1. Brett Weinstein – ‘Realm’

For a while now Brett Weinstein has been cutting ‘Trilogy’ ledge lines through Chicago’s little-heralded plazas, and cracking through its industrial craters and dark alleys, but the increasingly well-crafted ‘Deep Dish’ flicks have packaged up his nighttime prowling with a doom and gloom well matched to one of skating’s most-avoided cities. In ‘Realm,’ their best one so far, Brett Weinstein guns through tricks with the spry urgency of ‘Wonderful, Horrible’ era PJ Ladd, like on the line with the 50-50 backside 180, and generally busts out in all directions — up stairs, down them, fakie manualing around corners and rattling up loading docks. And when the confounding prospect of launching out of a concave fountain to grind a round planter isn’t enough, he incorporates Zubaz. The dude does not slow down; check for him in Theories’ Chicago clip and Deep Dish’s joint vid with Snack.

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2. Miles Silvas – ‘Numbers Edition 3’

Realistically, which is to say in the realm of reality, track pants movement-pusher Miles Silvas made this list, inconsequential as it is, with just the knee drop after the switch frontside bluntslide in this part. The depth of his talent and taste though means he delivers another fulsome video part of his uncommonly singular style and near-peerless choice in tricks — in just the first minute here he’s got a backside bigspin the hard way over a handrail, a backside noseblunt at a tough-to-recommend speed, and Cam’ron. Nobody really is landing tricks like this dude (see: the hubba kickflip backside tailside roll-away, or after the switch backside heelflip over the bar) and there’s not so many who measure up when it comes to mind-bending backside tailslides in general, variations on which this part is sort of built around. Quibbling is restricted to how Miles Silvas seems to have toned down his outfits from the LRG pattern wars.

3. Tiago Lemos – ‘The DC Promo’

Sometimes it’s tough to root for a superhero, but damn if Tiago Lemos doesn’t continually force the rest of us, from pros to parking lot shove-iting weekend warrior bros, to redream what’s possible with some urethane, metal and pressed wood. He was quiet for a few months there but between flying a head-high nollie backside heelflip off a Philadelphia hip and passing Fort Miley’s high bar test in ‘The DC Promo,’ and a clinic on ledges that require a stepstool for civilians to mount in his Independent part after that, Tiago Lemos probably performed more of the craziest tricks released this year than anybody else, not seeming to stress it much in the process. The DC ‘Promo’ reset has him jumping on rails and mashing through pedestrians to defy SF Pier skatestoppers in shocking new ways, to a sunny Sunday-afternoon type of number that a decade ago might’ve soundtracked a Transworld part. People talk about Tiago Lemos’ jean shorts and switch mongo in the sense of ’90s revivalism but his skating increasingly seems like it’s from a whole other planet, and the foot-off switch backside tailslide at the Mission three-up three-down shows he’s on-trend anyways with all these ridiculous foot-off landings.

4. Chewy Cannon – ‘Palasonic’

It takes balls to soundtrack your video part to a bouncy PM Dawn song, and more so when you’re not even the first to use it. Chewy Cannon ricochets into Palace’s inaugural full-length with caution to the wind, as is his custom, but beyond the expected staccato wallie 180s, nollie 360s and switch frontside boardslides, he went in after a few years of relatively rote output. Shit like the backside 50-50 hop-up to another backside 50-50 and the fakie backside 50-50 to switch manual could be yanked from many of-the-moment videos, though probably not with such panache — the switch backside nosegrind at South Bank should be hung in a museum — but Chewy Cannon digs deeper this time out, pulling out stunts like the switch backside noseblunt and repeated spaghetti-man spins on the frontside noseslide, dredging up some of the gully tech he plied in the Blueprint days.

5. Oskar Rozenberg – ‘Elite Squad’

Yung ‘Oski’ came as the transition-frying secret weapon last year in Polar’s ‘I Like It Here Inside My Mind,’ and his capacity to brutalize ramps and bowls and lesser beings in general only grew this year as he took his all-the-way-up approach to the European contest circuit, the Brooklyn Banks, China and various points in between. In return for a monochromatic sneaker with a semi see-thru sole, Oksar Rozenberg gave to Nike nearly five minutes of high-definition heaters, careening off walls, backside 180ing out of frontside smith grinds, impossibly charging a high bar out of vert, and doing doubles with Hjalte Halberg. That reservoir kickflip is perfect in every way.

