Summer 2025 is halfway over, kids are heading back to school, Halloween candy is popping up in grocery stores. Pre-season football is on the horizon. Everyone is finalizing their plans for Labor Day. Yet we still don’t have a song of the summer.
So what happened? Did the charts fail us? Is something cultural, maybe even generational going on? More importantly, do we even need an official song to define the summer season anymore?
“Ordinary” is #1. But is it the song of the summer?
Technically speaking, there is a song sitting at the top of the Billboard Hot 100: Alex Warren’s Ordinary. It’s been No. 1 on Billboard’s Songs of the Summer chart since Memorial Day, but almost no one is calling it the song of the summer.
The unassuming, pseudo-Christian, love ballad doesn’t carry the energy, joy, or momentum we associate with past summer anthems. Critics have called it “grocery store music,” fitting for quiet afternoons rather than pool parties. Its rise to No. 1 feels less like a celebration and more like a default setting.
Even pop mainstays like Morgan Wallen and Sabrina Carpenter, who dominated 2024 with huge hits like Espresso and I Had Some Help have come up short this year. Their new tracks aren’t bad, just safe, downbeat. Songs that drift in and out of the background without ever really grabbing you.
In short: summer 2025 is low on contenders and even lower on conviction.
From Pop Frenzy to Musical Fatigue
To be fair, 2024 was a hard act to follow. That summer brought an avalanche of bangers: Charli XCX’s Brat era, Sabrina Carpenter going viral, and a wave of high-energy singles tailor-made for festivals, TikTok, and radio. What happens after a year like that? You get a musical “hangover”.
That’s the word music insiders keep using to describe this summer’s vibe. A collective comedown from last year’s pop highs, mixed with a more anxious, overstimulated cultural mood. The world feels heavier. Listeners are retreating into nostalgia, into something that’s comforting and familiar.
Blame the Algorithm (and the Audience)
Another reason we don’t have a clear winner? We’re all listening to different things.
Streaming has splintered the charts. Instead of one song rising to the top through radio dominance and MTV, we now have dozens of personalized playlists quietly competing for your attention. One person’s summer jam might be an Afrobeat deep cut. Another’s might be a chill indie track from five years ago.
There’s no longer a centralized place where a definitive summer song is declared. Instead, your “song of the summer” depends on which corner of TikTok you’re in or whether you’ve even opened the app in weeks. When everything is an option, nothing becomes a movement.
Fewer Big Bets, More Safe Choices
It’s not just the fans feeling fragmented. The music industry itself seems caught in a holding pattern.
Many of the artists who could deliver a summer-defining smash are sitting this one out. Major album drops have been delayed. Promising singles have lost steam. Even when big names do release something, the trend has leaned melancholic with slower beats and introspective lyrics.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Music can reflect the mood of its moment, and this moment feels emotionally exhausted. It is a challenge if you’re looking for a crowd-shaking chorus that screams “SUMMER!” in all caps.
Is the Song of the Summer Dead… or Just Changing?
It’s tempting to frame this summer as a loss. Like we’ve misplaced a cultural tradition that once gave every summer a soundtrack.
Maybe we’ve moved past the idea that a single song can define the whole season. Maybe the “song of the summer” is becoming more personal, more localized.
That doesn’t mean the magic is gone. It just means it’s scattered. It’s found in playlists shared between friends, songs that live in the background of your best summer memories, or tracks that go viral for a week and then vanish. While some people miss the communal high of dancing to Uptown Funk with a crowd of strangers, others are happy to build their own soundtracks.
Summer 2025 hasn’t delivered a breakout anthem yet, but that absence says more about us than the music.
It reflects a fragmented media landscape, and a generation that’s feeling fatigued and is less interested in monoculture hits.
The era of the one-size-fits-all summer bop might be over, but the music hasn’t stopped. Maybe that’s enough for right now.
