Amid all the heat, sunshine, and adventure of summer, a rainy day can be the perfect time for much-needed rest and relaxation. Next time the clouds come to douse your beach day, just crank up these tunes to cool off in style.
- Passion Pit: “Sleepyhead”
It’s hard to pull off a song composed of almost entirely high notes, but Passion Pit’s kazoo-sounding synthesizer lends an ethereal quality to the soundwaves backing Michael Angelakos’s dramatic narrative. The product sounds like waking up, as you open your eyes to blinding sunlight and try to make sense of a mysterious, morning world, or like falling asleep, as the world fades away into nighttime mist. Let this track bring the sound of sunlight to your rainy day, alongside the message permitting you to sleep in.
- Weezer: “Undone – The Sweater Song”
As you nestle yourself in sweaters and blankets to face the sudden drop in temperature, it’s essentially mandatory to play this tribute to warm sweaters and their existential threat of unravelling: a crisis we all must face in our lives. As a bonus, as Weezer never fails to replicate the southern-California summer vibe, so their music will provide you with just enough summer beneath the grey clouds and downpours of today.
- Tame Impala: “New Person, Same Old Mistakes”
It’s common knowledge at this point that Tame Impala has the most perfect indie-electric soundbase, especially with this echoing melody grounded in base punches and declarative choruses, consummating an exquisite, mesmerizing, and layered masterpiece. It also reflects the idea of rain as refreshing the world, despite the problems you’ll continue to face. But please, don’t save this song “for a rainy day.” Be like me and listen to it constantly.
- Bob Moses: “Keeping Me Alive”
With a hypnotically slow vocal and instrumental foreground against a dynamic and quickening background, “Keeping Me Alive” is perfect for relaxing and restoring your energy, calming and reawakening. The track is part of Bob Moses’s creative reimagining of the electronic style of music, and this band is not to be missed.
- The Red Hot Chili Peppers: “Sick Love”
You know the cliche narrative of the rock band that lives the wild life for a decade or so, then gradually calms down and adopts a reflective music tone? “Sick Love” is the Chili Peppers’ own version of that transition, whether intended that way or not. We hear Flea’s signature bass towards the background, yet Kiedis’s staccato raps have melted into slower notes, tinged with added life experience. Even so, “Sick Love” is easily my favorite track on The Getaway (2016) when you remove their hit single, “Dark Necessities.”
- Bishop Briggs: “River”
Bishop Briggs has a beautifully full, elegant, and powerful voice, emphasized here by stomping bass, heavy claps, and otherwise minimalist instrumental. It’s only fitting that Bishop Briggs uses her sonorous voice with such a demanding tone: “Shut your mouth, baby stand and deliver.” That said, “River” is a much-needed burst of restorative empowerment.
- X Ambassadors: “Renegades”
Something about rain is freeing ‒ especially when you’ve given up on staying dry and can run soaking wet through the downpour. “Renegades” is all about breaking from the controlling grasps of societal norms and expectations to follow your own, original path independent of others’ opinions. Relax in the pride of being different to soft guitar aside a chorus like a rallying cry.
- The Neighbourhood: “Flawless”
We can all appreciate the darker tone of The Neighborhood, especially in this track describing a feeling of attraction powerful enough to destroy. Sweeping synthesizer maximizes relatively short-range vocals and brings out every ounce of the attitude you need to get through your rainy day.
- Cage the Elephant: “Spiderhead”
In “Spiderhead,” Cage the Elephant expertly weaves expressions of panic, cries for help, and declarations of insanity with reaffirmations of determination and reassurance ‒ per usual for the band. Any sound within their dynamic instrumental may sound shrill on its own, much like any individual portion of their lyrics or subject matter, but the resultant mirage is utterly divine ‒ like any experience of insanity.
- Glass Animals: “Life Itself”
After your relaxed rainy day, if you are among the majority of Georgetown students who struggle to come to terms with doing nothing, “Life Itself” is here to help you along. Relax to their organic chords and percussion reminiscent of the jungle, or any home to pure and primitive life itself. On your rainy day, it’s perfectly okay to, much like Dave Bayley, sit in the car and listen to static. And if someone says you like fine? You look fantastic.
