| 1 | Dark Sarah | "Attack Of Orym" | Attack Of Orym | I've been looking forward to Amberian Dawn's upcoming album of ABBA covers for months, |
| 2 | Amberian Dawn | "Angeleyes" | Take a Chance - a Metal Tribute to Abba | and I spend a frankly inordinate amount of my attention and an even more absurd fraction of my time keeping up with new releases, |
| 3 | Metalite | "Hurricane" | single | so I was borderline mortified to realize that I've spent two solid months |
| 4 | Tulip | "Gemini" | single | looking forward to an album-release that was behind me. |
| 5 | Averlanche | "Little Lotus" | single | Take a Chance came out at the beginning of December, along with its third single ("Super Trouper") the same day, |
| 6 | Liv Sin | "Karma" | KaliYuga | and somehow the single occluded the album in my tools. |
| 7 | Belle Morte | "Exorcism" | single | I have opened a major investigation into this debacle. |
| 8 | Halflives | "everybody knows it" | everybody knows it +2 | Meanwhile, though, the new Dark Sarah album came out last week, and contains no literal metal covers of ABBA songs, |
| 9 | Forever Still | "Can't Begin To Explain" | single | but you might reasonably guess otherwise if you didn't know ABBA's catalog very well. |
| 10 | Dark Sarah | "Goth Disco" | Attack Of Orym | I had somehow also forgotten that Heidi Parviainen formed Dark Sarah after leaving Amberian Dawn, |
| 11 | Ravenlight | "Masque of the Red Death" | Immemorial | so associating them with each other is not my personal genius, |
| 12 | Against Myself | "Sweet Chants Of Death" | single | but if you love things enough, they will find you, |
| 13 | A Light Divided | "Inhale / Exhale" | Inhale / Exhale +1 | will run down the street after you and grab your hand and turn you around. |
| 14 | Hail Sagan | "Alongside Their Own" | single | "Oh!", you might say. |
| 15 | Brachmond | "Die Schlacht" | single | I said "Oh!" a lot this week: |
| 16 | DEAR MOTHER | "Heart" | single | realizing I could barely pick any of these new Dark Sarah songs to not play; |
| 17 | Moyra | "Rage of the Sky" | single | basking in the ABBA; |
| 18 | Death & Legacy | "The Unnamed Shadow" | The Unnamed Shadow +1 | pasting the URIs of half of these bands into my random work tools for collating collective knowledge, |
| 19 | Seeker Pearl | "Ouroboros" | single | wondering gleefully what else I have missed, |
| 20 | Ravenlight | "Springtime Lament" | Immemorial | as if I weren't already unmanageably immersed in joy; |
| 21 | Cornoctuan | "Weight of Light (The Lightless, Pt. III)" | single | looking at the negative Fs in the weather forecast; |
| 22 | Marras | "Parasiitti" | single | emailing Aaron that Gracie's' new Peanut Butter Sriracha flavor is definitive; |
| 23 | Dead End Finland | "Up so High, Down so Low" | single | playing old Comsat Angels records; |
| 24 | Dark Sarah | "Delerium" | Attack Of Orym | feeling the bones of my aging, declining cat so close under her skin |
| 25 | Uriah Heep | "You'll Never Be Alone" | Chaos & Colour | as she falls lovingly asleep in the bend of my arms with her tiny nose |
| 26 | Ronnie Romero | "The Battle Rages On" | Raised on Heavy Radio | on my trackpad. |
| 27 | Wig Wam | "Forevermore" | single | Did you know that Uriah Heep are still making albums? |
| 28 | Crowne | "Just Believe" | Operation Phoenix | Did you care that they were ever making albums in the first place? They've been doing it for 54 years, |
| 29 | Arctic Rain | "One World" | Unity | 3 longer than Magnum and only a year less than UFO and Deep Purple, |
| 30 | Mono Inc. | "Wiedersehen Woanders" | Ravenblack | and I admit that I kind of confused them with Foghat until well into both bands' post-mainstream stubbornness, |
| 31 | Subway To Sally | "Leinen los" | Leinen los +1 | but where Foghat have settled into a comfortable legacy-tour bluesiness and more live albums than studio ones, |
| 32 | All For Metal | "Raise Your Hammer" | Raise Your Hammer +2 | Uriah Heep have kept up the expansive, Hammond-heavy hard-prog-rock ambition. |
| 33 | Cruachan | "The Reaper" | single | I too aspire to get old in defiantly assiduous dedication to unfashionable arts |
| 34 | Vengeant | "Gaia's Throne" | Mana 5 | with unexhausted implications: |
