Rihanna Umbrella
Security banned umbrellas from her gigs following complaints that people were getting poked in the eye. A summer song worth risking a cornea for, in our opinion. SW
Beyoncé Crazy in Love
Crazy in Love is now so old that it genuinely contains the lyric “got me hoping you’ll page me right now”. Yet somehow, no matter how many times you hear it, it doesn’t seem to tire. Even the endless Glee covers, or the funeral march version Beyoncé recorded for the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack hasn’t sullied it. SW
Dizzee Rascal Bonkers
When I was a child and I imagined what being on drugs was like, the noise inside my head was the rough approximation of this entire song, just with more policemen yelling at me. Now I’m an adult, I’m like: “Damn kid. Failed your SATs but got that one right.” JG
Daft Punk Get Lucky
Listen: we all overdid it. It’s fine. Admit it now. We overplayed this song. We hammered it into the ground like a nail. It’s been six years. Try it again. The little guitar riff: buh bonky bonkedy bonk. Is that a pineapple full of rum in your hand? Were those sunglasses on your face? They were not. I’m afraid it is time for you to … get lucky. JG
Rihanna ft Drake Work
Work is sweat; it’s sand in your crevices; it’s that cool drip of water racing down the side of a pre-mixed cocktail can towards your thigh. Work is summer in a song; it’s dry-humping anything that moves; it’s Lilt; it’s Rihanna in excelsis; and it’s so good it doesn’t matter that Drake almost ruins it. MC
Lil Nas X Old Town Road
One of those rare viral moments that transcends the internet and becomes a hit on planet normie. Time will tell if Lil Nas X ends up like that kid who signed a record deal after yodelling in supermarkets and ended up … yodelling in more supermarkets. SW
Nelly Hot in Herre
Nelly does a searing job here: “It’s getting hot in here / So take off all your clothes”, seeming more like some urgent government warning than a creepy chat-up line. SW
Carly Rae Jepsen Call Me Maybe
Is Call Me Maybe a summer banger? Not really: it’s a sort of for ever-banger that just seems to make more sense in summer. If you haven’t “accidentally” sprayed someone with the hose while washing their car on a blazing hot July day to the heady sounds of Carly Rae, though, then have you really been in love? Think about it. Not sure you have. Annul your marriage. JG
DJ Khaled Wild Thoughts
You, a low-ceilinged club with sweat on the walls, some very earnest chats with strangers in the bathroom, holding a can of beer to your head in a futile attempt to cool your blood: summer is here, and Wild Thoughts is the capital-H Horny soundtrack to it all. That said, the “burned out, cremation” line shouldn’t have got past as many people as it did. JG
Luis Fonzi ft Justin Bieber Despacito
We should scrap star signs and just assign people personality matrices based on which bit of Despacito they sing along to. Here’s my dating profile: “Favorito Favorito baby looking for his Sube Sube, Sube Sube Sube. Bom Boms need not apply. Had my time wasted enough.” JG
Katy Perry California Gurls
This song very urgently makes me want to untie the front of my bikini top despite never ever having worn one in my life. It is actually quite a weird feeling. I’m turning this one off. I don’t need this energy ruining my summer. JG
Azealia Banks 212
In 2012, it seemed impossible that you could still have that feeling that people had the first time they heard the Velvet Underground or Public Enemy – of hearing a bolt from the blue that didn’t sound like anything else. Yet 212 had that thrill, wonderfully explicitly, full of giddy cunnilanguage and nods to German house and New York disco. Now Azealia is better known for winding up Elon Musk, but this remains a perfect three minutes and 30 seconds. SW
Justin Timberlake Can’t Stop the Feeling
In which a pre-lumberjack, post-hair relaxer Justin “JT” Timberlake shouts the word “dance” and “wavy” at some kids with the manic enthusiasm of a children’s TV presenter whose home life is catastrophically falling apart. Guaranteed to get nervy uncle Clive dancing at the family barbecue, mind you. MC
Mariah Carey We Belong Together
Sure, long summer days are great, but be warned: the heatstroke-aggravated, tequila-assisted evening meltdown that often involves screaming about loyalty in the ear of someone you have only snogged once while every emotion you’ve ever felt comes racing towards the surface – this is the soundtrack to that, basically. Altogether now: “Oh baby baby, we belong together.” *Vomits* MC
Iggy Azalea Fancy
Very weird couple of weeks when Azalea was the biggest rapper in the world before everyone woke up from a love spell and decided she was a fraud. Still, you can’t argue with this bassline and Charli XCX’s rebellious vocal, which recalls that Shampoo/Daphne and Celeste era of pop when all you needed to do to be a bad girl was bunk off school and swear at your parents. SW
Drake ft Wizkid & Kyla One Dance
In the future, when the concept of seasons is something we only remember via Instagram filters, people will ask what “summer” was exactly. And they’ll be playing One Dance via a speaker in their finger and they’ll smile fondly and say: “Wow, that must have been quite nice.” And they’d be right. MC
Psy Gangnam Style
