Discover more from Check This Out!

Finding great music so you don't have to - a twice-weekly newsletter with reviews, features, interviews, playlists, and more!

What Was Your Song of the Summer?

Popular opinion says the music this summer wasn't memorable. I beg to differ.

Kiley Larsen

Sep 6, 2023

I’m often talking about the many ways the music industry is broken in 2023, and to keep up with current events, there’s something that has irked me for the past three months: discourse over the “lack of a summer song” for this year.

As algorithms, major labels, and TikTok continue to dominate what you’re listening to, a byproduct of this corporate mess is the idea that no particular pop song is ruling our collective summer. Whether this is a constant topic of conversation to drive clicks or there truly are those who prefer their tunes spoon-fed and genuinely haven’t found the ten-second clip that they might want to, ya know, stream the entire song, is something I don’t have the answer for.. but the notion that there haven’t been any summer “bops” kinda drives me crazy.

The past three or four months have gifted so many songs that will define this epically hot summer for me (remind me of these sub-one-hundred-degree temps in the mountains in ten years) that I find the idea of the lack of heaters downright lazy.

Here are my three songs for the summer of 2023, but I really want to know what song you’ve been listening to over the past few months. Or, do you buy into the idea that we’re living in a vacant aural lot? Let me know in the comments!