There's been no Song of the Summer - does that matter?

Ellie Muir dissects a peculiar change in the cultural mood

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"In summer, the song sings itself," wrote the American poet William Carlos Williams. It's true - except, of course, when Sabrina Carpenter sings it. Just last year, Carpenter's sugary disco track “Espresso” seemed to emanate from every radio and speaker system, spending seven weeks at No 1 in the UK, six weeks in the US, and racking up more than 1 billion streams on Spotify. It was, many people agreed, the Song of the Summer.

The summer song is one of pop's greatest pleasures. Every year seems to bring a new, unavoidable earworm - played everywhere, from supermarkets to nightclubs, between the months of June and September. On some level, the “Song of the Summer” is an official title, its status enshrined by record chart compilers Billboard in the US and the UK’s Top 40. But what makes a Song of the Summer is also somewhat vibe-dependent — a particular mood in the musical monoculture, a you’ll-know-it-when-you-hear-it intuition. There are some songs from the last 25 years that just scream summer. Think of Nelly’s dancefloor classic “Hot In Herre”, crowned as Billboard’s 2002 summer pick. Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg’s fantasy-filled “California Gurls”, the winning bop in 2010. Or Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams’s cheeseball disco track “Get Lucky” - utterly inescapable in 2013. But what about 2025? For the first time in a long while, the ubiquitous summer banger has failed to really materialise.

Numerically speaking, this year’s Song of the Summer is, according to Billboard, Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”. The emotional ballad - a sort of fusion of Coldplay and Rag’n’Bone Man - has been the longest-running No 1 of the year, holding top spot in the US