Why is there no Song of the Summer for 2025?

Globe and Mail

a day ago

In April, Charli XCX took to the stage in Indio, California to perform at Coachella. The mainstage performance served as a capstone on a breakthrough year that included Charli's first solo U.S. arena tour, her first platinum album in Canada and her first Saturday Night Live parody.
In 2024 she also launched a phrase into the cultural lexicon: 'brat summer.' Named after the cheeky ethos of Charli's sixth studio album, Brat, the phrase spawned more than one million TikTok videos, inspired a Kate Spade shopping edit and even made its way into politics, earning nods from Kamala Harris and Barack Obama. It became such a phenomenon that, despite Charli having declared it 'over' last fall, brat summer still loomed large over Coachella almost a year after her album's release.
Blue Rodeo's Lost Together is always the song of summer
Brat summer brought forth not one single song of the summer, but a season's worth of hits: the Guess remix featuring Billie Eilish marked Charli's first top 10 on the Canadian Billboard Hot 100 since 2014, but there was also Apple, which spawned a viral dance on TikTok, and Sympathy Is a Knife, a top 40 hit that courted attention for its probable subject, Taylor Swift. In total the album produced seven entries on that chart.
Toward the end of her set, Charli flashed a series of slogans signalling she was ready to pass the seasonal baton: 'Addison Rae summer,' 'Lorde summer' and 'Haim summer' flickered across the screen as part of a laundry list of Charli-approved artists ready for the summer 2025 spotlight.
But four months later, as Halloween candy appears on grocery store shelves, it's clear none of those 'summers' materialized. Rae's singles remain niche – her highest-charting song on Billboard's Canadian Hot 100 this summer, the menacing Fame is a Gun, peaked at 59. Lorde cracked Canadian top 40 with What Was That, but its success paled in comparison to her 2013 hit Royals. And despite catchy singles like Relationships, Haim only flirted with cultural saturation this summer.
There are certainly other contenders, but few artists have captivated the collective imagination at scale this summer. The lack of an obvious, ubiquitous hit blaring out of car windows raises the question: Does 2025 not have a Song of the Summer?
The data powering Billboard's official Songs of the Summer chart, which tracks popular songs from May through September, provides an obvious answer: Alex Warren's sweeping, saccharine ballad Ordinary, which has been perched atop the chart every single week since spring. And north of the border, the song is actually even more popular, according to Richard Trapunski, national editor for Billboard Canada, who points out that Ordinary actually appeared on the Canadian Hot 100 before cracking the U.S. chart.
Ordinary is the only song in contention to be crowned this summer's most popular, according to chart analyst, pop critic and Hit Parade podcast host Chris Molanphy. 'There's nothing that stands any chance whatsoever of taking it away. We're now into August,' Molanphy says. 'Stick a fork in it, it's done.'
The data, however, don't tell the whole story. The annual debate over the song of the summer is as much a cultural conversation as it is a chart race. Molanphy, who unpacks chart hits in his 'Why Is This Song No. 1?' column in Slate, explains that some years the song that dominates the charts all summer is also the crowd favourite, like in 2019, when Lil Nas X's Old Town Road was inescapable. This year, Molanphy says the lack of another galvanizing hit has allowed Ordinary to float to the top of the charts despite disdain from critics. 'Will anybody fondly remember 2025 as the summer of Ordinary?' Molanphy asks. 'I doubt it.'
Part of the resistance to Ordinary is sonic. The song, inspired by the 24-year-old singer's wife, is not the type to blast from a boom box at the beach. 'There's something very serious and very earnest and very heavy handedly persuasive about that song,' says NPR music critic and correspondent Ann Powers, whose 1999 column about that year's summer songs in The New York Times helped popularize the modern debate about the song of the summer. 'It doesn't effervesce,' she says. 'There's no bubbles in that song.'
Scanning the charts reveals other contenders peeking through a sludge of dated hits. Songs are currently sticking around on the charts longer than they have in the past; a global phenomenon that's especially defined in Canada, according to Billboard Canada's Trapunski, who cites Shaboozey's A Bar Song (Tipsy) as one recent example. The 2024 hit broke a record as the longest-charting No. 1 in the history of the Canadian Hot 100. It remains in the top 10 on the chart dated Aug. 9, alongside Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club, a song originally released in 2020.
A few songs have, however, been able to break through. Golden by HUNTR/X, a fictional girl group from the Netflix animated film KPop Demon Hunters, is a top-five song in Canada and challenging for No. 1 on the U.S. Hot 100 as of publication time.
Then there's Tate McRae, whose singles Sports Car and Revolving Door were two of the 10 most-streamed songs globally in the first half of 2025 on Spotify, according to the streamer's Global Impact List. McRae's recent feature on Morgan Wallen's single What I Want is currently a Canadian top 10, and No. 2 on the Songs of the Summer chart.
Though Wallen's song is a success, it feels less omnipresent than past summer songs, or even McRae's own breakout, Greedy, one of the defining songs of 2023. If anything actually does feel inescapable this summer, it's sounds, not songs. Take, for example, a viral clip from PinkPantheress's excellent but commercially overlooked mixtape Fancy That. The song, Illegal, has been used in more than one million TikTok videos and 300,000 Instagram reels, meaning anyone who's spent the summer mindlessly scrolling is as likely to have heard it as anything on the pop charts. Likewise, a clip from the British airline Jet2 in which a voice-over enthusiastically announces 'Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday' has soundtracked a staggering 2.2 million TikTok videos and was recently sampled by Lizzo.
While it may stand to reason that memes have turned musical tastes into collective aural brainrot, a theory worth considering about why this year's slate of summer songs is so slight is that 2024 was over-stuffed with great songs and compelling musical narratives. It was easily pop's most exciting year of the decade thus far: Taylor Swift had dual blockbuster projects in The Tortured Poets Department and the Eras Tour, Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter prompted a necessary conversation about race and genre, and Kendrick Lamar and Drake had a rap beef for the ages. Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter also broke out with sparkling singalongs, the Pride anthem Pink Pony Club and last year's frothy song of the summer contender Espresso. Then there was Brat, which invited its listeners to party until they turned slime green.
It was a lot. In 2024, pop had a big year and a brat summer. This year feels more like a hangover. The remnants of a megayear for music are everywhere; 2024 hits clutter the top 10 like bottles of beer with a few sips left strewn all over a home the day after a great house party. Now the charts need a glass of water and a nap – an Ordinary year before we're ready to party again next summer.