‘A sublime, breezy confection’: writers on their 2026 songs of the summer

Kim Petras – Jeep

Kim Petras’ greatest song to date is also the best outsider country song in recent memory: if Ethel Cain and Lana Del Rey could ever put the beef behind them and duet, the dusty gutter romance of Jeep is exactly how you’d want it to sound. The song creates a flyover state love story in a strangely effective union of hyperpop and Americana, creating a windswept fantasy of “doing some middle America shit” with your man: Four Loko-fueled hookups, gas station canoodling and screaming along to rage music beneath the stars. The truly audacious thing is the bridge, a whispered and impressionistic slur that feels like Petras is eight drinks deep, doing donuts in her car until everything blurs. It’s total make-believe, but Petras is so good at making you feel her longing that it gets me choked up. When she recently came out at a Charli xcx show to perform Jeep unannounced, it already felt like an anthem. Owen Myers

Nirosta Steel – English Party

Nirosta Steel, the long-running solo project of Steven Halls, an Arthur Russell collaborator, is rightfully this year’s consummate product for music nerds. Like Los Thuthanaka and Cindy Lee before him, his music seems to transcend time and provenance, which is just as well, because his latest album, My Skyscraper, is assembled from 40 years of stockpiled material, with no indication of what was recorded when. Opener English Party could just as easily soundtrack the summer of 1976 as it could summer 2026. English Party is first and foremost a summer party track, with sex and fun its prevailing ambitions. Steel half-sings lyrics in close, erotic detail over sexy funk guitar, produced as though it were recorded from the other room. Steel knows summer is for seeking lust through discomfort: swim shorts stuck to belly hair, making out in a porta potty. Allegedly recorded as a demo for Madonna, English Party deserves to enter the gay summer canon immediately. Emma Madden

Madonna – Danceteria

The song that should singlehandedly revive the clubbing crisis – or at least lure you out for one sweaty summer night. How could you listen to Madonna’s in-the-know paean to the many gorgeous creatures she met in New York’s early-80s dance-floor demimonde and not want to go out and let life happen to you, to meet your own Debi Mazar and Haoui Montaug and turn your lives into a work of art? She might be looking back more than four decades, but her spoken-word vocals and the song’s frisky bass-line bubble with real-time discovery, like you’re arm-in-arm walking down the club’s sardine-packed hallways, catching eyes and dancing yourself into being. Write your own version in some filthy warehouse this summer. Laura Snapes

Big Freedia and Sophie – Blaze That Ass

This is the summer where we all join forces to defeat the efforts of rightwing losers around the world who are sweating through their suits trying to erase and eradicate Black and brown and trans people. If that feels exhausting, Blaze That Ass is a renewable resource to keep spirits up. Created 10 years ago by New Orleans bounce icon Big Freedia and hyperpop innovator Sophie and a bootlegged highlight of DJ sets ever since, the track found an official release on Juneteenth. But the late Sophie’s glossy amalgamation of Chicago house, Detroit techno, NY Ballroom and UK bleep has never sounded more like the future when paired with Freedia’s gospel exhortations; sometimes, her voice is cut up into rattles like a tambourine, and sometimes the bass is so deep it sounds like a sermon. With its explosive breakdown and expert pacing, it’s an international anthem to getting off your ass and getting to work. Jessie Doris

Veeze – Malice in the Palace

The up-tempo bounce of Malice in the Palace belongs on a booming speaker in front of the bodega in your block. Michigan’s Veeze is a rapper’s rapper: an eccentric technician whose music is without outward ambition and hooks, stumbling into a Lil Wayne archetype – in the same way Wayne expanded his New Orleans roots into something more national and traditional, Veeze does the same with Michigan swag rap – which has made him a top-tier rapper. On Palace, his dark comedy shines, with lines such as “this bitch wanna fuck two days a row, I ain’t feeling it today” and “this nigga Veeze the worst him and Hitler hand to hand.” Although the summer is expected to feature music for vibrant and pretty, Veeze’s music is raw, studied, but completely casual. His references remain sport-heavy and dense, an intelligent guy whose references are almost encyclopedic. If the summer is where boys step outside, spitting game to women on the block, then the soundtrack to those shenanigans will be Veeze. Jayson Buford

