Is the ‘song of the summer’ a dead concept?
“Song of the summer!” someone is always quick to proclaim the second a catchy new tune is released between the months of May to September. But can there ever be one defining hit of the season anymore?
What would be the song of the summer 2025? Chappell Roan’s ‘The Subway’? Heavier rockers would say no. They might suggest giving the crown to Turnstile, or Hayley Williams, while more classic rock and roller might ever dare suggest it go to Oasis, arguing that their dominating live comeback over the hotter months has made one of their old 1990s hits a 2025 repeat winner.
At Far Out, even our team would all put different tracks up for the honour of the top spot, whether it be a new Wet Leg number, an Ethel Cain sombre tune, a Getdown Services rager or some niche left-field release from an independent label.
It all begs the question: what constitutes a song of the summer? Can a slow, sad song even qualify, or does the track in question have to have sunny qualities? Is it judged based on energy, or is this purely statistical?
If statistics win out, technically the song of the summer 2025 is ‘No Broke Boys’ by Disco Lines and Tinashe in the UK having dominated the charts for nine weeks now, or Alex Warren’s ‘Ordinary’ which is probably more the song of the year given that it’s been in both the UK charts and the Hot 100 for over 20 weeks now. But I can tell you now, neither of those songs has come anywhere near close to my summer, I’m not sure about yours.
It’s another argument for the way that the charts have become devoid of any real meaning. Back when buying physical music was the only way, sales genuinely did match up to popularity, as it was obvious that the best-selling single of that week, or the songs that remained the more consistently best-selling, were the ones dominating culture.
Now, in a world of streaming services, social media and the vast multitude of ways that songs are discovered and listened to, and the ways ways a certain song can be adopted by a particular audience or brought back into the spotlight even from decades ago, the process of picking one top song is near impossible, and the challenge to pick a defining one is even harder.
Society is full of pockets, and culture even more so. It’s no longer just a game of genres; there are subgenres amidst subgenres, cultures within cultures. Take indie, for example; some might try to argue that Chappell Roan fits in that label and see their own brand of indie as a more pop-leaning place, others would be passionately offended by that, settling into vastly different camps even under the same wider umbrella. On both sides, the song they’d see as defining the last however many months would be very different.
But isn’t the ‘song of the summer’ the one you’ve been listening to most while making all the good memories? As the chart becomes less and less clear, it serves to highlight just how personal music is. Each of us loves the music we love, and especially when it comes down to the soundtrack for the sunny months, it all has to come down to our personal playlists, the shows we’ve seen and the song you hear in your head when thinking back to good times, and not the attempt to quantify these things.
