G&G’s Summer Playlist

In the spirit of the World Cup, this playlist of new summer songs ranges farther afield than the traditional South. There’s Beatles-esque pop from Minnesota, simmering slow roll country from Ohio, and even a jangle rock stunner from Australia. But you’ll also find terrific sounds and storytelling from North Carolina and Kentucky, along with a blues-rock superstar who just keeps churning out memorable, explosive licks. Read about the tunes below, and keep scrolling for a Spotify playlist of the season’s top tracks.

The Nashville-based garage-blues godfather rips off a fierce stomper that stacks killer riffs—vibrato cascades, popping upstrokes, chunky power chords—into a near-wordless hook machine about what we’ll do for money. The lead single from his new album, Frozen Charlotte, “Dollar Bill” is White at his most primal and gloriously loud: windows-down, volume-up summer fuel.

North Carolina’s Carter Faith and Oklahoma red-dirt son Wyatt Flores trade lines on a duet stitched together from mutual restlessness—two broke hearts talking themselves into something they probably shouldn’t. With Faith’s airy ache set against Flores’s rasp, it’s the summer’s most companionable bad idea, a slow-rolling flirtation for the empty hours.

The singer and banjo-and-fiddle polymath returns with a song she first wrote years ago with Appalachian music legend Dirk Powell and only now cut with her full band. Over accordion, banjo, fiddle, and Powell’s plucky guitar, Giddens conjures a Carolina idyll—cane fields, whippoorwills, fireflies, and a lover worth more than any dollar.

The Philadelphia lifer opens his latest album, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, with the woozy, unhurried shuffle he’s spent a career perfecting—jangling guitar, twinkling chimes, and a lazy mandolin line curling underneath. As Vile cruises Lincoln Drive toward the city, half-narrating his own contentment (“True love is the pure drug for me”), the song slowly unspools into a hammock of a track, ideal for an aimless summer afternoon.

BJ Barham’s Raleigh-bred alt-country crew goes full Boss on the lead single from American Aquarium’s latest effort, New Ways to Lose, produced by Shooter Jennings. Horns punch, guitars roar, and Barham—country’s bard of the hard-luck heartland—turns a love song to his wife into a fist-pumping anthem: “I found you this go-around,” he sings in the chorus. “I’ll find you in the next one, too.”

The superstar’s country-disco turn continues on the second single from her upcoming album, Crisco (out in October). It opens with a cowgirl and a cherry El Camino, then rambles through Saginaw and Abilene as she collects pocket change and nicotine. Twang meets strings meets a dancefloor pulse, all in service to an overarching idea—keep moving, keep grooving, till the going’s gone. Wanderlust you can two-step to.

The Oklahoma red-dirt heroes cover Robert Earl Keen’s beloved 1998 barroom benediction, with Tennessee mandolin virtuoso Sierra Hull adding shimmer. Evan Felker’s weathered drawl makes Keen’s small-town homily—the bar’s full of friends, everybody’s here, and for one night everything’s alright—feel lived-in and true, while Hull’s mandolin sparkles like summer evening light through a screen door.

Here’s a genuine ghost: a lost 1978 Waylon Jennings barn-burner, unearthed by son Shooter, with a surprise guest—the late Glen Campbell ripping guitar. Two Country Music Hall of Famers (a Littlefield, Texas, outlaw and an Arkansas Rhinestone Cowboy) caught lightning one December night, and it sat in a vault for nearly half a century. Loose and swaggering, it still feels very much alive.

The Los Angeles trio of Zeimani, Kucha, and BG Womack—granddaughters of soul legend Sam Cooke—step out on their own with a bouncy, organ-driven charmer about not rushing headlong into love. Anchored by a scratchy Latin-led groove and the sisters’ sultry three-part harmonies, “If I Let You,” from their upcoming Daptone Records debut, pulls off a neat trick: deeply traditional vintage soul shot through with a hazy, psychedelic swirl.

The Australian songwriter delivers a breezy jangle-pop smoothie. Jacklin, well-versed in the art of emotional restraint, turns push-pull ambivalence into an irresistible one-line hook that blends affection and retreat in the same breath. Sad underneath, sunny on top, and ideal bittersweet summer listening.

This Athens, Ohio, group takes cues from the jam rock of Marcus King but adds a little of what the band calls “Appalachian Soul.” The song lopes along in a steady groove before delicate guitar wizardry kicks in, never reaching a roar but instead dissolving into blissful calm, like the still waters of a lake at sunset.

For the Jayhawks’ first album in six years, Sanctuary Park (out in August), and fittingly for a band marking forty years, the Americana godfathers reunited with producer Bob Ezrin, who last helmed 2000’s Smile. The bouncy pop of the lead single leans on the two things the mostly Minnesota band has always done best: singer Gary Louris’s plainspoken melancholy and those gorgeous, honeyed three-part harmonies.

An up-and-coming duo based in Lexington, Kentucky, brothers Gus and Phin Johnson combine vivid storytelling with Americana grit on their latest single. “Timmy” name-drops Billy Strings in a track about a young music fan trying to figure out his place in the world, shifting from awkwardness to summoning the courage to ask his crush to the Homecoming dance. Intrigued? Check out Low Gap’s album Geneva, which came out earlier this year.