Isabella Lovestory feat. The Deep and Cece Natalie – Gorgeous (Remix)

From Brat and Fancy That to Midnight Sun, it’s clear that we’re living in the pop princess remix renaissance. Gorgeous (Remix), my favorite addition to the trend, takes the breezy 2000s R&B charmer off Isabella Lovestory’s sophomore album Vanity and revs it up a notch, leaving it new and nostalgic at once: the slinky, confident hook hits like a Brandy chorus remembered from a dream, while stabs of fat, buzzing synthlines scream hyperpop. Like the best summer songs, it feels effortlessly timeless: yes, this totally soundtracked sitting in front of an open fridge with an annotated copy of Paris Hilton’s hot-pink Confessions of an Heiress circa 2007, but it’ll also soundtrack sipping Aperol spritzes and playing footsie literally next week. Produced by new pop queen-maker Oscar Scheller (the mastermind behind another one of this year’s buzziest remixes), this update ropes in Korean hyperpop femmebot The Deep and sultry pop enigma Cece Natalie in a nuclear alt-pop crossover that’s as full of humor as it is bad bitch manifestations: just listen to how Cece pouts “They wanna fly me out, they cannot pay the toll / That’s the rave in LA, I only do real shows.” It’s a seductive, sparkling promise for the summer, the sound of becoming the girl you always knew you were. Lydia Wei

Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert – Horses and Divorces

Summer is synonymous with fun, but in the latest, seasonally attuned song by Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert it signifies another F word – Friendship. Horses and Divorces, a warm, noterño-flavored waltz, finds these once-warring country stars bonding on a shared love of shit-talking, heavy drinking and the wiles of Willie Nelson. For those who don’t know the backstory: 15 years ago, Musgraves was a struggling songwriter who co-wrote a piece titled Mama’s Broken Heart that she hoped would launch her solo career. Instead, the song was pitched to Lambert, who cut a version that shot to No 1. The ensuing resentment only eased after Musgraves reached out to her fellow Texan singer with a lyric of reconciliation too witty to resist. The light and frothy tone of the music they concocted suits the summer season perfectly, as does the chorus, which cries out for a mass sing-along. Better, the song’s message of finding common ground couldn’t be more prescient at a time when political factionalism has driven us all to the brink. Jim Farber

Izco – Wonderluv

And the future sound of London is … this young Hackney-based producer, a key member of Brighter Days, a DJ and musician collective who are putting on some of the best parties in the UK capital right now (and who recently brought the ampitheatre down at Worldwide festival in France). Real name Izzy Cofie, Izco just released his debut album, Powerscroft, on Gilles Peterson’s taste-making Brownswood label and this is its standout single: a sublime, breezy confection of vintage soul (it samples American singer Leroy Hutson), jazzy flourishes, a killer hook (“turn me onnnnn”) and a thwacking, rough and ready breakbeat that gives it some proper inner-city, pavement-pounding grit. It’s one for coasting around the neighbourhood, dodging traffic on an e-bike; for road trips and anywhere that sunshine might be dappling through the trees. You will luv it. Kate Hutchinson

Olivia Rodrigo – Stupid Song

The third album from Olivia Rodrigo has managed to excite teenage girls as much as it has their dads, songs about minidresses, vodka-crans and all-consuming early romance through-lined with a deep love of The Cure. As someone of dad age, the song that has been played the most in my childless home is one more aimed at her exact demographic, the excitedly over-the-top, and increasingly unhinged, ode to fresh feelings: Stupid Song. It’s a thrilling act of escalation, a tonic to the similarly structured Vampire’s toxic, and while it was described by a colleague as too “Glee Club” (it does admittedly have the earnest on-your-feet energy of a Broadway show-stopper), it more closely reminded me of early Arcade Fire. Like some of their most cinematic tracks, there’s a giddy abandon that makes you want to tear off running down the street, safety and sweaty summer pits be damned. Such stupidity knows no age limit. Benjamin Lee

