“Cruel Summer” by Taylor Swift

"Cruel Summer" is the deep cut from Lover, Taylor Swift's seventh studio album from 2019, that refused to stay deep. Swift produced it with Jack Antonoff and wrote it with him and St. Vincent, who plays guitar; Antonoff adds keyboards, vocoder and drums alongside drummer Michael Riddleberger, and Serban Ghenea mixed it. It's synth-pop with a bruise, wobbling beats and vocoder-warped vocals wrapped around a summer romance as painful as it is intense, and early reviews zeroed in on the hook and the bridge.

Fans kept asking why it was never a single, and after it joined the Eras Tour set list in 2023 and blew up on social media, Republic finally released it that June. It spent four weeks at number one on the Hot 100, and in 2024 Rolling Stone added it to its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.