It’s August, which means the Song of the Summer debate has once again descended upon Pitchfork.com. And because it’s another year without a consensus favorite, here are 20 picks for Song of the Summer from our writers, scientifically parsed into three categories to provide the fullest picture of our annual discourse.
The Bonafide Contenders
Bad Bunny: “Nuevayol”
Let’s be honest: Bad Bunny has claimed a song of the summer for most of the decade so far. But the radiant, speakers-cracking “NUEVAYoL,” from the Puerto Rican rapper’s hometown love letter DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, may just be his best. Looping in a sample from salsa legends El Gran Combo’s “Un Verano en Nueva York,” he unleashes an elastic, dembow floor-filler that seamlessly bridges past and present Boricua musical hallmarks. Here, Benito did better than just concoct an irresistible banger to quake out of every bodega and block party all summer; he rallied the Nuyorican diaspora for its new anthem.
–Eric Torres
PinkPantheress: “Illegal”
On “Illegal,” PinkPantheress’ sugariest hit to date, the singer/producer cleverly compares the time-warping headrush of getting overly fried to navigating a situationship at the height of its passion while staving off paranoia and overanalysis. A sticky haze of two-step drums and fizzing synth pads, the track is so blissed-out it’s just a little bit scary. When it all concludes in a sequence of shallow, rapid breaths, it’s equal parts erotic and erratic: The thrill of losing control becomes the whole appeal.
–Jude Noel
PLUTO & YKNIECE: “Whim Whamiee”
This is that fried glossolalia we need to unite the world in 2025 (WHIM WHAM!). The phrase hits like a roundhouse kick, five shots swigged at once, a maniacal grin after you clinch the jackpot (WHIM WHAMEEEE!). There’s an infectious arrogance to the song, these women so convinced of their own charisma, success, swagger (LULULEMON!). “We forever gettin' money, you forever gon' be mad,” Pluto cries as the drums do a little winner twerk in your loser ass face (AH-HA-HA!). Funkmaster Flex can keep hating (BOMB SOUND EFFECT) but I’m about to play this as much as “SkeeYee” (BOMB SOUND EFFECT MIXED WITH A GLORIOUS “WHIM WHAMIEEEEEE” SOARING OUT OF THE ASHES).
–Kieran Press-Reynolds
Sabrina Carpenter: “Manchild”
Can “Manchild” be a song of the summer if you really have to pay attention in order to fall in love with it? I thought this song was bad, but maybe I was just being, as Sabrina suggests, slow! A couple listens in, you start to appreciate its clever, playful misandry and really love Carpenter’s soft rhyme of “hard to get” with “incompetent.” Best of all, it sounds like K.K. Slider sitting in on a jam with Fleetwood Mac and ABBA circa “If It Wasn’t for the Nights.”
–Shaad D’Souza
Sayuri & Sopholov / Fuentes Prod: “Secunena”
Porn stars, infidelity, being a lifelong flirt: Sayuri & Sopholov tell all on their breakthrough single “Secunena,” a reggaeton howler that captures the delirious highs of the genre’s first wave. They sing lines like schoolyard chants, and with every repeated lyric the production amps up its cartoonish ambitions, serving up synthesized beats and melodies with cocksure flair. Producer Fuentes understands how to make every sound a noisemaker, but also a chance to feel the music in your body. Each summer needs a horned-up anthem this fun, this bawdy, that celebrates sex as an unruly romp.
–Joshua Minsoo Kim
Justin Bieber: “Daisies”
“Daisies” is less a statement than a secret that Justin Bieber was waiting to whisper in our ear—surprising in both its sensibility and the sheer fact of its existence. Levity has hardly been a hallmark of modern-day Bieber, but this first single off his unexpected seventh album moves lightly as linen, with evident ease in its ambling beat and achingly simple, petal-plucking conceit. The man pulling the (guitar) strings here is Mk.gee, the anti-pop hero whose smudgy playing gives the song texture. From a pop star whose career has been defined by slick and “expensive-sounding sounds,” “Daisies” is proof that scaling back your ambition can yield sweet results.
–Olivia Horn
MOLIY: “Shake It to the Max (FLY) (Remix)” [ft. Silent Addy, Skillibeng & Shenseea]
It isn’t a New York summer without a dancehall hit. And, this year, “Shake It to the Max (FLY)” (the remix, specifically) is as ubiquitous in Flatbush as the aroma of jerk chicken and the sound of dollar cabs honking. It’s the song that wafts through the air as I bike down Church Ave., that Funkmaster Flex plays when he wants to switch it up from the government-mandated Kendrick, Drake, and Chris Brown. It’s all about MOLIY’s slinky, chipmunky shadow of a hook sandwiching cocky, snappy verses from Skillibeng and Shenseaa. It’s the real sound of a heat wave.
