| 1 | Black Veil Brides | "Temple of Love (feat. VV)" | single | In a long-ago era of plastic music, when I used to shelve my "metal" CDs separately from everything else, I kept The Sisters of Mercy in the metal section. |
| 2 | Imperial Triumphant | "Paranoid Android" | single | I was aware, of course, that culturally speaking they were not a metal band, |
| 3 | Violet Orlandi | "Moonage Daydream" | single | but my CD shelves weren't a cultural taxonomy, |
| 4 | Crashing Atlas | "Capacities" | single | and my experience of the band resembled my experience of metal bands more than it didn't. |
| 5 | Eleine | "Stand By The Flame" | Stand By The Flame +3 | This small-data assertion from an almost-pre-internet era retains maybe-surprising pertinence in my later project to model all the world's music genres and how people relate to them. |
| 6 | Nereids | "Ascent" | single | Communities overlap, and project different vantages onto the same music. |
| 7 | Degrees of Truth | "Alchemists" | single | Individual distinctions of taste cut cross-sections through these in slightly different dimensional rotations. |
| 8 | Seas on the Moon | "Guiding Star" | single | New things you discover change your understanding of the things you already know. |
| 9 | Kassogtha | "Awake" | single | I know a lot more bands now in the various dark interstices between gothic, industrial and metallic. |
| 10 | Adgarios | "Sekhmet" | Raido | I also don't have to make that kind of material decision about music any more at all. |
| 11 | Frayle | "Head Down" | single | Even metal and not-metal can overlap. |
| 12 | Мещера | "Чёрный Туман" | Жатва | Neither Black Veil Brides nor Ville Valo (neither via HIM nor his VV solo project) count as metal according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, |
| 13 | Thy Shade | "Go West" | single | but their collaboration on this gloriously bombastic cover of the already twice-immortal Sisters song "Temple of Love" |
| 14 | 大山まき | "Ukiyo Drive" | Valkyrie | seems to me like a conclusive validation of my original point. |
| 15 | Manntra | "The Hunter" | The Hunter +1 | Maybe sometimes you need to hear somebody play a song a different way |
| 16 | Cyhra | "Life Is A Hurricane" | Life Is A Hurricane +1 | in order to hear the original a different way yourself. |
| 17 | Art Nation | "The Last Of The Burned" | Inception | My CD-shelving metal separatism lives on in playlist subtagging here, |
| 18 | Shakra | "Devil Left Hell" | Invincible | and in my long-ongoing curation of Exoskeleton, my playlist of metal covers of non-metal songs, |
| 19 | Boys From Heaven | "Sailing On" | The Descendant | where you'll note that I have embraced the coexistence of metal and not-metal to assert that "Temple of Love" qualifies. |
| 20 | The Defiants | "What Are We Waiting For" | Drive | To aggressively generalize, there are three main categories of such covers: |
| 21 | Robledo | "Real World" | single | versions that evoke the latent metallic elements of their source material; |
| 22 | Arch Echo | "Final Pitch" | single | versions that allow the source material to expose some hidden vulnerability in metal itself; |
| 23 | Ray Alder | "Hands of Time" | II | and covers that sever this connection with a rusty broadsword and draw some new creature with the flowing blood. |
| 24 | Metopia | "Rise Above" | Anthropozän 5 | Violet Orlandi has done some of all of these, but this deconstruction of Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" |
| 25 | Mors Subita | "Don't Stop" | Don't Stop +3 | resembles Tori Amos' dissection of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" more than it does the BVBVV celebration of "Temple of Love". |
| 26 | Scar Symmetry | "Overworld" | The Singularity (Phase II - Xenotaph) | And Imperial Triumphant's translation of "Paranoid Android" from Morlock to Klingon |
| 27 | Humanity's Last Breath | "Instill" | single | is only maybe a little less startling than those because Radiohead's oblique original is already a cloud of its own anxious noises. |
| 28 | Johnny the Boy | "Die Already" | You | "Cloud of anxious noises" is definitely a vibe I appreciate, |
| 29 | GUHTS | "White Noise" | single | but I think it's also fair to say that I like clouds and noises more than anxiety, |
| 30 | Fuimadane | "Banasár" | single | and that I tolerate expansive excesses of self-belief |
| 31 | Fen | "Wracked" | single | more exuberantly than I do claustrophilic perimeters of self-doubt. |
