| 1 | Marnie Stern | "Working Memory" | The Comeback Kid | Some of our methods for joy operate by embracing chaos |
| 2 | Toehider | "Horse Song" | Horse EP 4 | with a combination of love and judo, |
| 3 | Inculter | "Morbid Origin" | single | turning it through leverage and core strength |
| 4 | Insomnium | "Flowers of the Night" | Songs Of The Dusk - EP 3 | and a tongue in its ear |
| 5 | ANGRA | "Dead Man On Display" | Cycles Of Pain | so that it ends up facing towards something more alluring, |
| 6 | Eluria | "¿Dónde Van?" | Detrás de la Cerradura | and then nudging it in the direction it now wants to go. |
| 7 | Dominic Gebhardt | "Witches Of Eldrathia" | Witches Of Eldrathia 5 | I say "some", but maybe my definition of joy is itself tangled in chaos, |
| 8 | Deep Sun | "Eternal Love" | single | and movements away from the edge are transient needs for something else, |
| 9 | Liliumdust | "Midnight" | single | comfort or a safe reference state we can use to calibrate every other feeling. |
| 10 | Shattered Vessels | "In Silence" | single | I suspect that our emotional polarities betray themselves in our supposedly stolid politics, too, |
| 11 | Serenity | "Sun of Justice" | Nemesis AD | and thus that the inward-facing movements towards nationalism and tribalism and walled stasis |
| 12 | Delta | "At Last" | single | are expressions of the same woundedness as staging increasingly complicated basement listening rooms |
| 13 | The Last Martyr | "Burn It Down" | single | in order to listen to the same Steely Dan albums in fractally greater fidelity. |
| 14 | Koburg | "Silent Voices" | single | The new Marnie Stern songs are vastly detailed, but there's a kind of detail that invites you to dream of stopping time |
| 15 | NOVELISTS | "Prisoner" | Prisoner +1 | in order to wander among suspended soundstages marveling at the placement of each instrument, |
| 16 | Crashing Atlas | "Fake It With Me" | single | and there's a kind that wants to show you that you can be blastingly displaced |
| 17 | Stoned Mary | "PUSH" | single | by the concerted effort of tiny notes and gestures. |
| 18 | Spiritbox | "Too Close / Too Late" | The Fear of Fear | Because I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, |
| 19 | TRiDENT | "twinkle" | single | there's a part of me that insists on trying to reframe every set of potential moral binaries |
| 20 | She is Legend | "How's everything" | single | into a new real-world Alignment grid. |
| 21 | RAISE A SUILEN | "STRAY CERBERUS" | REVELATION 5 | Good/Neutral/Evil, I realized while I was still very young, |
| 22 | Mada Mitakoto no Nai Sekai | "マーシャル・マキシマイザー feat.松下" | EMOTiONS 6 | is not a taxonomy of human convictions, |
| 23 | capo2 | "kuchiguse" | single | but an explanation of subjective relativism. |
| 24 | AFTER SQUALL | "スターゲイザー" | single | A single human, in isolation, cannot be good or evil. |
| 25 | ULTRA | "Table" | 到底及ばない | Villainry exists only by reference to heroism, |
| 26 | NEMOPHILA | "(Sic)" | single | and this enmity is usually invertible. |
| 27 | Apartamentos Acapulco | "Ya No Tengo Palabras" | single | The whole point of D&D, of course, was to role-play heroism, |
| 28 | K!ngdom | "Contando Estrellas" | single | and thus Good vs Evil was essentially a normative translation of |
| 29 | Kiko y Shara | "Todo Si Es Contigo" | single | protagonism vs antagonism. |
| 30 | mafalda cardenal | "solo se que no se que" | single | The other D&D alignment axis, Lawful vs Chaotic, is closer to psychologic than moral, |
| 31 | G.E.M. | "11" | single | but conflates, I think, two real axes of orientation: |
| 32 | iskwē | "Part Two" | single | collective vs individual |
| 33 | Tanxugueiras | "As que tiñan que estar" | single | and reductive vs expansive. |
| 34 | Moody Joody | "Velvet Connection" | single | The pathological extremes of the grid of these two are |
| 35 | Samantha Stone | "Reckless" | single | fascism (collective and reductive), |
| 36 | Julia Wolf | "Burning House" | Burning House +1 | discompassionate libertarianism (individual and reductive), |
| 37 | Brittany Ray | "Death of Her" | single | oppressive communism (collective and expansive) |
| 38 | Oscar the Wild | "Multicolour" | single | and neoliberal consumerism (individual and expansive). |
| 39 | Bronnie | "Drown In Your Misery" | Drown In Your Misery 6 | But as with the original grid, one of the axes is a lot freer than the other, |
| 40 | Kate Clover | "No More Romance" | single | or at least for me to frame this as an alignment grid would be only half ingenuous, |
| 41 | Career Woman | "No Alibi" | single | because I do believe in the collective/individual axis as a categorical continuum that doesn't have a moral gradient, |
| 42 | TORRES | "I got the fear" | I got the fear +1 | but reductive/expansive is ultimately a thinly disguised rewrite of fear/joy. |
| 43 | IAN SWEET | "Bloody Knees" | SUCKER | One of these is a degree of freedom, the other is a moral imperative phrased to almost conceal the implied judgment. |
| 44 | Dessie Magee | "Welcome Ghosts" | Welcome Ghosts +3 | Of course I don't believe that you have to listen to music the way I do, |
| 45 | CALI JEWLS | "I'm Not Leaving" | single | in constant headlong terror of what I haven't heard, |
| 46 | Autoheart | "Too Polite To Fight" | single | trying to love every amazing thing for ten scattered minutes |
