Snowboarding

The next time you're ready to shred the slopes like Shaun White, you might want to blast the adrenaline shots and brief breathers in our Snowboarding Essentials. While "Alive & Amplified," "Mountain Song," "Bad Reputation," and "The Rat" are as subtle as a sudden face plant, we've also included songs that are as sublime as the first time you hit the bottom of a hill without falling, from the heavenly haze and spare beats of "We Own the Sky" to the shimmering synths and gorgeous harmonies of "My Girls."

Not to be outdone or overlooked is our Next Steps, which hops across genres like a rider clearing a row of rails.

Aside from a few obvious choices — the pedal-pushing power chords of "Misfit Love," the widescreen thrash metal of "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and the heavy-duty hardcore of "Don't Bother Me" — our Snowboarding Essentials is full of killer leftfield cuts. We're talking prickly dashes of disco-punk ("Heart of Hearts"), slope-ready surf guitars ("Love In A Trashcan"), heady hip-hop ("Rising Down"), and a Thom Yorke appearance that's chillier than a coat-free afternoon in the Alps ("Rabbit In Your Headlights").

And just when you think our playlist kinda makes sense, we've got some Deep Cuts that could rip the rivets right off your board.

More than just a side-project song from the Animal Collective camp, "Comfy In Nautica" sounds like it was recorded on top of Mount Everest. No wonder why it's in the middle of our soundtrack devoted to skyscraping freestyle jumps and double backflips — a schizophrenic sampling of icy electro-pop ("Heartbeats," "A Cause Des Garçons"), raucous indie rock ("Ill Placed Trust," "Jerk It Out"), and pure X Games anthems from the punk ("Scott Farcas Takes It On the Chin," "Superman") and melodic metal ("The Last Effort," "Stormy High") side of things.

Hey, snowboarding star: think you're ready to finally land the "double backflip backside 180" you saw on a Winter Games clip last week? Or, at the very least, something other than an Ollie and a wicked McTwist or two? Well then, you're gonna need a kick in the snow pants. And what better way to do that than to pop in a pair of earbuds and listen to half-pipe hooks (Rise Against, AFI, Anti-Flag), snow-dusted synths (Broken Spindles, Ming & Ping, MGMT), brittle drum breaks (Swollen Members, the Cool Kids, Wu-Tang Clan), and groove-locked guitars (Bloc Party, Led Zeppelin, the Sword). Now, if only you could get a nickname as great as "The Flying Tomato" . . .