| 32 | Prognan | "Grob" | Sve Je Tiho Na Istocnom Frontu | I would rather think in stories about what we can become |
| 33 | Uada | "Retraversing the Void" | single | than in disdain, however deserved, for what we have been. |
| 34 | Verwilderd | "Prophecy Of Chaos" | single | Even my nostalgia tends to recall obsolete futurisms |
| 35 | Krigsgrav | "The Black Oak" | single | more often than it rues abandoned traditions. |
| 36 | Vreid | "Flammen" | single | I do not miss CDs, |
| 37 | Thomas Cucé | "Eraser" | single | and I liked Radiohead better before they were important. |
| 38 | Nik Nocturnal | "Devour" | single | Find an abyss to throw yourself into. |
| 39 | Madmans Esprit | "죽었으면" | single | The endless darkness is rarely either. |
| 40 | HAILROSE | "REPTILIAN" | single | You cross a boundary between logics and the perspective flips. |
| 41 | DAMNED | "Fla:ill" | single | There's no moral precedence to frailty, |
| 42 | DaizyStripper | "Zessyou OH YEAH!!" | single | no reason drums can't be a kind of machinery |
| 43 | Gacharic Spin | "レプリカ" | single | as readily as a resonant skin. |
| 44 | Houts | "久遠" | 久遠 +2 | You don't need a video loop to make music visual, |
| 45 | Mr.EggPlant | "HINATA" | single | you just need to want to see the world through some other scope: |
| 46 | BLUE ENCOUNT | "有罪布告" | 有罪布告 +1 | tele-, micro-, peri-, kaleido-. |
| 47 | p l a n t c e l l | "Summer on Route 134" | single | All these powerlines must lead somewhere. |
| 48 | Bocchi | "Natsu Ni Oboreru" | Natsu Ni Oboreru - EP 4 | Seeker of joy, |
| 49 | Haze | "nemurihime" | nemurihime +1 | follow all of the paths at once. |
| 50 | 角巻わため | "Fins" | Fins +1 | They lead cartoon idols into forests of wolves, |
| 51 | Aimyon | "calcium" | ai no hana 4 | or lift new stars out of revivalist seas; |
| 52 | BABY-CRAYON~1361~ | "To me who was weak yesterday" | single | they sort us into the protection of alliances |
| 53 | THE ORCHESTRA TOKYO | "KAZAMIDORI - Roa Kusunoki solo ver." | KAZAMIDORI 2 | or nudge us to the front; |
| 54 | Quubi | "Dear my..." | single | they conflate coyness with courage; |
| 55 | PLEVAIL | "13-step paranoid" | 13-step paranoid +1 | they teach our robots that the only way to be human is through. |
| 56 | 浦小雪 | "潮風" | single | They direct us to edges, |
| 57 | reche | "3253212" | single | but all paths are edges. |
| 58 | Yume Suzuki | "Curse of Needles" | single | We traverse a plain of infinite individual sharp points, |
| 59 | みゆな | "笑って" | 笑って +1 | inferring a merciful surface across them by our movements. |
| 60 | W O L F C L U B | "Journey to the Second Sun" | single | Does this also work with stars? |
| 61 | New Arcades | "Believe" | Believe 6 | Apparently. Here we are. |
| 62 | Geographer | "Van Halen" | Van Halen +2 | We write ourselves exquisite unsigned letters and don't recognize our own hand. |
| 63 | Baby Queen | "Dream Girl" | single | We imagine what life must be like for the version of ourselves in dreams and mirrors: |
| 64 | Christine and the Queens | "Marvin descending" | PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE | free in some way we are not, |
| 65 | Eva Weel Skram | "La meg være" | single | capable of adroit twirls we have not been patient enough to practice, |
| 66 | Fay Wildhagen | "Reason" | single | justified. |
| 67 | Lande Hekt | "Axis" | Pottery Class 2 | But the difference between purposeful orbit and helpless spin |
| 68 | Dream Wife | "Curious" | Social Lubrication | is not muscular, it is where you look when nothing holds still. |
| 69 | Ratboys | "It's Alive!" | single | We fold ourselves into a tiny moment, |
| 70 | Jazmin Bean | "Piggie" | single | and on our earnest signal it is launched into the rest of time. |
| 71 | Crawlers | "Messiah" | Messiah +1 | We sound like somebody else; |
| 72 | Chris Farren | "Bluish" | Bluish +1 | we trace traveled arcs; |
| 73 | The Catalina | "Middle Class Dropouts" | Middle Class Dropouts +1 | we swim out past the breakers and the world doesn't die, |
| 74 | Nightly | "wear your heart out" | single | so we swim back and dry off and does anybody else feel like bubble tea? |
| 75 | Earlywave | "No Question" | single | A long, slow draw of longing, and then a pearl of sweetness? |
| 76 | The Maine | "blame" | blame / how to exit a room 2 | It's the beginning of the world as we will know it, |
| 77 | Broken Records | "Night Time" | single | chiming like a darkness we could dance in, |
