DJs Weigh In: What’s the Song of the Summer?

The best DJs know how to read a room. It’s a delicate skill. One wrong drop, one song cut off before its best verse, or one bizarre tropical house remix of an R&B classic could kill the entire dance floor vibe. It could take five more songs before the audience’s trust is restored. In many cases, the Song of the Summer is often a break-in-case-of-emergency secret weapon. 

The definitive pick may vary from set to set, from club to club, or from chart to chart. “I don’t know if there is an answer that means as much as it would have 10 years ago,” Rebecca Black says. But these songs share an ability to get bodies moving. Black’s recent set at Day Trip in Los Angeles called back to never-ending Brat days with Charli XCX’s “365,” but also included the Black Eyed Peas’ “The Time (Dirty Bit).” Meanwhile, DJ and producer Jacobdior has been filling his New York club nights with similarly expansive sets: Kehlani’s 2025 single “Folded” still has as much of a hold as Amerie’s 2005 hit “1 Thing.” 

There are certain songs that are surging hard enough to define the season — even a few that have already been out for a year or two, or 14. Here, five DJs break down their picks for the Song of the Summer.

Rebecca Black has her finger on the pulse of pop just as Slayyyter keeps her finger on the trigger. It makes sense, then, that “Crank” is Black’s Song of the Summer pick. “From the beginning of spring when I played that in clubs to now, it feels like you’re seeing people not only embrace it when it plays but also embrace it as a culture,” she says. “That’s a post-Brat-ification thing that I think has also redefined what it means to really be a song of the summer.” Slayyyter’s Wor$t Girl in America single has roots offline as much as it does online. “There’s something to be said about a song that really bands people together more than just a song that you would hear all of the time,” Black says.

Honorable Mention: Zara Larsson, “Midnight Sun”

The first time DJ Miss Milan heard Tyla and Zara Larsson slide on the A*Pop single “She Did It Again,” it became an immediate song of the summer contender for her. “This is one of those songs that should be in rotation for summertime,” Milan, who is best known as Doechii’s official DJ, says a few days before her solo Lollapalozza set. “It just gives that real ‘Baby Boy,’ Beyoncé, old school vibe. It’s sultry and sexy, [while] still giving you a danceable vibe.” As she started slipping it into her mixes, Milan was surprised to see the crowd on the same page. “Oh, you guys like this? OK, cool. We’re having a great time,” she remembers thinking. “It gets the reaction that I think it deserves.” 

Honorable Mention: Yung Miami, “Spend Dat” 

JacobDior has spent most of his summer DJing all around New York, calling his audience to the dance floor with everything from Beyoncé to Charli XCX’s Brat. But as each night reaches its peak, he knows exactly what to drop to send an electric current through the room: Yung Miami’s propulsive single and scammer shoutout, “Spend Dat.” “The crowd could be dead. The club’s almost closing. That song comes on, everyone’s alive,” JacobDior says. “Everyone’s dancing. Everyone’s singing. They go crazy for it.” The song got its legs on TikTok, then the DJ started to hear it when he was going on and in the sets his DJ friends were playing, too. “I started putting it in my sets and it just became a really big thing.”

Honorable Mention: Trim, “Coconut Water”

When RoseGawd first launched her career as a DJ in 2017, it was the summer of Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow,” the kind of song that went up just as hard in Los Angeles as it did in Dallas. Nearly a decade later, RoseGawd is getting a sense of the same Song of the Summer dominance with Yung Miami’s “Spend Dat.” While DJing a mixer during the NBA Finals, she dropped the track as soon as the New York Knicks won. “The whole room erupted,” she says. “I know specifically that room was a lot of LA natives and transplants at the same time because of the type of party it was. I said, ‘Oh yeah, she has a hit on her hands.’” 

Honorable Mention: Beyoncé, “Morning Dew (Donk)”

Lately, Club90s DJ Jeffrey Lyman’s schedule has been packed with club nights centered around hyper-specific pop culture themes: Heated Rivalry Night, Off Campus Night, Michael Jackson Night, and the recurring Disney Channel-themed night Bop to the Top. No matter what kind of crowd each night brings out, they all go berserk for the same hit: Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat.” “As soon as those first few notes hit, the whole room erupts,” Lyman says, noting the song’s post-Coachella resurgence. In place of Nicki Minaj’s verse, the DJ cuts to the instrumental and lets the room take it away, instead. “When literally every other song is Disney Channel and it’s just as big, if not bigger, than a lot of the Disney Channel songs — that shows me the power of that song.”

Honorable Mention: The Killers, “Mr. Brightside”