| 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. |
| 2 | Yasutaka Nakata | "NANIMONO (feat. 米津玄師)" | NANIMONO EP 5 | This soundtrack one-off reminds me of my favorite SUPERCAR songs, which achieved a yearning mechanistic humanism in the same way, at least for me, as the effervescing Pokémon flora and every "landscape" with a bridge. |
| 3 | FRANKIE | "Blink" | single | We will probably not look back on this as a golden age of glittering pop songs, but only because we are now cursed with the awareness that it is always a golden age of glittering pop songs. |
| 4 | Arkells | "My Heart's Always Yours" | single | Even stomp-and-holler can be performed in weightless exoskeleton boots. |
| 5 | The Naked And Famous | "The Water Beneath You" | Simple Forms | But oh my god, can we just take a moment and spin like there's nothing else, like outer space itself is shimmery and breathable and the roiling magma is finally going to launch us all into freedom? |
| 6 | Amaranthe | "Maximize" | single | Did you ever sketch imaginary spaceships for escaping mundane gravity? |
| 7 | In Flames | "Through My Eyes" | single | And isn't escape ultimately what all engines and monsters and power are meant to offer us? |
| 8 | Pretty Maids | "Heavens Little Devil" | single | Visceral fantasies are escape masquerading as indulgence. |
| 9 | Heimdalls Wacht | "Spökenkieker" | Geisterseher | Nihilistic fantasies are escape masquerading as indifference. |
| 10 | Kai Hansen | "Born Free" | XXX-Three Decades In Metal | But ultimately, fantasy itself is a form of inherent triumph, |
| 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, |
| 12 | Waldgeflüster | "Und immer wieder Schnee" | Ruinen | and why some utopian impulses aspire to the glacial. |
| 13 | Desperate Journalist | "Hollow" | single | But of course this gothic fear isn't always cast in metal. |
| 14 | Prayers | "Mexica" | single | Sometimes it emerges in activist mantras |
| 15 | Super Unison | "Prove Yourself" | Auto | and noise-surge shards |
| 16 | Teodasia | "Stronger Than You" | Metamorphosis | and thornflower detonations. |
| 17 | Theatres Des Vampires | "Morgana Effect" | Candyland | The vampires, after all, are us. |
| 18 | Katie Gately | "Sift" | Color | Do not be misled by our complicated bookish disguises. |
| 19 | Yamaneko | "Elite" | single | There is dance music too for discontinuities. |
| 20 | Andrew Tan | "俱傷" | 親愛的偏執狂 | Slow transcendence for the implaccable math of our doom. |
| 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. |
| 22 | Black Table | "Gargantua" | Obelisk | The audience for our defiance is only ever ourselves. |
| 23 | Ho99o9 | "The Dope Dealerz" | The Dope Dealerz / Double Barrel 2 | But who else was ever going to make sense of our private languages? |
| 24 | Matias Puumala | "Elektrobeast" | single | The higher up Bald Mountain you climb, the more overwrought the weather. |
| 25 | NINJA TRACKS | "Repentance" | Elemental | But the storms basically only really exist to make the eventual giant-eagle rescue more dramatic. |
| 26 | MONO | "Death in Rebirth" | Requiem for Hell | You'll enjoy the cathartic crescendos more if you pretend you don't know they're coming. |
| 27 | Ulrich Schnauss | "Love Grows out of Thin Air" | single | (But they do, because we can only pretend to be mortal for so long.) |
| 28 | Trophy Eyes | "Counting Sheep" | Chemical Miracle | We open our mouths, and shouts come out. |
| 29 | The Front Bottoms | "Joanie" | Needy When I'm Needy 2 | Even when we pretend |
| 30 | John K. Samson | "Alpha Adept" | single | it's our cat talking. |
| 31 | In Her Own Words | "Nothing Left" | Unfamiliar | How plaintive that we had to call one kind of openness "emo", as if the others are all merely paperwork. |
| 32 | Everyone Leaves | "Feeling Other" | The Lonely End | As if any kind of expression isn't an expression of otherness |
