A great pop song should grab you right away. For most of the last sixty years of pop music, this was an ironclad, nonnegotiable requirement. The radio was king, and in order to become a radio hit, a song had to convince a listener, who might be distracted wandering through the produce aisle or parallel parking at soccer practice, or surfing through channels and ready to change to the next one within five seconds, to instead focus in and connect instantaneously. With the rise of streaming and viral whole-album sales, many of the biggest pop artists can convince tens of millions of people to listen to their new releases on repeat even if they are thick, sludgy, and inaccessible. And that’s all well and good, dense stuff can still be artistically worthwhile and rewarding if you listen enough times, and today’s pop fans seem eager to do so. But still, a truly great pop song should be so undeniable, so immediately captivating, that it can convert people into fans without any other context.
What ingredients does a song need in order to pull that off? For me, the opening is crucial. To get technical, I want a song to start with a glittering three-against-four synth polyrhythm (like Clarity or Stay the Night by Zedd). Maybe add in a swelling Reese bass (like in Maroon by Taylor Swift, it gives the baseline a low, rumbling, subterranean feeling), which then opens up to a low pass filter sweep and then an immediate cut out (Burn by Ellie Goulding, gives it a swelling feeling that dramatically sets up the vocal entrance). And then I want a female vocalist singing with a sense of introspective wistful yearning, and ideally I want her to be singing about ghosts. Like it would be perfect if the opening lyric of the song were “I was a ghost.”
A song with an opening that contains every single one of these ingredients came out on July 4th of this summer. It’s called “Golden” and it has five different listed artists, none of whom I had heard of before this, and some of whom are fictional. It is absolutely a product of the streaming, fan-army pop music age, as it was written for the viral Netflix film Kpop Demon Hunters, an animated depiction of a bunch of fictional KPop groups who compete in a singing competition, and also apparently fight actual nonmetaphorical demons with the superpower of music. Needless to say, radio was not this song’s primary distribution vehicle. Nevertheless, I think it has what it takes to succeed in that arena as well. It has additional compelling ingredients when you get past the intro, including an upbeat triplet-based pre-chorus (like Run Away With Me by Carly Rae Jepsen), and a woman with an alto voice nevertheless singing as high and loud as she can in the apex of the chorus (Chandelier by Sia). Half of the lyrics are in Korean, and the ones that are in English that don’t explicitly mention ghosts are boring as hell (“I’m done hiding now I’m shining like I’m born to be!!!”) But that’s fine. I’ve heard it on the radio three times in the past week and I’ve never even considered turning it off. It has spent two weeks as the number two song on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, and tomorrow, we will learn if it has the juice to finally snatch the number one spot and give 2025 a Song of the Summer that doesn’t completely suck.
I.
The Song of the Summer is an arbitrary made-up thing, but so is everything else, and as arbitrary made-up things go in pop music (the ‘Adult Contemporary’ charts, the American Music Awards, the membership of Maroon 5), it’s pretty useful. The summer is a time where everyone is a little looser, and more willing to suspend disbelief, a liminal space between academic years where the regular rules don’t have to apply. It’s the Las Vegas of seasons, and like Vegas, it is a Mecca for indulgent pop music that feels thrilling in the moment and slightly embarrassing in retrospect. When a Song of the Summer works right, it seizes this spirit, uses it to grab everyone’s attention, and briefly re-creates a moment of monoculture that is ever rarer during the rest of the year. Some Songs of the Summer are straight-up bangers that transcend their summer and become immortal, recurring staples of the canon, like Umbrella (2007), California Gurls (2010), and Call Me Maybe (2012). Most others are not that good in retrospect, but are still enjoyable as charming time-capsules to a moment where, for example, everyone went absolutely nuts over OMI’s Cheerleader (2015), or the previous year when no one could tear themselves away from the human car crash that was Iggy Azalea, or in 2019 when we all locked eyes grimly and said “yes, actually, we are going to make Old Town Road the most successful song of all time.”
