Tough Age - "Snakes and Ladders"
Tough Age - "Warm Hair"

Songs are important. We all know this - it's why we're here - but like triply so in the warm months. Without a good anthem a country crumbles back into the sea, gets swallowed up by its neighbours, and this is why every summer you need to figure the "song of the summer" out early. Otherwise the whole thing just disappears.

Sometimes it's more definite than others - like, last year I think we had to make do with the first ten seconds of this? - the thick, unyielding neon of it - and it was a bummer but we figured it out like we needed to. Other years the song of the summer is petting a dog that's too sleepy to care either way, or it's the ambulance ride you take with your friend who fucked up his arm running for the cops after you broke into the pool.

This year, though, I'm pretty sure the song of the summer is quitting your job. Just some Wednesday soonish standing up at your desk, looking around at everyone all dimmed and hunching in the glare of their monitors, with your ears a little ringing from the roar of the AC, with your skin a little gross in the fluorescents' subtle x-ray, going "hey does anybody want everything?" and everyone's like no and you're all, okay, and so okay, you walk out to the elevator, press your palm against the panel, and just like that it's done. The song of the summer is bike keys in bike lock, drift of business suits in a pack laughing past you, the phantom shiver of maybe your phone in your pocket. The taste of blue pen ink evaporating on your tongue. The song of the summer in how it's early days still so your pedals bite a little into your soft feet through your work shoes, it's pushing so hard that your breath in your body starts to feel hard, so not-yours that it surprises you, something mechanized and violent. The song of the summer is how in that moment, in the skimpy bike lane five or six blocks from the office that's no longer yours, all you want is to feel completely this way, like your brain and your body are finally untangled. It's how you want to not be responsible for yourself anymore or like at least for a second and then as you're distracted by thinking about how you might be able to phrase this in a letter of resignation it's also barely feeling it when you clip a car door, it's the slow drift of voices going Hey are you okay hey stop as you don't stop. The song of the summer is the strange calm of blood running down your leg as you get to the park, any park, riding over the grass and dropping to the ground. It's how it feels to be you in this moment, staring up at the leaves so thick across the sky you can barely tell there's sky at all, with the caffeine and the sunshine and the adrenaline and the generic Wellbutrin you won't be able to afford any longer and the new work of not thinking about it all dissolving at different speeds, effervescent, in your bloodstream. The song of the summer is the long, layered chord of all your choices held together in your faulty body, holding out against the day. The song of the summer is relief, all at once, or the sound of how it will be.

[Tough Age's very, very excellent new record, I Get the Feeling Central, comes out on June 23. Order it here.]