–Mano Sundaresan
Addison Rae: “Headphones On”
In the doldrums of summer, I often feel like a bug trapped in amber trying to claw my way towards a life worthy of the grandiose expectations that the season carries. The closest I’ve gotten to finding a sense of direction during these hot, neverending days has been the Zen musings of Addison Rae. Her song “Headphones On” is about accepting pain and discomfort as inexplicably tied to joy, about seeing the ordinary as sublime, about recognizing that any one moment in your life is as significant as another. Singing as gossamer as chiffon and as gently as a babbling stream, Rae reminds me that no one is coming to save me from my ennui, but that I can always take one small step—putting on my headphones and playing my favorite song—and make it my whole life.
–Vrinda Jagota
Drake / PARTYNEXTDOOR: “Somebody Loves Me”
This is what that Drake/PARTYNEXTDOOR album should’ve sounded like: two disgruntled men searching for love like Arthurian knights on their quest for the Holy Grail. If “NOKIA” was an easy layup to score a hit, “Somebody Loves Me” is a deep contested three that somehow goes in. It’s got the feel of an R&B demo, with PARTYNEXTDOOR and Drake skittering around a half-time beat doing impassioned Future Hendrix impressions. When they take turns singing that big, despondent hook—“Who’s out there for meeeeeeeee”—you can almost imagine them falling to their knees on the dancefloor.
–Mano Sundaresan
The House Favorites
Zara Larsson: “Midnight Sun”
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I’d always kept Zara Larsson—10-year-old Swedish singing competition winner-turned-pop workhorse—safely sequestered in cell block six of the Khia Asylum. But “Midnight Sun” is simply too much my shit: Ray of Light via Jersey club by way of Lisa Frank, seemingly designed in a lab to short-circuit gay guys’ critical thinking. So try to believe me when I insist that there is subtle craft at work here, in the mixolydian arpeggios that undergird the song’s second verse, and the synth bass that flirts with Larsson’s (highly capable) voice as she sings, “It’s been a while since I cried over something so nice.” And by its final chorus, “Midnight Sun” gives up on syncopation entirely and begins jackhammering towards transcendence. Who needs subtlety anyway?
–Walden Green
Bamby: “Pas Jalouse” [ft. Kerchak]
She rides a motorcycle and doesn’t need a man. He only came to the party to stir up trouble. But there’s one thing she can’t get off her mind: the way he looks underneath the ski mask he never takes off. She’s Bamby, the lightning-hot French Guianese singer whose collaborations with Martinique shatta queen Maureen and Amsterdam dancehall producer Kybba dominate my summer playlist. He’s Kerchak, the basso-voiced young French drill rapper recognizable by balaclava. And this is “Pas Jalouse,” a will-they-won’t-they dancefloor heat check with gothy orchestral ambiance and absolutely no right being this funny.
–Anna Gaca
Lana Del Rey: “Henry, come on”
Frustrated with what he saw was an inauthenticity in the way Americans were told to understand something so primal, the legendary boxing writer Jimmy Cannon once quipped that Howard Cosell was a guy who “changed his name, put on a toupee, and tried to convince the world that he tells it like it is.” But over the course of Lizzy Grant’s time as Lana Del Rey, her project—of using artifice as a lens onto spiritual truths—has only come to seem better suited for our world. On “Henry, come on,” the Christian God and Icarus and Levi Strauss and John Wayne (né Marion Robert Morrison) conspire to make the speaker feel at peace in her abandonment, alone in the West, motionless on the edge of a frontier.
–Paul A. Thompson
Haim: “Relationships”
What’s summer without making a little mess? On “Relationships,” the melancholy high point of their new album, the Haim sisters try to figure out what’s not working: why happiness can feel so sad, who really started that fight, whether two people can ever truly work out their differences. Caught in a wistful groove that seems to skip and loop on end, they throw platitudes at the problem until it seems like everything is about to break down. Until, suddenly, things start blooming—the sturdy bassline picks back up; the piano flutters in gentle harmony; and, for a second, it seems like maybe this time it really will be easy.
