" | Santa Cruz | Shredding glam-thrash metal by Santa Cruz. |
| 2015-06-30 | 13 | Shiraz Lane | "Mental Slavery" | Be The Slave Or Be The Change 5 | Old-school heavy metal from Shiraz Lane. |
| 2015-06-30 | 17 | Burning Point | "All the Madness (2015)" | Burning Point | Power-thrash metal from Burning Point. |
| 2015-06-30 | 22 | Tearless | "Deathwish" | Step into Darkness | Beauty-and-the-beast-mode gothic symphonic metal from Tearless. |
| 2015-06-30 | 26 | Myrkur | "Onde Børn" | single | Myrkur's indie-turned-black-metal goes dreamy. |
| 2015-06-30 | 30 | Månegarm | "I evig tid" | Dödsfärd | Dry, merciless pagan metal from Månegarm. |
| 2015-06-30 | 35 | Vattnet Viskar | "Dawnlands" | Settler | Black-punk-metal from no-actually-they're-from-New-Hampshire Scandinotians Vattnet Viskar. |
| 2015-06-30 | 39 | A Pregnant Light | "Blixen" | Neon White 3 | Matte-finish depressive black metal by A Pregnant Light. |
| 2015-06-23 | 6 | Abyssal | "I Am the Alpha and the Omega" | Antikatastaseis | Black metal cryptomuttering from Abyssal. |
| 2015-06-23 | 30 | Embassy Of Silence | "Hang Me High" | single | Surgingly muted anthemic metal by Embassy of Silence. |
| 2015-06-16 | 12 | Dead of Night | "Touched by the Hand of God" | The Dead Shall Rise | Do you feel like gothic symphonic metal is never quite fast enough? Dead of Night might be. |
| 2015-06-16 | 13 | Elyose | "Femme de verre" | Ipso Facto | Do you feel like gothic symphonic metal is never quite French enough? Elyose might be. |
| 2015-06-16 | 14 | Child Of Caesar | "Defector" | Love in Black | Do you miss when gothic metal meant Sentenced and HIM? Try Child of Caesar. |
| 2015-06-16 | 15 | Amanita Virosa | "My Slightest Hope" | Asystole | Do you like choky melodic black death speed symphonic metal? Of course you do. Amanita Virosa. |
| 2015-06-16 | 17 | Ecnephias | "The Firewalker" | Ecnephias | Black metal? Progressive metal? Yes. Ecnephias. |
| 2015-06-16 | 36 | The Animal In Me | "I Really Like You" | single | Crunch pop-metal cover-specialists The Animal in Me do "I Really Like You". |
| 2015-06-16 | 37 | Tabu | "Escúchame" | Destino | Spanish throwback-metal bluster from Tabú. |
| 2015-06-16 | 41 | Tempel | "Carvings in the Door" | The Moon Lit Our Path | Tangled crypto-metal from Tempel. |
| 2015-06-16 | 50 | Nergard | "Lights and Shadows" | A Bit Closer to Heaven | Understated progressive-metal by Nergard. |
| 2015-06-09 | 4 | Close Quarters | "My Way Or The Highway" | single | Hair metal recreated with modern conditioner by Close Quarters. |
| 2015-06-09 | 21 | Powerwolf | "Armata Strigoi" | single | Suspiciously hygenic pagan-metal grubbing by Powerwolf. |
| 2015-06-02 | 10 | Cohol | "Infrastructure" | Rigen (裏現) | Rococo Japanese black-rose-metal shrieking by Cohol. |
| 2015-06-02 | 11 | Edge Of Paradise | "Perfect Shade of Black" | Immortal Waltz | Crunchy slightly-goth hard-rock/metal by Edge of Paradise. |
| 2015-06-02 | 26 | Leprous | "The Price" | The Congregation | New album by Leprous, the best progressive metal band still progressing. |
| 2015-06-02 | 33 | Jute Gyte | "Lugubrious Games (Sans Frontières)" | Ship of Theseus | Keening, disintegrating avant metal by Jute Gyte. |
| 2015-06-02 | 36 | Corvus | "All I Need" | Chasing Miracles | Glorious retro-glam metal by Corvus. |
| 2015-06-02 | 37 | Karlahan | "The Lighthouse Keeper" | Exile | Faintly djenty prog-metal by Karlahan. |
| 2015-06-02 | 38 | Tezaura | "Unleash The Butterflies" | Unleash The Butterflies | Gothic not-so-symphonic metal by Tezaura. |
| 2015-06-02 | 39 | Vanhelga | "Desperation" | Angest | Wall-of-sound black metal by Vanhelga. |
| 2015-06-02 | 40 | Breaking Orbit | "Transcension Part 2" | Transcension | Light-not-dark progressive metal by Breaking Orbit. |
| 2015-06-02 | 43 | Agent Fresco | "See Hell" | single | And maybe my favorite song so far this year, a new single by Icelandic post-progressive-metal geniuses Agent Fresco. |
| 2015-05-26 | 12 | Entrails | "No Cross Left Unturned" | Obliteration | Splattered death-stomp metal by Entrails. |
| 2015-05-26 | 34 | Pyramaze | "The Battle of Paridas" | Disciples of the Sun | Muscular power-metal by Pyramaze. |
| 2015-05-26 | 36 | Öxxö Xööx | "Därkäë" | Nämïdäë | Warped avant-metal umlautness by Öxxö Xööx. |
| 2015-05-26 | 37 | Unleash The Archers | "Tonight We Ride" | single | The triumphant power-metal return of Unleash the Archers. |
| 2015-05-26 | 38 | Osculum Infame | "Cognitive Perdition of the Insane" | Axis of Blood | Black melodic power-black-metal by Osculum Infame. |
