| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 4 | Sampha | "Blood On Me" | single | If you have a drum machine and an ocean of guilt, you don't have to wait for anything. |
| 5 | Plaitum | "Grace Hits" | Grace Hits / MYO 2 | You can just take your toy hammers and smash it all into quivering shards. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 8 | Pretty Maids | "Face the World" | single | Or maybe you'd rather a Danish ex-Thin-Lizzy cover-band turned melodic hard rock? |
| 9 | Aardvarck | "Yogya" | Indo EP 3 | Maybe everybody knows this by now, but fluxwork can be way more menacing than power-metal. |
| 10 | Sophie Ellis-Bextor | "Wild Forever" | Familia | Ohohoh, somebody told Sophie Ellis-Bextor that I wanted her to make a few more rock songs. |
| 11 | Jhameel | "Bye" | single | R&Beemo is totally a thing. |
| 12 | Carousel | "Home" | single | Also, presumably, this shambly brit-rock band called Carousel, but good luck finding anything about them amidst the stuff about all the other bands already called Carousel. |
| 13 | Devin Townsend Project | "Stormbending" | single | Devin Townsend is one of the few people who can make "Stormbending" just seem like an obvious descriptive title. |
| 14 | Memphis May Fire | "Carry On" | single | I will admit that I only started paying attention to Memphis May Fire when I heard them on a Punk Goes Pop compilation. So I guess that worked exactly like it was supposed to. |
| 15 | P.s. Eliot | "broken record" | 2007 - 2011 | If you missed anything by pre-Waxahatchee Alabama feminist-punk band P.S. Eliot, here's the whole discography neatly collated. |
| 16 | We Are the Catalyst | "One More Day" | Elevation | We Are Dark Pixiecore. |
| 17 | Christopher Bissonnette | "Small Feathers" | single | The sound of sitting fairly quietly on an old wooden chair. |
| 18 | Library Tapes | "Hebden Bridge" | single | The sound of sitting fairly quietly on an old wooden chair as interpreted by a ghost quartet. |
| 19 | Zero Bedroom Apartment | "Blurry Morning Glance" | The Best of Zero Bedroom Apartment | The sound of sitting fairly quietly on an old wooden chair as interpreted by a ghost quartet and then filtered through a prismatic dream. |
| 20 | Olan Mill | "Imondia" | single | And then blurred. |
| 21 | Good Weather For An Airstrike | "Let go" | single | And then polished. |
| 22 | Erik Levander | "Tillsäg mig huld" | single | And then replayed as fitful ambient jazz. |
| 23 | Rhian Sheehan | "Solis Ortus" | single | And then abstracted again. |
| 24 | MONO | "Ely's Heartbeat" | single | Post-rock = ambient + drums. |
| 25 | Eluvium | "Posturing Through Metaphysical Collapse" | False Readings On | But we're all post-rock now. Your decision is whether to fight that or embody it. What do you think? This has been your hour of theoretical peace. |
| 26 | Helms Alee | "Meats and Milks" | Stillicide | And now we return to wars and microbursts already in progress, |
| 27 | Goblin Cock | "Montrossor" | Necronomidonkeykongimicon | dressed in cartoon armor |
| 28 | Erik Ekholm | "Radiate" | Ultimate Epic Music | that transforms us into demigods. |
| 29 | Dan Bull | "Praxis Makes Perfect" | Praxis Makes Perfect +1 | But even demigods have social responsibilities. Especially demigods. |
| 30 | Trevor Morris | "Myanmar Chase" | Hard Target 2 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | The more of the world you see, the more of it your conscience embraces. |
| 31 | Covi Quintana | "Yo Me Enamoré" | single | But the more pain, so too the more joy. The trick is to accumulate the lightnesses to balance the weights. |
| 32 | Los Yayers | "No Tiene Sentido" | single | The reward, as with any exploration, is a cabinet of equilibrial wonder |
| 33 | Jimmy Eat World | "Sure and Certain" | single | that you bring back to install exactly where you live. |
| 34 | pg.lost | "Ikaros" | single | Can you step onto the nearest sidewalk and feel like you're at the beginning of the road to everywhere? |
| 35 | Labirinto | "Mal Sacré" | Gehenna | To a beckoning hell in every language? |
| 36 | Chase Huglin | "Pills" | single | To rickety tree forts we say we built for our kids, but use to hide from our own adulthood. |
| 37 | Dallas Smith | "Only One You" | Side Effects | To notional dirt roads paved flawlessly smooth. |
| 38 | Volturyon | "Pile of Human" | Cleansed by Carnage | To pulverization as a texture. |
| 39 | A Loathing Requiem | "Annihilation Induced by the Luminous Firestorm" | Psalms of Misanthropy (2016 Remix) | To sacred mosaics made of shattered subverbal terror. |
