Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Song Of The Summer About this episode Last year was Brat summer and saw the rise of Chappell Roan, Shaboozey, and Sabrina Carpenter. But is there a song of the summer for 2025? Today we're talking about the competing songs of this summer from Justin Bieber, Morgan Wallen, KPop Demon Hunters, PinkPantheress, and more.
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0:41 Aisha Harris? Every year, a handful of songs vie for an unofficial, honorific Song of the Summer. They're the songs we hear out of car windows, on TikTok, on the radio, and at parties, over and over and over again.
0:54 Stephen Thompson? Last year was brat summer and saw the rise of Chapel Rohn, Shaboozie, and Sabrina Carpenter. But is there a Song of the Summer for 2025? I'm Stephen Thompson.
1:04 Aisha Harris? And I'm Aisha Harris. Today, we're talking about the Songs of the Summer on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. It is just the two of us today, so let's get right into it. Stephen, so last year, we had basically an embarrassment of riches when it came to try and decide what the Song of the Summer was going to be. You know, Charli XCX, Chapel Rohn, Kendrick Lamar, Sabrina Carpenter, they were all competing for Song of the Summer last year. And you closely follow the Billboard charts for NPR, which is just, you know, one of the factors in determining this very specific category. But I'm curious, like, what is different about the Song of the Summer competition, if there is a competition, this year?
1:44 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, and it's worth noting upfront that this is entirely theoretical. This is 100% unofficial. There is not a trophy given out. Chart-wise, there is absolutely no argument that the Song of the Summer is Ordinary by Alex Warren.
2:16 Stephen Thompson? This song feels so much.
2:18 Aisha Harris? Listeners could not see Stephen, but he was giving the most pained, yet expressive, emotive lip sync of this song.
2:27 Stephen Thompson? Aisha, I was lip syncing from the heart.
2:29 Aisha Harris? Oh, OK.
2:30 Stephen Thompson? This song, when you break it down, now, first of all, I mean, chart wise, it's been number one now for weeks and weeks. Certain songs that top the Billboard charts just don't go away. There are songs still in the top 10 that were number one on the charts all last summer. Shaboozie's A Bar Song Tipsy is still in the top 10 a year later. So this song is never going to go away.
2:53 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
2:54 Stephen Thompson? Just want to prepare people for that fact. This song is just, if it had been engineered in a lab to appeal to a gigantic cross section of radio listeners, you can kind of listen to the song and break down the boxes that it checks, right? It has the uplift of a Coldplay. It has the hooks of an Imagine Dragons. And it has the choir just getting bigger and bigger and bigger in ways that reflect generations of praise music. This song is really hitting a broad cross section of demographics in a completely inoffensive way with a very,
3:37 Stephen Thompson? very sweet video. It's Alex Warren and his real life wife, and it's sweet, but it is like, holy cow, you really feel how hard the choir is working when you watch that video.
3:49 Aisha Harris? Oh, my goodness. I think I'm impervious to this kind of earnestness. It gives me the ick to use, never has a word been more perfect to describe how I feel. Like you said, inoffensive. And inoffensive is also just maybe a nicer way of saying bland. This is kind of where the charts have been trending lately. It's like trad, wife, Christian, pop, adjacent, core, aesthetic and sound. And Alex Warren fits that perfectly. Same with, like, Benson Boone, who, you know, Beautiful Things last year was also kind of in the conversation about song of the summer and-
4:23 Stephen Thompson? Still in the top 20.
4:24 Aisha Harris? Yeah, yeah. And now- Like now Benson Boone has another song that I don't think is quite broken through in the same way Beautiful Things did, but Mystical Magical.
4:34 Stephen Thompson? Oh, boy.
4:50 Aisha Harris? You know, Stephen, I had to listen to this song for the first time. Moonbeam Ice Cream.
4:55 Stephen Thompson? Moonbeam Ice Cream. I feel like Benson Boone has been flirting with like a winking, kind of deliberately giving you the ick.