| 47 | The Young Hearts | "Hit The Ground Running" | Hit The Ground Running 5 | in a dizzy, restless spiral into next week, |
| 48 | Bad Suns | "Living Or Dying" | Living Or Dying +2 | but it's useless to pretend that my support for your right to hole up with tube preamps and Pretzel Logic |
| 49 | Volunteer | "Feels Like Home" | single | means I think you're making the world better that way. |
| 50 | Cloud House | "Photographs" | Still Here | It only means that I think we can make the future better without requiring everybody to constantly help. |
| 51 | 408 | "Remember Her Like That" | Remember Her Like That +1 | That's what I mean: I'm a collectivist, but I tolerate individualism in the spirit of expansiveness; |
| 52 | Minority 905 | "Winter Blues" | single | but it doesn't work the other way. |
| 53 | Youth Fountain | "Requiem" | Together In Lonesome | It would make no sense to say that I'm an expansivist who tolerates reductivism in the spirit of collectivism. |
| 54 | リスキーシフト | "MUSIC" | single | Joy is not my personal choice among equilegitimate options, |
| 55 | reGretGirl | "Bubbles" | Confession e.p. 5 | it's my best understanding of our human purpose. |
| 56 | All is Well | "Trying is Everything feat. Yasu" | single | I will not try to cheat you out of your solitude or your friends, |
| 57 | Silhouette from the Skylit | "Invitation to Anew" | single | but I think we should be, with most of our collective and individual programs, |
| 58 | Noan | "Zero" | single | obsessively intent on understanding how to systemically deprive you of your fear. |
| 59 | Wrest | "Little Star" | single | Our marshals will come for your sadness. |
| 60 | There Will Be Fireworks | "Smoke Machines (Summer Moon)" | Summer Moon | They gather quietly at your door, |
| 61 | SPECTRES | "The Old Regime" | single | unarmed but morally authorized. |
| 62 | Palm Ghosts | "Tilt" | single | When you let them in, they will search for pain in your secret hiding places, |
| 63 | DECEITS | "Serenity (Blows The Wind)" | If There's No Heaven... | but what they find, they will carry away gently in their arms. |
| 64 | Sixth June | "Collapse" | single | Morale is improved by bearings; |
| 65 | Unprocessed | "Glass" | single | misery, like any other contagion, cannot be mitigated by tolerance. |
| 66 | Boris | "om strutsar" | single | Our grandest adventures involve travel to edges, |
| 67 | SATÂNICOS | "Remphan Rites" | single | but not in order to hack at unprotected frayedness in a region with looser sword regulations. |
| 68 | Lovecrose | "Rossz utakon" | Végtelen mint az óceán | The dungeons in D&D are convenient fabrications |
| 69 | Axioma | "Spectre in the Code" | Primal Descent 4 | of environments free of moral complexity, |
| 70 | Voutsa | "Nyrkkisääntö" | single | but the dragons are a reminder that sometimes our imagination becomes real. |
| 71 | Subway To Sally | "Eisheilige Nacht" | single | Or, more precisely: that our imagination is the primary constraint on what we believe could become real. |
| 72 | Seventh Crystal | "Infinity" | Infinity 5 | We place dragons in the empty spaces in our incomplete maps, |
| 73 | Overland | "One Touch" | S.I.X | of the future as much as the ocean, |
| 74 | Jim Peterik And World Stage | "Dangerous Combination (feat. Kevin Cronin & REO Speedwagon)" | single | to acknowledge the power we invest in the unknown by fearing it. |
| 75 | Echo Deep | "Nami (feat. Takue SBT)" | single | But of course we also line their conjectural lairs with treasure. |
| 76 | Nobuhle | "Ng'funa Wena" | single | Maybe, when we get there, any there, there will be monsters to fight, |
| 77 | Sun-El Musician | "Amandla" | single | and gleaming riches for the victors. |
| 78 | Mthandazo Gatya | "KUYALUNGA" | single | But maybe there will just be another island, |
| 79 | Son of Africa | "Chwayita(Queen Charisma)Siphiva-Nkosi sikelela" | single | too intent on its own debates and disquisitions to have come looking for us first. |
| 80 | QHUBINJA | "DUDU EMNDENINI" | DUDU EMNDENINI +1 | Maybe its secret people will come down to their shore with spears, |
| 81 | Cevuzile | "Wangishela Ngiziphuzela" | Ngikhumulela Wenawedwa | annoyed by the music from our dancing ships. |
| 82 | Ithole leNdidane | "Isilima sendoda" | Umnyamanambana | Maybe, instead of telling them new rules we expect them to impose on themselves, |
| 83 | Sminofu | "AYAWAHLANGABEZA" | Uber Driver | we will wrap them in our arms |
| 84 | Thokozani Langa | "UXAM' UXAKEKILE" | single | and sing them our songs, or what our songs become in this new embrace. |
| 85 | Majozi | "Keep It Open" | A Great Exchange | Tongues, ears, the frayed edges of chaos woven into a few more yards of bright pattern. |
| 86 | There Will Be Fireworks | "So Long, Sundown" | Summer Moon | And then, by listening in turn, we do not take away their songs, we release them. |
| 87 | Serenity | "Crowned by an Angel" | Nemesis AD | We release ourselves from being the people who had never heard them yet, |
| 88 | RAISE A SUILEN | "Just Awake - Cover" | CORUSCATE -DNA- 5 | and thus from a few more old shreds of fear and loathing. |
| 89 | Sunrise Skater Kids | "Misery Business - Japanese Version" | Misery Business 2 | We release our dreams from hoping we never have to leave home, never have to come here, never have to hear this. |