The alchemy doesn’t always work out. Sometimes two songs jockey it out, each denying the other one the chance to gain enough momentum (2022 As It Was vs About Damn Time, or 2016 One Dance vs Don’t Let Me Down). Sometimes nothing emerges and we just muddle through (2018, most recently). But last summer, we were treated to one of the most culturally decadent musical summers in my lifetime. Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n Sweet album cycle yielded “Espresso,” one of the best summer songs of all time, as well as Billboard Number One hit “Please Please Please,” and “Taste,” which peaked at number two but which posted an extremely competitive run on my own personal Spotify Wrapped sweepstakes. Charli XCX’s Brat defined the entire summer, at least according to the memes and thinkpieces on my feed. Chappell Roan’s Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess escaped containment and sent “Good Luck Babe” into the stratosphere. Kendrick Lamar’s unanimous decision annihilation of Drake made “Not Like Us” ubiquitous, setting the table for his outrageous Grammy’s run. And blowing out all of these juggernauts at least from a charting perspective, a whole bunch of dudes had crazy success crooning out their feelings about whiskey, led, of course, by the definitive 2024 Song of the Summer champion, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song.” Everyone was in a frenzy of cultural consumption, no one could log off, and we all just held on for dear life and hoped the waves would take us somewhere good.
This summer, the pendulum has swung. No one wants to consume culture anymore. Everyone would like to be deleted from this hellscape. The thinkpiece industrial complex is in shambles, with NPR stumbling around looking for a catchy song in vain, the Wall Street Journal blaming the staying power of 2024’s crop of songs for the reality that “There Are No Good Songs This Summer,” and Wired Magazine claiming that “The Song of the Summer is Dead,” and speculating that it is our president’s fault. I think this is overstated; Trump’s first term gave us “Old Town Road” and “Despacito”, while Morgan Wallen’s grim hegemon “Last Night” dominated Joe Biden’s America in 2023. But something’s amiss. Let’s take a tour of the dismal contenders for 2025’s Song of the Summer, which will help illustrate how desperately we need this pleasant, nonsense KPop song to gain escape velocity and really take off.
II.
“Ordinary” by Alex Warren has spent nine of the last ten weeks as the Number One song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Since 2000, only four songs have spent ten or more summer weeks at number one: “Old Town Road”, “Despacito”, “Blurred Lines”, and Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together.” In other words, if Ordinary can notch a tenth week in the number one slot today, it will cement itself not only as the Song of the Summer, but one of the most dominant Songs of the Summer of my lifetime, a five-year storm of virality. As an appreciator of the art form of the Song of the Summer, this would be incredibly depressing. This song sucks, and would suck plenty in any context, but is uniquely awful for the role of “fun, carefree, silly summer anthem.” Here is a list of songs of the summer for the past 25 years. I do not see a top SOTS on that list that is worse than “Ordinary,” and I certainly don’t see one that is less summer-y.
A year ago I complained about how Noah Kahan’s Stick Season was a wimpy, pale imitation of the flawed, but to me beloved, early 2010s stomp-and-holler era of Mumford and Sons, the Head and the Heart, and the Lumineers. This genre of music has been taking it on the chin on Twitter in the past two weeks after a clip of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes’s NPR Tiny Desk performance blew up. As pop music Youtuber Anthony Fantano said, “the entire internet convened to hate this stuff, but you let this thing slip through?” This thing being “Ordinary,” which is a pale imitation of Imagine Dragons, instead of Mumford and Sons. If you took the macho, frenzied, weirdly emotionless yelping of Imagine Dragons’s “Believer,” cut all of the electric guitar, drums, and anything else that gave it any propulsive energy, and then added a gospel choir, you’d end up with something approximating “Ordinary.” I make no pronouncements about who can and cannot employ gospel choirs in their music. But the downside risk of doing so is lesser for modern RnB artists like, say, Frank Ocean, and greater for blonde white 24 year-old dudes from Carlsbad, California who arrived at pop music after flunking out as aspiring influencers. That downside risk is fully realized in this song, perhaps the whitest-sounding soul-gospel-folk song that any soul-gospel-folk song has ever sounded.
