The 50 Best Summer Jams Ever

Can you feel it? The air as thick as marmite, inky sweat bunching you hair, dreams of cans of Ting and the broken tune of a humming desk fan. That’s right: it’s a heatwave, baby!

At the time of writing, we’re in the midst of the longest heatwave this country has seen in 20 years—platform announcers are warning us to carry bottled water on the train, everybody’s feet smell of rotten meat and vinegar, fears of a hosepipe ban are beginning to mount, chaos reigns. You see, the United Kingdom is not designed for heat. Just as the two days of snow we get once every February throw our infrastructure into unmanageable disorder, so the prospect of temperatures above 24º produces a state of slow-motion unrest. The traffic dribbles, the tarmac bubbles, Budgens have run out of Twisters and concentration levels dip below the subatomic. When the weather is like this we revert to a pre-natural state: that of park cans, of lying back on dry grass, of switching off push notifications and listening to the greatest summer jams ever.

For that’s what really makes this great cloying cloak of a climate bearable: the right tune. That perfect melody, that somehow captures the frisson of pollen mingled with lager. Those sacred edits that pound, those gooey dubs that drunkenly swagger, those crisp burnt bangers that slam like flat palms of sun-cream on pink, freckled backs. Now there are many things we’re not good at here at THUMP UK—we can’t breakdance, we can’t speak Farsi, we don’t “get” Lil Peep—but if there is one art, one alchemy, we have mastered, it’s finding the perfect summer jam. Which is exactly what we’ve done for you here. Fifty of them in fact. Ready for you to blast across the nearest green space you can find through your tiny, tinny AA battery-powered portable speaker. Stop complaining about how sweaty the backs of your knees are and have a Solero.

From pristine disco to fuggy dub, gauzy ghettotech to humid deep house, here’s everything you’ll need to soundtrack this and every summer.

Check it out on YouTube here:

And most of them on Spotify here:

Enjoy.