5:03 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
5:04 Stephen Thompson? For a while now, and this song really leans into that. And I'm not dumping on Benson Boone. Like, there's a tryhard quality to Benson Boone that I actually find kind of sweet. Benson Boone feels in many ways like a throwback to American Idol. He auditioned for American Idol and basically like dropped out of American Idol as part of his trajectory. Mystical Magical, it has charted along with a song called Sorry, I'm Here For Someone Else from Benson Boone's new album, American Heart, which came out just a few weeks ago. And you're right, that it hasn't taken off the way that Beautiful Things has, in part because it's still competing with Beautiful Things for radio play and streams. And, you know, he's kind of run into some of the same problems that Shaboozie has run into trying
5:49 Stephen Thompson? to follow up a bar song, Tipsy. But Benson Boone is definitely part of the conversation. And like, I appreciate that Benson Boone is trying really hard. He's doing backflips for your amusement, and he's leaning into a certain kind of silliness here. And I think that's one reason a song like Mystical Magical is in the song of the summer conversation, even though it is lyrically speaking, a pretty objectively terrible song.
6:16 Aisha Harris? Yeah. Oh, my goodness. I feel like if Alex Warren's Ordinary is like going to be at weddings in perpetuity, you know, this is the song that various people will walk down the aisle to. Mystical Magical feels like the song that will play at a lot of like on the dance floor when everyone's getting down. It's like gonna become that kind of song.
6:34 Stephen Thompson? A lot of drunk uncles are gonna lip sync to this song.
6:37 Aisha Harris? Yes, yes. Not at the weddings that I go to, most likely, but yes.
6:42 Stephen Thompson? The first time I heard Ordinary by Alex Warren, I saw it rising on the charts. And I was like, oh, what's this? Listen to it. And I was like, uh-oh.
6:53 Aisha Harris? Hope you don't have weddings to go to this summer.
6:54 Stephen Thompson? Hope you don't have any weddings coming up.
6:59 Aisha Harris? Okay, so, yes, we've got Alex Warren, we've got Benson Boone, but then we can't talk about Song of the Summer without talking about Morgan Wallen.
7:08 Stephen Thompson? Yes, Morgan Wallen has been a part of the Song of the Summer conversation for several summers now. He has had several undisputed songs of the summer. And this year, he has an album called I'm the Problem that has landed several songs in the top 10 and that have been kind of sitting there all summer long so far. There's the title track, I'm the Problem. There's a song called Just in Case that has done really well. And then there's kind of the Song of the Summer-iest song of the bunch. It's called What I Want, featuring Tate McRae.
7:51 Stephen Thompson? This album, I'm the Problem, that's been at number one for much of this summer, you know, it's got 37 songs and they're just getting streamed over and over and over again. So you certainly couldn't leave him out of this conversation.
8:02 Aisha Harris? So we're gonna move on now to someone who has sort of been bubbling around for a few years now, and I feel like she's finally had her breakout hit, and that is Raven Lynnay, and her song Love Me Not.
8:28 Aisha Harris? So this is our throwback song.
8:30 Stephen Thompson? Yeah, it sure is.
8:31 Aisha Harris? Honestly, the first time I heard this, it kind of reminded me of Duffy a little bit, like-
8:35 Stephen Thompson? Oh, yeah. I was gonna say Amy Winehouse, but I think Duffy's a good Paul.
8:38 Aisha Harris? Yeah, Duffy, Amy Winehouse, you know, throwback to the aughts, but then also that was a throwback to the 60s.
8:45 Stephen Thompson? And certainly 90s and aughts R&B as well.
8:47 Aisha Harris? Oh, yeah, for sure. It sounds so different from a lot of the other songs that are in contention here. Like, what about it? Is bubbling. Like, why is it this song?
8:56 Stephen Thompson? I mean, nostalgia is a big part of this conversation on a lot of songs that have hit as song of the summer, you know, including like Dochi's Anxiety.
9:05 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
9:09 Stephen Thompson? You know, where it's not just that the song is compelling, the song is interpolating Gautier's Somebody That I Used To Know. It's a piece of Gen Z nostalgia. This song is kind of tapping into that same thing. It's tapping into multiple retro cycles at once. It's nostalgia for Duffy and Amy Winehouse, who in turn were nostalgia for girl groups. For me, the fact that it is tapping into many veins of nostalgia while also just being a really timeless, summery, bubbly song. I mean, this song has had a very slow rise and a pretty authentic rise. This song came out in May of 2024.