| 40 | Hjerteslag | "Sang Til Sonja" | single | If you can't figure out who you've offended, maybe you aren't ready to apologize yet. |
| 41 | Ine Hoem | "Moonbird" | single | How much of this is trying to breathe the elusive air of places you haven't quite been? |
| 42 | Still Changing | "In The End" | single | How many of our movement are attempts to hold the hands of people we imagine? |
| 43 | Marsicans | "Far Away (Saudade)" | single | We have the math to show that they must exist. |
| 44 | Everything Everything | "I Believe It Now" | single | So much math that you are forgiven for wondering whether it's people we love or the numbers that they produce. |
| 45 | Communions | "Don't Hold Anything Back" | Don't Hold Anything Back / Eternity 2 | But of course these are two ways to say the same thing. |
| 46 | Destrage | "Symphony of the Ego" | single | Construction is the opposite of resignation. |
| 47 | Auras | "Dream Elixir" | single | Silence derives its power from noise. |
| 48 | Ion Dissonance | "Treading on Thin Ice" | single | Or, said another way, noise is an investment in future silence. Now you understand the tender heart under the adamantine exoskeleton of deathcore. |
| 49 | Skálmöld | "Niðavellir" | single | Which is why, too, folk/death metal was as inevitable a reaction to modernity as paganism. |
| 50 | Hordak | "Bloodline of the Wolves" | Padre | Heritage is our most foundational construct. |
| 51 | Unzucht | "Der dunkle See" | Neuntöter (Deluxe Edition) | Gothicism is the plaintive desire for life to be more complex than death. |
| 52 | The Beauty of Gemina | "End" | Minor Sun | A wish for something we say to echo. |
| 53 | Synk;yet | "自責ノ園" | 罪咎の糸 | For a tiny perfect music box to contain a better universe |
| 54 | Celldweller | "Razorface" | Soundtrack For The Voices In My Head Vol. 03 | lined with glossier darkness |
| 55 | MIYAVI | "Another World" | Fire Bird | and less-predictable absolutely-straight lines. |
| 56 | A Tribe Called Red | "ALie Nation" | single | We want to hear our story told. |
| 57 | Terry Malts | "Seen Everything" | single | And oh, can't it be a shimmery love story? |
| 58 | Greywind | "Afterthoughts - Remastered 2016" | single | With castles rising out of dawn mists? |
| 59 | Avastera | "Oceans" | single | Parapets on which we dance. |
| 60 | Arms Aloft | "The Voyage of the Dawndreaders" | What a Time to Be Barely Alive | Which sounds dangerous, but we gloriously never fall. |
| 61 | Scholars | "I Must Insist" | single | It is an urban-planning challenge, of course, to combine vertiginous parapets with megacity density. |
| 62 | Brave Girls | "YOO-HOO" | single | But you can do a lot with careful lighting. |
| 63 | Tempa T | "Not A Rocker" | single | And virtual streets on the upper floors. |
| 64 | Ali Barter | "Girlie Bits" | single | Sometimes we can't just sit. |
| 65 | Aly & Fila | "Unbreakable" | single | Sometimes we need spinning lights. |
| 66 | Shatta Wale | "Real African" | single | Sometimes we need to dance in somebody else's spaces. |
| 67 | Shield Patterns | "Balance & Scatter" | Mirror Breathing | Or, together, in the spaces nowhere between us. |
| 68 | Mark Isham | "The Offer" | Mechanic: Resurrection (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Followed by a chase scene, |
| 69 | Peter Hollens | "Danny Boy" | single | and wild sentimental overreaching. |
| 70 | Signals Midwest | "You're Gonna Be Golden" | At This Age | These are our perfect inevitable incoherent plots, the only ones in which these impossible characters make sense. |
| 71 | Shinova | "Qué casualidad" | single | Or not sense, exactly, but whatever it is when our secret earnestnesses are squeezed to the surface, |
| 72 | Miss Montreal | "Tic Toc" | single | and our stomps find the sync with our heartbeats, |
| 73 | Danny Vera | "Ghost" | The Outsider | and orchestra flourishes fly off our fingertips like drops from the prize-vintage rainstorm we've saved in climate-controlled cellars for just this moment. |
| 74 | Distrito Rojo | "Distrito Rojo" | single | For the moment, still, we share this round world and thus all our horizons are the same, and so by implication all the comfortable places those horizons surround. |
| 75 | Bosshafte Beats | "Ghettoblues" | single | Different mechanisms, but the same physics. |
| 76 | Silvana Imam | "Sett Henne - Radio Edit" | Sett Henne 2 | Different arguments in the same addictive cadences. |
| 77 | Sting | "I Can't Stop Thinking About You" | single | Different stories always setting up for the next surprising postscript. Like, this week: Sting Cannot Possibly Be the Same Guy Who Could Not Possibly Be the Same Guy Who Was in the Police. |