“She’s tapping into the feeling of living through global turmoil, from Trump to climate change, and still just figuring out how to put on our sunglasses and move forward the best that we can,” Louie says. “How do you deal with the existential dread of our current existence? Here we are, in the midst of history, trying to find ways to seek joy and love and live our lives—it inspires this idea that Charli is getting at, which is that there’s always a risk that we’re just going to party ourselves off a cliff.”
It’s not just Charli who has been mired in the metaphysical mud; many contenders for 2026’s SOTS aren’t exactly optimistic. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” which has lingered on the charts all year, is a country ballad that seems fated to be heard all summer blasting from boats on the lake and backyard barbecues. It is suffused with pining and tears, a song about a cowboy who leaves a Tennessee girl with nothing but a bottle of Jack Daniels when he decamps to his home in dusty Texas. There’s Ariana Grande, too, who is returning with Petal; the album’s first taste is a sour one, a ploddingly unhappy ballad called “hate that I made you love me” with lyrical references to flowers being laid on someone’s cold, dead tomb and bumblebees stuck in gloops of honey.
Then there’s Kim Petras’s excellent new “Jeep,” which, she has said, was inspired by her experience evacuating her home during the 2025 Palisades fires, when she was forced to pack up everything she owned into her car and escape to the desert. As for Olivia Rodrigo’s take on the national mood? The title of her latest album’s first single says it all: “Drop Dead.” “Party Rock Anthem,” this is not.
“Sure, sometimes songs are meant to transport us to some made-up place where everything is fun and sparkly, but to me, the most important artists touch on the reality of the world—and right now the reality of the world isn’t always great,” says Bethany Cosentino of the band Best Coast, who released a sad summer masterpiece back in July of 2010 with the indie rock classic Crazy for You. On it, she sang of romantic indecision and emotional confusion, bathing it all in the golden haze of her native Los Angeles. More than a decade later, in 2023, she released a song called “Natural Disaster” inspired by climate anxiety. “In summer, there’s this pressure to be posting your epic Cape Cod vacation. Energetically, you’re supposed to be out frolicking around, running through the sprinklers with a White Claw, suntanned. But the truth is, a lot of people are just trying to survive.”
Another artist vying for SOTS this year is Drake, who surprise-released three (!) new albums in May after years of laying low in the wake of a knockout brawl with Kendrick Lamar. Lamar, infamously, dealt a few lethal deathblows to the Canadian rapper on the diss track “Not Like Us,” which ended up being its own kind of SOTS back in 2024, when it blared unavoidably from car radios and Bluetooth speakers in Central Park. Now, Drake is returning battered and bruised, with one of his albums called Iceman as if to say that he is destined (or doomed) to stay hardened and cold no matter the forecast outside. Over the years, he has recorded a hefty share of SOTSs, but, because he’s also always had something of an emo soul, many of them, like “Passionfruit” (2017) and “In My Feelings” (2018), have a shiny surface over their mopier core. Across this latest three-album feat, he sounds wizened and on the back foot, while also desperately trying to dance his way into our hearts with the fun “Cheetah Print.” But the song that has probably gotten the most attention—and landed at #1 on the Billboard charts—is the prickly, resentful “Janice STFU.”