Back in April, as Charli XCX neared the end of her Coachella set, several phrases appeared across the jumbo screen behind the stage. Maybe they were predictions, maybe wishes: “Addison Rae Summer,” “Celine Song Summer,” “Lorde Summer.” Those were just a few. But a few months later—and more than a year after Charli’s “Brat Summer” saturated the culture in lime green—none of those prophesied summers really came to be.
You may have had a “Paul Thomas Anderson Summer,” I may have had a “Haim Summer,” and Lana Del Rey may have had an “Ethel Cain Summer”—all of which popped up on the screen at Coachella—but odds are we didn’t all have any one of them all at once. After recent summers of Barbenheimer and the Eras Tour and of Brat, “Not Like Us,” and “Espresso,” summer 2025 is now on its way out with nary an entry in the monocultural canon.
The summer without monoculture has been most notable in the music world, where there has been no shortage of discourse concerning the lack of a Song of the Summer. This became palpable to me early on for two reasons. First was the experience of turning on pop radio in the car and still hearing Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather,” and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” on repeat instead of new releases. Second was the relatively soft landing in June of “Manchild,” the first single off Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album, Man’s Best Friend. The song did hit no. 1 overall on the Billboard Hot 100 briefly in June but tumbled down fairly quickly. Perhaps the transcendent success of “Espresso” last summer set too high a bar, but if Carpenter couldn’t produce a consensus Song of the Summer, something was definitely up.
Likewise, despite Charli’s prognostications, releases from Addison Rae, Lorde, Haim, and Miley Cyrus received critical acclaim and adulation from those artists’ fans, but they never translated to major chart success or had staying power. (For the record, Haim’s “Down to Be Wrong” is my personal Song of the Summer, followed by Romy Mars’s “A-Lister.”) There was a moment in July when it seemed like Justin Bieber could have a late-breaking entry for a breakthrough hit with “Daisies,” and while that song is still kicking around the top 10, it never fully took off.
It’s not just an issue of perception; 2025 has indeed, so far, produced only a handful of hits across genres, according to streaming data from Luminate, which compiles the numbers used in the Billboard charts. Of the 10 songs that have been streamed the most through the first half of this year in the U.S., only three—Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem,” Drake’s “Nokia,” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”—were released this year.
“Ordinary” has spent a whopping 10 weeks at no. 1 on the Hot 100. But its success has existed outside of the Song of the Summer conversation since “Ordinary” is just not a summer bop. No offense to Warren, but we’re not reheating Imagine Dragons’ nachos at the beach, please.
The summer crowd-pleaser content vacuum hasn’t just pertained to music, though. In her July 25 newsletter, New York Magazine book critic Emily Gould noted the lack of a Book of the Summer. At the time, not a single literary novel appeared on The New York Times’ list of the top 15 bestsellers. Last year, I couldn’t set foot in the park without spotting someone on a bench holding Miranda July’s All Fours.
In what’s actually been a good year for movies, several summer blockbusters like Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, F1, and Jurassic World: Rebirth have either underperformed, felt siloed by genre, or leaned so heavily on existing intellectual property that it’s hard to see them as truly new.
And though it’s relatively normal for the summer to be a slow season in television, the biggest small-screen story over the last few months was probably CBS’s cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which also symbolizes a type of watercooler media of an increasingly bygone era.
So, without an “Espresso” or a Barbenheimer, what has happened instead?
It’s been trendy for years now to declare the death of monoculture, even though in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen how badly people actually want to be brought together through entertainment. But this past summer has looked a bit more like what those prognosticators have typically described: the triumph of the niche over the mainstream.
In music, artists from the fringes of pop’s typical center, like the Marías, Ravyn Lenae, or Sombr, have worked their way into the middle reaches of the streaming and Billboard charts. The New York Times’ Popcast recently polled a group of 10 “tastemakers,” asking for each of their Songs of the Summer, leaning into the diffusion, and got 10 different answers
KPop Demon Hunters became a surprise hit, both in music and on Netflix, and left-of-center shows like The Hunting Wives and genre movies like Weapons may also be hitting harder given the absence of a monolith.
Despite the absence of megahits in traditional, top-down, produced entertainment, we have shared plenty of online brain rot this summer, from Labubus to the Coldplay concert CEO to Jet2holidays. You could make a decent argument for PinkPantheress’s “Illegal” or Disco Lines & Tinashe’s “No Broke Boys” as the Song of the Summer despite the fact that their impact is mostly contained to TikTok. I’m sure there’s some point to make here about shortening attention spans, but you’ve heard it all before.
It’s also worth considering that the absence of new hits may be due to the presence of and demand for nostalgia. Not only is a song like “Tipsy” a holdover from 2024, but it’s also based on a sample of J-Kwon’s song by the same name from 2004. You could make a similar point for Jurassic World: Rebirth or even Weapons, with its Whitest Kids U’Know tributes. Dare I mention the Oasis reunion tour? Or the Backstreet Boys’ summer run of sold-out shows at Sphere in Las Vegas? Especially for millennials, there’s a clear interest in reveling in the good ol’ days instead of engaging with what’s new. Some of that is likely the product of a streaming-based entertainment world, where the decay curve for big releases is slow and anyone can revisit archives at any time. According to The Wall Street Journal, before 2020, there had never been a track that spent more than 40 weeks in Billboard’s top 10. There have been eight such songs since then, including Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control,” another hit from 2023 that’s still an inevitable radio and chart presence.
Perhaps Charli didn’t mean that we would all have a “Joachim Trier Summer” but that you could have that, and I could have an “Ari Aster Summer” or a “Yung Lean Summer,” and all of it could coexist. If you want to look at this past season’s cultural output as something exciting, rather than stale and underwhelming, this is the best way to do it.
It’s worth noting that, after a summer of no monoculture, fall seems primed to bring us back together. Though “Manchild” never took off the way “Espresso” did, every song on Man’s Best Friend is currently listed in the Spotify Top 50—Global playlist several days after the album’s release. Of course, we are also just one month away from a new Taylor Swift album. For the TV watchers, Season 5 of Stranger Things begins in November, the same month that Wicked: For Good is released in theaters. This may have been the summer without monoculture, but only time will tell whether it set us up for a Sadie Sink Solstice or a Taylor Swicked Fall.
Nora Princiotti
Nora Princiotti covers the NFL, culture, and pop music, sometimes all at once. She hosts the podcast ‘Every Single Album,’ appears on ‘The Ringer NFL Show,’ and is The Ringer’s resident Taylor Swift scholar.Source link
