Welcome to summer. It's officially time to start thinking about The Song Of The Summer, that world-dominating track that sounds much more appealing now than it will by the time the leaves turn. The charts suggest it'll be Rihanna or Drake or Justin Timberlake, but for now, while the race is still on, Pitchfork staffers have their own ideas about what *should* soundtrack the season, from Big Pop to weirdo dance tracks to jangly indie rock to rap that just sounds right streaming out of car windows.
Marc Hogan: Anderson Paak — "Am I Wrong" [ft. Schoolboy Q]
Contrary to popular belief, the song of the summer often arrives long before Memorial Day weekend. Last year, OMI’s “Cheerleader (Felix Jaehn Remix),” originally released the previous May, topped Billboard’s annual Songs of the Summer chart. So while Anderson .Paak probably lacks the commercial support to pull off a similar feat this year, the dead-of-winter release date for his latest album, Malibu, shouldn’t disqualify it from summer-jam status. Malibu doesn’t waste a track, but “Am I Wrong”—simmering disco-funk about not having time to waste—is its song for summer. Off the Wall horns, a bass line that will sound great reverberating out of open car windows, and spacey synths underpin .Paak’s flirtatious lyrics about the preciousness of the moment. “I’m only coming out to play,” he insists, and guest rapper Schoolboy Q, while delineating the song’s Studio 54 lineage and TGIF frivolity, also declares, “Music ain't music without soul.” For his part, .Paak makes some negative assumptions about non-dancers. The next few months, whenever this is playing, he won’t be wrong.
Jayson Greene: Rihanna — “Consideration”
My secret: I hate summer. My reasons: 1) It’s awful; 2) No one enjoys heat that feels like someone is forcing maple syrup down your throat, they have just been told repeatedly that they do. For me, summer is a time of sluggishness, of weakened will, of lack of purpose, when my blood and the air and the world bogs down into slow-motion. I don’t need BBQ jams; I need music that feels humid and bored and itchy and restless, like I do, which is why my song of the summer is Rihanna’s “Consideration.” The beat is slow, Rihanna’s eyes are glazed, and she nearly yodels the song’s hook, sounding deranged by heat. She gazes outside but can’t find any peace in it, and everyone, everywhere, is trying to cover their shit in glitter to make it gold.
Ryan Dombal: Rihanna — “Needed Me”
When it comes to bleary and humid summer jams, I have to agree with my esteemed colleague Jayson Greene in nearly every respect. Except he got the Rihanna song wrong. It’s an easy mistake to make, since nearly all of ANTI sounds like it rose out of the waviest pavement steam. But “Needed Me” is the one. It stalks, simmers, sweats. It exudes the intoxication of summer, when a ball of hot plasma 93 million miles from Earth can feel like it’s just a few blocks away, when the air sticks to your face, when minds shut off and bodies comes out, when you might have to swat away some scrub and then unload a few bullets through his ego for good measure. The song is a fuck you to giving a fuck, perfect for a time when fuck all is just about all anyone can muster.
Jillian Mapes: Ariana Grande — "Greedy"
I decided months ago that this will be the best summer of my life, and part of fulfilling that involves being a little selfish about getting the things that I want, across the board. “Greedy” is a Studio 54-style anthem for that inclination, an ode to not feeling bad about putting your own needs first. Anchored by Ariana’s biggest belting on her recently released Dangerous Woman, “Greedy” is overtly cheesy and shameless in that fact. Basically it’s the musical equivalent of lamé hot pants, a pair I can’t wait to wear out by the time September rolls around. (Listen via Spotify, or watch Ari's recent "GMA" performance of the song.)
Laura Snapes: Tegan and Sara — “Stop Desire”
I loved last year’s “Cool for the Summer,” but summer romance should never be “chill” or covert, and Tegan and Sara's “Stop Desire” is drunk in lust and about as subtle as the first bad sunburn of the season, i.e. the perfect sweaty make-out jam. Their pop evolution has been exciting not least because they're spectacular at pounding out weapons-grade bubblegum like this, but because it's illuminated a side they once kept hidden. Gone are the dense metaphors that used to litter their lyrics, in their place adrenaline-laced dispatches from the place where crushes rule all. Tegan's reckless impatience for a cute girl to notice her could go down in flames, but channeled right, it could also light up a whole fairground. Spoiler: She gets the girl, every cherry lining up.
Jenn Pelly: CC Dust — "Never Going to Die"
Underground music plays by a different set of rules when it comes to this stuff, because our pop trickles up from the punk scene. We may never hear our summer songs bumping serendipitously from a car stereo, but we hold them close like a great hope. Featuring Mary Jane Dunphe of the inimitable punk outfit Vexx, CC Dust’s “Never Going to Die” gets a proper release on the synth-pop duo’s debut 12” in August. But all this summer, I predict, it will soundtrack post-show parties for kids who can’t dance, it will blare inside of apartments without air-conditioning. It will bring some beauty to this season where the scrappy parts of life are more visible and less romantic, where all-black dress becomes more curious than usual. “Never Going to Die” sounds like a seaside daydream. Its beats are hard as hell, its spirit viscerally uplifting, its feeling infinite. It might trick you into believing that summer, or really anything, can last forever.
