The Singles Jukebox

Not pictured: the gentleman’s hairstyle…

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[5.33]

Katie Gill: You can do better than someone who wears a man-bun, Cassadee Pope. The song’s a ridiculous combination of lesser-known summer clichés and the lyric “something that bright’s gotta burn out sometime” made me roll my eyes, but there’s traces of individualism in here! If more of the song was delivered the way she delivered “making out on the boardwalk” in the chorus, it’d get higher points.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Because we don’t have enough gruel for the summer. The quaver in Pope’s voice and breathless rush of words in the lyric is reminiscent of Carly Rae Jepsen (also pop-punk adjacent), but everything else is either overwritten or stock, or “Sublime on the boombox.” One longs for the completely legit memories of “making out to Radiohead.”
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: A sweet reminiscence of a perfect summer akin to Keith Urban’s “Til Summer Comes Around,” only not so sad nor a ballad. “He talked like, and he walked like, and he looked like, and he burned like summer” is a great twist of distant-summer-song phrasing, and Pope’s strong vocal carries the sentiment all the way.
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: It’s not hard to figure out what she’ll eventually liken him to, but the lengthy path she takes to get to her final shtick is quite the one to follow. She crams all the details of her date to this rushed retelling, and then rolls a few more similes just when you think she’s done. I knew where it was all going, but after she filled in the lines with way more than what I needed, it’s now beyond the limp cliché it could have been.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: The metaphor gets taken a little too far over the course of “Summer” — dude trucks off on September 1st, not even the real summer is that punctual. But at least Cassadee Pope sells the fleeting drama for all its worth, and sounds committed to the goofy poetic device.
[5]

Iain Mew: I like the meta moment half way through the bridge when she sings “something that bright’s gotta burn out some time” just as some shade finally arrives in the scorching arrangement. If that was where the relationship end twist came in it might be more powerful; as part of the undifferentiated dazzle it doesn’t do much but add to the heat exhaustion.
[4]

A.J. Cohn: This song doesn’t smolder so much as simmer, its somewhat ponderous production keeping it shy of real burning heat.
[4]

Brad Shoup: She’s on her Luke Bryan for the chorus, with that repeated “summer” that likely comes with its own live armflap. A lot of imagery lands, and if lust is described more than communicated, the senserush of summer lingers. I think the woo! was perfectly deployed.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: This is supposed to be a reminiscence, but there’s not a lot of fall in “Summer”; rather the lusty descriptions of a white-tee-wearing, burning-hot lad emerging from water render it something like a gender-flipped take on the bro-country beach song. All those boardwalks and boomboxes only go so far in claiming “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” territory for this single though: Pope’s lyric gets muddled between celebration (the canned whoops of joy in the chorus) and sadness. Her first band, Hey Monday, was originally signed to Pete Wentz’s label and her best solo moments have been when she delivers her country songs with a pop-punk frontwoman’s heightened emotional urgency. I like the line about “bottle rocket sparks in the Florida sky”; Pope is from the Sunshine State, and this stray and plausibly autobiographical detail suggests a more bruised and contemplative song than this one turned out to be. That’s not to say “Summer” needs less party; I’m not convinced that nuance is her strength.
[5]