Meet the songs vying for the title of summer anthem of 2024. Which one is your favorite?

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — You know a summer song when you hear it.

It’s the song that gets you off the dance floor. A song that sounds best when sung by the people you love, cups in hand, in sweltering heat. It creeps into your brain and stays there, taking you back to the summer you first heard it, even years later.

At their best, summer songs are aural representations of the hottest months of the year, says Mike Errico, a songwriter and lecturer at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

“They’re happy, extroverted, cheerful and fun, with a big, repeatable chorus that even the most musically inexperienced can join in with,” Errico told CNN. “The fact that you can dance is a big plus, because it can work during the day on the beach or at night in the clubs.”

Interestingly, most of these songs were released weeks or months before the first day of summer. And quite a few of them got a big boost from TikTok, where their catchiest 15 to 30 seconds found a huge (and influential) audience.

A decade ago, it was easier to zero in on the song of the summer. You couldn’t get past “Blurred Lines” in 2013, and “Call Me Maybe” the year before. But such breakthroughs are becoming fewer and fewer as the monoculture shrinks—now TikTok is perhaps the most influential factor in a song’s success, and with its ever-accelerating trend cycle, songs by even major artists can easily get lost in the crowd.

And yet, some hits have made the breakthrough. The contenders for this year’s song of the summer are storming the Billboard Hot 100, being used as soundtracks online and inspiring us to sweat it out offline. Now that summer has officially begun, check out these musical treats and decide for yourself: What will be the song of the summer of 2024?

“Espresso”, Sabrina Carpenter

Carpenter’s cotton candy-light single sounds like a summer affair: quite short, nothing profound and just Fun. That most of the texts are sugary nonsense —“I know, I make Mountain Dew for you” And “My damn things are on vacation,” for two – only adds more frothy charm to the film. But it all works because Carpenter gets the joke and ironically plays the role of a reluctant lover who endures a man’s attentions, if only because it boosts her own ego. “Isn’t that sweet? I think so too!”

“Lunch”, Billie Eilish

Driving, upbeat and slyly sexual, this culinary-inspired song from the young Grammy winner’s latest album is certainly the closest to summer Eilish’s sound has ever come. She’s downright giddy with lust on “Lunch,” a track that flirts between heavy bass and feather-light piano as if riding the highs and lows of passion. It’s a song that seems destined to end in a mosh pit, with bodies jumping and writhing to Eilish’s version of lovestruck pop.

“Evil”, Tinashe

Finally, after years of reliably cranking out danceable R&B anthems, Tinashe’s viral moment has arrived — with a big help from a British TikTok dancer. Savvy TikTokers have layered Tinashe’s new single over a video of a dancer named Nate bumping and grinding in a soca dance class.

But even without the meme treatment, Tinashe’s latest song seems destined to make a splash this summer – as Janet Jackson proved when she mixed the new “Nasty” with her own song of the same name during a recent live performance. Over a clean, slick beat, Tinashe matter-of-factly emphasizes how bad she is. And her evocative, quotable chorus is born to last beyond TikTok: “Will anyone be able to take on my freak?”

“Good luck, baby!” Chappell Roan

While previous entries on this list have been more ambivalent on the subject of love, Roan’s anthem is this summer’s bleeding heart. “Good Luck, Babe!” features the musical theatricality of Kate Bush, ’80s synths straight out of Cyndi Lauper’s catalog, and a queer point of view that’s all Roan’s own.

In the most exciting moment, Roan imagines that the woman she loves will wake up in the future next to a man she detests: “You know I hate to say it, but I told you so.,” she sings, suddenly breaking into a high vocal belt. If summer is about taking it easy, Roan hasn’t gotten the memo: She’s doing vocal acrobatics here. (And at Roan’s increasingly popular live shows, thousands of people sing along.)

“Million Dollar Baby”, Tommy Richman

This ubiquitous TikTok smash seemingly became an overnight hit, but it’s a smash hit on first listen, with its captivating falsetto chorus, trap-funk undertones, and vague but relatable lyrics about success.

The song itself is perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy for Richman: Before it exploded onto TikTok (there are at least five million videos to a clip of the song) and streaming platforms, he was virtually unknown. Here, he borrows sounds from more established artists like Sampha and Brockhampton to create a track reminiscent of sweaty, exhausting summer nights.

“Not Like Us”, Kendrick Lamar

Here’s a summer song that breaks all the rules. At 4:33, it’s the longest song of the bunch, by a minute. “Not Like Us” has no real chorus, and the closest thing to one – Lamar singing the title – doesn’t appear until two minutes in. It has three verses that, typical of Pulitzer Prize-winning Lamar, are packed with wordy, off-kilter rhymes. And yet, the latest of Lamar’s diss tracks against Drake, himself a longtime contributor to the summer song, has become a bona fide hit (albeit a wordy one).

With its surgical dismantling of the man behind “One Dance” and “Hotline Bling,” “Not Like Us” forces listeners to pay attention throughout its entire runtime. Even without a hook, it’s a song meant to be rapped along to with a crowd—perhaps that’s why Lamar performed it five times at his Juneteenth show in LA. His audience knew every word.

“A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, Shaboozey

Shaboozey’s summer hit, which only recently began with Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” is a country version of J-Kwon’s immortal club hit “Tipsy.” But unlike J-Kwon’s celebration of the club circa 2004, Shaboozey is decidedly downcast after his post-work day drinking spree. “Everyone at the bar gets tipsy,” he complains.

Nevertheless, lyrics about dragging yourself from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker, in a desperate attempt to get rid of the stress of the 9-to-5 job, not It may not be as light as “Espresso” or as danceable as “Nasty,” but “A Bar Song” has an easy-to-sing chorus that’s meant to be played at closing time in a Nashville honky-tonk bar.

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