| 1 | Fancy Cars | "I'll Follow" | single | You could put this in a time capsule to explain the shiny non-hip-hop wing of pop as of 2016. If, you know, you didn't have any Carly Rae Jepsen songs. |
| 2 | Starchild & The New Romantic | "Mood" | single | Or this for the vein of indie R&B that's kind of laptop Prince with fluttery swoon instead of precision funk. |
| 3 | Lydia Loveless | "Same To You" | Real | But this one comes out of the capsule from early 90s alt-country guitar-roar. |
| 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? |
| 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. |
| 6 | Strident | "Pro Patria Mori" | When Gods Walked the Earth | It's a lot easier to demonstrate divinity than to explain it. |
| 7 | Zephyra | "My Gift, My Curse" | As the World Collapses | Imagine combining In This Moment, Arch Enemy and Madder Mortem. |
| 8 | Forest Of Fog | "Awake" | single | Swiss one-man epic melodic pagan black metal. |
| 9 | Fatherson | "Forest" | Open Book | Highland anthems of loneliness. |
| 10 | Transsexdisco | "Uboczny efekt narzekania" | Transsexdisco | Polish electro-punk. |
| 11 | Ellevator | "St. Cecilia" | single | What if CHVRCHES had a traditional band line-up? |
| 12 | Dark Suns | "The Only Young Ones Left" | Everchild | The recombining of post-metal and post-punk. |
| 13 | Levi | "Between Days" | single | Tropical beep-house. |
| 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. |
| 15 | Running Wild | "Black Skies, Red Flag" | Rapid Foray | Unwashed-hair metal. |
| 16 | DGM | "The Secret Pt. 2" | The Passage | Soaring melodic progressive metal. |
| 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. |
| 18 | Nergard | "One Of These Days" | single | Sometimes progressive metal is where melodic hard rock went to hide. |
| 19 | Golden Coast | "Recess" | single | Eventually we'll stop calling any music "laptop" because how would you make music without a laptop? But for the moment there's still sometimes a sense of acoustic displacement that works as a personality. |
| 20 | The Naked And Famous | "Laid Low" | single | Whereas this, despite similar nominal elements, feels like it originates from completely within a single dreamworld. |
| 21 | Patternist | "Far from Now" | single | Like fun., but with less punctuation and more fun. |
| 22 | Lowell | "High Enough" | Part 1: PARIS YK - EP 3 | Of course fluxpop is a thing. |
| 23 | Wildlife | "2017" | single | Imagine pet dragons. |
| 24 | Angel Olsen | "Sister" | single | Slow-motion heartache in the old Cowboy Junkies vein. |
| 25 | Dream Wife | "Everything" | EP01 4 | And then slow-motion speeds up again because it can't stop falling in love. |
| 26 | Blanck Mass | "D7-D5" | single | And sometimes even weird clattery noises line up into grooves and sparkles. |
| 27 | Zero Bedroom Apartment | "Maiden Worldwide" | Ambient Works, Vol. 2 | Or don't. |
| 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. |
| 29 | We Are the Catalyst | "Home" | single | Heavy pixie post-rock. |
| 30 | Carly Rae Jepsen | "First Time" | EMOTION SIDE B | But you do have more Carly Rae Jepsen songs. |
| 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? |
| 32 | Lesbian | "Pyramidal Existinctualism" | Hallucinogenesis | Like doom-thrash played by gnostic goblins. |
| 33 | INHEAVEN | "Drift" | single | Ebulliently twee popgaze. |
| 34 | St. Tropez | "Time" | St. Tropez | Thick, blurry, faintly Madchester post-rock-gaze. |
| 35 | A-Lin | "幸福了 然後呢" | Love Song | I don't pretend to really understand what's going on in Chinese pop, but that means that Greatest Hits albums can sound perfectly new to me. |
| 36 | R-chord | "不愛, 也是愛我 (feat. 李佳薇)" | 要你知道 | And also that Hong Kong can make grand rap-verse-soaring-guest-chorus anthems as rousing as "Love the Way You Lie" or "Written in the Stars" or "Read All About It". |
| 37 | Grido | "Gravita' Zero" | single | Also in Italy. |
