Who has the best summer song of 2021? BTS’ Butter, Billie Eilish’s Lost Cause, Olivia Rodrigo’s Good 4 U and Dua Lipa’s Levitating are all anthems in the running
- In 2020 Taylor Swift’s Cardigan topped charts and Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams made a comeback thanks to a viral TikTok video – but what about this year?
- Bruno Mars and John Mayer have returned and Doja Cat teamed up with SZA, but will Billie Eilish and Cardi B’s new singles smash Bad Guy and WAP’s successes?
We don’t get to choose the song of the summer. It chooses us.
It’s the one that you hear blasting out of passing cars, on street corners and – this summer – from beach parties, which are returning after the pandemic put a damper on 2020’s summer get-togethers.
Last year, that definitive summer song wasn’t so definitive. It was either The Weeknd’s omnipresent earworm Blinding Lights, which continued to reign throughout the autumn and winter months, and only recently started to recede; Taylor Swift’s Cardigan, an appropriately intimate anthem for a year when everything turned inward; or Fleetwood Mac’s 40-plus-year-old Dreams, which enjoyed an unexpected resurgence thanks to a popular TikTok video, which shows just how unpredictable the song of the summer race can truly be.
As long as another song from yesteryear doesn’t crash the boards and make a run for summer supremacy (Cyndi Lauper’s All Through the Night, anybody?), here are 10 contemporary candidates for song of the summer, 2021 edition.
Lorde, Solar Power
It doesn’t matter what the calendar says; Lorde says it’s summer, so it’s summer. The New Zealand mood-pop sensation returned last week with this light, airy, upbeat celebration of the sun, which nods to US hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest (“can I kick it? Yeah, I can!” Lorde says, sounding, gulp, happy) and is genetically engineered by producer Jack Antonoff to get the summer party rolling. You have no choice but to submit.
BTS, Butter