9:46 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
9:46 Stephen Thompson? It's only been on the charts for about four months, which, you know, compared to your Teddy Swimses and your Shabuzes makes it a spring chicken. But it has had this kind of organic word of mouth rise. Raven Linet was not a household name. You know, she's been in the industry for about a decade. You know, she played a Tiny Desk concert in 2022. She didn't just come out of nowhere. But all that work, kind of like Chapel Rohn's rise, where she had years and years of struggling before she became an overnight success.
10:13 Aisha Harris? It does feel like the song has been around forever because I do remember like adding it to my like songs.
10:18 Stephen Thompson? You were a first wave fan of this song. So now you're like this old thing?
10:22 Aisha Harris? Yeah, I'm like, oh, I didn't realize we're still talking about this. I like it. I really, it's a really fun song. I think if you like this song, you should definitely go back and listen to her earlier stuff. I especially love Sticky, which is also very retro. Raven Linet, cannot say enough good things about her. She's, and it's great to see her having this moment here. The next song I want to talk about very briefly is one that I already gushed about as a happy, but it is Molly, Silent Addie, Skilabang, and Shansia, the remix to Shake It To The Max Fly. This, to me, feels like the most song of the summer if you're the type of person who likes to go out and shake your body in the summer.
11:15 Aisha Harris? Not that international music hasn't been rising for a while, but it's great to see this is like a very much international co-production. Molly, who is Ghanaian-American, Skilabang, Shansia, they're Jamaican. It's just fun to hear these types of songs sort of getting some love. And it's peaked relatively high, considering at number 44 on the Billboard Hot 100, which is, which is pretty good. And I don't know, it's a very fun song. I love it. And it feels like summer.
11:44 Stephen Thompson? There are songs that feel sweaty in like a high effort kind of way. And there are songs that feel sweaty because they're just dripping.
11:54 Stephen Thompson? And this, you can just feel a mass of sweaty bodies swarming around this song.
12:00 Aisha Harris? Yes.
12:00 Stephen Thompson? At all times. And I think that's something I'm looking for from a song of the summer is the sense that the song is rooted in some sort of human interaction is like a box that I want to see checked in my summer songs.
12:13 Aisha Harris? Absolutely. Well, after the break, we're going to talk about the return of Sabrina Carpenter, the rise of K-pop demon hunters, and the songs that are starting to blow up on TikTok. So stick around.
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13:55 Aisha Harris? Welcome back. Okay, so we have another return from last summer. Maybe perhaps not as omnipresent as she was last summer in the same way, but Sabrina Carpenter does have "Man Child", which did peak at number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
14:24 Stephen Thompson? I love this song.
14:25 Aisha Harris? It's fun.
14:26 Stephen Thompson? And I really, really like Sabrina Carpenter. You know, Sabrina Carpenter had certainly one of the songs of the summer last year with Espresso, but also "Please, Please, Please" and "Taste", you know, all of those were huge top 10 hits kind of simultaneously. You know, I think it was a surprise that she came back with like a new cycle just a year later. The album "Man's Best Friend" drops at the end of August. This is kind of the first single from it. And when you say it's not as omnipresent as her songs were last year, I do think that's true. It debuted at number one and has kind of been sliding down the chart ever since. That decline can be a little bit of a mirage with the way that the charts work. Because the song debuted at number one because of massive interest. Like, oh, my gosh, there's a new Sabrina Carpenter song. Also, the video for this song is hilarious.
15:10 Aisha Harris? Hilarious chaos.
15:11 Stephen Thompson? And extremely, extremely well-made video. It is going to win like probably the Grammy for Best Music Video and stuff like that. You have to keep in mind that like the charts are kind of a cocktail of streaming, airplay, and sales. And so often like a song by a major artist will like post these huge streaming numbers in its first week and then kind of tail off as that curiosity wanes. And it takes a little while for radio stations to kind of add the song to their rotations. So I wouldn't give up on Man Child just yet as a part of the song of the summer conversation in 2025, just because it's slid out of the top 10. Also, as we get closer to this album coming out, she's likely to release more singles.