| 38 | Druid Cloak | "A Golden Crypt" | Lore: Book Three | Yes, this is what music by something called "Druid Cloak" should sound like. |
| 39 | Kemper Norton | "Yadnik" | Toll | Pretty sure "Kemper Norton" translates to "Druid Cloak on Fire" in something. |
| 40 | Red Mecca | "Världen genom lånade ögon" | single | Transnational electro-pop admits its Swedishness. |
| 41 | Ellen Sundberg | "Favorite Town" | Cigarette Secrets | Swedish anthem-folk Americana. (Made with high quality Swedish ingredients.) |
| 42 | Nada | "Scary (From UNPRETTY RAPSTAR 3 Track 3)" | single | Meticulously frenetic Korean talent-show trap. |
| 43 | Jimmy Eat World | "Get Right" | single | Emo in the meditatively churning mode. |
| 44 | Amasic | "Cheap Thrills" | single | Emo in the coy pop-song-covering mode, which is kind of not terribly different. |
| 45 | Taking Back Sunday | "You Can't Look Back" | single | Emo in the bouncy John Cougar Emocamp mode. Little foreclosed houses for you and me. |
| 46 | Paty Cantú | "Rompo Contigo" | single | Tense, simmery Mexican arena pop with trace EDM murmurs. |
| 47 | Crying | "Wool in the Wash" | single | Crinkly, joy-bleary math pop in the sense that ultimately everything is some kind of math. |
| 48 | Plini | "Inhale" | Handmade Cities | Giraffes on the cover is Illuminati code for Math Rock Within. |
| 49 | New Model Army | "Echo November" | Winter | At this point Justin Sullivan has almost owned this name longer than Cromwell. |
| 50 | Ingrid Michaelson | "Light Me Up" | It Doesn't Have to Make Sense | If Adult Alternative is still a living thing, as opposed to a brand conception frozen in its initial target-moment, I think this is it. |
| 51 | Shovels & Rope | "St. Anne's Parade" | single | New old-fashioned country folk. |
| 52 | [Alexandros] | "Swan" | Swan +2 | Kind of Japanese emo, if you imagine an emo bordering on visual kei instead of on pop-punk. |
| 53 | INORAN | "Thank You" | Thank You | Kind of Japanese alt-rock, if you imagine alt-rock bordering on j-metal instead of electric blues. |
| 54 | Raaka-Aine | "Vaiennetut" | IV | Finns who could arguably pass as Japanese in either of the two previous modes. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 57 | New Arcades | "Where We Were Before (feat. Sarah Bird)" | single | We will march, together, with tiny camera drones whirring around our heads, banking footage for our movie of how it felt. |
| 58 | Prom | "I Know How It Is" | Holding Pattern | It felt like angels were watching us from invisible hurricane clouds precessing through a perfectly clear sky. |
| 59 | Too Close To Touch | "Crooked Smile" | single | At least until the angels started landing on the hoods of cars. |
| 60 | Solution .45 | "Mind Mutation" | Nightmares in the Waking State, Pt. 2 | And we finally got a look in their eyes. |
| 61 | Lies | "White Light" | Abuse / Plague | And then the riots. |
| 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. |
| 63 | Hardline | "Where Will We Go from Here" | single | Meanwhile, we'll be on guitar-shaped spaceships headed into glittering voids. |
| 64 | Tyketto | "Reach" | single | Don't forget about us. |
| 65 | ADIAM | "Black Wedding" | Black Wedding | Neither the new demigods in their domes, nor the new engineers in our sentimental labyrinths among the power cells and conduits. |
| 66 | Bosshafte Beats | "Alpha ist Imperium" | single | Rhetorically, at least, you can cut a human society free from almost everything without changing the essential fears and compensations. |
| 67 | Chelan | "Beams" | Vultures | And we are only more beautiful and seductive in sparser light. |
| 68 | Against Me! | "Crash" | single | Only more organic silhouetted against the newest materials. |
| 69 | Elenco de Soy Luna | "Vuelo" | Soy Luna - Música en ti | Most defenseless when we are caught with our glossiest facades edgewise. |
| 70 | Mhairi | "Clarity" | single | Most vulnerable when our force-fields flutter. As they must, for they are generated by our own insistent, welcoming doubt. |