When even the most surface-level, mainest of mainstream outlets begin to question if there was a Song of the Summer, you know things are not going great in the music world.
Now that we’re firmly in September it’s unfortunately clear that even by the most lax of standards, 2025 has failed to provide even one ubiquitous single that could be heard blaring out of car stereos, added to countless viral videos, or used to define this tumultuous year.
There’s no clear reason. This is not indicative of some greater issue in society. At least not to someone who’s been watching this exact scenario unfold over the past decade plus. After moaning and groaning since 2014 about the deterioration of songwriting and the executives’ failure to market the right talent, I’m left totally unsurprised by this.
It’s the natural endpoint after years of the top brass neglecting to organically nurture new acts. In my opinion, the last real Song of the Summer prior to 2024 – working under the definition of a universally acknowledged hit single – would have been Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ in 2013.
Streaming of course fragmented fanbases, creating fewer superstars each year since. Mercifully last year the world was gifted not one but two genuine hitmakers in Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan – who regrettably have not delivered successful follow-ups to those platinum songs.
The year to date has not been without a handful of semi-hits. Doechii’s Gotye-cribbing ‘Anxiety’ was a conversation starter for a solid portion of the year, seemingly living through an entire cycle of critical appraisal within a few short months.
K-pop and its rabid fanbase is indisputably the biggest cohesive movement in music at the moment, but average joe in Wichita Kansas knows mostly of the fanbase and not the acts themselves. Not much has filtered through in terms of household name recognition. Blackpink who? Stray Kids what?
‘APT’ is the rare song that has made any sort of impact with the general public, and audio wallpaper distributor Bruno Mars was sharp enough to attach himself to the Rosé hit. The mutually beneficial arrangement allows for Gen X and elder millennials to acquaint themselves with a K-pop star while also giving Mars a quick boost to his cachet.
Which leads us to our final actual hit of 2025 thus far…Alex Warren’s ‘Ordinary’, which appears to have landed in our world from some bizarro dimension. Not only is it aggressively uncool in a way that even the most ironic of post-modernists cannot defend it, but it seems to have achieved success in a fashion entirely antithetical to modern sensibility: it’s only popular offline.
For some reason the Internet’s merciless mockery of anything and everything that sounds like Imagine Dragons has not affected this song’s ascent in the least. Imagine Dragons are still seen as an antiquated relic of millennial stomp-rock, make no mistake about it, but Alex Warren and his retread of that group’s ‘Believer’ keep on keeping on. Am I crazy?? Is nobody else perplexed about this whole thing?? Why is Benson Boone being excoriated by publications everywhere while this guy remains unscathed?
The horizon looks largely bare, save for the monolith that is Taylor Swift. After a massive flop in The Tortured Poets Department and an embarrassing performance by Travis Kelce in this year’s Super Bowl, it almost looked like the marketing juggernaut had derailed and Taylor Swift had finally lost her grip on relevance. But one aw shucks appearance on a podcast and one engagement announcement later and it appears the mania persists. Will that translate into an actual hit single to salvage both Swift’s and 2025’s reputation?
Or will this year’s one and only legitimate music moment belong to…a 10 second snippet of a decade-old hit used in an ad for a discount airline?