Music always shines brighter in the sunshine. But as this week brings the UK’s hottest ever June temperatures, in creeps a worry that this level of extreme heat is becoming our new normal. Here are five songs for the sweaty days ahead.
Before she went down a very different path and had three children with Elon Musk, Grimes was the chirpy, alternative Canadian singer who wrote this fizzy pop song in the middle of the night. She was trying, she has said, to do “Taylor Swift cosplay… to write something country”. It turned into a fabulous electro-pop bop about everything from rising sea levels to the music industry’s commodification of young girls. Even with downtrodden topics, it remains a fun, bouncy listen.
When the indie English rock band released this song five years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, it felt like it took over the world. It’s a dreamy reflection on missing someone in the hot “late nights in the middle of June.” Rest assured that, a few years after its oversaturation, you can return to it as a truly brilliant song.
There is nothing more hypnotic than Nina Simone singing George Gershwin’s Summertime. The song was made famous by Ella Fitzgerald, but something about Simone’s gritty voice makes it magical. It’s a lullaby, hazy and sleepy, for a hot evening that is slipping away.
The south-London singer-songwriter spent years being exploited by a major label before breaking free and releasing her debut album My 21st Century Blues to enormous acclaim in 2023. This track is exactly what you’d expect from the title: a raw, disco-tinged panic attack about the state of the planet, with Raye’s powerhouse voice tinged with both dread and hope.
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The summer staple that never gets old. Boney M’s 1976 cover of Bobby Hebb’s original is pure Caribbean-inflected disco joy, produced by the unstoppable Eurodisco machine Frank Farian. It’s impossible to feel doomed while this is playing.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance