Diamora Hunt didn’t have to do much during the first stretch of her CultureCon Café set in early June. Organizers for the event recruited the Los Angeles-based DJ, who performs as Rosegawd, to keep the room from feeling static. For a while, she played
background tracks while guests mingled throughout Sincerely Yours, a Black-owned art gallery and club in downtown L.A. Once everyone seemed comfortable, Hunt found the perfect moment to turn up the heat.
The crowd’s attention had been split between each other and Game Four of the NBA Finals, where the New York Knicks were rapidly rebounding from a 29-point deficit against the San Antonio Spurs. With less than two seconds left in the match, the Knicks took the lead. In time with the final buzzer, Hunt dropped “Spend Dat,” the Yung Miami hit released in April. “That room erupted in a unison of happiness,” Hunt tells Rolling Stone. “They just took that moment to be talking about, ‘Where are the scammers?’”
In the weeks since, “Spend Dat” has surged to certified summer soundtrack status with a Number 17 peak on the Billboard Hot 100. The chart’s top 10 has been consistently occupied by blockbuster hits from Ella Langley (“Choosin’ Texas”), Olivia Dean (“Man I Need”), Tame Impala (“Dracula”), and more. But the charts and the clubs don’t always agree on the song of the summer. Playing a song in a car or through a set of headphones counts as a single stream, but what about a track dropped in a room full of hundreds of sweaty bodies?
“A lot of people would consider it as what’s charting the highest and what’s being played most on the radio,” says Jacob Carnes, better known in the club scene as Jacobdior. “But now that I DJ and I’m out listening to music all the time, I feel like the song of the summer is what gets people moving. What song can you put on that makes the crowd go from zero to 100, everyone knows the words, and you just know it’s a hit?” This summer, he’s had “Spend Dat” on his rotation alongside viral hits like Trim’s “Coconut Water” and BabyChiefDoit’s “Ghetto Love Story,” which only just entered the Hot 100 a few weeks ago, plus older tracks like Amerie’s “1 Thing” and Kehlani’s “Folded.”
“Radio used to be able to tell you what to play in a sense of, ‘Oh, this is what’s hot.’ You’ll hear it enough. Either you like it or you don’t,” Hunt says. “Now it does depend on [a DJs] own algorithm.” She remembers when the gap between what dominated on air and outside didn’t feel so wide. Around the time Hunt started DJing in 2017, Cardi B set the summer on fire with “Bodak Yellow.” It was inescapable, the kind of hit that signaled a definitive shift. “I could play that five times in a row and it would go up every single time,” Hunt says. “There hasn’t been a song that I could do that with since.” Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” might be the closest parallel — the rapper played it five times during his Los Angeles concert in 2024 and the single spent three weeks at Number One.
The summer of “Not Like Us” was also the summer of Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet and Charli XCX’s Brat. Carpenter premiered “Espresso” at Coachella in April, while Charli previewed Brat with “Von Dutch” in February. They arrived at the just right moment, growing right as the coat check at the club was obsolete once again. “If you want something to really live in the summer, you may want to drop it in the fall or those later winters,” says DJ Miss Milan, official DJ for Doechii. This strategy gives songs time to find an audience and take hold without being drowned out by an influx of summer releases. It worked like a charm for Ella Langley.
“Choosin’ Texas” made its Hot 100 debut in October 2025 before hitting Number One on Valentine’s Day earlier this year. The breakup hit simmered to the top so slowly that many who aren’t avid country listeners missed its ascent entirely — even the DJs who have their finger on the pulse. “Ella Langley is having a historic moment,” Rebecca Black says about the song, which has spent 15 weeks at the top of the chart. “I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it once all the way through just because that’s not my cup of tea.” Black’s music, like her upcoming album Age of the Exhibitionist, out in September, leans into the kind of pop that permeates queer spaces, while her DJ sets are geared towards blending pop with electronic music and dance.