6. Dylan Sourbeer – ‘Sabotage 5’

Putting up two parts for each of the last two ‘Sabotage’ releases, and several before that, Dylan Sourbeer has maybe drawn more tricks out of Love Park’s now-mothballed granite blocks than anybody else, and their consistent quality gives hope for seasons to come across the way at Philadelphia’s Municipal plaza. It was already happening as Ryan Higgins and Brian Panebianco made ‘Sabotage 5,’ with Dylan Sourbeer’s ample footage largely split between Love, Muni and deconstructed Love — backside noseblunting the entire Muni bench easily ranks up there with his backside nosegrind flip out on the long out-ledge at Love, and his two-hitter line on the benches with the shirt in hand will be remembered long after our computer systems gain sentience and begin optimizing efficiency by minimizing human involvement and interference. The lines and tricks seem to pour out of this dude and you could watch it all day. Perhaps in some fashion, forcing these dudes out of Love Park will wind up opening another new Philly chapter.

7. Mike Arnold – ‘Lloyds’

Like a console savant whose muscle memory and Mountain Dew intake fuse to create an equilibrium capable of mastering a video game down to each pixel, so did erstwhile Skateboard Cafe-goer Mike Arnold sing a poem of knowledge and devotion to Bristol’s Lloyds Amphitheatre, a waterfall of blocks and stairs that functions like a Rubik’s Cube in Mike Arnold’s scabby hands. Lloyds offers comparatively less to work with than some others in a recent spate of one-spot parts, but Mike Arnold puts his imagination to work, screeching and switch kickflip 360ing across steps, clamoring straight up the blocks both regular and switch, banging on trash cans (that wallie ender) and at least once, heaving himself into the drink.

8. Cole Wilson – ‘Oddity’

A new crop of handrail jockeys is busily refining what this fall’s podcast braintrust termed a ‘calculated’ approach to locking onto angled bars, producing monstrosities such as Riley Hawk’s Shep Dawgs curvatures and Jamie Foy’s much-discussed 50-50 body varial 50-50. In terms of sheer risk tolerance and poor judgment, few can match Ketucky’s Cole Wilson, who in this year’s Foundation vid — one of those unfortunate and increasingly common cases of a worthy full-length picked up and discarded days later — seemed to purposely pick the hairiest and hoariest rails on offer across the American underbelly. Many of his tricks defy comprehension and good sense, justifying double and sometimes triple angles as he grinds up and through multiple kinks, nosegrinds down some more, and straps in for a maximum-turbulence ride down some particularly poorly maintained iron toward the end. Cole Wilson also pushes forward the handrail 50-50 gap to 50-50, which once eluded Powell Peralta gap-tamer Frankie Hill, boated by Silas Baxter Neal in Transworld’s Perpetual Motion, bringing it to a couple round bars.

9. John Shanahan – ‘Mean Streets’

Half the fun in John Shanahan’s increasingly sick video parts is analyzing, placing and appreciating the attention to detail in his sometimes fairly ludicrous outfits, which show an hands-onness maybe not seen since Ali Boulala, Jim Greco and Dustin Dollin were trolling thrift stores for vintage leathers. John Shanahan’s curatorial efforts extend to his tricks and spots too, constructing something greater than the sum of several very good parts over the last couple years. He’s polished his 360 flip over the can, of course, and his backside nosegrind pop-outs and switch k-grinds, but in his VX part for LurkNYC he puts himself out there a little but more with a straight-up hubba noseslide, goes big out of a bank and shows some deference to post-2000 trend gyrations when he hippy jumps away from an otherwise textbook noseblunt.

10. Joey Guevara – ‘Pyramid of the Sun’

‘Right to Exist’ was last year the title of a Santa Cruz video, amusingly suggesting a chip on the shoulder of a decades-deep stalwart once more having to assert itself amid a barrage of smaller, hipper upstarts. The title could just as easily apply to Alien Workshop, whose untimely implosion beneath overleveraged corporate bloat and fairly rapid resurrection — sans prior teamriders — brought on any number of reprisals and bad feeling. Three years down the line, it feels like Mike Hill has reestablished a footing with Yaje Popson, Frankie Spears, Brandon Nguyen and Joey Guevara — this last with the velvet-soled feet and affinity for Detroit’s crumbling foundations. His going-pro part this year, which could’ve been ported straight out of ‘Inhabitants,’ trades in mainly basic ingredients that Joey Guevara can craft into uncommonly satisfying-to-watch tricks — the frontside tailslide shove-it, the nollie backside 180, the fakie shove-it. It’s maybe a little bit long but gets over on the little touches, like the quick switch 180 up the step and the mild surf action following the bar-hop backside 180.