| 33 | Hardline | "Where Will We Go from Here" | Human Nature | no matter how in-group-anthem it codes. |
| 34 | The Exquisites | "Faith" | Home | Some nights a beat-up guitar is all we can afford, |
| 35 | Lempicka | "Sugar High" | single | some nights we get lucky and score a borrowed chorus pedal that sometimes works. |
| 36 | Varien | "My Prayers Have Become Ghosts" | single | But other nights, our racks are packed with the finest space-program byproducts |
| 37 | Puppet | "To Be Alive (feat. Aaron Richards)" | single | and our switches and knobs conjure minuets of robots and ghosts, |
| 38 | Aero Chord | "Kid's Play" | Love & Hate - EP 5 | just so we can murmur "They're not going to get us" to ourselves. |
| 39 | Fareoh | "Illegal" | single | And we dance however we feel, and fibonacci stepping stones materialize where our shoes happen to reach a surface. |
| 40 | T-Mass | "Cash" | We Made It 3 | Puzzle-jaw airlocks snap shut exactly an inch behind us, |
| 41 | Ian Hawgood | "One Day Winter" | Snow Roads | and then it's suddenly blast-quiet. |
| 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, |
| 43 | A Sense of Gravity | "Shadowed Lines" | single | but this only an argument for enjoying implications while they hold. |
| 44 | George Cosby | "Glamour" | A Savage Kiss EP 3 | Ask yourself this: are you posing for a picture or are you just standing there? |
| 45 | Unfathomable Ruination | "Pestilential Affinity" | Finitude | In this instant before we are pulverized: |
| 46 | Jimmy Eat World | "You Are Free" | single | - How whole can we believe we are? |
| 47 | AS IT IS | "Pretty Little Distance" | single | - What can we find to clap for? |
| 48 | The Secret Songs of Us | "Falling" | Moments in Slow Motion | - Who watches us while we sleep? |
| 49 | Altered Sky | "Livewire" | single | - Who wakes us up wild-eyed? |
| 50 | Wiley | "Bring Them All / Holy Grime (feat. Devlin)" | single | We sneak out into private cities |
| 51 | Jammz | "It's a London Thing (feat. Scott Garcia)" | single | overwritten on the ones that were already here when we awoke |
| 52 | Latexxx Teens | "The End" | The End +2 | in the daringest pants we hide from our parents, |
| 53 | Dardem | "Tus Dudas" | single | which naturally look a lot like the ones they hide from us, but each in their own season's agreed-upon rebellion hues. |
| 54 | Aphonnic | "Ombligos" | single | Dark sarcasms are timeless, but more fun if you feel like you scrawled them in stealth. |
| 55 | Titta | "Bikinit" | single | But isn't that also true of breathy come-ons |
| 56 | Besserbitch | "Pretenders and Liars" | single | and sing-along assurances |
| 57 | Eux Autres | "Other Girls" | Hell Is Eux Autres | and everything we're unsure of? |
| 58 | Joker | "Piyango" | Joker Feats | Turkish hip hop is among the many topics I'm unsure of, about which you should clearly trust nothing I say, but I'm pretty sure Joker is the best rapper in Turkish hip hop. |
| 59 | Toygar Işıklı | "Kemal Soydere / Duvarlarım" | Kara Sevda (Orijinal Dizi Müzikleri) | I have a favorite Turkish TV-soundtrack epicore composer, too. |
| 60 | Mechanist | "Rigel" | Sector N-707 | Epicorestep should be more of a thing. |
| 61 | Crying | "There Was a Door" | Beyond the Fleeting Gales | As should prog-emo. |
| 62 | Beth Nielsen Chapman | "Almost Home" | Uncovered | Beth Nielsen Chapman co-wrote "Almost Home" with Mary Chapin Carpenter. It closes Uncovered, an album of Chapman's versions of songs she wrote for and with other people. "Almost Home" flirts with afterlife-as-goal fatalism, and Carpenter's version played it for country-gospel reverence. But this one sounds more like a demo, less worshipful than sentimental. |
| 63 | Beth Nielsen Chapman | "Life Holds On" | Beth Nielsen Chapman | And I might not trust that subjective distinction, but this is the first Beth Nielsen Chapman song I ever heard, when I was younger and a lot less tolerant, and somehow I believed it immediately. |