Matthew Schnipper: Fat Joe and Remy Ma — “All the Way Up” [ft. French Montana]
It’s been 12 years since “Lean Back” was the song of the summer, so it’s Fat Joe’s turn again. He’s certainly seized the moment, with a beat where the sax loop sounds like a syrupy take on Jennifer Lopez’s “Get Right.” It’s a timeless victory anthem. Nothing crazy here, just classic New York City rap you want to play out of your car really loud.
Jeremy Gordon: Sheer Mag — “Nobody’s Baby”
I think of summer as a cold beer consumed on a roof while someone handier than me chars meat on a grill, the weather warm enough to almost be uncomfortable if it weren't for the company and the prospect of drinking and eating more. What do I want to hear in this setting? Ideally, rock ‘n’ roll. Not prog, with the time signatures and wizard epics, or fey shit, with the tripled high harmonies and twee outfits, but something that gets to the point. Guitars that are hard, but not too hard, and make you want to move a little. Song names that sound like movie titles. Between one and three solos that sound like they were played on their back. Thin Lizzy, basically. But Thin Lizzy is gone, which is what makes Sheer Mag so important as a a groovy, punchy rock band with meaty riffs and tear-in-my-beer lyrics about the people who’ll do you wrong. “Nobody’s Baby” is a sob story on rock ‘n’ roll cruise control—heavy enough to put you in a power stance, soft enough to make you a little sad, perfect for standing on roofs with your friends as the sun goes down. Give me some hot dogs and let me live.
Mark Richardson: Todd Terje & the Olsens — “Firecracker”
The primary melodic motif of “Firecracker” has made a long journey from Martin Denny’s exotic image of “the Orient” on his 1959 album Quiet Village through the subversive electronic circuits of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s gear 20 years later and now into the grooves of a new project from Norwegian producer Todd Terje, featuring his live band the Olsens. In Terje’s hands, music is a space for fantasy, and “Firecracker” is no different. His work is defined by selective amplification; in both his remixes and his original productions, he locks in on a bassline or a melodic motif or a specific phrase, blows it up to the size of room, and invites you to dance in the middle of it. Perhaps because he comes from a land where the winters are brutal and the summer sun never wants to leave the sky, Terje’s work is particularly evocative of the current season, suggesting wide spaces and bright colors and warm breezes and maybe even firecrackers.
Evan Minsker: Chance the Rapper — “No Problem”
I’m not built for the heat, so if I’m driving a hot car, all human empathy goes out the window. When a dude in a fancy car pulls into the parking space I was eyeing or prematurely runs a stop sign, I decide that he’s an entitled garbage person. I tend to soundtrack these experiences with burly, too-loud, too-angry guitar music—something like Foster Care or Motörhead. It’s momentarily satisfying, but it probably isn’t a good idea when you reach your destination and have to sit at the dinner table with your grandma, the rage uncomfortably lingering in your system as she talks about her friends from church and Dr. Oz.
Chance the Rapper’s “No Problem” splits the difference perfectly—it’s defiant in the face of entitled big money assholes, but the music itself is strewn with joy. He boasts self-made power, tossing off threats at major label bigwigs while invoking Schoolboy Q’s “no bodyguard, walkin’ solo through the mall” bliss. Backed by one of Coloring Book’s best gospel samples, he becomes the Patronus of the lunch pail everyman, gleefully making it clear that he’s getting the job done without anybody else’s help. Lil Wayne, who currently seems happy to tell his label to go fuck itself, sounds perfect on the track. 2 Chainz shows up with a Petey Pablo reference. It’s fun, it’s joyous, it’s anchored by a threat, and it sounds really good in my car.
Brandon Stosuy: Anohni — “4 Degrees”
Songs of the summer are generally about drinks, sex on beaches, and other carefree warm-weather fun. But with our increasingly screwed-up weather patterns, it’s hard not to associate changes in the seasons with damaging shifts in the overall ecosystem. I listen to plenty of happy music, but when I looked at my iTunes to see which track I’ve played the most since our short spring immediately turned into full-on summer, it was Anohni’s “4 Degrees.”
The first single from the accurately titled HOPELESSNESS, “4 Degrees is a catchy song about global warming, and the effect a four degree shift will have on the world. The way Anohni implicates us and herself (“I want to hear the dogs crying for water,” “I want to see the fish go belly up in the sea,” “I want to see the animals die in the trees”), is a reminder that we’re all at fault, whether we care to admit it or not. But when you mix her leaping otherworldly voice with Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never’s lush, industrialized club production, it easily doubles as a dance track. If you want, you can continue hearing it that way, pretending the title’s rise in temperature is a reference to it getting hot in herre—even if it’s more productive looking closely at the reality of the song, and trying to find some solutions. The odd thing, though? In its truer form, you’ll still want to dance to it.
