Charli xcx – 365
No offense to the Lana Del Rey and boygenius girls, but when it comes to music, I have a limited tolerance for languid, sad or woozy; during the heat of summer especially, it’s uppers only. Few do that better than Charli xcx, a premier practitioner of loud, high-BPM music, who captured the zeitgeist in June with her album brat. And no song embodies the album’s insouciant, candid, neon-green bold ethos – or the fuck-it heedlessness, headlong nights and chaotic mood swings of summer – better than album closer 365. The mutable track, essentially a version of album opener 360 on stimulants that blasts into full club mode over three minutes, wields the figure of the party girl as an enviable, imitable main character experience. It’s a glorious celebration of hedonism, of cresting a wave of reckless energy, whether or not you “do a little key, have a little line”. (This song has given me lucid dreams of doing coke.) Everything is a disaster, so why not aspire to pure, oblivion-chasing fun? I will be bumpin’ that all summer long. Adrian Horton
Hozier – Too Sweet
Playing against type always gets people’s attention. Apparently, that strategy worked for Hozier on his latest single, Too Sweet, the singer’s first No 1 smash since his breakthrough hit a decade ago with Take Me to Church. In Too Sweet, one of contemporary music’s most sincere stars gets to play bad boy, incarnating the sort of louche and elusive bon vivant who can fuel heated summer crushes in the more straight-laced among us. The main character, a night owl with a yen for whiskey, knows a sweet tea-teetotaler when he sees one, an insight he spends the entire lyric driving home. The music that serenades his sentiment suits the sweaty season just as well. It’s fired by a sly funk beat primed to pack a sweaty dance floor or beach party near you. Hozier’s breathy vocal, heaving with eros, ups the ante, only intensifying the lust sweet souls often have for darker ones. Jim Farber
Self Esteem & Moonchild Sanelly – Big Man
You can thank a Swedish beatmaker for pop’s greatest pairing since Kim Petras and Sam Smith. Big Man is Self Esteem’s first official single since her Mercury-nominated album Prioritise Pleasure from 2021, and comes ahead of Moonchild Sanelly’s next release, also produced by Esteem’s long-time collaborator, Johan Karlberg. Clearly he knew they’d hit it off. The British singer-songwriter and South African rapper are kindred spirits, both body positive, self-empowerment alt-pop future superstars, and their team-up is a big, buoyant, ball-buster with smart, gender-swapping lyrics and meme-able chorus teasing male ego. It’s written, said Self Esteem, from the perspective of a good boyfriend, the ones that “don’t take your success as a direct threat to their existence”, and who, inverting rap braggadocio, boast about taking care of household chores. Hopefully they’re out there somewhere. Rather than pack a high-energy punch, Big Man has a glacial, lowrider cool, all eccentric trap skitter and stuttering synths – a Paper Planes for 2024, perhaps – until it climaxes in a cathartic, Animal Collective-style burst of intensity. Roll the windows down for this one, lads. Kate Hutchinson
Beyoncé – Ya Ya
The best song to emerge from Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, released at the end of March, has been Ya Ya. Sorry to the line-dance-ready Texas Hold ‘Em and the nostalgic 16 Carriages. It’s the fast drums and claps of Ya Ya for me. The anthem bounces between political speech – “You lookin’ for a new America? Are you tired, workin’ time and a half for half the pay?”– and call-and-response dance instructions – “Ladies? (Yeah?) / Fuck it, we shakin’ / We swimmin’ / We jerkin’ / We twerkin’” – and romantic yelling – “And lover boy, you’re so fine / Ooh, you got me losin’ my mind / But you gotta keep the faith” – all as the chorus shimmies to the bouncy “Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya, ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya”. It interpolates the apotheosis of sunny summer songs, I can’t get enough. I find something new and more fun in it every time I listen. The track is wild and loud. It showcases Beyoncé’s huge, confident vocal range. I can listen to it at the beach, on a rooftop, with a dozen people or alone between my headphones – and find myself in a great mood. Blake Montgomery
Sabrina Carpenter – Espresso
It’s a shot of unbridled pop perfection which helped brew a star, launch a mug full of memes and is as inescapable as friendly neighborhood coffee shops. Bubbling over with all of the hallmarks of the song of the summer, Sabrina Carpenter’s red-hot Espresso is an obvious choice for the 2024 mantle. Steamy and confident while being slightly acidic, energetic and memorable yet not too bitter, the anthem’s lyrics fit right in for sweltering days under the bright sun and sexy nights when hearts tend to beat fast. Perhaps even more exciting, Espresso heralds a triumphant return to just how fun pop music can be, and marks the arrival of Carpenter as a bona fide cultural force with the 25-year-old superstar’s highly anticipated album Short n’ Sweet dropping during the season’s dog days on 25 August. It all grinds up to a musical jolt the world desperately needed a sip of. Rob LeDonne
Bonny Doon – Clock Keeps Ticking
Clock Keeps Ticking, by the Detroit indie trio Bonny Doon, has an invigorating, youthful glow – it’s a song about never being able to find the time to fulfill all your life’s hopes and aspirations that still manages to feel profoundly optimistic. Those aspirations range from the simple and universal (“I want someone to complete me/Like in romantic comedies”) to the warmly far-fetched (“I want to see a UFO”) and the mildly juvenile (“I want to take a hero’s dose,” referring to a large amount of magic mushrooms.) But that mix of small-scale ambition and grandiosity is what gives the song its ramshackle charm. Contained in this laundry list of ambitions is all the hope and possibility of a great summer: the bittersweet feeling that the you have all the time in the world to achieve your life’s dreams, and that it could slip by in an instant. Shaad D’Souza
AG Cook – Britpop
A degree of mania has gripped Britain this summer: our impossible, fluked spot in the Euros final, the promised Labour landslide actually coming to pass, the infernal, upside-down weather making everything seem that bit more unreal. As a nation that loves to mint a moment with a communal chant, may I suggest the sole lyric to AG Cook’s kaleidoscopic Britpop as the main contender: “Brit, Brit, Brit, Brit, Brit like Britpop,” courtesy of a staccato-chopped Charli xcx. Despite the warped, pink-and-green Union Jack on the artwork of the album of the same name, it’s not quite a manifesto, but something like a reclamation and a statement of intent – that at its best, British pop can be this weird and frenzied, this experimental and joyous, totally sincere and totally absurd at the same time. Laura Snapes
Chappell Roan – Good Luck, Babe!
