Summertime Radness: the SYNT Summer Soundtrack
12 songs for hot people, literally and metaphorically
It is finally warm enough to walk around outside without any actual purpose other than to serve cunt, listen to music, and maybe get a nice cold beverage. For some reason, so much emphasis is put on making the most of summer, more so than any other time of year. You’re expected to travel, party, go to festivals, spend money you likely don’t have, and put all existential dread, whether career, school, or relationship-related, on hold.
However, we here at See You Next Tuesday believe in making summer a time for both. Having an eventful summer isn’t just for uncomplicated people, and if you don’t want to choose between complete summertime sadness or nonstop compulsory fun, we have the playlist for you.
“Nice out”- kilo kish
A massively underrated Art Pop voice and interdisciplinary creator, Kilo Kish has several songs I could have included here that I half-reasonably, half-inexplicably associate with summer. But NICE OUT was my introduction to her, and was on repeat for all of July three years ago, so here it is. Lyrically, its motifs do smell of summer nights – margaritas and tequila, sweat and blistered skin, L.A sunshine and of course, the title. The melody has a sort of dark synth quality to it that tinges its dancey beat with a hint of melancholy, à la Cruel Summer (the Bananarama one, not Taylor Swift. Please). The result is an accurate portrait of how it feels when there’s a sense of obligation to have fun and be social in the summertime that breeds pressure and isolation.
“road head”- japanese breakfast
Personally, I find it hard to break out of associating media with the time of year you become obsessed with it. In summer 2023, I had just finished reading Michelle Zauner (AKA Japanese Breakfast)’s memoir Crying in H Mart, and pretty much refused to listen to any other artist after her writing hit me like a ton of bricks. This track though, and a lot of the ones from her sophomore LP Soft Sounds From Another Planet, possess a dreamy, summery quality, with the gentle guitar lick repeating itself for the whole song with little to no variation. Paired with Zauner’s vocals, this song feels like the musical equivalent of driving down a coastline at sunset with the windows down in the summer.
“slip away”- perfume genius
For the first 22-ish years of life, what makes summer summer is that it is bookended by school starting and ending. Hence the uptick in teen summer films about senior year coming to a close. And, when you’re a year out from graduating high school, those movies tend to hit particularly hard. Such was the case for me when Booksmart came out in May of 2019 when I was in grade eleven. This Perfume Genius track accompanies a simple yet heartbreaking scene at a graduation party near the end of the film, and its atmospheric sound really embodies the kind of self-discovery that comes in the intermediary periods when you exist outside of school, and the bittersweetness of knowing you won’t be going back.
“pain”- king princess
Speaking of which, on the other end of the spectrum is Bottoms. The film begins at the fair, a quintessential end-of-summer third space for teenagers that marks their return to structured academic life. These teenagers, however, start the year by making a fight club, wherein a montage of sparring haphazard self-defense punches is set to King Princess’ PAIN, creating perhaps the most simultaneously gay, chaotic, and memorable montage in cinematic history. Although I was starting my fourth year of college, not high school, when it came out, the nostalgia of how hard the end of summer hits in high school, but how fun it is to go back to being an absolute nuisance with your friends, really hit thanks to that King Princess song.
“i’m sailin”- Mazzy star
Widely known for their ambient, folk-inspired, quintessentially nineties sound, not a lot of people appreciate just how folky and almost country-inspired Mazzy Star were on their first album, 1990’s She Hangs Brightly. Twangy and hypnotic, this song almost feels like walking on a dusty, sandy trail in a Southern town while chewing a piece of straw. “Sailin,” too, contains the double meaning of the simplicity and cruising feeling of the melody and the rather summery activity of sailing itself (despite it now only really being practiced by rich white people with nepotistic access to a marina). Overall, the song inspires one to don cowboy boots, lie in the sand, and take advantage of summer’s monotony to contemplate literally everything that has ever happened to them.
“there goes the neighborhood”- sheryl crow
It is incredibly hard for Country music despisers like myself to survive the summertime, with all the festivals, barbecues, and other opportunities to be assailed by the genre. This song is as far as I will go, because it puts the cunt in Country, and is far more the former than the latter. It is the only song that has ever given me the urge to line dance, wear a cowboy hat (a real one, not the sparkly pink Barbie looking one), or ride a mechanical bull. But more than that, it paints a more gritty, girly, surly version of a hoe down. The “scene” is all about drag queens, dropping acid, and freaks. The funky sax really seals the deal on the sexiness and cynicism that make this an actual country song worth listening to.
