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Song of the summer 2024: writers pick their tracks of the season

From Sabrina Carpenter to Kendrick Lamar, Guardian writers pick out the songs that will be soundtracking their barbecues for the summer

Perhaps even more exciting, Espresso heralds a triumphant return to just how fun pop music can be, and marks the arrival of Carpenter as a bona fide cultural force with the 25 year-old superstar’s highly anticipated album Short n’ Sweet dropping during the season’s dog days on 25 August. Roan warns a closeted, sapphic lover that her life of compulsory heterosexuality will lead to soulless, suburban ruin, and one day she’ll wake up as “nothing more than his wife.” Bubblegum pop with a message, and a grown-up one at that – how refreshing to have a lesbian-themed hit written for the female gaze, one that squashes the “I kissed a girl” trope from celebrity culture’s distant past. Not long after this withering four-and-a-half-minute takedown of Toronto’s most famous “certified pedophile” against a stripped-down DJ Mustard beat debuted at No 1 on the US Hot 100 in May, it was vaulted into the stratosphere with Kendrick’s epochal Juneteenth concert, where he performed it no fewer than five times with members of every major LA gang on stage in an act of righteous overkill that left the most Too Big To Fail artist of his generation to fly the white flag.

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