Skeng – London
Go down a Hackney backstreet or stroll along the River Lea this summer and at some point you’re likely to hear this gnarly celebration of the city blaring from a car or loudspeaker. Skeng is a rising and yet controversial dancehall rapper from Jamaica whose sound is far darker and more menacing than his peers; it shares stylistic touchstones with popular London-centric rap styles like UK drill and similarly to many of those artists, Skeng raps about the realities of street life and has been accused of glamorising weapons and gang violence.
It’s hardly a picnic tune but this track – which he apparently wrote in celebration of his first UK tour here in spring – hints at his comedy chops. It has a whiff of the People Just Do Nothing About it, opening with the line “Hello mate (bloody hell)”, while the video shows Skeng and friends waving around bottles of bubbly on quad bikes in a London park. The rest is, as they say, pure fire: though Skeng’s patois is distinctly thick and fast, it unfolds with serpentine precision over the instrumental’s plucky strings; the guttural purr of its refrain – “Lon-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun’ – lingers for days. Kate Hutchinson
Bad Bunny – Yo No Soy Celoso
Bad Bunny didn’t just try to make the song of the summer but the album, saying Un Verano Sin Ti should be played “in the summer, on the beach, as a playlist”. Free-pouring tequila into your friends’ mouths, making eyes at people in swimwear, brooding at the pink-ening sky: there’s a song for every mood on this all-inclusive record, and thanks to Bad Bunny’s similarly broad vocal range – from breathy entreaties to barked orders – all are kept as buoyant as a long volleyball rally.
Tucked amid the brilliant reggaeton, mambo and more is this gem, with a bossa nova-adjacent rhythm picked out on acoustic guitar and a drum rim; a wistful early-evening track cut with small-hours melancholy. Bad Bunny doth protest too much on a song whose title translates as I Am Not Jealous, as he surveys his ex with someone he doesn’t like, but even if you don’t know Spanish his pain is so palpable in the wounded “ouch, mi corazon” that ends the chorus: chest-out bravado caves to reveal a hurt little boy, in one of the musical moments of the year. Someone get the lad another caipirinha, stat. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Jungle – Good Times
Kicking off with a celestial-sounding intro before exploding into what could become the hit of the sweltering summer of ’22, the rollicking Good Times strikes a perfect balance between throwback jam and modern day smash. The brainchild of production duo Jungle, the moniker of British music makers Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland (perhaps best known for their 2014 sleeper Busy Earnin’), it’s Good Times that should solidify them as dance floor staples.
There may be bigger hits and starrier artists during this summer music season, but with the song seemingly a sonic cousin of Glass Animals’ smash Heat Waves, could Good Times follow a similar underdog single to mainstream hit trajectory and be absolutely everywhere as the days slog on? To be frank, we’re all well aware there’s both plenty to fret and celebrate worldwide. But with Good Times, we’re urged to enjoy what we can and, at least momentarily, put blinders to the rest. Let’s face the music and dance. Rob LeDonne
Sky Ferreira – Don’t Forget
Please, “feral girl summer” all you want, but I personally will be hewing to “vengeful wraith summer” and taking Don’t Forget as my villainous anthem. Although Sky Ferreira’s booming comeback single seethes directly at her record label – an enduring cause of strife for the 30-year-old cult pop icon – it also suggests an appreciably wide range of applications.
“Tears of fire in the sky,” she snarls, and with dangerous heatwaves and wild fires raging, we might cock a snook in the direction of the governments and corporations casually letting the planet burn; as Ferreira sings of betrayal and exploitation by paternalistic forces, perhaps a few supreme court justices might come to mind. Surging with rage and towering above the earth on storm clouds of reverb, Don’t Forget is a full-blooded offensive against letting your heart harden during another successively hellish summer. Laura Snapes
Beyoncé – Break My Soul
Break My Soul, the first single off Beyoncé’s upcoming album Renaissance, soft-landed in the last week of June, fresh yet familiar. The elastic house track – which nods to, if not outright samples, Robin S’s 1993 dance floor touchstone Show Me Love – is not the swaggering Beyoncé of Lemonade. Having conquered almost all genres (and Coachella), Beyoncé is in sublime restoration mode: “I just fell in love, and I just quit my job / I’m gonna find new drive, damn they work me so damn hard,” she coos, in a gesture to her non-billionaire fanbase that lands sweeter than it should.
This is multi-purpose sustenance – an upper on the dance floor, a salve in the baking sun, a mood stabilizer for daily life amid overlapping, unending crises. If there has been a sound, for me, that summons the fun out of this sputtering summer, it’s Beyoncé tumbling down “oh baby baby” into the chorus, or the mantra offered by New Orleans bounce legend Big Freedia: “release your trade, release the stress, release your love, forget the rest”. The Queen bid bliss, and I keep listening. Adrian Horton
Bartees Strange – Wretched
Just try to sing along. Don’t worry if you can’t. Yes, the chorus of Bartees Strange’s Wretched sounds inscrutable at first. But the Ipswich, England born, Oklahoma raised rising star’s rush of heartfelt exuberance will make his verbose performance stick in your mind and on the tip of your tongue all summer long.