Zara Larsson and Shakira – Eurosummer (Girls Trip)

Regardless of nationality, I think we all turn a little European in the summer. Late nights, questionable tan lines, boyfriends who last for two weeks: such is the stuff of the season. It doesn’t hurt that my home in New York City feels especially Euro this year. There’s the infiltration of World Cup fans, all my friends have started smoking skinny cigarettes, and there’s a lasting party atmosphere thanks to the Knicks’ championship victory. So Zara Larsson and Shakira’s ode to being hot and carefree feels fitting. Clocking in at less than three minutes, Eurosummer is bubblegum pop of the highest order, conjuring scenes of midsummer excess with a chorus that includes the cry of “Naked and never sober”. Unlike past summer songs of yearning (Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe! comes to mind), our protagonists know better than to chase anything other than the next party. Alaina Demopoulos

Jump Source – Endlessly

This summer, it feels near impossible to attend a DJ set during a day party or rooftop hang without hearing the swinging, sunny sound of tech house. It’s a much-maligned genre that, at its best, combines the laid-back grooviness of house and propulsive minimalism of techno; at its worst, it plods into predictable, middle-of-the-road background music for day drinking. Jump Source, the Montreal-based duo of Priori and Patrick Holland (both beloved names in the left-field electronic music circuit), home in on the genre’s sweet spot on their debut album Fold from April – all while exploring its more atmospheric, brainy tendrils. On standout track Endlessly, for instance, the duo don’t sacrifice detailed production for catchy hooks; its grooving, ear-worm bassline and subtle string stabs set a stylish scene for weirdo pop maestro BEA1991 to unleash an abstract incantation for the night: “Fated that the moon is right / … A lick of that finer potion.” The meaning of the words don’t matter here as much as the feeling they convey: freedom, everlasting revelry. It goes down like a crisp glass of orange wine: gluggable but with a faint funkiness that makes you pause and think. Michelle Hyun Kim

CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso & Anderson .Paak – Ay Ay Ay

CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso wrote Ay Ay Ay with Anderson .Paak after eating shroom chocolates. “Chocolates of truth”, CA7RIEL told Pitchfork. The three took an ice bath at the Argentine duo’s fictional Free Spirits Wellness Center. Both were done in service of creative focus and restraint. They wrote lyrics that concern pleasures of the flesh I cannot reproduce here. The resulting song is a heady dose of Brazilian batucada drums, shades of bachata and an atmospheric psychedelic breakdown from .Paak that stretches into a warm oblivion. Of all the genre-defying tracks on Free Spirits, Ay Ay Ay is a brief thesis statement of the duo’s commitment to the groove, to hedonism, and to the bit. If Free Spirits is a high-concept wellness retreat, Ay Ay Ay is a wink to spiritual clarity in all its forms. Like CA7RIEL and Paco, it’s cerebrally engaged, musically curious and never that serious. Stefanie Fernández

D’Leesa – Healer

It’s unclear whether D’Leesa is legally qualified to practice medicine, but even without an official license, the Atlanta bedroom pop producer knows exactly how to fix a broken heart. On Healer, the viral R&B singer plays the part of sexy empath, a uniquely understanding lover who can see past her girl’s defense mechanisms through to the mushy soft matter of pure emotion. Over a beat as minimal and insistent as a cardiogram, D’Leesa establishes a sultry bedside manner before gradually turning up the heat. D’Leesa is an un-showy singer, whose superpower is one-to-one directness. The song’s space-y instrumental matches her unadorned vocals, landing somewhere between the pulse of early techno and an anti-gravity version of Ghost Town DJs’ My Boo, offering only the thinnest gloss of atmosphere. So when the chorus does finally hit, and her voice peels off into multiple gauzy layers, you feel carried away by the uplift, giving us one of the most exciting breakout singles this summer. Harry Tafoya