1. Matt Militano — ‘Vanish’

Whether or not the 5Boro hookup proves as lucrative and titillating as Habitat flow or the pizza delivery game remains to be seen, but the late-arriving development if nothing else suggests that intergalactic powers are beginning to exercise their might more responsibly with regard to the fate of lanky and laconic Matt Militano, whose tricks seem only to sharpen as potential sponsors dither, seasons change and the expanding universe challenges mathematicians to keep up. Zach Sayles’ excellent ‘Vanish’ vid teed up the final ’10s summertime with Matt Militano banging on cellar doors, fully wrapping impossibles and bending physics in such a way as to wallie out of a nose manual, in time with ‘Twin Peaks’ bass plucking. All his tricks are gems here — he shove-its the hard way off a smith grind in the middle of a round bar, takes a backside 180 nosegrind back to regular on Philadelphia’s big red blocks, he grinds the middle of a metal fence — and his song has a bassoon.

2. Korahn Gayle – ‘Cover Version’

Dan Magee and Kevin Parrott’s Blips full-length ‘Cover Version’ this year came as a passion project ostensibly in tribute to seminal clips and tricks from decades past, but read like a clinic in how to film, construct and sequence a top-shelf full length with skating to match, all the requisite London bustle and grit in sharp relief. Quiet handstyler Korahn Gayle’s part is the best in it, gifted with screwface-inducing one-off ledge tricks such as the fakie backside tailslide flip out and the nollie heelflip backside noseblunt up the angled South Bank block, switch kickflip backside tailsliding Blueprint’s favourite gap to ledge, shocking and stoking the sidewalk elderly. It’s the type of video part that needs only one song to cover all the bases, the blocks and the big stuff, the mean backside drift on the London Bridge stack fakie heelflip to the switch wallride to frontside crooked grind a crack in the wall.

3. Mark Suciu — ‘Verso’

Does Mark Suciu need an editor? After four video parts this year totaling about 22.5 minutes of footage — last week he said he’d originally planned to do six — one risks growing numbed to further midsized hubba bluntslides, bump-to-bar kickflips, bigspins out. Award season aside, there can be no doubt that Mark Suciu is among the most gifted ever to put sole to grip, but his machinelike footage zone-flooding risks turning the exercise into a slog all around, Mark Suciu included, as per his recent Chrome Ball entry. His best stuff comes when he’s really reaching, like the Municipal Plaza line in ‘Search the Horizon,’ his clips involving the Fred Gall rail at Love Park, and this year’s ‘Verso’ opus,* culminating in its matched sets of tricks stacked against one another like a color-coded bookshelf, except with previously unseen ledge combos. Maybe sheer volume cannot win Mark Suciu Skater of the Year — maybe he never will be ‘Thrasher enough,’ even as the mag elevates self-care and underrepresented groups — but as skating sorts itself into ever-more specialized niches it’s bracing to watch a fleetfooted tech master huck at thunder gaps and big rails to see if he can, and ponder what new directions remain as far as ledge wizardry. ‘Verso’ is too long, of course, but it also is a part you can get lost in and savor new wrinkles, like the nighttime line in Milan, Grant’s Tomb ollie flex, the ride out on the varial heelflip.

*no magnum

4. Gustav Tønnesen — ‘Reverb’

The easygoing freedom radiating off Gustav Tønnesen’s otherworldly tricks arises partly from his and Sour’s congenial, blissful separate-ness from the California pro-circuit rat race. He generally seems unconcerned, and it’s probably a contributor to rather than detractor from Sour’s assorted successes and achievements since the Sweet split. The askew ‘spot’ choosings and bottomless skill reservoir regularly exhibited in the ‘Sour Solution’ entires can leave one wondering what a Gustav Tønnesen part could look like given the ‘big-budget’ treatment and an indulgence toward more-standard video part trick choices, and Adidas’ late-arriving ‘Reverb’ vid offers one version — there’s a nollie 270 fronside noseslide into a bank, a switch crooked grind in a line, a switch hardflip over a gap, all typically feather-light and unhurried, but it’s not long before he’s wallriding out of a backside noseblunt slide and finding all types of things to do with a corrugated metal vent thing. Inevitably, he is drawn to Max Palmer’s angle-ironed cage-bank and the Rector Street bench’s final hours before boosting a switch kickflip off a few angled bricks and up a four-foot euro gap, as it was foretold. An actual magician.

5. Nik Stain — ‘Skate Clip’

Whether or not the planet will receive a ‘definitive’ Nik Stain video part maybe is not the right question; there are those who would pound their fists and tear their hair and pronounce that it was already in ‘Bruns’ while others may suggest that there shouldn’t be one, requiring questers to sift 917, Supreme and assorted Jersey video files for a fleeting and piecemeal picture of the truth. Johnny Wilson’s springtime Vimeo freshener hit closer than anything else for a while, the elbows-out backside smith grinds and backside tailslides seared further into the permanent record as critical reference points for a moorless age. Nik Stain gives himself to the purpose, scorpioning across water and asphalt, barreling over rails and double sets and painting urethane swipes across the Manhattan marble, until the next one.