| 35 | Norwald | "Nekaroth, the Undefeated" | The Spark of Freedom | sentences unimproved by Large Language Models, |
| 36 | Vorna | "Hiljaisuus ei kestä" | single | listening as a reagent for mood instead of a thickener of it, |
| 37 | Finrir | "Power of Mjolnir" | Viking Metal 5 | wild crushes, |
| 38 | Aara | "Emphase der Seelenpein" | single | refusing inscrutable magic sold into ignorance |
| 39 | 'Iisnááhí | "Ma’iitsoh ‘Ałchinígíí" | single | in favor of scrutable magic that gets better with explanation, |
| 40 | Heretoir | "Fatigue (2022)" | Fatigue (2022) +1 | things cooked in pans, |
| 41 | Enslaved | "Forest Dweller" | Forest Dweller +3 | trying to answer good questions with better questions, |
| 42 | Ne Obliviscaris | "Graal" | single | tapping gently on one's moral compass when the needle gets briefly stuck. |
| 43 | Bisa | "The Sinner I Am" | single | Optimism isn't a function of selective perspective |
| 44 | Transworld Identity | "Everything Must Burn" | single | any more than globalism is a dream of uniformity. |
| 45 | Dark Sarah | "Piece Of My Heart" | Attack Of Orym | Localists seek a world made for them, |
| 46 | Isiliel | "聖暗顕現" | single | and thus naturally mistake globalism for a simple inverse that seeks a world made for not them. |
| 47 | ELFENSJóN | "禍つ闇に詠う" | single | But the opposite of what you already know isn't a different textbook, |
| 48 | sui sui | "Being Alive" | LIFE | it is the library of all of the books, |
| 49 | シユイ | "RE RE REPLAY" | single | and the swirling clouds of all the words that haven't been marshaled into pages yet. |
| 50 | On the treat Super Season | "Dancing Samurai" | single | The opposite of your music is our music, which is all of it. |
| 51 | Kaneyorimasaru | "Iki o Shiteiruyo" | Watashi no Nocturne | Our nights are lit by different lights, |
| 52 | puleflor | "Yonetsu" | single | but alike in our bleary refusal to accept the darkness, |
| 53 | あたらよ | "空蒼いまま" | single | indistinguishable from orbit, |
| 54 | Maaya Uchida | "Dust Tail" | Loud Hailer | unconsolable in our machinery. |
| 55 | Nanase Aikawa | "Pray for the world" | 中今 | We do not pray for the world, we make it ourselves, |
| 56 | 安斉かれん | "YOLOOP" | single | very much alone together. |
| 57 | maeshima soshi | "Moon Prison" | single | The moon releases us, |
| 58 | Fire-Toolz | "It Is Happening Again (Thank You, Council Of Saturn!)" | single | and watches to see where we shimmeringly go, |
| 59 | Alice Longyu Gao | "Hëłlœ Kįttÿ" | Hëłlœ Kįttÿ +3 | only slowly realizing that we sparkle because we took its shattered fragments with us |
| 60 | Derya | "METEOR" | single | back incandescently to earth. |
| 61 | ELYELLA | "Bailando mal" | single | We dance beautifully, |
| 62 | Charlotte Sands | "Alright" | single | we cower grandly, |
| 63 | Ava Max | "Sleepwalker" | Diamonds & Dancefloors | we stay behind to run our fingers along the drawn curtains of darkened and then abandoned rooms. |
| 64 | P!nk | "TRUSTFALL" | single | We're in the corner, remembering watching her kiss you, |
| 65 | FLEKS | "Casablanca" | single | or remembering imagining her kissing you, |
| 66 | PRIZM | "10/10" | 10/10 +1 | or deciding what we would wear to walk out of the water |
| 67 | Platforms | "Home By Dawn" | single | if we had a time-machine and maps |
| 68 | PVRIS | "GODDESS" | GODDESS +2 | and a body. |
| 69 | Ergo, Bria | "Can't Wait" | single | We do, though, and therefore everything: |
| 70 | Mr.FanTastiC | "See you" | single | these teeming cities never unlit, |
| 71 | ラックライフ | "℃" | しるし / ℃ 3 | the way everything has a season until you realize that's all we mean by seasons, |
| 72 | the Still | "All About You (and Our Song)" | single | the sounds we make as we wait for something we've already fallen in love with |
| 73 | Bearwear | "sad but dancing, happy but crying" | single | before it even fully exists. |
| 74 | TRiFOLiUM | "冬の花火" | 冬の花火 +1 | Our hearts travel ahead of us, fire in the cold. |
| 75 | UNMASK aLIVE | "Swindle" | Moon Bride 2 | We had a girlfriend on the moon. You would have loved her if you had met her, |
| 76 | The XCERTS | "GIMME" | single | and you show your courage by whether that stops you. |
| 77 | K!ngdom | "AT!KE (A ti qué te importa)" | single | She had the look. We are the kingdom of those looks. |
