| 1 | Lacuna Coil | "Delirium" | single | What could be more gothic than choruses first? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 4 | TeamMate | "Nothing's Ever Over" | single | This is what my songs would sound like if I were way better at it and liked less-self-conscious bands. |
| 5 | October Tide | "Swarm" | Winged Waltz | This is what my songs would sound like if I made Swedish doom-laden melodic death metal. |
| 6 | Orphan | "Strut" | Strut | This is dance music made by, or possibly for, HVAC ductwork. |
| 7 | Qulinez | "In My Arms" | In My Arms +1 | The club scene cut from Frozen. |
| 8 | G.E.M. | "有心人" | single | It's perfectly reasonable to assume the "melo" in "melodrama" means melody. |
| 9 | Marco Carta | "Non so più amare" | single | Although the "drama" in "melodrama" also kind of means melody. |
| 10 | Pvris | "St. Patrick" | White Noise | Pvris could easily open for CHVRCHES and be the bridge from metropopolis to pixie. |
| 11 | Wire | "Internal Exile" | Nocturnal Koreans | If you liked John Cale reworking Music For a New Society, you might like this post-tour mini-album of Wire allowing themselves to experiment in the studio. |
| 12 | Raindear | "Iréne" | Embers | Maybe a Kate Bush young today would start off sounding like this. |
| 13 | Postiljonen | "L.I.E" | single | If you can cover a city in snow, even briefly, so many other versions of clean suddenly seem possible. |
| 14 | King Melodies | "Loserville" | single | What if ABBA had started been launched by SXSW instead of Eurovision? |
| 15 | Susanna | "We Don't Belong" | Triangle | It is possible to make music by singing into a cave of ice and pedals and ephemeral reeds and imaginary strings. |
| 16 | MythFox | "Oriana" | single | It is possible too to pull back out of the cave on a Steadicam helicopter so that the mountains fan out with your breath. |
| 17 | Celestial Trax | "Together" | From The Womb 4 | But obviously the cinematic quality is illusory right up to the moment when it shatters. |
| 18 | Nepentes | "Protesta" | Razones de Peso 6 | And you find yourself in Medellín and you start a punk band. |
| 19 | Northlane | "Refuge" | Equinox 3 | Or Australia. |
| 20 | Niki & The Dove | "So Much It Hurts" | Everybody's Heart Is Broken Now | "Niki & The Dove" sounds like a name Prince would have given a band, and this record of fluttery, nostalgic Swedish synthpop is at times as close to Prince's gossamer glamor as anything. |
| 21 | White Sea | "Bloodline" | single | White Sea owes more to Garbage. |
| 22 | Garbage | "Empty" | single | Garbage, in turn, sounds like the reunion of Lush has reminded them where they came from themselves. |
| 23 | Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties | "Green Like The G Train, Green Like Sea Foam" | single | Cat Stevens as emo. |
| 24 | Half Hearted Hero | "Same Old Same" | single | What if you aren't sad but you like the way the sad music sounds? |
| 25 | Ayria | "Feed Her to the Wolves" | Paper Dolls (Deluxe Edition) | Let's play master and servant. But with Roombas. |
| 26 | Skold | "Today Your Love" | The Undoing (Deluxe) | Then afterwards, we eat the Roomba by moonlight. |
| 27 | Aborted | "Cadaverous Banquet" | Retrogore | And then the zombies. |
| 28 | Programm | "Everything at Once" | A Torrid Marriage of Logic and Emotion | But Toronto indietronic indie rock survives. |
| 29 | Hudson Scott | "Clay" | Clay +2 | Owen Pallett Frankmusik Calvin and the Hobgoblins Oscar. |
| 30 | [Alexandros] | "New Wall" | New Wall / I Want U To Love Me 3 | J-rock going for rock drama without visual kei glam. |
| 31 | NOCTURNAL BLOODLUST | "Malice against" | ZeTeS 6 | J-metalcore going for pummeling intensity without visual kei diffidence. |
| 32 | San Mei | "Revel" | single | In Australia, the synthesizer has no natural predators. |
| 33 | Andrius Pojavis | "The Gist" | single | In Lithuania, the drum machines play only kick-drums on quarter notes, but it is enough. |
| 34 | Lonely The Brave | "Rattlesnakes" | single | But in Cambridge, the other one, there are guitars. |
| 35 | Gates | "Habit" | single | Gates remind me of Camden. Gates are a post-rock band from New Jersey. There's a Camden in New Jersey, but Camden were a pre-post-rock band from Wisconsin. |
| 36 | Laakso | "True Believers" | Grateful Dead | They have guitars in Sweden, too. |
| 37 | Maniac | "Midnight Kino" | Midnight Kino +1 | What if the Buzzcocks had wanted to be Slade? |
| 38 | Sola | "Tuira" | Kuninkaat | In Finland, post-rock blends into chamber-pop. Not just there, I guess; Sola can join my Agent Fresco / Haken vapor-rock package-tour. |
| 39 | Seka Aleksic | "Crnooka" | single | Meanwhile, there's turbo folk. |
| 40 | Miss Montreal | "Nothing Left To Say" | Don't Wake Me Up | K's Choice + Little Mix. |
| 41 | Ted Poley | "Stars" | single | Outside, somewhere, there is always America. |
| 42 | Dan Bull | "Rocket League Ye" | Generation Gaming X | Gamegrime. |
| 43 | Green Light Theory | "Our Last Day" | Afterthoughts - EP 5 | LA power-pop. |
| 44 | Gojira | "Stranded" | single | The metal that Killing Joke would sound like if they were really metal. |
| 45 | Tonci Huljic | "Explosive" | Victory - The Greatest Hits | A Bond best-of opens by taking bow-pop into epicore. |
| 46 | Morphinist | "Terraforming I" | Terraforming | The less-flowery alien alternative to Botanist. |
| 47 | Marsicans | "Swimming" | single | Sheffield : Crookes :: Leeds : Marsicans. |
| 48 | Blender | "Han gör himlen blå" | single | ABBA : Roxette :: Roxette : Blender. |