6. Tristan Funkhouser — ‘Baker 4’

Baker’s generational handoff over the course of its seven-year weekend since ‘Bake and Destroy’ has gone better than a lot of its old-guard board brand contemporaries, aided by the company’s more malleable and freewheeling character and recent, forceful returns of formerly wandering veterans like Kevin Long and Sammy Baca, who really came out of the wilderness to put a calf-socked Chuck onto 2019. As far as distilling Baker’s ethos for the Ross-shopping set, covering the late-’10s trick spectrum and general get-in-the-vanness, Tristan Funkhouser’s ‘Baker 4’ rave-up fired on all cylinders, combining a speedball crouch and the type of wild lower-body contortions that Baker spirit animal Ali Boulala shimmied across an alcohol-drenched floor in an earlier installment (see: pyramid ledge, backside smith frontside shove-it out). This is for sure the yung T-Funk’s best and most-developed skating to date, between shit like the wallride shove-its, the overpass 5-0 rollercoaser and the stomach-churning float after the last 50-50, but the screaming ollie out to frontside wallride — teed up by his friends hollering at gapers, a GX bomb while the crew loses their minds, and needle-thread through what looks like a TV film unit on lunch break — is basically a Baker video all by itself.

7. Ronnie Sandoval — ‘Take It Back’

The grievous-injury-as-part-opener has held fast through another decade, mayhap serving some drama-injector function, or at least stating a particular skater’s price of admission for the clips to come, even if in the more-general sense of skate video function it rarely contributes to the basic chore of firing up the viewer. Ronnie Sandoval’s life after kneecap shattering, as presented in the ensuing five minutos of Vans’ slow-burning ‘Take it Back’ and uploaded in an August heatwave’s sweaty grip, does pitch in. Between screaming pumps through transitions he’s generally either out to test his recently refurbished patella or keep it as far away from the coping as possible, heavily tweaking inverts and placing his hands and feet in all types of rarely recommended places, ranging from over-vert bowl sections to a dinosaur face. For an imperatively tilted video, Ronnie Sandoval’s part makes its own arguments, such as not writing off future American involvement with Oski’s monstrous vert wall, and for beautifully executed filming, in an era when hyper stylization steadily gnaws at visual comprehension of the actual trick.

8. Bobby Worrest – ‘Welcome to Venture’

After the late-00s ATV movement helped push AntiHero, Spitfire, Indy and Thrasher to the top of the stack, it probably was inevitable that the merciless and ever-turning ‘wheel of skate trends’ would revolve from ‘fight’ to ‘switch,’ and Venture’s 2019 rebirth maybe was foretold by the same stylistic lodestar that guided swishy pants’ replacement of stretch denim. Nabbing East Coast ledge journeyman Bobby Worrest marked Venture’s re-arrival this year, as well as a recent peak among a string of video part gems he’s continued pumping out while traversing certain hemispheres and defying age’s vagaries. There is a certain torch long carried by Dennis Busenitz on which Bobby Worrest seems to have his own grip and feel, holding court first in southeast Asian public spaces where he cracks over artisanal bridges and slaloms past mopeds, and eventually/inevitably back in his beloved Pulaski park, working all corners and exhorting his filmers to keep up — honk if you turn up the volume for ‘up the three’ on repeat watches. His hat stays backwards, the beard stays on, the noseslide 270 line is all-time and he still is putting notches on the big white wall.

9. Heitor Da Silva – ‘Adidas Skateboarding Presents’

Olympic handlers this year plotted 2020 precious-metaling strategies, Mark Suciu translated ledge combos into matching syllables, and trophy-hunting hillbombers gritted their teeth and hung on; others gathered valuable items or built up experience points. Palace it kid Heitor Da Silva seemed to spend his year swerving in good jeans and savoring an achingly ’90s switch frontside flip. His skating’s an easy breeze on a hot afternoon, even hucking out of a backside tailslide, he never seems to be sweating stuff much, including a standalone intro vid for big-two sneaker supplier Adidas. It’s in the push before the bank-to-bank ollie and the consolation-prize kick-out wallride, the powerslide down the bank almost as good as the gap switch heelflip preceding it, daring even the most grimly stair-counting contest-run programmer not to grin.

10. Dane Barker – ‘Welcome to Converse CONS’

Among the many and varied appeals of Quasi’s newly signed crust-grating contraption Dane Barker is the rough alchemy mingling his spindly and focused poise with the brutal lacerations he womps upon various spots, in the case of this Cons vid certain So Cal cuts, elsewhere Virginia’s wilds and an awfully good heater in downtown Chicago. The ollie up and then out to binride in this vid and the staircase noseblunt slide are exacto-precise, the bannister transfer and years-in-the-waiting bar hop to pipe smacker at the New Spot are twofisted machete swipes; his ride-on 50-50 to legitimately popped ollie out maybe the most vertigo-inducing clip since Clint Walker’s stories-up bailed nollie heelflip.