Men lie, women lie, summers don’t.
And yet, there is something unquantifiable about a true song of the summer. Very rarely is it the most streamed song or the song that spends the most weeks at number one—although it can be either one of those things. A true song of the summer tends to dominate outside activities. You hear it in clubs, coming out of cars, inside of coffee shops, outside at picnics, or just spilling out of people’s headphones as they walk by.
It’s a song that eventually becomes inescapable. And while every summer you’ll have a lot of songs people love, there can only truly be one song of the summer winner. So with Memorial weekend—the unofficial start of summer—here, we thought we would rank all the song of the summer contenders, featuring a range of artists, from veterans like Kendrick Lamar and Tinashe to younger upstarts like J.P. and Cash Cobain.