It’s, ahem, strange (no need to forgive the pun) structuring eschews the condescending summer song formula. And that’s what makes it so essential. That and, of course, the propulsive keys and percussion, and Strange’s genre-enigma guitar playing. Together with its soft-loud verse-chorus pattern, those elements will make Wretched defy its title for post-lockdown festival crowds hankering a pogo-and-holler worthy anthem. And after the song’s galvanizing tone sets in, delving into its fountainhead gush of lyrics is an equal delight on subsequent listens – especially its themes of steadfast, rescuing friendship in this era of echo chambers and self-isolation. Kyle Mullin
Charli XCX – Used to Know Me
There’s a scene in season two of acerbic comedy Hacks that cuts to a slow-mo montage of day party joy, on a lesbian cruise. This song blares, its Euro-house synths grinding. As Charli XCX hoots out the titular hook, Hacks protagonist Ava practically ascends (watch the show if you haven’t already, on Prime Video). Back on dry land, a layered story underpins the track.
Charli XCX’s final album from her five-album Sony deal sees her lunge almost comically towards pop, cosplaying the standard major-label star she refused to be. Here, she sings about being “finally free from your control”. Is that only a post-breakup reflection, or two fingers flicked towards her label? It’s a wink, a dance floor banger and that ideal song of the summer candidate: one that’s been out since March, with time to percolate. Real heads will notice she joins Beyoncé in interpolating Robin S’s Show Me Love (Stonebridge Mix), sampled here throughout. Tshepo Mokoena
Flo – Immature
Summer anthems can’t all be breezy beach-based frolics, chat-up lines over barbecue smoke, or escapist lyrics mixed with vodka-sloshed oonts oonts beats. Sometimes they need some grit. Everyone’s irritable as temperatures rise and patience is usually the first thing to go.
On Immature, Renée Downer, Stella Quaresma, and Jorja Douglas, AKA hugely promising British girlband Flo, have basically had enough. Riding an elasticated, low slung beat that recalls early 00s Timbaland – complete with cut-up baby cries a la Aaliyah’s Are You That Somebody? – the trio remonstrate with a mute man whose signals are misfiring. “Say you want my body, body / But you ain’t never do a thing about it” Douglas shrugs nonchalantly on the chorus, before the trio nail that sun-assisted, life’s-too-short-let-me-check-what-else-is-out-there frustration with a curt, “I’m tryna understand your point of view / But you fucking with me, fucking with me.” That it’s all delivered with the honeyed finesse of peak Brandy at least offers a dash of summer warmth to the long overdue kiss off. Michael Cragg
Sofi Tukker – Original Sin
Great summer songs make us feel liberated. The new one from the inventive dance duo Sofi Tukker goes further. It makes us feel redeemed. Original Sin is an anthem of absolution, ear-worming its way into your consciousness to alleviate guilt right as it lures you to a place tailor-made for transgression: the dance floor. “So, I think you’ve got something wrong with you/Something’s not right with me too,” the duo sing. “But the state you’re in is innocent/what the fuck’s original sin anyway?”
The song, which undulates more than pounds, has been a club favorite for months, building a buzz that deserves to serenade us through the whole warm season. The insinuating flow of the rhythm pulls you in, while the vocals of the duo – Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern – beguile. There’s great play between the wit of his deadpan delivery and the care in her tone. The song itself couldn’t be simpler, repeating the same verse over and over, leaving just a few breaks for its lilting chorus. But that sublime combination makes the song’s sweet message go down easy. Jim Farber
5amDiaries and Jackson Homer – SOFA
Watching Netflix on the sofa might not be one’s first go-to activity in the summer months (unless of course, it’s this torturously hot summer and there’s an effective A/C setup) but in little-known rapper 5amDiaries’ little-known new song, he makes it sound like the only place to be. Employing a sly, of-the-season 90s beat, courtesy of Jackson Homer, he proceeds to tell a simple, easily relatable tale of using the guise of checking out “a cool show I wanna show ya” to get tipsy and fool around instead. Who among us …
It’s hard to listen without getting off the sofa to move around though (Spotify in the kitchen?) and harder not to smile at his barely contained annoyance over his date’s bad manners (“knocking bare shit over, she don’t use a coaster” he says, head presumably shaking, eyes rolling) and while the song has made something of a hushed debut, it’s harder still to imagine this one not entering heavy summer party rotation by the end of the season. Benjamin Lee
Cardi B ft Kanye West and Lil Durk – Hot Shit
It’s been four years and a lifetime since Invasion of Privacy, Cardi’s all-conquering hood-epochal major-label debut that remarkably saw all 13 tracks chart platinum or better. Since then, the wildly charismatic South Bronx pop-rapper has mostly kicked the can while the anticipation for her long-awaited follow-up has only built, giving birth to a couple of babies with Offset and a string of non-album singles including ubiquitous chart-toppers Up and WAP.
Hot Shit might not have the juice to match those dizzying heights, but our girl’s first single as a solo artist in 17 months is an earworm of a posse cut that will go off in the club – well, Cardi’s verse at least (that Electric Boogie sample!) – and throttle your car’s subwoofers to their limit. Durk has shown better during his meteoric rise than his middle verse, Kanye sounds like he needs a vacation despite a welcome return to cussing, and producer Tay Keith won’t be accused of overreaching with the now-familiar bass-heavy trap beat that sounds like so much of his previous work. But Hot Shit – which has been positively unavoidable on Hot 97 from the first of July when it dropped – is a good example of a track that rises above the sum of its parts on an artist’s sheer magnetism. Bryan Armen Graham
