Charli XCX – Speed Drive
This summer’s Barbie movie/marketing campaign has been at once fun and sinister. It’s hot pink, tongue-in-cheek frivolity; it’s the tip of a wave of revisionist IP. Speed Drive, the pop chameleon Charli XCX’s contribution to the soundtrack, follows suit. A hyperpop banger “about just being hot” with its foot on the gas for all of one minute, 58 seconds, it feels potentially designed for TikTok virality – short, endlessly loopable, the soundtrack to a hot girl summer. It’s also addictive, playful fun, the sonic equivalent of barreling down the highway with your friends, late-night adrenaline, temporarily impenetrable confidence, uppers. No thoughts, just frenetic vibes on loop, thanks in part to a version of Toni Basil’s Mickey reprocessed for screen-addled brains. Once you’ve rewired to the song’s relentless 174bpm, it’s difficult to come back down. (Do not try to parallel park to this song.) Am I getting steamrolled by the commerce machine? Maybe, but Speed Drive is a high I’ll keep chasing all summer long. Adrian Horton
Kylie Minogue – Padam Padam
Any number of artists could have done Padam Padam, but only Kylie Minogue could nail its end-of-the-pier humor and coquettish sexuality – and sell the absurdity of it all like it is the secret to life. The lead single from her 16th album is a full love boat fantasy laced with below-deck seediness; you can imagine its metallic echoing through a cruise ship engine room amid hissing turbines and sea men wielding heavy machinery. It’s made for this summer’s best memes, but Padam Padam is stickier than a passing fad, with a vampish undercurrent of thick bass and pitched down vocals alongside cheeky demands to get your kit off. And while Minogue’s recent singles have been colored by wistful longing and a refusal to be counted out, Padam Padam is unburdened by the personal narrative of its performer, freeing Minogue up to play sunny showgirl once more. It exists in its own shiny bubble of dance-pop joy. Owen Myers
The Dare – Sex
Some of the best songs of summer ooze sex. My pick for the best summer song of 2023 – a song that’s actually called Sex – oozes the virtual opposite. While this hilarious ditty by The Dare has been seen by many as a throwback to the randy indie sleaze scene, it’s more like a wacky send-up of it. The clunking synth beat in the song is about as a funky as a metronome, the vocals about as erotic as a zombie, and the lyrics the precise inverse of pillow talk. “Sex, it’s what I’m thinking of / Some people call it ‘love’ / I might even finish way too quick,” deadpans Harrison Patrick Smith, the 27-year-old New Yorker who performs as the Dare. Along with that cheeky salute to premature ejaculation, Smith’s blunt verse also includes allusions to incest, S&M, threeways and a hit-it-and-quit-it situation. His couplets can be clever in a Wet Leg meets Kim Petras’s Slut Pop sort of way – ie “Sex / It doesn’t hurt to try / Sometimes the hurt is why.” Or, “Sex, to me / It’s just a mystery / A lie we tell / Together we can prove it.” The music has some smart twists too, especially halfway through, when a putrid slab of synthesized something comes plopping into the mix with a fury that evokes nothing so much as someone taking a dump in the middle of the recording. Critics of the song – and there have been many - call it “cringy”. I call it something else: “brilliant”. Jim Farber
Jorja Smith – Little Things
The British singer Jorja Smith caused a minor stir last summer with her track All of This, when accusations of appropriation were levelled at its take on a style of house music that originated in South Africa called amapiano. But her latest single, Little Things, hones in on dancefloors closer to home. Its clackety-clack rhythmic workout is reminiscent of the glory days of UK funky (“si-mi-nuh party hard”), while the jaunty jazz-piano flourishes could have come off any broken beat classic. Production by P2J and New Machine aside, this is a nimble-footed anthem for the summer of singledom, where Smith enters a room, spots a hottie and hopes for a quick fling with them before she heads home. Smith is perhaps best known for her smouldering torch songs and it’s refreshing to hear her in this new light: fun, flirty and feeling herself in the run-up to her new album, falling or flying. The drum’n’bass remix with Nia Archives, meanwhile, turbo-charges the BPM and takes Little Things from the house party to the festival. Kate Hutchinson
Olivia Rodrigo – Vampire
In a sea of sub-Swiftian young singer-songwriters, ex-Disney star Olivia Rodrigo’s poignant debut Driver’s License drove its way into our heads and hearts back in 2021 for its sad specificity. There was pulsing, prickly anger but it was overtaken by melancholy even when the song eventually goes up a gear. For sophomore album-starter Vampire, that sadness has been sucked out, falling tears replaced with growing bile. The 20-year-old is in a justified rage at a blood-sucking, fame-fucking opportunist (who could be anyone from her ex Zack Bia or, if some theorists are to be believed, alleged ex-friend Taylor Swift herself) and backed by frantic, thrilling piano, recalling both Elton John and the Beatles (the old guard’s warm embrace of Rodrigo is easily explainable), she swiftly convinces us to remain fixed in her corner. Like Driver’s License, it starts somewhere small and ends somewhere huge, and like that song it’s a canny, cathartic place for us to exorcise our own demons, whatever or whomever they may be. Benjamin Lee
Jessie Ware – That! Feels Good!
