Sama Farrag Let me start off by saying that I am a winter girlie. I thrive the second the temperature drops, happily cosplaying Bella Swan staring out a foggy window while atmospheric indie tunes float through my headphones (famously referred to as Hoa Hoa Hoa weather).
But summer music? That’s an entirely different beast.
Summer has little patience when it comes to your vintage knit sweaters or your carefully curated melancholic playlists containing Radiohead and Bon Iver. Summer is sticky, loud, and completely unrefined. It’s the sonic equivalent of cheap sunblock, stale car AC, and lukewarm iced coffee leaking through its plastic cup onto your passenger seat.
Think about how heat alters your brain. When the asphalt stays hot long after midnight, your phone battery is perpetually at four percent, and suddenly every bassline rattling your rear-view mirror feels like a core memory being minted in real time. We don’t need sterile, algorithmic pop tracks, we need records that bleed through time into the heatwave – the ones built out of neon lights, salt water, and that frantic and underlying panic that July is slipping through your fingers.
So if your current rotation is feeling a bit stale, throughout the hyper-curated playlists. Here is the real and unvarnished rundown of albums worth cranking until your speakers blow.
Lana Del Rey – Norman F*ing Rockwell
Lana has been the undisputed patron of sad-girl summers since Born To Die dropped in 2012, but NFR! Is where she officially ascended into the pantheon. It sounds like golden hour captured on a grainy 16mm film reel that someone left out in the sun too long, Jack Antonoff’s piano production gives her just enough room to drawl about bad poets, self-destruction, and california literally burning down around her. “Venice Bitch” is nearly ten minutes of pure, unadulterated psychedelic drift and it could go on for twenty more without anyone complaining. Her cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” breathed new life into the track and was the song of the summer back in 2019. Put NFR! On the exact second the sun starts dipping below the shore line, the sky turns that bruised shape of purple and relish in one of the most perfect albums ever made.
Drake – Views
People love to make fun of tiny Drake sitting on the CN tower, but let’s not rewrite history: the summer of 2016 was completely swallowed whole by this record. It was a cultural reset. The lights were brighter, the birds were chirping, and the vibes were just immaculate. With the internet currently having a massive 2016 renaissance – everyone looking back at that pre-covid, nostalgia-drenched cultural peak – Views is the main artifact. You literally could not walk down a single block or go to a cabina party without “One Dance” or “Controlla” being the only songs played that night. Is it bloated? Absolutely. Does Drake overshare? Always. But those Caribbean dancehall grooves capture that exact humid city energy where it’s 28 degrees at midnight and nobody wants to go home because the night is still young.
Beyoncé – Lemonade
Remember where you were when this dropped? Because I do – on the way to Makadi Bay with my parents and having my mind completely blown. Lemonade was a seismic shift that stopped the internet dead in its tracks. It hit like a sudden and violent summer thunderstorm that cleared out the suffocating humidity, left the pavement smoking and instilled a burning hatred towards Jay-Z in millions of women. Moving from the brassy, strutting funk of “Hold Up” to the raw, guitar-shredding rage of “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Beyoncé delivered an absolute masterclass in burning your life down to the ground and rebuilding it better. It’s loud, righteous, and completely immortal. We haven’t forgotten about you, Becky With The Good Hair.
Calvin Harris – Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1
Zero deep thoughts here. Absolutely no trauma-dumping – just poolside basslines. Calvin Harris realized that nobody wanted complicated social commentary in the middle of July – we wanted disco keys, thick grooves, and every massive artist in his contacts list on one record. Getting Frank Ocean, Migos, Pharrell and Young Thug on the same track list sounds like a fever dream you’d read about on a music blog in 2017, but somehow he turned it into the ultimate golden-era party soundtrack. “Slide” defined generations and is still an absolute banger.
Dominic Fike – Sunburn
I know everyone is still mad at Dominic Fike for his 10 hour Euphoria song, but hear me out. This record doesn’t sound like a clean, sterile studio project made by executives in Los Angeles. It sounds like it was thrown together by a guy who hasn’t worn shoes all week, has saltwater dried in his hair, and keeps a skateboard in his trunk. Fike smashes 90s alt-rock guitars straight into fast, effortless hip-hop flows, and the result is total, hyperactive coastal chaos. It’s fast, bratty, and light on its feet. “How Much Is Weed” is a masterpiece, coming in as my top song on Spotify wrapped in 2024.
Charli xcx – Brat
Pure, sweaty, middle-of-the-night chaos. Charli birthed Brat Summer, murdering the polite clean girl aesthetic with a single strike and replacing it with aggressive, neon-green, bass-boosted adrenaline. Sewer rat summer, if you may. It became an absolute cultural obsession for a reason: it’s loud, messy, hyper-specific, and insanely vulnerable. Listening to “360” or “Von Dutch” feels like standing directly in front of a DJ booth while your ribs vibrate and someone spills drinks on your boots. It is the undisputed anthem for terrible decisions made way past midnight when you know you have to wake up in three hours.
SZA – Ctrl
Hyper-honest, warm, and completely devoid of fronting. Listening to Ctrl feels like sitting on a back porch at midnight, drinking cheap coffee out of a mug, and listening to your smartest friend overthink her entire dating life in real time. SZA’s voice just floats over those hazy, analog beats. “20 Something” and “Supermodel” have gotten me through some of the toughest summer blues. It’s conversational, raw, and hits hardest on those heavy, stagnant July nights when the air stays warm long after the sun goes down.
Tame Impala – Currents
Swirling, psychedelic pop engineered specifically for high-speed late-night drives. Kevin Parker builds a soundscape so dense and hyper-detailed that it wraps around you like warm air blowing through the window of an Alfa Romeo at 2:00 AM. Tracks like “Let It Happen” stretch out, mutate, and roll, making you feel like you’re floating on an empty highway to nowhere, while the streetlights blur past your windshield.
Lorde – Melodrama
The absolute, unmatched drama of being young in the summer. Melodrama maps out every house party, every terrible crush, every reckless car ride, and every quiet breakdown in a crowded bathroom with terrifying precision. It’s explosive and hyper-detailed. You can practically taste the feeling of being a teenager, feel the bass thumping through floorboards, and smell the humidity hanging in the dark July air every single track. I need extensive therapy for the amount of times I’ve had “Liability” on repeat.
Frank Ocean – Blonde
If Brat is the peak of the night, Blonde is the long and quiet walk home when the sun is coming up, your knees hurt, and you suddenly realize August is almost over, Frank stripped away almost all the heavy drums here, leaving us with minimalist electric guitars, pitched vocals, and devastating, poetic lyricism. He dropped one of the best albums of the century and dipped. That beat switch on “Nights” is immortal, a shiver-inducing line in the sand dividing the heat of the seasons from the cold, sobering reality of what comes next.
