| 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. |
| 2 | Oceans of Slumber | "To the Sea - A Tolling of the Bells" | single | Misery doesn't make us less human, |
| 3 | Emma Ruth Rundle | "Ancestral Recall" | single | or less majestic, |
| 4 | X-Perience | "Everytime" | 555 | or less aware of our capacities for grace. |
| 5 | Reasons Behind | "Shades Of Neon" | Project: M.I.S.T. | It only makes us hoard joys more fruitlessly, |
| 6 | The Waymaker | "Kingdom of Heaven" | single | waiting to feel like it's safe again to let them go into the air. |
| 7 | WagakkiBand | "Singin' for..." | single | Meanwhile they hum inside us |
| 8 | SKÁLD | "Fimbulvetr" | single | constantly. |
| 9 | Varg | "Auf die Götter" | single | I miss fearing wolves, |
| 10 | Pukuut | "Sumununa Pisunga" | Minutsit Kingulliit | or flying over Greenland, |
| 11 | Veonity | "Acceptance" | Sorrows | or whatever else it was I used to do. |
| 12 | Draconian | "The Sacrificial Flame" | single | We will not extricate ourselves from this with ritual, |
| 13 | Mors Subita | "Into Eternity" | single | but measuring routine against ritual gives us a way to talk about the difference between entitlement and legend. |
| 14 | Graupel | "Fade Away" | Fade Away +2 | Mythologies are moral structures against which to brace ourselves, |
| 15 | Incantation | "Siege Hive" | Sect of Vile Divinities | not temples to cower in. |
| 16 | Expander | "Waste Ranger" | Neuropunk Boostergang | All grandeur converges in wreckage |
| 17 | Unleash The Archers | "Abyss" | Abyss | and waits there for the light. |
| 18 | WILL-O' | "One Way!!" | Baby's Breath 4 | You cannot back up a derailed train |
| 19 | PEDRO | "さよならだけが人生だ" | single | by electing an engineer that promises to. |
| 20 | Aiolin | "Snowdrop" | single | You have to get off. |
| 21 | ARLEQUIN | "IntheMirror" | The laughing man | I miss fearing that our leaders might not always be on my side. |
| 22 | TOTALFAT | "Marching For Freedom" | WILL KEEP MARCHING 5 | I miss eating ramen or tacos in warm, tiny spaces. |
| 23 | BLUE ENCOUNT | "Yumemigusa" | single | I miss Cary Grant and Stuart Adamson and Ross Perot. |
| 24 | Novelbright | "Sunny drop" | single | I miss pushing into crowded trains on winter mornings. |
| 25 | Scenarioart | "Ao no libido" | single | I miss things I didn't need, and have easily replaced with improvements. |
| 26 | A. G. Cook | "Oh Yeah" | single | I miss feeling like we operate this city by pulling together with bare hands on the same levers. |
| 27 | Xadvoi | "Intoxicated" | single | Instead, we have been forced to acknowlege that this is mostly an ornamental choreography, |
| 28 | Wstdyth | "7lights" | single | guard-changing at the gates of ceremonial palaces. |
| 29 | XZARKHAN | "TimeSplitters" | TimeSplitters +1 | Our real cooperation is symbolic: |
| 30 | blackwinterwells | "SWORDHERO" | single | we agree to behave as if these tall glass buildings are filled with essential acts, |
| 31 | POPSTARBILLS | "PROPER // WITHOUT U" | single | and civilization is a construct of our aggregated labor, |
| 32 | Alice Gas | "PULLINGALLMYHAIROUT" | single | and "labor" includes all the frivolous or ninth-order things most of us do. |
| 33 | Senses | "Like a Dream" | single | We agree not to make eye contact with people who have begun to cross out of our illusions. |
| 34 | d0llywood1 | "imallovertheplace" | single | We pointedly ignore tourists as if being pointedly ignored is what separates tourism from anthropology. |
| 35 | Yandere | "alpha halo" | single | We count on luck. |
| 36 | angelus | "Fatigue" | single | We record selective measurements of the luck we have had, |
| 37 | Punkinloveee | "Plastic" | single | and pretend we are making diligently informed decisions. |
| 38 | Epsilon Zero | "The Last Time" | single | We invert the apologies we should have offered, and print them as warnings. |
| 39 | Unleash The Archers | "Carry the Flame" | Abyss | We agree to dream in metaphor and smoke. |
| 40 | Patty Smyth | "Build a Fire" | Build a Fire / Drive 2 | And yet, each in our isolated rooms, we are together. |
| 41 | The Killers | "Lightning Fields (feat. k.d. lang)" | Imploding The Mirage | This lonely year's most yearning moments are as human as anything we have lost. |
| 42 | Moses Metro Man | "Wêreld se tyd" | single | We will remember it by songs, |
| 43 | The Happy Fits | "Hold Me Down" | Hold Me Down +3 | and withheld food obsessions we've learned to make barely-adequate approximations of at home, |
| 44 | The Front Bottoms | "new song d" | In Sickness & In Flames | and the resulting weight we have gained or lost. |
| 45 | chloe moriondo | "I Want To Be With You" | I Want To Be With You +1 | We will save up stories of how it was for the people who will be born afterwards, |
| 46 | Caitlyn Shadbolt | "Edge Of The Earth" | single | and then end up mostly telling them recursively to each other: |
| 47 | Imogen Clark | "Found Me" | The Making Of Me 6 | Remember how we wandered out in the world for years, and then one year just stayed in our rooms? |
| 48 | Bully | "Where to Start" | SUGAREGG | We used yellow moons to punch holes in the nighttime, and watched them each from separate windows. |
| 49 | Lucius | "Man in My Radio" | single | We spoke to each other through lenses and frequencies. |
| 50 | Bely Basarte | "Me va a doler" | single | We tried to let the effort of getting through this distract us from everything that has been getting inexorably worse while we have been failing catastrophically to become great again. |
| 51 | The Killers | "My God (feat. Weyes Blood)" | Imploding The Mirage | Remember all the obviously inane things we used to claim defined us? |
| 52 | Protest The Hero | "Gift Horse" | Fabula & Syuzhet 2 | So much powerless belief. |
| 53 | Thyla | "Fade" | single | Responsibility doesn't make us any more often right, |
| 54 | Nomcebo Zikode | "Bayabuza" | Xola Moya Wam' | or any less trapped in our souls. |
| 55 | Solly Moholo | "Saul" | single | It only makes us human, |
| 56 | Unleash The Archers | "Afterlife" | Abyss | waiting to come alive again when we've been alive the whole time. |