The most interesting hot girl summers stem from a crushing heartbreak. Nothing incites a woman to say “fuck it” and enjoy an unbothered, hedonistic phase quite like some dark, looming lore from her recent history. Every beach day or bikini selfie should conceal a profound, but glamorous, sorrow. Consider Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe! On its face, it’s melody-driven, please-everyone pop, with Stevie Nicks-tinged synths and lush orchestration. Then the lyrics hit like one too many White Claws on a sweltering afternoon. Roan warns a closeted, sapphic lover that her life of compulsory heterosexuality will lead to soulless, suburban ruin, and one day she’ll wake up as “nothing more than his wife”. Bubblegum pop with a message, and a grown-up one at that – how refreshing to have a lesbian-themed hit written for the female gaze, one that squashes the “I kissed a girl” trope from celebrity culture’s distant past. Alaina Demopoulos
Kendrick Lamar – Not Like Us
Y’all wanna see a dead body? Diss tracks, with odd exceptions, rarely become commercial radio hits much less all-conquering summer bangers. But the knockout blow of the century’s defining rap beef is a unicorn in more ways than one. Not long after this withering four-and-a-half-minute takedown of Toronto’s most famous “certified pedophile” against a stripped-down DJ Mustard beat debuted at No 1 on the US Hot 100 in May, it was vaulted into the stratosphere with Kendrick’s epochal Juneteenth concert, where he performed it no fewer than five times with members of every major LA gang on stage in an act of righteous overkill that left the most Too Big To Fail artist of his generation to fly the white flag. And that was before the music video filmed on the streets of Compton dropped on the Fourth of July, hardly coincidental timing after having branded Drake as a colonizer for appropriating Black American culture. Twelve years ago when I interviewed him for Sports Illustrated, Kendrick spoke about the importance of keeping the city of Compton alive with positivity. Even in the single most incendiary, malicious act of his career, the Pulitzer prize winner has stayed true to that value by leveraging Not Like Us as a unifying anthem so hot it’s brought Bloods and Crips together. Nothing was the same, for real. Bryan Armen Graham
Susanna – Elephant Song
One of the best sonic things about summer, up there with bumblebees and ice cream vans, is the sound of music carried by a hot breeze, whether blasted from a car stereo or lilting from a busker. Very much in the latter category is this soul-filling song from Norway’s Susanna (also known for her group the Magic Orchestra), with half-improvised saxophone, piano and voice sounding like a casual jam session floating out of a practice room window into the sunlight. It swells in its latter third with the addition of timpani, strings and synths, as Susanna’s jazzy vocal coheres into something much steadier: “We don’t know what will happen in the end,” she sings in one of the year’s strongest choruses. On headphones after three afternoon pints in the sun, it’s a blast of pure existential happiness. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Renao – Hot Stuff
It’s certainly not the first summer where country and pop music have melted into one but it’s felt like 2024 has seen the two genres closer than ever. Away from the more radio-endorsed examples from Shaboozey and Sabrina Carpenter, Bangalore-born, London-living up-and-comer Renao has crafted a brief but punchy intermingler that should be played just as loudly through the end of August. It might be less pool rager-suited and more fitting for a long, open-topped road trip, sun blazing and (passenger-consumed) cans of cold beer at the ready because like many of the greatest summer songs, it’s propulsive yet melancholic, similar to Post Malone’s late August 2019 killer Circles. There’s a similar karaoke-made earnestness here as the singer details what sounds like a lost love and the painful messiness that comes after (“I say what’s just enough ‘til I breathe in what I lost”), made to be tipsily group-sung out of the car window. Benjamin Lee