15:56 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
15:56 Stephen Thompson? I think she is going to continue to be a part of the pop music conversation for quite a while.
16:01 Aisha Harris? Yeah, and even the song itself is like an extension of the brand that she kind of established last year of like, these men, they're so dumb. It's like Slim Pickens 2.0. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just, she's building on that. And so, you know, a little bit of deja vu from Sharon. I don't mind it. I'm here for Sabrina Carpenter. She's, she's very fun.
16:23 Stephen Thompson? Absolutely.
16:24 Aisha Harris? So Stephen, you recently did an episode on the sort of Netflix juggernaut of the summer, K-pop Demon Hunters, and you really can't talk about that movie without talking about the fact that it is in this conversation about song of the summer. So what are the songs from that movie that have popped the most?
16:43 Stephen Thompson? Well, a bunch of songs from the soundtrack have kind of crashed the Billboard Hot 100, coming from both of the fictional groups that are in K-pop Demon Hunters. There's a group called Huntrix, and there's a group called the Saja Boys, and the Saja Boys are like a demon boy band. And Huntrix are like a heroic girl group who fight demons. And both of them have landed songs kind of in the top 40 of the Billboard charts that are part of this conversation. Saja Boys have a song called "Your Idol," a song called "Soda Pop" that is so catchy. The Huntrix song that has broken through the most, it's not even my personal favorite Huntrix song, is called "Golden."
17:29 Stephen Thompson? This song is such an earworm.
17:30 Aisha Harris? Yeah. What I wrote in my notes was it sounds like a song that like Katy Perry or Pink would have recorded maybe a decade plus ago.
17:38 Stephen Thompson? It's like a Katy Perry K-pop song. You're right.
17:40 Aisha Harris? Yeah, it feels very early 2010s to me. There are their pluses and minuses to that. I was a little less enamored with this, but the Saja Boys, "Your Idol Song", oh my, my goodness. I love that song.
18:10 Aisha Harris? That song, it's dirty. Oh my goodness. Some of the lyrics include, "You're down on your knees. I'mma be your idol." Like, what?
18:21 Stephen Thompson? I think one thing that works so well about these songs and part of what I enjoy about them as part of a Song of the Summer conversation is they work really well as freestanding pop songs, but they work even better in the context of the movie. And it's like a musical where the songs are actually telling you something about the characters, telling you something about the story, moving things along instead of kind of stopping the story dead to just like play a pop song. And I think that's part of why this soundtrack, and you know, it's certainly not the only movie where that happens, but I think that's one reason that this soundtrack has taken off so much. You see how often the charts are just constantly manipulated by competing fan hives.
19:05 Stephen Thompson? There's this process where it's like, we're gonna put out 25 different variant editions of the CD with a piece of ephemera in it and a bonus track and all these different ways that artists will activate their fan hives, basically saying, "Buy multiple copies of our album on week one." What is kind of interesting to me about K-pop Demon Hunters is that's not happening. They haven't even released physical editions of this soundtrack. This is a true grassroots, word-of-mouth phenomenon where people are finding this movie on Netflix, falling in love with it, talking to their friends about it, and streaming the soundtrack over and over again. It feels like a monoculture event instead of a fan activation event.
19:49 Aisha Harris? I miss that. I miss that so much.
19:51 Stephen Thompson? Yeah.
19:52 Aisha Harris? I'mma be your idol. So good. All right, so let's move on to our last few here. I want to hear your take on Pink Pantheress's Illegal, Stephen. It's very fun.
20:19 Stephen Thompson? It is catchy.
20:21 Aisha Harris? Yes.
20:23 Stephen Thompson? And like so much of Pink Pantheress's music, really extremely well suited to TikTok.
20:28 Aisha Harris? Yes.
