Songs of the Summer, My Summer, Brat Summer
Bumpin’ that.
When it comes to the song of THE summer — the kind of inescapable hit like “California Gurls” or “Despacito” in past years — there’s a pretty clear criteria.
The song of the summer tends to be:
Ubiquitous (you will hear it whether you want to or not!)
Broadly appealing (you’d encounter it in both Midtown and the Midwest)
Sonically shimmering (it feels like summer)
By that metric, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” has got to be it, and Billboard agrees, having crowned the frothy tune the Global Song of the Summer (the chart based on sales and streaming data from around the world). Vibe wise, it makes sense, with “pure pop” becoming, well, popular again.
I don’t particularly like “Espresso,” it’s too cloying to be truly enjoyable. A scan of the lyrics, on this song and others on the album, show that Carpenter is not a girl’s girl. The oddball lyrics (“I’m working late, cause I’m a singer”) feel less like genuine quirks than they feel like an attempt to reverse engineer Max Martin’s “melodic math.”
But my complaining is nonsense. It’s catchy and family-friendly, and the label paid Spotify a bunch of money to push it everywhere, so there it is. The song of the summer.
Buttered Popcorn’s Summer Playlist
These are the the songs of my summer: what I obsessively listened to from Memorial to Labor Day, when I wasn’t streaming NTS Radio (I’ve found it much more varied and fun than the algorithmic stuff that Spotify serves up). Listen along as you read! Besides the first track, the playlist is unranked and just ordered to be somewhat cohesive.
"Not Like Us" - Kendrick Lamar
That Kendrick-Drake feud reset the cultural conversation, and this deliciously bitter track was the atomic mic drop that cemented Kendrick as the winner. Of the 1,180 songs that have been Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, I’m pretty sure this is the only one to include the word “pedophile” in the lyrics. (Wop wop wop wop!)
This is my Song of the Summer, and I think many would feel the same. I heard this song everywhere: blaring from car windows, blasting outside the bars.
"Lithonia" - Childish Gambino
A case of the lead single being the best track on the album. The grungy, grandiose, Weezer-esque “Lithonia” is so good that the rest of Bando Stone and the New World disappointed in comparison.
"Nobody's Soldier" - Hozier
The instrumentation is so fun.
"Guard Down" - August Moon
In an alternate universe, the fictional boy band from The Idea of You could have had a hit song in this world. Fake bands having real chart success have happened in the past (see Hannah Montana or The Archies). Based on the onscreen and offscreen talent working on this movie, I thought that this Harry Styles fanfic romance could have made August Moon a real thing, but my prediction was wrong.
The movie did pretty well as a streaming-only release on Amazon, and their marketing team did their best. But one can only imagine how a full-fledged theatrical marketing campaign could have had Nicholas Galitzine and the other guys in the band perform on a late night show. Or even real-life Coachella. None of the songs on the soundtrack are great on their own, but the movie does a really good job of selling you on the idea that August Moon is one of the biggest bands in the world. And true to its origins as thinly-veiled Harry Styles fanfiction, each song in the movie parallels an actual One Direction track1.
“Guard Down” has by far the most Spotify streams on the soundtrack, and the studio released the music video that we only saw snippets of in the film. This is the very YouTube clip that convinces Anne Hathaway’s character to hop on a plane for a cross-country booty call.
"Diet Pepsi" - Addison Rae
Unexpectedly good song about youthful lust and fantasy from the lead actress of Thanksgiving. The music video was directed by Sean Price Williams, a prominent cinematographer who also directed The Sweet East, which is similarly about young girls weaponizing the male gaze back at them.
"BIRDS OF A FEATHER" - Billie Eilish
A sign that the dark, moody RnB that used to dominate charts is on its way out, and exuberant pop is in. Even Billie Eilish is belting, even if it's under a haze of reverb.
"Life" - Jamie xx; Robyn
Wish I was able to snag tickets to those tiny warehouse shows that Jamie XX hosted in July.
"Girl, so confusing featuring lorde" - Charli xcx
We can’t forget about Brat Summer. Charli XCX’s masterful marketing campaign turned her album into a cultural moment. I’ve been a fan of Charli since “Vroom Vroom,” and this album is terrific, but it does feel like brat exists more as a meme than it does a piece of music. There’s a lot of focus of the brash, clubby tracks, not so much on the sad, existential songs. brat contains multitudes. For those of us living in New York, Brat Summer was inescapable, but elsewhere in the country, the average person does not know what the fuck we are talking about. That means we are better than the average person.
"Risk" - Gracie Abrams
I’m annoyed that I can’t get this song out of my head. Gracie Abrams’ whole deal is a little annoying (being the daughter of JJ, boosted by Taylor Swift), and the production from Aaron Dessner is subdued to a fault. Feels like it should really explode at the last chorus.
"Aquí Te Espero" - Ivan Cornejo
“Regional Mexican” is an awkward name for a genre, but as used, it usefully describes the form of Latin music that I find appealing even though I know zero Spanish. In the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote a really good introduction to the SoCal sadboy crooner, who melds sierreño music with the vibes of bands like Cigarettes After Sex.
