The best hour of summer is the one right before the sun clocks out. Nobody’s peaking yet, everybody’s grinning, the drink is still cold. Here’s what that hour sounds like when you get it right.
1. Barry Can’t Swim - Dance Dance Dance!
Barry Can’t Swim makes music for exactly this window, that gold-light stretch where the day hasn’t decided to become a night yet. The piano loop is stupidly joyful and the whole thing swings instead of thumps, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Twenty seconds in and your shoulders are already gone.
2. Jamie xx - Life (feat. Robyn)
Robyn over a Jamie xx production was always going to work, and it does the second it starts. It rides a sample that sounds like a memory you can’t quite place, and the chorus is the kind of dumb-happy that only lands in July. Try being in a bad mood while this plays. You can’t.
3. Peggy Gou, Lenny Kravitz - I Believe In Love Again
Peggy Gou put Lenny Kravitz on a house record and somehow it didn’t come out sounding like a car advert. It’s warm, a little cheesy, and by the second chorus you’ve stopped caring about either of those things. Rooftop at 7pm, drink sweating through the napkin, this is the one.
Then the sun goes down and it stops being polite. More on that tomorrow.