And the lyrics. “Believer,” like The Monkees’s “I’m a Believer,” Marshmello’s “One Thing Right,” and a million other country songs, has a guy describing himself as a dirtbag loser who didn’t believe in anything until he met this amazing girl who was so hot she made him want to be a better man, and to believe in something. With the caveat that I’m not an expert in Christian Rock, I’m pretty sure there are a bunch of songs from that genre that sound a lot like “Ordinary” that follow a similar structure, but with the amazing girl subbed out for Jesus Christ, our lord and savior, who made the formerly-degenerate singer/narrator believe through the power of his Glory and whatnot. “Ordinary” has plenty of Christian Rock imagery, with its rueful depiction of the modern world as a fallen, godless monstrosity (“They say the Holy Water’s watered down, and the town has lost its faith,” is how he opens the song), and its general appeals to biblical imagery (“Oh Lord, return me to dust”, “Hopeless hallelujah on this side of Heaven’s gate.”) What makes it truly galling to me is the way that he blasphemously flaunts this by implying what this woman is giving him is actually better than the God that everyone else gets to experience. “The angels up in the clouds are jealous knowin’ we found something so out of the ordinary.” The angels?!? Are jealous?!? Of this whiny blonde dude and his boring instagram influencer wife?!?
The pop song that this monstrosity most evokes besides “Believer” is Benson Boone’s breakout smash hit “Beautiful Things.” That song also features a white dude croon-belting about how his boring, normal, dare-I-say ordinary life with his lovely girlfriend is so special. But what makes it at least a little endearing to me in its goofy, derpy way is the modicum of vulnerability Boone brings to it. He’s terrified that someone will take away these beautiful things that he’s got, and he needs them so badly. He wants them, he needs them, oh god. The bravado, the belting, and the backflips all mask an underlying sense of earnest desperation and terror. Warren has absolutely none of that on “Ordinary”. He’s smug, self-satisfied, and utterly confident that his relationship is so damn good that you and I and everyone else should spend three precious minutes of our brief, flickering existences solemnly listening, our heads bowed in worship to the altar of his wimpy situationship. Even angels could learn a thing or two from this guy.
There is nothing fun about this song, nothing loose, sloppy, risky, debauched, nothing that makes me want to dance on the beach, or make a bad decision, or laugh at a joke. No one is Mountain Dewing it for me or switching it up like Nintendo in this song. The word cheerleader is not pronounced in a funny and catchy way. No one is riding a horse until they can’t no more. If I tried really hard to suspend all of my rational thoughts and get into it, I still could not make much progress because there is no real hook to sing along to, and belting “Ordinary” along with him is profoundly un-cathartic. This is just a terrible, terrible summer song.
III.
But as I mentioned at the top, it’s a historic juggernaut. Some true pop stalwarts have attempted to compete “Ordinary” and compete for the Song of the Summer title. The week before Ordinary completed its slow climb to number one, the slot was held by Morgan Wallen and Tate Mcrae’s “What I Want,” the 2025 pop music equivalent of a presidential ticket. Tate is not the most fashionable pop star to root for these days, with her transparent Britney Spears imitation, her relatively unoriginal writing, and her relentless heterosexuality, but root for her I have nonetheless. In advance of her 2025 album So Close to What, the podcast Switched on Pop made a career retrospective episode on her entitled “Learning to Love Tate Mcrae,” where they break down her hit songs like “All I Wanna Be”, “Greedy”, and “Sports Car.” I didn’t need to learn to love anything, because to me these songs are all absolute bangers. Wallen has many songs that I don’t consider bangers, but he is the King Midas of the music industry right now, and with the success of the funny and incredibly listenable “I Had Some Help” featuring Post Malone, he has a track record of using pop megastar collaborators well in his music. He does not do so on “What I Want,” instead relegating Mccrae to echoey background singer for his own boring, robot-dirge about how women don’t get him. A better Wallen-Mcrae collab might have seized the summer in May and held on through June and July, and Wallen’s team surely expected this one to hang around a little bit longer. Instead, “Ordinary” had no trouble sweeping it away after one week. It has not regained the top spot, and I can’t imagine it will.