One summer, my friend Richard shat himself while rollerblading, for ever tarnishing quite a nice memory of warm, endless evenings for me. Gangnam Style – essentially the musical equivalent of a thousand Instant Idiot: Just Add Alcohol “comedy” T-shirts – carries the same summer-spoiling properties, reminding everyone that fun can be shat on at any moment. MC
Ed Sheeran I Don’t Care
Why are so many of Robert De Niro’s films terrible? Why wasn’t there a single good gag in the last two seasons of Seinfeld? Because when you are at the top of the game you can give up trying and just churn out Skyped-in rehashes of your previous successes and wait for the cheques to roll in. SW
Robin Thicke Blurred Lines
Reluctant to big this song up too much in case the ghost of Marvin Gaye sues me or I get picketed by an entire university but: if you somehow strip this song of every scrap of context; if you forget the last five years of discourse; if you ignore “What rhymes with hug me?”: this song is designed to make men in red trousers embarrass themselves at a Henley afterparty, and for that reason alone, I suppose it still has a place in the summer canon. JG
Cardi B ft Bad Bunny & J Balvin I Like It
Winter would be a lot easier to take if this ludicrous Latin-trap hybrid was pumped into every home rather than people relying on those weirdly shaped Sad lamps that always seemed like a Charlie Brooker invention anyway. The real star of this three-way pileup is Cardi B, obviously, who radiates a sort of barbecue-in-the-park-charm, even when comparing sex to furiously beating a piñata. MC
Katy Perry I Kissed a Girl
Look, let’s not lie to ourselves: we all feel hornier in the summer. We also get sweaty backs, unsightly blotches, look awful in shorts, smell weird and have a continuous film of sweat on our hands. I Kissed a Girl, Perry’s unsurprisingly problematic sapphic banger, is the perfect encapsulation of that constant battle between sexy and really, really unsexy. MC
Black Eyed Peas I Gotta Feeling
I know we’re all sick of will.i.am now (launch another smartwatch about it, mate! Say something mad about wet wipes!) but with time away from him we can finally admit: he and the BEP made a curious sub-category of banger; the “just got passed the Aux cord in the back of an Uber” jam, and this is the best of them. JG
LMFAO ft Lauren Bennett & GoonRock Party Rock Anthem
If they remade Big now with your younger brother who does Fortnite dances so frantically you’re worried he might not make it into his preferred secondary school, the plot would be: he gets big, he somehow forms LMFAO (with his uncle???), he makes the song Party Rock Anthem, he falls very in love with cocaine. I would, to be fair, watch it. JG
Flo Rida ft David Guetta Club Can’t Handle Me
Basically I Gotta Feeling but featuring a super Auto-Tuned Flo Rida instead of Black Eyed Peas, Club Can’t Handle Me is big night out in 2010 vibes: poppin’ bottles, stripping off, sweaty nightclub, hands in the air. However, let’s be real. Club can’t handle you right now? Rest assured that yes, Liquid nightclub in Basingstoke can, and also it’s £9 for a Smirnoff Ice, thanks very much. IS
BodyRockers I Like the Way
This is an actual pervert’s anthem. If someone crept up behind you and growled: “I like the way you … act all surprised” in your ear, you’d call the police immediately. The vocalist’s delivery suggests he’s simultaneously orgasming and shitting. However, in 2005, it was basically illegal for clubs not to play it eight times a night. Weird. IS
Pitbull Hotel Room Service
Sampling – and ruining – the Nightcrawlers’ Push the Feeling On is quite the achievement, but Pitbull did it! Shame on everyone who danced to this in the summer of 2009 because, on closer listen, Pitbull is inviting you to an orgy in a budget hotel where he declares “I’m the plumber tonight / I’ll check yo pipes” and seems to be threatening to ejaculate in your eye. Not so fun now, is it? IS
Cascada Evacuate the Dancefloor
Summer requires two songs to help guide us all safely to the end of it: a song to do shots to, and a song to vomit shots out to. Evacuate the Dancefloor is both of those songs. JG
George Ezra Shotgun
Some summer anthems earn their place by being instant classics that encapsulate the pure joy and excitement of summer. Others just mention lots of holiday words (hot sun, bikini bottoms, lager tops) and have simple lyrics that are easy for drunk festival crowds to chant. Shotgun is definitely one of these two things. IS
Las Ketchup The Ketchup Song
You think you’re too good to try to remember the Las Ketchup dance at a heady summer marquee wedding, with sweat glistening on your forehead and children skidding around you on their knees – all the nans have got lifts home so the real fun can start – but you’re not and you never will be. You think you’re too good to say: “Hey, ha!” a lot? You think you’re too good for fun? You disgust me. JG
Omi Cheerleader
Cheerleader – or rather 2014’s Felix Jaehn remix – came out in that summer we were all really into tropical house, AKA before Ed Sheeran got involved and every song had to have a horn on it. But in 2019, it’s like looking back at a terrible ex, if your ex was an annoying nursery rhyme-like song. Were you only into them because they were there? Were they actually quite irritating? What were you thinking?! IS