| 78 | La La Love You | "El Principio de algo" | single | The main thing we learn from dressing our hands as robots |
| 79 | Cala Vento | "Ferrari" | Ferrari +2 | is that we can't build machines to accelerate ourselves away from our skin. |
| 80 | La Paloma | "Tiré una piedra al aire" | Tiré una Piedra al Aire 5 | Until the next world is a stone that we have thrown into space, |
| 81 | Apartamentos Acapulco | "El Primero" | single | we are required to invent each moment for the first time. |
| 82 | Diagnóstico Binario | "El final" | single | The moments themselves insist on this, |
| 83 | Locos De Atar | "Instantes" | single | no matter how many times we fail them. |
| 84 | The Differential | "Waiting Game" | single | "You dance beautifully", they say. "Try again!" |
| 85 | Willkuer | "Die Besten sterben nie" | Die Besten sterben nie 5 | "Du tanzt wunderschön. Versuchen Sie es erneut." |
| 86 | Wildways | "Хищники" | single | I took two years of German in high school, |
| 87 | Silbermond | "Wenn's am schönsten ist" | Wenn's am schönsten ist +3 | somewhere around the time Uriah Heep were making their 14th and 15th albums. |
| 88 | Jimmy Nevis | "Small Spaces" | Things We Don't Talk About | You never know what you're going to need later |
| 89 | Praiz | "Mission" | single | until you realize the later already happened a while ago. |
| 90 | Killorbeezbeatz | "Re Sqeezeng In Amapiano" | single | Sometimes other people's dancing looks like it is coming out of your future, |
| 91 | Mvzzle | "Ungowami" | single | and it might be, but it's not their future. |
| 92 | Mthandazo Gatya | "Ewallet" | single | Maybe you just have different apps on your phones. |
| 93 | INKAZIMULO YABANGCWELE INDUMEZULU GOSPEL GROUP | "Umhleli wezinto" | single | You walk to the edge of the earth and throw your phone off of it. |
| 94 | Maredi | "Mosadi Wa Pelo Ke Mmone" | single | There's a wedding going on, a little ways away along the cliff. |
| 95 | Amberian Dawn | "Mamma Mia" | Take A Chance - A Metal Tribute To ABBA | There's a tent, and some cover band is playing ABBA songs inside, |
| 96 | Dark Sarah | "Breaking Free" | Attack Of Orym | but a few people have drifted out to watch you, |
| 97 | Jessica Andrews | "Somebody's Problem" | single | or to peer over the edge in case the phone landed on some accessible ledge. |
| 98 | Ville Veikka | "100 asiaa" | single | You never know. Things don't necessarily cooperate with your decisive measures. |
| 99 | Meemo Comma | "Cloudscape" | Cloudscape +2 | A guy has a bag with some extra phones. Why is there a guy at a wedding with a bag of extra phones? |
| 100 | Chicane | "We Were Once Kings" | We Were Once Kings +1 | What did we think was going to happen when the phone reached the bottom of nowhere? |
| 101 | Amidy | "Love You Enough" | single | It buzzes, shuddering a little as the warmth of your hand starts to fade. |
| 102 | Rachel Nusbaumer | "Lacrimosa" | single | Google Maps smiles up at you. "I saved your parking location." |
| 103 | fromjoy | "docility" | single | You walked for a week to get here. |
| 104 | Andromida | "Judgement II" | Judgement II +3 | All the things you anticipate are cliffs, |
| 105 | Xavier Boscher | "Fox" | Zoologica Duodecim #4 : Forest 5 | but only from the angle of your approach. |
| 106 | Olympus Lenticular | "A Thousand Winds" | When the Silence of Absence Deepens | You get to the edge of the world, and there's just more world. |
| 107 | KUYASHII | "Hello" | Dreams | The only thing that ends there is whatever story you were telling yourself about what this journey would solve or escape. |
| 108 | Tim Hecker | "Lotus Light" | single | Stories aren't solutions, they're catalysts. |
| 109 | Teramaze | "EASY LOVER" | single | When you reach the end of one, run out of words, there's always "oh!" |
| 110 | Tove Lo | "Dancing On My Own - triple j Like A Version" | single | There's a sky over my town, too, but you have to see it for yourself. |
| 111 | Amberian Dawn | "Under Attack" | Take A Chance - A Metal Tribute To ABBA | Most of the things you think you missed are close behind you, following patiently. |
| 112 | Dark Sarah | "Hero And A Villain" | Attack Of Orym | The rest are right in front of you. |