What was the song of the summer? You’ll never, ever guess the correct answer.

I’m not sure if the Gen X stare is a thing, but it certainly was last week when someone asked my thoughts on the song of the summer. I had nothing.

Every summer, you see, has at least one song of the summer, the pop music equivalent of a freshly cracked cold beer: fizzy, refreshing, over in a few minutes, recyclable.

Some years you get a party pack: Last summer, for instance, brought us Sabrina Carpenter’s percolating “Espresso”; Chappell Roan’s supreme kiss-off, “Good Luck, Babe!”; Post Malone’s buddy-jam with Morgan Wallen, “I Had Some Help”; and the entire slab of Charli XCX’s season-defining album, “Brat.”

But, by any available metric, 2025 was no “Brat” summer. And the reason we find ourselves sans summer jam in 2025 is simple: We’re just not in the mood.

At the start of this year, a slump in champagne sales signaled a gloomy summer party forecast, bolstered by larger trends that charted an antisocial turn in post-pandemic America. We’re spending a lot more time at home, and a lot less time together.

These aren’t ideal conditions for summer jams, which rely on infectious dance-floor magnetism to take hold. Take it from someone who attended weddings during the hysteria surrounding both the “Lambada” (1989) and the “Macarena” remix (1995).

Not to mention every other condition that might otherwise cultivate consensus around a bop. Gen Z isn’t out there partying as hard as their generational forebears; they’ve pulled back on drinking and, thus, clubbing. And nobody is filling that space on the floor. If anything, it’s getting worse: The United States is the only country reported to be facing a tourism decline this year. The World Travel & Tourism Council forecasts a $12.5 billion drop in international visitor spending this year compared with 2024.

Swirling around this social isolation and algorithmically driven hermitude is a world that, put simply, may not inspire fits of collective celebration. Flip or click to the front of this newspaper for dozens of reminders of why that might be the case.

Despite all of this, I do have a song of the summer candidate, sort of. It’s a melody that has infiltrated our collective consciousness through more insidious avenues than radio or the PA setup at the pool party. We’ve been searching for the beach ball when we should be sifting for the microplastics.

My nominee, when you think about it, is incontestable: British singer Jess Glynne’s high-energy “Hold My Hand” — or, at least, the first few seconds of the chorus.

If seeing the title typed out immediately triggered replay of Glynne’s infectious hook, then you know what I’m talking about, and I needn’t explain myself further. Otherwise, there’s still a high likelihood you know this 2015 song, even if you’ve never heard the whole thing.

In January of this year, Jet2Holidays, a budget-conscious British tour operator, used Glynne’s track as the background for an online promotion campaign, with cheery narration provided by voice-over actor Zoë Lister.

Nothing beats a Jet2Holiday, and right now you can save 50 pounds per person. That’s 200 pounds off for a family of four!

Since its first appearance on TikTok, some 3.1 million users have grabbed the audio of Glynne and Lister’s happenstance duet to supply background music for video after video of vacation activities gone horribly, virally wrong.

Hotel rooms with bad views. Sea turtles with bad vibes. Would-be parasailers getting dragged down the beach at high speeds. Riders getting flung from inflatable rafts at higher speeds. Zip-line adventures with disastrous results. Waterslide encounters with disastrous results. Rope swing attempts — you get the idea.

Part of the viral power of these clips is that people love watching things go wrong in spectacular ways. Another part is purely Pavlovian: When I hear Glynne’s voice (“Darling, hold my hand!”), I brace for disaster. When Glynne’s fans hear her voice, they shout the ad copy right along with the song. Despite the song’s best intentions, Glynne’s effervescent invitation to love now arrives like a harbinger of certain doom. Who wants a hot dog?

If you’ve got a suggestion that beats the song by Glynne, do let me know — but the available summer jam data makes for a grim read. Since 2010, Billboard has dutifully tracked summer hits with its own dedicated chart. And if you believe its rankings, this summer, just like the two before it, has been property of Morgan Wallen.

As of late August, he has three of the top five songs: “What I Want” with Tate McRae; “Just in Case”; and the title track to his most recent album, “I’m the Problem,” each a thumpy mid-tempo reminder that you might not want to date him. But Wallen’s reliable place on the charts seems more correctly attributable to the ever-widening market for male grievance packaged as anodyne “co-worker music” than any particular knack he has for party-starting.

Meanwhile, the purported summer jam that has spent the past 10 weeks blocking Wallen from the No. 1 spot — the plodding, dragon-imagining praise anthem of Alex Warren’s tear-streaked “Ordinary” — is a bigger musical drag than all three Wallen tracks combined.

Indeed, the only tracks on Billboard’s Songs of the Summer chart that even graze bop territory are old news: Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther” was released in November; Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s “Die With a Smile” came out last August; and Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” was first released in 2020 — practically an oldie.

As new releases go, only Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” and Ravyn Lenae’s buoyant “Love Me Not” make fair showings toward the bottom of the Songs of the Summer Top 10, but, although each is a bop, neither is a banger. The one true contender for the title — the heat-seeking, Billboard Hot 100-topping “Golden” by fictional K-pop girl group Huntr/x — comes from a made-up (but very Korean) universe of the wildly popular animated musical fantasy film “KPop Demon Hunters.”

The unique popularity of Huntr/x — both global and niche-y — offers one potential clue to understanding the current shortfall of songs of the summer: As participants in the streaming economy (once known as “listeners”), we are less galvanized by the music we consume than we are entrenched in (and influenced by) our own algorithmically determined habits.

So maybe it makes a sick sort of sense that my song of the summer in 2025 is really just a broken fragment of a song, repurposed for an advertisement and co-opted into a meme highlighting the comedic value of people getting seriously injured on vacation. Nothing brings us together quite like each other’s misfortunes.

But I think the true stickiness of “Hold My Hand” is a function of its subtext — its relentless insistence that summer fun, for the time being, is off the table. Call it drat summer.