What Were Your 2015 Summer Jams?
Sometime a few weeks ago, in the middle of this supposedly Song-of-the-Summer-less summer, I realized that I was swimming in music that I adored. It happens regularly that I feel like I’ll go months without being excited about anything musically and then bam!, I’m overwhelmed with good stuff.
The Internet’s gorgeous third album, Ego Death, is a giant leap forward for the Odd Future-affiliated collective in terms of songwriting (virtually every melody on the thing is indelible) and matter-of-factly queer all over the place—that it was almost entirely ignored when it came out in June is a minor travesty. London’s Dornik released a debut album of R&B that’s both atmospherically modern and classicist—it’s the kind of thing a lot of people go for but never quite pull off and it’s the smoothest album I heard all summer. Jessie Ware’s part-time producer Julio Bashmore has created a dance album (Knockin’ Boots) that’s approximately 5,000 times more exciting and alive than the output of his cohorts in Disclosure. It’s the rare house-music LP that I want to listen to all the way through every time. Its vintage sources are impeccably curated. It is thick with texture and infested with hooks. It sounds modern without coming off as overly concerned about functioning within trends like EDM or deep house. I love it a lot.
Selections from those three albums are but a few of the tracks I’ve included in the playlist of my favorite summer jams below (it’s mostly made up of dance music and R&B, the two genres I listen to most frequently). Feel free to share the songs that moved you this summer below.
[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]