Two weeks later, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” debuted at number one, bumping “Ordinary” down. “Manchild” is written by the same team that gave us Sabrina’s 2024 hits; Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen, and Sabrina herself. Sabrina Carpenter might very well be the biggest pop star in the world right now, and Allen and Antonoff have two of the most ridiculous wikipedia discography pages you will ever see. They both independently know how to write songs that go number one better than literally anyone else in human history. And they succeeded here, but just barely, as “Manchild” was also bounced after one week at the top. Now part of that could be that the song isn’t quite up to their normal standard, with its goofy, stop-and-start, narrative structure, somewhat bloodless banjo-ey folk-pop pastiche, and its frankly offensive attack on the community of boyfriends who are really just out here doing our best and sometimes forget to charge our phones. But against a weaker field it too could have stayed around a little longer, and instead, “Ordinary” reasserted its dominance immediately.
Since then, no other contenders have gotten past that slot. Justin Bieber’s new album launched his nauseatingly obnoxious and horny grungy boy-band rock slop “Daisies,” which once again pits him against a woman he wants to sleep with who is sending him mixed signals and who he wishes was less superficial, and once again features mindnumbingly dumb gen-z tech puns (he’s graduated from “Heart full of equity, you're an asset” to “you leave me on read babe but I still got the message, instead of a line its three dots but I can connect them”). It debuted at 2 and then sank from there.
Drake’s sendy comeback vehicle “What Did I Miss,” his hyperrelatable ballad about what it's like to have Lebron James and Demar Derozan stop hanging out with you because everyone thinks you’re a pedophile, bricked at the two spot as well, and Drake was so pissed that he posted a kidding-not-kidding Instagram story complaining about it, and maybe accusing Warren of fraudulently juicing his numbers. “I’m taking that soon, don’t worry,” he wrote, but if I was a Drake fan who wanted him to have a number one song during the “Ordinary” reign, I’d be worried. “What Did I Miss” fell like a rock and is No. 31 three weeks later. It’s not coming back.
Chappell Roan released “The Subway,” the first single in her new album cycle, and there was speculation that it would be her first number one hit. But it’s not on pace, possibly because it is not that good, a slow, drippy, Cranberries-esque ballad featuring her characteristic word-salad writing style (“Till I can break routine during foreplay and trust myself that I won’t say your name”), this time about running into an ex on the New York City subway, that is clearly sung by a midwesterner who has not actually spent much time awkwardly avoiding eye-contact with acquaintances on the L-Train. Real New Yorkers know how to navigate this situation without making it into a whole thing. Noise cancelling headphones, stare blankly at the floor, text furiously, subtly switch cars when convenient. No soap-opera theatrics required.
Other sleeper contenders like sombr’s “Undressed”, Jesse Murph’s “Blue Strips”, or Doechi’s “Anxiety” (Excellent, decent, and atrocious, respectively), have missed their moment. “Ordinary” seems unstoppable, and today (at this link, whenever it updates to the week of August 16th, 2025) we will learn if it can defend its position from even the KPop stans, the final boss of the pop charts. If it does, we are doomed to suffer the indignity of an embarrassingly awful 2025 Song of the Summer. This reflects poorly on all of us, and I hope we all try to do better next year. If it doesn’t, if Golden can finally squeak past, then there’s hope. Golden is not a perfect song, but it’s one that reminds us that sometimes, we’re going up up up, that this is our moment, and that things are going to be going to be golden. May we all be so lucky to have such a positive vision of the future.