Happy Labor Day! 

I hope you are taking the time to enjoy the final weekend of summer. Now that the season is coming to a close, I thought it would be good to dissect the 2026 Song(s) of the Summer. Is it just me or does it feel like the songs fell a little flat this year? Nothing really hit me like “Espresso” in 2024 or “Midnight Sun” last year. Let’s dissect the options below.

The summer has come and gone in the blink of an eye. When we look back at the season, what will we definitively be able to point to as the Song of the Summer?

With every passing year, it feels as though the weight of the title becomes less relevant. The nichification of music discovery coupled with social media’s, specifically TikTok’s, ability to repopularize old songs have made it more difficult to pinpoint a general soundtrack to this current time period. Anecdotally, I haven’t seen much Song of the Summer discourse at all this year. 

On TikTok, the top three summer songs were tracks that were over a decade old. At No.1, we have “The One That Got Away” by Katy Perry (which is a timeless summer anthem, to be fair). Below that, there is “Cinderella” by Mac Miller featuring Ty Dolla $ign, which comes from the late artist’s decade-old album The Divine Feminine, reinforcing the strong 2016 nostalgia we’ve seen all year. And following that, there was “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over” By Lenny Kravitz,” whose instrumental provided the perfect soundtrack to people’s summer recap videos. 

It isn’t until No. 4 that we see a hit from this year with Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings” ranking in the spot, which has also seen some play on the Billboard charts too. But the one song on the list that I actually saw touted as the Song of the Summer on my feeds was “Spend Dat” by Yung Miami, which comes in at No. 7. 

“Spend Dat” was also on Spotify’s list of Songs of the Summer alongside chart-toppers like “hate that i made you love me” by Ariana Grande and “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley. Spotify is always an interesting indicator since streaming can reflect what’s trending online and what’s playing on the radio.

Turning toward traditional radio play, Billboard has not yet released its official list (that comes out tomorrow), but we can make some educated guesses. I got a real glimpse of the songs that the greater public were listening to while driving upstate in July. The songs that were playing nonstop on the radio were “Choosin’ Texas,” “Boston” by Stella Lefty and “I Knew It, I Knew You” by Taylor Swift. Unsurprisingly, the top hits were all country-influenced. 

Such is the case with many of Billboard’s Songs of the Summer over the past two years. While last year’s Song of the Summer, according to the charts, was “Ordinary” by Alex Warren,” that song was closely followed by three Morgan Wallen songs. And Wallen was also featured in the top spot on the outlet’s Song of the Summer chart in 2024 and 2023. But this year, “Choosin’ Texas” will inevitably be crowned Song of the Summer by Billboard, as it has smashed records as the longest run ever at No. 1 with 20 weeks on the Top 100. 

While “Choosin’ Texas” is the unequivocal Song of the Summer, there usually are tracks that feel like they defined the summer. I’d say 2024 had “Espresso,” “Not Like Us,” and “360” (lest we forget Brat Summer) while 2025 had “Midnight Sun” and a lot of songs that felt like youth group à la “Ordinary” (although, as NPR even reported last year, the vibe felt less definitive).

As the years pass, it feels like our cultural moments and collective listening habits simply continue to dwindle. It’s something we’ve all let slip, but it is still sad to not have a major musical moment to define summer 2026.

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. Now that we’ve discussed songs of the summer, here are the tracks I’m choosing to ring in the fall.

In this week’s playlist:

Other things I want to share with you.