| 2015-05-19 | 18 | Cain's Offering | "Stormcrow" | Stormcrow | Pyrotechnic power-metal from Cain's Offering. |
| 2015-05-19 | 28 | Trapper | "Lonely Hearts" | Go for the Heart 5 | Glam-metal EP by Emm Gryner's Trapper. |
| 2015-05-12 | 8 | ANGRA | "Newborn Me" | Secret Garden | Epic power-metal from Angra. |
| 2015-05-12 | 9 | Signum Regis | "Living Well" | Through the Storm | Sturdy old-school euro-heavy metal by Signum Regis. |
| 2015-05-12 | 10 | Civil War | "War Of The World" | Gods & Generals | Euro-style US-history metal by Civil War. |
| 2015-05-05 | 13 | Sigh | "Kaedit Nos Pestis" | Graveward | Sigh go power-metal, sort of. |
| 2015-04-28 | 6 | Helloween | "Battle's Won" | Battle's Won +1 | Bombastic battle-metal from Helloween. |
| 2015-04-28 | 9 | Shining | "Den Påtvingade Tvåsamheten" | IX / Everyone, Everything, Everywhere, Ends | Complicatedly crazed avant-garde metal by Shining. |
| 2015-04-28 | 10 | Diapsiquir | "Satan Postmortem" | Lubie Satanique Dépravée | Blastnoisy torture-metal by Diapsiquir. |
| 2015-04-28 | 18 | Dark Sarah | "Light in You (feat. Tony Kakko)" | single | Symphonic metal filigree by Dark Sarah. |
| 2015-04-28 | 37 | Semargl | "Held (feat. Tyler Milchmann)" | single | New song in the ongoing wanderings-around-and-out-of-metal by Semargl. |
| 2015-04-07 | 26 | Secret Lie | "Filling Spaces" | Pandora | Pop-punk/folk-metal/hard-rock thing by Secret Lie. |
| 2015-04-07 | 40 | Heidevolk | "Winter woede" | Velua | Pagan metal forest-dancing by Heidevolk, including an "Immigrant Song" cover. |
| 2015-04-07 | 43 | Byzantine | "Scold's Bridle" | To Release Is to Resolve | Is it possible to have progressive stoner metal? |
| 2015-04-07 | 54 | Argentum | "Изумруд" | По лабиринту судеб | Understated Russian gothicish metal by Argentum. |
| 2015-03-31 | 8 | Dødheimsgard | "Aphelion Void" | A Umbra Omega | Ambient black metal from Dodheimsgard. |
| 2015-03-24 | 15 | The Monolith Deathcult | "Reign of Hell" | Bloodcvlts | Neural-grind death metal by The Monolith Deathcult. |
| 2015-03-24 | 22 | Tragedy | "We Are Tragedy" | The Solo Albums | More joke-metal covers of pop-songs by Tragedy that I think are actually pretty good. |
| 2015-03-24 | 27 | Solipsist | "The Burning Mass" | The Burning Mass | Pummeling growl-metal by Solipsist. |
| 2015-03-24 | 30 | Sacral Rage | "En Cima Del Mal" | Illusions in Infinite Void | Debut by Greek retro-power-thrash metal band Sacral Rage. |
| 2015-03-24 | 35 | Dynfari | "Ljósid" | Vegferd Tímans | Shrieky Icelandic black metal by Dynfari. |
| 2015-03-24 | 36 | Taranus | "Requiem" | Taranus | A folk metal album in which the metal is replaced by crunch Spanish hard rock, by Taranus. |
| 2015-03-17 | 3 | Sarpanitum | "By Virtuous Reclamation" | Blessed Be My Brothers | Noisily cryptic blackdeath metal from Sarpantium. |
| 2015-03-17 | 19 | Mute Tale | "Realm of Serenity" | Gordian Knot | Rousing gothic symphonic metal by Mute Tale. |
| 2015-03-17 | 34 | Void Creation | "1984" | Deadnology | Pummeling death/thrash metal by Void Creation. |
| 2015-03-10 | 13 | Enslaved | "Thurisaz Dreaming" | In Times | Not to be confused with progressive-metal masters Enslaved. |
| 2015-03-10 | 14 | Smuta | "Life Path" | The Way | Not to be confused with Russian pagan-metal band Smuta. |
| 2015-03-03 | 3 | Whispering Woods | "Original Sin" | Perditus Et Dea | Avant-gothic operatic concept-metal by Whispering Woods. |
| 2015-03-03 | 4 | Onyria | "Sleep No More" | Break the Silence | More straightfoward gothic symphonic metal by Onyria. |
| 2015-03-03 | 5 | Mastery | "V.A.L.I.S.V.E.S.S.E.L." | Valis | Crazy noise-metal by Mastery. |
| 2015-03-03 | 13 | Evolvent | "Win or Die" | Whatever Happens | Arch gothic operatic metal by Evolvent. |
| 2015-03-03 | 34 | Moonspell | "Extinct" | single | Yet another advance track from what continues to seem like maybe an album-of-the-year candidate from gothic metal veterans Moonspell. |
| 2015-03-03 | 36 | Sannhet | "Revisionist" | Revisionist | Lurching black-doom metal by Sannhet. |
| 2015-03-03 | 44 | Neolith | "Of The Angel And His Orison" | IZI.IM.KURNU-KI | Demonic-abyss metal by Neolith. |
| 2015-03-03 | 50 | BabyDollSymphony | "Reginleif -Na Wo Tugu Mono-" | Shuuen Ni Itaru Ragnarok - Single 2 | Florid j-metal by BabyDollSymphony, who are not as goofy as BABYMETAL, but. |
| 2015-03-03 | 54 | Kjeld | "Tûzen Sinnen" | Skym | Clattering black-viking metal by Kjeld. |