| 78 | The Front Bottoms | "Punching Bag" | Punching Bag +1 | explaining all the helpless convictions we demonstrably defy. |
| 79 | Jimmy Eat World | "Telepath" | single | Do you want to know what I know? |
| 80 | Bad Chase | "Misfortune St." | single | I know that a jigsaw puzzle is already a box of a thousand tiny perfect pictures. |
| 81 | Snakefight | "Awit ng Kabataan" | single | I know that we won't run out of songs as long as we don't run out of kids. |
| 82 | Talata | "Hindi Mo Kaya" | single | I know we are all of us creatures of the sea banished into the air. |
| 83 | Da Igual | "Corazón Partío" | single | I know we only love things that can be taken away, |
| 84 | EXISTENT | "Stiller Held" | Stiller Held | but that the love remains, |
| 85 | Shamir | "Oversized Sweater" | single | that the transience of things leaves a trail of loves behind it, |
| 86 | toast | "yearbook" | single | that we were not happier in those pictures, |
| 87 | glaive | "all i do is try my best" | single | that we may not be happier in the next moment but the moments add up. |
| 88 | 8485 | "Atlantis (2°)" | single | We are more perfect in songs, |
| 89 | Petal Supply | "Person" | single | in experiments where we are allowed to exaggerate or simplify or transform, |
| 90 | Hooray For Earth | "Fantasy Something" | single | in distracted reverie, |
| 91 | MALKA | "Matriarch" | single | in diligent rapture and triumphant succession. |
| 92 | Christine and the Queens | "Shine" | PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE | Joy and death are not functions of each other, exactly, I think, |
| 93 | N-Dubz | "Habibti" | single | but they cannot avoid coexisting. |
| 94 | Y-Zer | "Insane" | Insane +1 | Individual joys end, some of them slowly with varying grace, |
| 95 | Tuggawar | "Clap Dem" | single | some of them in senseless abrupt collapse. |
| 96 | Texture | "Dead Bodies" | single | Catharsis and frivolity are not polarities, |
| 97 | Slikback | "REVOLVE" | single | they are each other's sub- and superharmonics. |
| 98 | Makhadzi | "Noto Baiza" | single | It is a coincidence, but not an irony, that the sudden death of Boston musician and organizer Justine Covault, |
| 99 | Darque | "Blessed" | More Life | whom I knew only barely, came days before the release of both her own band's new album, The Signal Light, |
| 100 | Oska Minda Ka Borena Music | "PANIKI" | single | and Linda Given's memoir The Book of Joie, |
| 101 | Playco RSA | "Okase mpone" | single | about the Cambridge toy and joyful object store she ran, |
| 102 | OSKIDO | "African Prayer - Radio Edit" | single | which wasn't how I knew Justine but could have been. |
| 103 | Ngoana Mme | "Sontaha Mesong" | single | I loved Joie de Vivre before I knew anybody there, |
| 104 | Wanitwa Mos | "Uthando" | single | met employees through musicians and vice versa, |
| 105 | Igqhirha Lomculo | "Amanyange" | single | and for a while the unassuming back door to the Echo Nest's rustic offices was next to Linda's house, |
| 106 | Ofeleba | "Singomaf' Avuke" | Singomaf'avuke | so I'd see her watering plants or, I imagine, counseling garden gnomes as I arrived for a day of trying to express jubilation in fractions. |
| 107 | Mabhlukwe | "sgiya ngengoma" | single | Linda's book is an intentional eulogy, Justine's album sadly forced into that role despite its own ambitions. |
| 108 | Estiva | "Meant To Be" | Infinita | Sometimes we outlive our joys and get to think about what they meant to us. |
| 109 | Alexander Popov | "Fantasy" | Fantasy +1 | Sometimes in medias res is how it ends, not how it begins. |
| 110 | BT | "k-means clustering - Producer's Cut" | k-means clustering 2 | Signal lights work both ways, shining from the unresolved edges of our plans, |
| 111 | Dronny Darko | "Sealed and Wired" | Dronny Darko & Red Fog | our determination leaking out as radiance through mirrors and shards of bright glass, |
| 112 | Reverorum ib Malacht | "Ps 141 (Lord, I cry out to You … Let my prayer be set before You as incense)" | Kyrie Eleison | betraying our loneliness, but also revealing our position, |
| 113 | Tenhi | "Aina sininen aina" | Valkama | summoning help, |
| 114 | Christine and the Queens | "Big eye" | PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE | refusing help, refusing despair, |
| 115 | Justine and the Unclean | "Sweet Denial" | The Signal Light | refusing to let anything hopeful ever really end. |