“There are so many spaces that exist now that can play exactly the kind of music that is — whether it’s me or anybody else — that person’s thing,” Black says. “You can find that anywhere if you look hard enough. Some people just aren’t interested in looking. They’re happy to digest whatever is out there.” Her songs of the summer have included tracks from Kim Petras’ Detour, plus an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink blend of Slayyyter’s “Crank,” Ninajirachi’s “Fuck My Computer,” and the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.” She’ll even throw in a crunchy remix of “Crazy Frog,” sometimes. “When you’re building a show, you only get that moment of hearing something for the first time once, so I’m always trying to get back to that,” Black says.
Black recently brought her eclectic mix to Day Trip Festival in LA, but made the executive decision to exclude a song other DJs latched onto this summer: Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat.” “I think I heard literally every act before me play a remix of that song, and it did go off,” she says. “It got to the point where I literally was like, ‘OK, I’m not even going to touch that because everybody’s heard that so many times.’ But maybe that is what makes it a song of the summer.” The 14-year-old hit single surged back onto the Hot 100 at Number 26 following Bieber’s headlining performance at Coachella in April. He only sang along to a few seconds of the track during the YouTube portion of his set, but it was enough to revive the nostalgia in everyone watching who wanted more.
Black may have avoided it, but “Beauty and a Beat” has become a staple in the pop culture-heavy sets DJ Jeffrey Lyman has hosted with event organizer Club90s this summer. The song is as well received at Heated Rivalry Night and Off Campus Night as it is at Bop to the Top, their recurring Disney Channel party. “As soon as those first few notes hit, the whole room erupts,” Lyman says.
This summer has been particularly nostalgia-heavy for Club90s, which launched an ambitious 20-date Michael Jackson Night tour in July. They’d tried to host parties dedicated to the King of Pop in the past, but struggled to fill the rooms. Even the first few weeks after the blockbuster biopic Michael arrived were slow. “I almost gave up,” Lyman says. “But it takes a while for these things to simmer.”
Michael hit theaters in April. By June, it became the highest-grossing music biopic in history with more than $911.9 million at the global box office. Michael Jackson Night became a hit, too. “You could name ‘Billie Jean’ as a song of the summer, as well,” Lyman says. “That’s the pivotal MJ anthem that everyone is blasting and wants to hear.” The track climbed to Number 17 on the Hot 100 more than four decades after its initial release. In this instance, cultural dominance blurred the lines between the charts and the clubs. Bieber and Jackson belong to a similar song of the summer category as Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” which dominated in 2022.
Still, DJs can’t spend each night living entirely in the past. There are only so many new memories that you can build from nostalgia. “Especially from a DJ standpoint, the song of the summer has always been somewhat of a community opinion,” Milan says. Any summer of Drake can be cited as a perfect example. “Everyone always goes back to [saying], ‘I wish I could relive that summer 2016 era again. People correlating their experiences with that song also makes it the song of the summer.”
For anyone going through a gnarly breakup, that might be “Choosin’ Texas,” but Milan says, “it doesn’t make me want to hit the club” — at least not like Tyla and Zara Larsson’s “She Did It Again,” or Ayra Starr’s latest run of singles. “I’m not just walking in the mall and just pressing Shazam,” Milan says. “Like, no, this is something that we’ve heard in the party and the DJ is dropping it, and we all sung it with all our hearts and we danced to it and we enjoyed this night.”
While some clear picks have been locked in, it isn’t too late for some others to storm in as last-minute song of the summer contenders. There’s the Beyoncé archive release “Morning Dew (Donk)” (“That could come and steal the show, especially if she puts out some type of dance remix,” Hunt says), and Saucy Santana’s viral track “Quiet on the Creek.” There’s still a chance for it to hit in the club, if not on the charts. “I’ve always advocated for DJs to develop their own personal taste as a DJ, where you have to have a balance of reading the room, but also giving the room something to read,” Milan says. DJs have to be open to some trial and error here, especially as we approach the final stretch of the season. But it’s worth the risk if it results in a moment like the one Hunt captured with “Spend Dat” back in June.
Summer isn’t over yet.
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