20:29 Stephen Thompson? You know, I first heard this mixtape that it came from Fancy That back at the beginning of May, and really had the thought like, oh, this could really catch on. I felt like Pink Pantheress was going to have an absolutely gigantic year last year, where she had broken through as this big TikTok star. The song Boys A Liar Part Two, you know? And then she took 2024 off and kind of came back in 2025. And I feel like she is in the process of regaining momentum. Like, just that little excerpt we played, like, that's going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
20:59 Aisha Harris? It's good. And she's also the queen of just making songs that are very, very short. Like, they get in, they get out, they do their jobs.
21:06 Stephen Thompson? Such a gift.
21:06 Aisha Harris? That's sometimes all you want. That's sometimes all you want. We can't close this conversation without really talking about someone who, I think, out of all the artists we've already discussed here, has been around the longest and is still out there. And that is Justin Bieber, who, he's jumped into that conversation, maybe a little bit later than these other ones, but he's there. One of the songs from his new album Swag is "Daisies."
21:45 Stephen Thompson? Oh, that rumbly, bouncy guitar.
21:48 Aisha Harris? Mm-hmm.
21:48 Stephen Thompson? The minute you hear it, you're like, oh, this is summer.
21:51 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
21:51 Stephen Thompson? And that album just dropped a couple of weeks ago. There was like one day's notice that that record was coming out. He hasn't been rolling out singles all year. If he had put "Daisies" out in March, it might have knocked Ordinary out of the top of this conversation.
22:05 Aisha Harris? If only.
22:08 Stephen Thompson? It's gonna be very interesting to see how this song and this album age on the charts, how long it sticks on streaming, how much it's added to radio, because it definitely belongs in this conversation. And I think particularly Daisy's is a really catchy, appealing song that adds like a little bit of pop rock to the conversation in ways that most of these songs don't.
22:30 Aisha Harris? Yeah, thus far, it's peaked at number two on the Hot 100 as of this taping. I'm not gonna lie, I love this album. I think it's really good. I don't need all the interlude skits with Druski. Keep that at home, please. I didn't need that. But I do think he's just exploring R&B in a very interesting way. And I really like to see Justin Bieber grow. He's got a very good catalog, considering what he came out of and what he could have been.
22:58 Stephen Thompson? I appreciate the fact that with this record, it does feel like he's a little bit liberated from that pop machine. There's a huge industry surrounding Justin Bieber. Don't get me wrong, he's not an indie act.
23:07 Aisha Harris? Absolutely.
23:08 Stephen Thompson? But there is a quality here, like he's getting to make the music that he wants to make.
23:12 Aisha Harris? Yeah, absolutely. Well, that comes to the end of our conversation. But before we go, who is the one artist, or what's the one song that we should go out on that we haven't already talked about as a Song of the Summer contender?
23:26 Stephen Thompson? Well, I'm sure Drake would disagree. But I'm gonna go with Lola Young. Lola Young has been kind of percolating in the charts' lower regions, hasn't quite broken into that kind of upper echelon top 10, like so many of the songs that we've mentioned. But Lola Young is an extremely charismatic singer. We talked about Amy Winehouse and Duffy and kind of a little bit of throwbacks to the throwbacks. Lola Young falls into that category a little bit, but still feels very modern. And I feel like if the stars align just right, a song like "One Thing" could have the kind of trajectory that we've been talking about for artists like Raven Linnae.
24:18 Aisha Harris? Very Remy Wolf. I like it. I like it. Into it. Well, that is Lola Young, "One Thing." And we want to know, what is your Song of the Summer? Because we all have our own. The charts, they only tell us so much. Find us at facebook.com/pchh to let us know. And a reminder, we'd love to know what you think about this podcast, so please help us out by telling us what you like and how we could improve by completing a short anonymous survey at npr.org/pchhsurvey. We'll also have a link to that in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show. Stephen, thanks so much for being here. As always, this was a blast. Thank you, Ayesha.
25:00 Speaker 04 Ordinary.
25:02 Aisha Harris? I'm so sorry. All right, that was not a pleasure for me.
25:08 Aisha Harris? This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Mike Katsev and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. And Hello, Come In provides R and B music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris. I'm not ordinary. We will see you all next time.
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