The Beatles, 1967
The idea of summer albums – of communal listening – has changed with the advent of the internet. Every sonic niche is now catered for. But now and again, big releases drop like bombshells and glue us all together again. One record invented the summer album: Sgt Pepper’s. Released in June 1967, it spent 22 weeks at No 1 and reintroduced the Fabs as whimsical experimentalists, setting tongues wagging and funny cigarettes sparking everywhere. Influenced by India and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, it also found the Beatles harking back to the era of brass bands. The Summer of Love's counter-cultural clarion rings loud and clear in She’s Leaving Home and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. Legend has it that, pre-release, the Beatles went round to Mama Cass’s house and played it with the windows open late into the night. Not a single neighbour complained Photograph: PA
Kyuss, 1992
The heat of the sun isn’t just an excuse to fire up a barbecue. It can be a pitiless thing. The Cure’s Killing an Arab might mark the moment in Albert Camus’s L’étranger where his sun-maddened protagonist kills a man on an Algerian beach, but SoCal stoner rock is another iteration of how heat actually packs weight. Long before Josh Homme was playing solo acoustic gigs for James Lavelle’s Meltdown festival, he was the guitarist in Kyuss, the genre pioneers who made this obscure but influential album. Blues for the Red Sun combines the heaviosity of blues metal with the trippiness of the desert at night and the groove and swing that would go on to characterise Homme’s next band, Queens of the Stone Age Photograph: PR
The Beach Boys, 1974
No discussion of hot weather pursuits can be complete without mention of the Beach Boys, hymners nonpareil of the Californian early 60s – arguably the most safe, prosperous and leisured time humanity has ever enjoyed. Released in summer 1974, the songs on this compilation pre-date Pet Sounds and provide more vitamin D than any other album before or since. Ostensibly about driving open-topped cars down to the beach to surf, Brian Wilson’s harmonic paeans to suburban teenage life pack in the pain of loneliness too. A compilation designed to reboot the Beach Boys’ flagging early-70s reputations, Endless Summer was more Mike Love’s baby than Wilson’s – a hard-nosed act that subsequent generations, miles from the surf, can only be thankful for Photograph: Redferns/Getty
Lily Allen, 2006
There are umpteen summer albums about London. But this one – Lily Allen’s excellent debut album from 2006 – nails the sub-genre beautifully. These are tales about being young and female in a capital full of chancers and sleazebags, told with an offbeat, bolshy flounce, all dropped Ts and references to “the filth”. Breezy and hard-hitting at the same time, the gentle undercurrents of ska and reggae combine with the seasonal aroma of late-night kebab shop and ozone all over the album’s deeper tracks, as well as the more famous singles (LDN, Smile). And, ahem, the Observer's Music Monthly sort of discovered her. How long ago it all seems now Photograph: PR
Meat Loaf, 1977
Most big cheesy rock records make a hell of a lot more sense with added UVA and UVB. Meat Loaf’s deathless Bat Out of Hell is an American rock opera set at a very different beach from Brian Wilson’s, one where the heat makes everyone horny and you might promise anything to get a shag. “It was a hot summer night and the beach was burning, there was fog crawling over the sand,” begins You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth. By the end, Meat Loaf’s (and lyricist Jim Steinman’s) protagonist is literally praying for the apocalypse to get out of this summer-fling-gone-wrong. Virginities are lost in cars. Vehicles crash. It’s totally epic Photograph: PR
Eric B and Rakim, 1987
Hip-hop wasn’t an albums genre at first. But by 1987, New York’s best invention had matured into one, and Eric B and Rakim’s first album is a classic of the golden age of hip-hop, before gangsta rap came along and harshed everyone’s mellow. Not that Paid in Full isn’t full of attitude – it is. “I hold the microphone like a grudge,” drawls Rakim, one of hip-hop’s most effortlessly authoritative voices. Released in July, those without a set of turntables could just put this record on and hear everything hip-hop had to offer: instrumentals full of dextrous scratching and early sampling, a soupçon of jazz and pin-sharp wordplay. Another of Rakim’s phrases – “pump up the volume” – would go on to be sampled by MARRS and soundtrack the same summer in a totally different context Photograph: PR
Spiritualized 1992
“Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to” may have been the motto of Jason Pierce’s previous band, Spacemen 3 (and, indeed, the unofficial credo of many a summer record). But it still applied to the debut album by Pierce’s most famous outfit, Spiritualized – a record at once bucolically addled and sonically glacial, in which psychedelia (the genre of summer, bar none) dovetails into minimalist, motorik drone-pop. It might have been released in March, but by the end of summer 1992 it felt like it had always existed, and sounded as mind-altering out of doors as it did in. Arguably never equalled by Pierce, its natural successor in head-nodding intensity is Brightblack Morning Light’s 2008 album Motion to Rejoin Photograph: Wendy Redfern/Redferns
Various Artists (Soul Jazz), 1960-75
Compiled by boutique UK specialists Soul Jazz, these three volumes of R&B, soul, funk, jazz and other genre-transcending marvels from New Orleans’s yesteryear are the biggest blast you could ask for – a sticky summer night’s festivities alchemised into soundwaves that command you to dance. There is not a duff track here. Combining famous names (Allen Toussaint, the Meters) with rarities, these three compilations are 100% guaranteed to part clouds, chill beers and set the world to rights, speaking of universal human emotions with the sass, feathers and syncopation peculiar to the Crescent City Photograph: PR
Os Mutantes 1968
If the name of the genre – Tropicália – weren’t enough to get you fanning yourself, the sound of this artefact from the Brazilian 60s can’t help but chime with the rising mercury and summer’s expanded horizons. Once again, psychedelia is at the foundation of this spirited record. But here, on their debut, Os Mutantes (the Mutants) combine a hot-climate reading of western pop with specifically Brazilian forms. The record was fearlessly political too, challenging both social mores and the military junta (Panis et Circensis, the opening track, translates as Bread and Circuses). American rock musicians started namechecking Os Mutantes in the 90s, leading to a widespread reappraisal – and Anglophones trying to sing along in Portuguese Photograph: PR
Lauryn Hill 1998
Hip-hop again, pop-reggae again, except channelled through erstwhile Fugee Lauryn Hill, already a star when she controversially wrote, recorded and produced her own solo album. The first single from Hill’s celebrated outing, the super-summery girl anthem Doo Wop (That Thing), came out in July 1998, setting the scene for one of the most righteous, most ubiquitous summer records ever; Miseducation itself followed in August. It spoke of New York block parties, of Hill’s time recording in Kingston with Rohan Marley, and of one woman’s battle with her demons, internal and external. Contains as much wisdom as it does cannabinoids Photograph: PR
