The American singer-songwriter's breezy disco bop has been inescapable over the last few months. Here experts dissect why it has had such a hold over popular culture – and our summer holidays There is no official metric to determine the "song of the summer", an evocative term popularised in a 1999 New York Times column by music critic Ann Powers, who concluded that Backstreet Boys' I Want It That Way was the season's preeminent anthem that year. Though Billboard and the UK's Official Charts Company now compile insightful "songs of the summer" charts based on cumulative sales, airplay and streaming over a preordained period, part of the concept's appeal lies in its somewhat nebulous quality: it's based on collective consensus rather than cold hard stats.
The song of the summer is the one that seems to soundtrack your middle of the year months even if you never consciously put it on – you just keep hearing it on the radio, in bars and coming out of someone else's smartphone. More often than not, it's a song that really captures the balmy, breezy ideal of what summer is supposed to feel like. Think back to Harry Styles' Watermelon Sugar in 2020 or Nicki Minaj's Super Bass in 2011.
This year, while Charli XCX's gleefully hedonistic Brat album has become a cultural phenomenon and Shaboozey's hardscrabble country bop A Bar Song (Tipsy) has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five consecutive weeks, one song has harnessed this sense of infinite possibility more than any other: Espr.