"Nasty" - Tinashe
"Chanel No.5" - Camila Cabello
Collateral damage from the Kendrick-Drake feud was Camilla Cabello’s album rollout. Two songs on C,XOXO feature Drake, but the month of June was decidedly not the time to promote them. There is no longer any hope for “Hot Uptown” to be a hit, and all parties involved have moved on. (No guarantees that it would have been successful, even without that rap feud. On this song, Drake’s pretending to be Jamaican again and the whole thing feels like it came straight out of 2016.)
Anyways, I really like the production on this particular album cut, which warps piano and vocal samples around Cabello as she brags about driving someone wild. The verse lyrics are stupid and I do my best to ignore them.
"Starburned and Unkissed" - Caroline Polachek
Featured on the soundtrack of I Saw the TV Glow, which is a terrific movie.
"Simple And Clean (Re-Recording)" - Hikaru Utada
Apparently Japanese musicians frequently re-record older work. A. G. Cook, who produced much of her excellent album Bad Mode, strips back the Kingdom Hearts theme song to be blissful and minimalist. Unlike the original version, it really does sound simple and clean.
"Beautiful As You" - Thomas Rhett
Julian Bunetta produces a lot of Thomas Rhett’s music, and he also contributed the bigger hits on Sabrina Carpenter’s new album (including “Espresso.”)
"Guy For That (Feat. Luke Combs)" - Post Malone
The Zynternet denizens are having a good time, thanks to Post Malone’s pivot to country. F-1 Trillion is loaded with features from established Nashville voices, and the album is too long and uneven to be truly enjoyable. But there’s a couple good songs, especially this one, even though it is a victim of the TikTok-driven trend of songs ending right before the bridge is supposed to start.
Billboard considers “I Had Some Help,” the bro-country team-up with Morgan Wallen, to be America’s song of the summer. It’s catchy, but the mix is straight up awful — the drums sound like they were recorded in a tin can, and the cymbals are clipped to shit.
"Good Luck, Babe!" - Chappell Roan
Now this song has a KILLER bridge. With this single, Chappell Roan began her extremely fast rise to the A-list, leading many people (including myself) to kick ourselves for not becoming fans sooner. It’s a close second to being my personal song of the summer.
Roan’s recent round of press has grappled with the psychological costs of suddenly becoming famous, and this Rolling Stone cover story covers this well. Great profile, hearkening back to the days when celeb profiles were less PR-managed. It’s the polar opposite of the GQ cover story with Beyoncé, which is not a proper profile but an advertisement for her new whiskey brand. The interview was conducted over email!!! Back in the day, the subject would have to spend at least a few days with a journalist. That has slipped to a couple hours, and now you don’t even have to meet in person to land a big magazine cover.
“Good Luck, Babe!” is a perfect song from start to finish, and I love a lot of her other songs. I do find the ad-libs on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess to be a little much, particularly on tracks like “Red Wine Supernova.” You should only hear the phrase “Okay, y'all, let's pick it up now” on a workout video.
This is a very stray thought but a lot of Roan’s song titles would make good names for a cocktail. “Naked in Manhattan” could be a mashup of the Naked and Famous and a Manhattan. (The former is a riff on the Last Word, and there’s a rye riff on that cocktail called the Final Ward. So I guess you can riff on the riff?) A fun, LA-ish twist on a paloma could be a “Pink Pony Club.” Mixing ingredients from women-owned brands is pandering as hell, but would be quite the “Femininomenon.” The “Red Wine Supernova” speaks for itself. Had I thought of this in June, I could have asked some friends to help me develop a whole menu.
"Magnetic" - ILLIT
I don’t have TikTok but sometimes the trending songs escape containment.
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"Angel Of My Dreams" - JADE
A sentence I never thought I would write: “I love the debut single by JADE, former member of British X-Factor group Little Mix.” It’s a journey into the music industry’s underbelly (and Simon Cowell diss track), with tempo changes and beat switches crammed into three minutes of beautifully bizarre dance pop.
"NO PAIN” - Silica Gel
This was released last year, but I came across this Korean band at a music festival that I went to in June and I really love their sound. It’s a mix of J-rock and electronic psychedelic indie rock.
Early Fall Music That I Really Like
Autumn just started two weeks ago (or hasn’t even begun, if you’re the New York Times). But there’s already some good music out there. Of course, Charli XCX’s “Talk talk” remix with Troye Sivan is terrific. And MJ Lenderman’s new album shows that there’s always a lane for crunchy slacker dude rock music.
Otherwise, I’m looking forward to hearing the new records from Jamie xx, SOPHIE (posthumously), and Samara Joy. And whenever Bruno Mars makes that album announcement… I’ll be ready 🫡
These are the August Moon songs in The Idea of You and their closest One Direction equivalent. Feel free to disagree.
“Taste” – “Live While We're Young”
“I Got You” — “Little Things”
“Guard Down” — “Drag Me Down”
“Closer” — “Fireproof”
“Dance Before We Walk” — “Best Song Ever”
“Go Rogue” — “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles
“The Idea of You” — “A.M.”
Move over Obama, Andrew's music list is here! 👀