With respect to the likes of Boygenius and Weyes Blood, as the world burns, I refuse to listen to sad music. I am simply depressed enough! You’ll find me instead on dancefloors both literal and imagined, which is why I fully support pop’s current obsession with disco and house-tinged songs. Beyoncé got the party started with last year’s instant classic Renaissance, and Jessie Ware continues the disco revival with my personal song of the summer, That! Feels Good! Ware enlisted a chorus of famous voices like Kylie Minogue and Róisín Murphy to coo the titular line in a euphoric spoken-word intro, Love to Love You-style. Then the bass line kicks in, staccato, bouncing and rollicking, the musical embodiment of a night out. Salted rims and pink champagne feature into the lyrics, but it’s not all fluff. “Just remember, pleasure is a right,” Ware sings during the bridge. Pop music traffics fantasies, and these days, it can feel like the ultimate fantasy is just making it to Friday night. Alaina Demopoulos
Amaarae – Counterfeit
Everything about Ghanaian American Amaarae’s recent second album, Fountain Baby, screams summer idyll. Firstly, there’s the shower-based artwork’s confident sexual desire with a hint of practicality given heatwave-induced sweatiness, while musically it’s a luxurious take on the perfect barbecue soundtrack, all muscle-relaxing polyrhythms, steel pan filigrees and sauntering horn sections. It’s inclusive too: prefer your summer soundtrack to have a hint of emo? Enjoy Sex, Violence, Suicide’s frantic punk-pop coda. But it’s the confident swagger of Counterfeit that stands out. Built around a re-recorded sample of Clipse’s 2006 Neptunes-produced heater, Wamp Wamp (What It Do), it reverberates with a heady sense of abandon, its playground chorus of “Rich bitch, rich bitch / Na-na-na-na-na” an intoxicating, drinks aloft mantra. While Clipse paired their braggadocio with nihilism, here Amaarae is far more playful, flitting between love for her “30 bitches in the crib” and for her stacks of money. In the end, she chooses the latter: “I reminisce and kiss the cash ‘cause really that’s my baby.” An unrelatable sentiment for most, sure, but the best summer anthems are all about fantasy. Michael Cragg
Coi Leray – Players (DJ Saige remix)
The fast-rising New Jersey-bred emcee scored her first top-10 hit with Players, the lead single off her sophomore LP which sampled Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message and inspired remixes from DJ Smallz and David Guetta over the winter. But the DJ Saige rework that dropped at the end of March, adding a fresh verse from Busta Rhymes while interpolating the Brooklyn doyen’s seminal 1997 smash Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See, is more than a fresh coat of paint: it’s pure pop perfection and the brand of weapons-grade earworm with legs that will carry well past Labor Day. The streets have been divided throughout the swift ascent of Leray, the daughter of the Source magazine founder Benzino, who’s been derided as a TikTok rapper and nepo baby/industry plant while also being hailed as one of hip-hop’s most exciting (and over-hated) new talents. Your mileage may vary, but the latest and greatest Players remix – which has been unavoidable on Hot 97 since it dropped at the end of March – is the sort of old school/new school marriage with a broad appeal that won’t be ignored. Bryan Armen Graham
Róisín Murphy – CooCool
CooCool is as soft as Róisín Murphy’s last album, Róisín Machine, was fiercely hard. It’s the sound of skin yielding to summer warmth, the first gulp of spritz-hitting, “silly season”, as she puts it, descending to melt away self-seriousness and fear. Made in collaboration with the impish German producer DJ Koze, the lead single from her forthcoming album Hit Parade gradually expands from cicada hiss and ambient glow to playful bass, boisterous brass, noodly little bits of guitar and radiant soul samples via some quizzical yet weirdly perfect samples of someone enthusiastically cleaning their teeth. It’s an incitement to freedom: the fulfilment of, as Murphy puts it, “a life’s work to funkify”. Laura Snapes
Dua Lipa – Dance the Night
Considering that it hails from the most talked-about movie of the summer (Barbie, of course), it checks out that it’s also a formidable contender for the singular song of the sweltering season. While showcasing nothing technically groundbreaking in the lyrics department, Dua Lipa’s Dance the Night is a deceptively simple bop which transforms a concept heard a million times over into something fresh and fun. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the shiny repackaging, wrapped with disco strings and topped with an explosive chorus, comes courtesy Dua Lipa’s go-to co-writer, Caroline Allin (Don’t Start Now, New Rules), along with the mega-producer Mark Ronson, the latter known to enthrallingly toy with the sounds of yesteryear (see: Uptown Funk, or his work with Amy Winehouse). There’s no use in resisting: throw on your best pink threads and let the joy of the track wash over you as you dutifully follow what its title suggests. Rob LeDonne
Pangaea – Installation
Across 16 years, Hessle Audio has established itself as one of the UK’s greatest dance music labels: cerebral without being dry, and bass and breakbeat-loving without cleaving to any one genre (Objekt’s Cactus, Joe’s Claptrap, Peverelist’s Dance Til the Police Come and Bruce’s What are just some of their greatest hits). Pangaea, AKA Kevin McAuley, is one of the three founders alongside Ben UFO and Pearson Sound, and his own work perfectly encapsulates Hessle’s balance between clever, artful arrangements and total brainless joy. The breakbeat house anthem Installation is his most commercial track yet: its female vocal, cut up into meaningless but wildly catchy syllables, is joined by the kind of central melody that lads chant on the way to an ill-advised bout of shirtless jetskiing. It’s so appealing right across the summer dance scene – from pool party to sunlight-denying bunker – that you could run a sweepstake on how long it’ll be until you hear it after entering the club. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
