No Song of Summer 2025? No Problem!

To hear the culture critics tell it, 2025 will be remembered for its failure to deliver a song of the summer. It feels a little like the year we had no peaches in B.C. Pop music appears to have died on the vine. Is this, too, a product of climate change somehow?

Whatever the case (or the cause), don’t be fooled. Admittedly, summer 2025 hasn’t been graced with a ubiquitous anthem along the lines of Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 stunner “Not Like Us,” Luis Fonsi’s 2017 summer jam “Despacito,” or Carly Rae Jepsen’s career-making 2011 bop “Call Me Maybe,” but there have been plenty of excellent singles, especially lately.

August has yielded a boatload of bangers, engineered to get the (pool) party started or, in my case, make cleaning the house kind of fun. For weeks, I’ve been dancing while doing the dishes to Nigerian singer-songwriter Rema’s frenetic, nonsensical “Kelebu,” Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter Amaarae’s catchy, club-ready “Fineshyt” and American rapper Tyler, The Creator’s filthy, confident “Big Poe,” which is technically a mid-July release, but I digress.

“Big Poe” opens Tyler, The Creator’s ninth LP, Don’t Tap The Glass, announced and, just days later, dropped late last month, on a Monday, no less.

He might have called it Break Glass in Case of Emergency. On first listen, it’s hard not to think that the tightly-sequenced, danceable surprise release was the American rapper’s response to a summer in need.

If so, we should thank him. In addition to giving us quality music, the hip-hop star from Hawthorne, Calif., appears to have started a trend: several artists have followed his lead. Now, instead of a universalizing summer single of 2025, a defining portrait of the sound of this year is emerging courtesy of the best Black artists working today.

From Chance the Rapper, a sensational comeback

Last Friday, with two weeks of summer to go, we were blessed with a trio of excellent albums, all surprise releases, courtesy three of Black music’s top talents: Chance the Rapper, Kaytranada and Dijon.

The biggest surprise may be that Chance the Rapper’s Star Line, his first full-length album in over six years, is quite good.

His previous effort, 2019’s The Big Day, was an infamous flop that turned most of his fans into passionate haters. Influential music critic Anthony Fantano of the YouTube music criticism channel the Needle Drop gave it a zero.

Fantano criticized its “disgustingly sentimental” and “painfully mediocre bars,” most of which were about how much Chance loved his wife. AllMusic called The Big Day a “horror show of an album” that proved “your favourite artist can, at any point, creatively combust.” Another critic called Chance the rap game Joe Biden.

“I’m getting this crazy feeling that people want me to kill myself,” Chance tweeted in 2019, amid the truly brutal backlash.

That’s not what I wanted. Neither did I want another album from him, though. Honestly, when Star Line dropped, I scoffed. But I was wrong. This is a spectacular return to form.

From beginning to end, Chance sounds clever and edgy again, energized, even angry — and why wouldn’t he be, after losing a sizeable chunk of his fanbase and, probably, plenty of money amid a contentious divorce.

Artistically, the split seems to have helped. Far be it from me to blame a woman for the mediocre work of her ex-husband, but it’s painfully clear that Chance the Divorcée is a much more compelling musician than Chance the Wife Guy.

He knows it, too. “I had an F-minus but that’s behind us,” he spits on the opener “Star Side Intro,” and the critics agree: Star Line has been hailed as a truly sensational comeback from — and I can’t believe I’m saying this in 2025 — one of the best rappers out there.

Kaytranada proves we’re human after all

Aint No Damn Way!, Kaytranada's fourth studio album, is much less surprising. Granted, it came out of nowhere, announced and released in a matter of days, Tyler-style, but otherwise this one is business as usual. The Haiti-born Montreal DJ has had very few missteps since his 2016 Polaris Music Prize-winning debut, 99.9%, and there’s little to criticize here but its lack of big names.

Kaytranada albums tend to lean on features. His previous work has been studded with high-profile collaborations with artists like Anderson .Paak, Pharrell Williams and Victoria Monét. But this time out, the producer has chosen to eschew such cameos in favour of groove after groove from the spacey, soul-influenced pocket he’s made for himself.

Fact is — and Ain’t No Damn Way drives this home — Kaytranada has never needed anyone. Previous LPs have been released alongside instrumental versions, which I typically prefer. Who needs vocals when the beat can stand alone?

And as the lo-fi beat scene continues to be cannibalized by AI, it’s nice to have new music, composed by a human, that can set the perfect tone for reading, writing, running or hanging out.

My prediction: Dijon is the next big thing

Finally, let’s talk about Dijon. The third and final surprise from last weekend was Baby, the sophomore LP from LA-based producer Dijon Duenas. This one may turn out to be the album of the year.

Duenas, known mononymously as Dijon, is in the middle of a massive glow-up. He produced three tracks for Justin Bieber’s latest album, Swag, and appeared on the best song from Bon Iver’s new Sable, Fable.

But with Baby, it’s clear that Dijon is much more than a vibe to be borrowed by pop’s biggest names. He’s the next big thing in music.

Dijon’s sound can be difficult to properly describe. Americana crossed with glitch-hop? 2020s hyperpop by way of ‘90s R&B? The Band meets J Dilla. Oneohtrix Point Never meets Frank Ocean, but it’s folk. Bon Iver meets Tricky, with a healthy dose of Prince. Joe Cocker, sampled by Sampha, on blown laptop speakers.

“Alt-R&B, post-pop, anti-Americana, and nu-jungle are all ludicrous descriptors but apropos,” Matt Mitchell wrote for Paste, giving Baby a 10 out of 10. In the New Yorker, Brady Brickner-Wood praised Baby as “An album rife with contradiction and collision, its brilliance contingent on its inelegance,” the sort of word salad you get when an artist defies every label.

My suspicion is that Dijon is in uncharted territory, and that his genre’s name will come in time, perhaps in hindsight, as we look back on the music that defined the 2020s.

I hate to hyperbolize, but it took me about 30 seconds to be confident that I was listening to this decade’s sound, and the rest of the minute to decide it was my duty to spread the good news of his coming.

So fine, there’s no song of the summer. But don’t cry. Contemporary music is not dead. It’s full of surprises.