–Sam Goldner
Jorjiana: “Shark (Remix)” [ft. Babyfxce E & Chuckyy]
I like to think I’d be shredding waves at the Rockaways every summer if I never heard John Williams’ Jaws theme. Fifty years on from the Spielberg hit, there’s a new frightening fish-inspired song: Jorjiana’s viral “Shark,” where the cartoonishly deadpan Indiana rapper terrorizes faceless bozos like they’re beachgoers in Martha’s Vineyard. With the kind of simple and repetitive hook that is sort of annoying until it inevitably gets stuck in your head, she gets spicy and reworks old Veeze flows over a minimalist beat that keeps the ominous Jaws vibe intact. Babyfxce E and Chuckyy match her energy with punchline-fueled verses that build up the tension until Jorjiana swings back for another round of “Shark, shark, shark, shark, shark, shark, shark a bitch.” It’s so goofy and irresistible that I bet even 93-year-old big John would dig it.
–Alphonse Pierre
Left-Field Bangers
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Eli Escobar: “i'll wait all day (4 U)”
New York DJ Eli Escobar’s “i’ll wait all day (4 U)” takes the architecture of the classic deep-in-the-feels club anthem and strips it to its essence: sunrise chords, a quick-stepping house rhythm, and a choppy, sped-up vocal hook that affixes itself to your heartstrings with a golden set of pliers. A bubbling synth arpeggio drifts and glistens, as bittersweet as a small, perfect thing behind glass. The effect is euphoric. “i’ll way all day (4 U)” is a song for falling in love on the dancefloor, for greeting the sunrise with a best friend, for coming out the other end of a long, hard slog and discovering that the secret to happiness lies inside yourself after all.
–Philip Sherburne
Media Puzzle: “Bundy Vision”
Nothing quenches musical thirst in summer quite like back-to-basics pop, and Media Puzzle figured out how to morph their fidgety punk into a satisfying sugar rush. Abiding by the genre’s unspoken rules—less is more, sharpen the hook, at least one motto-ready lyric in the chorus—the Australian egg-punks are reclaiming pop songwriting from the grips of chart-chasers to make their own hit, “Bundy Vision.” From the carbonated bassline to the angelic vocal harmonies cut short, it’s got the right ingredients to go down easy.
–Nina Corcoran
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Samba Jean-Baptiste: “born again freestyle (shed a tear).mp3”
Samba Jean-Baptiste is an artist who conjures the feeling of flipping through tear-stained scrapbook pages. Most exemplary is his bare-bones, string-laden “born again freestyle,” a frigid track that’s followed me between rainy days and heatwaves this summer. Nestled somewhere between Kid Cudi’s earnest crooning and Dean Blunt’s dry thespianism, Jean-Baptiste beckons for his lover to stay in spite of himself. “A lot of good things come in weird packages, baby,” he sings, and I can picture that sheepish, give-me-one-more-chance kinda smile on his face. We’ve all been there, right?
–Olivier Lafontant
Smerz: “Feisty”
Stop, this is my soooooong! Like I’m the only girl in the wooooorld. OK OK, pee faster, pee faster, gotta get back out there!! Oh my God, no, of course, here, I’ll pass you some toilet paper. Ugh, did you see him out there too? I can’t believe we matched on Tinder, he’s so not my type. You think he’s flirting with me? Oh noooo—I mean, did you see his shoes? I guess that’s what they’re calling fashion these days. Ugh, is my eyeliner bleeding? Oh my God girl yes, of course you can borrow my lip gloss. Fuck, you look amazing! I love you, girl. You’re right, fuck him. Hey, what’s your name?
–Arielle Gordon
dexter in the newsagent: “Special”
Have you ever been so in love that you start talking crazy? On the brisk “Special,” London’s dexter in the newsagent meets us there, in those moments when the summer sun kisses our crushes so gracefully that we’re ready to give it all away. She’s reserved yet assured as she makes big promises behind sweet guitar plucks: “I can love you like you want me to,” “I can give you all you want and more.” It’s a lot to offer, but it sounds so dreamy, the sort of love you want to root for.
–Rae-Aila Crumble
Sickboyrari: “Can I gaal Yu”
Summer is for flings, and also, in some cases, obsessively reinventing yourself in order to impress said flings. Just ask Sickboyrari, a lovelorn emo-rap legend who also answers to Black Kray, Gvcci Kray la Goth, 400 Dagree GothBwoi, Persian Cellphone Prince, and, a million other made-up monikers. Call it disingenuous, but there’s a certain honesty in customizing yourself, presenting as the person you would rather be. On “Can I gaal Yu,” he commits his most brazen act of shape-shifting yet—up-pitching, contorting, and layering his voice into a yearning squeak, like a small army of horny mice. The vocals might not sound human, but the desire certainly does.
–Samuel Hyland