Philip Sherburne: Lindstrom — "Closing Shot"
Sure, you got me: When it comes to summer jams, Lindstrøm's "Closing Shot" is almost a little too on the nose. Hell, pretty much any Norwegian disco is. Those dudes take to summer like vitamin D junkies trying to mainline the aurora borealis, and can you really blame them, given the kind of winters they have to put up with? Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, Todd Terje—when they're in anthem mode, all of 'em make songs almost desperately in thrall to the glory days of Balearic disco, almost slavishly attuned to the use value of a spongy bassline when you're dancing on sand. Europe's low-cost airlines really ought to be paying them dividends, because seriously, when the tunes dry up, bookings to beach raves in Croatia and Formentera and Crete are going to plummet.
If festivals are selling a fantasy, then Lindstrøm's "Closing Shot" makes good on it: It's eight-and-a-half minutes of larger-than-life shimmy, of conga-line mayhem, of chords so bright you gotta wear shades (which is fine, because you are anyway). And in calling it "Closing Shot"—and then wrapping it all up in a disintegrating denouement of misty synths and drunken handclaps—Lindstrøm knows exactly what he's doing. Ninety-nine times out of 100, when this song gets played this season, it'll be the last track of the night. There's no point following it up with anything else. This summer, all roads lead to this song's joyful climax, and all roads home will be strewn with confetti and stray flip-flops and kisses stolen beneath palm trees at dawn.
Quinn Moreland: Whitney — “No Matter Where We Go”
As soon as the sun decides to take up residence in our lives, I crave jangle more than sexy, sweaty bangers. I tried to resist the relentless cheer of Whitney’s “No Matter Where We Go,” I really did, but those breezy guitars ensnared me and now I’m in far too deep. Whitney may not be Rihanna but “No Matter Where We Go” is sexy in its own way—devotion is hot! But what’s really hot about this song is that I like to imagine that while the narrator and his girl are driving around with the windows down, she can knock some errands out of the way. Forget about Drake being an asshole about his girl taking his Bugatti out to buy Kotex—the dudes in Whitney want to help you accomplish your goals. What can I say, I like my summer jams to be practical.
Matthew Strauss: Innanet James — “Summer”
It doesn’t matter much if it gets muggy, if work doesn’t stop for a season—summer is all about hope and trying to have fun. And Innanet James’ “Summer” is about as fun as it gets. He has an infectious flow that beams through a bouncing beat. It’s a song that resonates and radiates. “Summer” could be a kickstart to a good night or a breeze to pass another hour by the pool. It easily brings anybody back to their youthful days, when everything you want summer to be comes true.
Noah Yoo: Kaytranada — “Lite Spots”
In high school, my summers were largely defined by hours spent in a beat-up Honda Accord, the manual windows rolled all the way down in an effort to combat the broken air conditioning. My only respite from that hellish sweatbox on wheels was blasting tracks to turn the car into a club, taking my mind away from traffic and renewing my energy. Kaytranada’s “Lite Spots,” with its one-two punch of sampled Brazilian pop and unruly house beat, perfectly embodies that feeling. You might be feeling lethargic and you probably won’t see it coming, but once it hits, you really don’t have a choice in whether or not your body is moving. “Lite Spots” is an instrumental without pretense: put it on for an instant party. My Honda called it quits last year, but I have no doubt that this would be the one to keep the party going all summer long.
Kevin Lozano: Jessy Lanza — “It Means I Love You”
The summer after my freshman year of college I very briefly interned at an online record store whose offices were located in Greenpoint's Pencil Factory. One of my coworkers gave me a lecture one afternoon about entropy, as we listened to music, and mechanically wrapped vinyl records in between bubble wrap and packing peanuts, to be shipped across the world. She believed that the summer was the perfect season to appreciate the molecular disorder every action produced, since our possible fates include thermodynamic energy running out, entropy stopping, and the universe dying. She looked me in the eyes and urged, “Dance while you can kid.” Through serendipity, I’m working in the same office building after all these years, writing about music, and not packing it into cardboard boxes. When I listened to Jessy Lanza’s “It Means I Love You,” it was still winter, and I was convinced then that it was prophetic. I could almost see myself, dimly through the aperture of the future, bobbing my head up and down Greenpoint Avenue to the beat of this song. “It Means I Love You” is a delightfully strange pop song that demands frenetic movement and keeps the specter of our cosmic fate at bay. Now with some well-needed perspective, I couldn’t be happier imagining all the dancing I’ll be doing at the end of the world.
Sam Sodomsky: A Giant Dog — “Sex & Drugs”
Like summer itself, “Sex & Drugs” seems like so much fun at the start. All slap-happy piano and fuzzy guitars, it’s the sort of indie rock that might have soundtracked an iPod commercial a decade ago. But once you start getting into it, the anxiety hits. The chorus—“I’m too old to die young / I can’t even REMEMBER being young”—is the type of thing you might think when you get to the beach and realize everyone is younger and more beautiful than you, and maybe it’s best you keep that t-shirt on. Then the long list of shout-outs in the bridge—to “all the people we fucked and all the hippies who sucked and all the hearts that we broke”—makes you consider the fact that you might actually miss the wintertime. At least then you had an excuse to stay inside and not see anyone. It all makes for the most cathartic, heart-racing bummer of the season. Dog days indeed.