Summer Songs Supermix 2026
Two and a half hours of eternal joy
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— Jonah & Erin
What does it mean to be the western world’s most popular style & culture sletter?
Among other things, it means we publish profound pieces about…
Also? Every year, right around now, we put together a Summer Songs Supermix for Spy Nation, the most musically open-eared readership across all media.
We proceed genre-agnostically, combining new songs we’re feeling with older songs whose excellence airlifts them out of strict linear time.
We’ve found that the juxtapositions, adjacencies and resonances in these playlists have a way of smudging the edges of strict linear time even further. The more you listen to a Spyplane-caliber supermix, the harder it becomes to discern what’s new and what’s old, and the line between familiar and unfamiliar wobbles, too. You will hear a song for the first time and feel déja vu. And you will hear a song you’ve played hundreds of times and detect all kinds of new things in it, to the degree that you might wonder if it’s a different recording than the one you know… Possibly “Spyplane’s Version Pt. 2.”
Today, we’re dropping our Supermix for Summer 2026. It’s 25 songs long, 2 and a half hours in all — though the last “song” is actually an hourlong composition. (It’s not Sleep’s “Dopesmoker,” though you should always feel free listen to that.)
Each of these artists has gems where these tracks came from, so please treat this mix not only as a self-contained collection, but also as a cluster of rabbit holes to tunnel down in 25 different directions…
Our last mix, from December, was (unintentionally) themed around memory.
In today’s mix, the theme of time’s slipperiness (unintentionally) recurs throughout the whole thing…
(Yes, streaming remains an affront to god, but it is unparalleled for sharing playlists with large groups of people circa 2026, so we hope god will forgive us.)
We kick things off with the fantastic, dazed “Just Talk,” by AC Marias, a Wire spinoff project. This song came out 40 years ago, in 1986, but when Erin and I heard it in a shop earlier this year, we couldn’t immediately place it, and wondered for a moment if it was by, e.g., some band we’d seen open for Beach House at Bowery Ballroom circa 2012 and forgotten about.
That segues into a 2020 song by Oklou, which, like the best Oklou songs, sounds like it was recorded underwater. It also sounds like a refinement of ideas on Oklou’s excellent 2025 album choke enough — which is to say, like a new Oklou song, except it came out 6 years ago.
Toward the end of Björk’s ecstatic “Big Time Sensuality,” she sings, “I don’t know my future after this weekend, and I don’t want to.” It came out in 1993, and it came on at a pizzeria two weekends ago. It was playing, anachronistically, in a mix of 1980s pop hits — it followed Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” which we did not include here, and segued into Talking Heads’ totemic “Once in a Lifetime,” which we did.
“Letting the days go by,” David Byrne repeats. “Same as it ever was.” We leap from there into Jay Z’s “It’s All Right,” which centers on a “Once in a Lifetime” sample, and which came out in 1998, 17 years after the original. That gap seemed chasmic at the time. But 😰 damn it if 28 years haven’t elapsed since then and now 😰. As it happens, Jay Z is spending this summer selling out stadiums as part of a global nostalgia tour.
Larry June, a contemporary Bay Area MC, comes through very nostalgically himself with “Organic Motion,” a 2026 song that pays homage to synth-heavy, rubbery, laidback & tasty ‘80s R&B-funk-soul sounds that already sounded retro when Jay Z was young.
“My watchie is platinum,” Larry raps, “but I don’t know the time.” Leila Bordreuil & Kali Malone hold the penultimate spot with a song about “eternal joy” that lasts a minute and a half.
I didn’t go into this playlist intending to theme it around time melting. Maybe, since 2020, that theme has been increasingly impossible to avoid in any arena of life. Or maybe it’s simply the case that so many songs touch on the slipperiness of time, explicitly or implicitly, that when you string enough of them end to end, you are bound to encounter this theme.
Plenty of songs here have no relationship to temporality. When I recently wrote about whether or not Ambient Music is Evil, I mentioned what I hear as an element of ambientness in a lot of ‘90s-era Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep production. I included Ghostface’s wonderful, woozy 1996 album cut “Marvel,” here. Its second half is instrumental, and its beat captures what I was getting at, though it’s much more percussive, not to mention much more horny, than any ambient song.
Thomas Bangalter’s new post-Daft Punk solo track “Mirage Part VI” starts off sounding like an electronic rainstorm and morphs, almost imperceptibly, to my ears, into an electronic sunrise. Ketty Lester’s “Love Letters” (1961) is here because it plays in a Brian Eno documentary we watched a few nights ago. We love Eno, we didn’t love the documentary, and we love this song: It was formative to his youthful musical awakening, and it’s a standout on this fantastic Cairo Records double-vinyl comp of “cosmic & earthly doo wop” we own & cherish.
One last note: Despite the opening art on today’s post, there is no Bob Dylan in this year’s summer mix. But we do close things out with another midwestern musician, Michigan’s Erik Hall. Specifically, his 2020 recording of Steve Reich’s 1975 postminimalist classic Music for 18 Musicians — the twist being that Hall performs all 18 parts himself. In the spirit of pointing outward to analog rabbitholes, you can find that one on vinyl here, and the amazing ECM original here.
In any event, it feels strangely appropriate to illustrate this incredible, undulating, repeating piece of music with a photo of 6 stacks of undulating pizza boxes.
The songs are listed below for reference, too. Enjoy!
And P🎹E🍕A🎹C🍕E til next time,
— J & E
AC Marias, “Just Talk”
Oklou, “fall”
Björk, “Big Time Sensuality”
Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”
Jay Z f. Memphis Bleek, “It’s All Right”
Larry June, “Organic Motion”
Ghostface Killah f. RZA, “Marvel”
Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes, “FIEFDOM”
John Carroll Kirby, “Suntory”
Thomas Bangalter, “Mirage: Part VI”
Aiden Ayers & Yu Su, “It’s Not Enough”
Aldous Harding, “I Ate the Most”
Bladee, “Versailles Flow”
Anna Domino, “The Land of My Dreams”
This is Lorelei, “But You Just Woke Me Up”
They Are Gutting a Body of Water, “sour diesel”
YHWH Nailgun, “Changer”
Porches, “SPRING”
Ketty Lester, “Love Letters”
Betty Hammerschlang, “Circlesss”
Lana Del Rey, “White Feather Hawk Tail Deerhunter”
Smerz, “Its here”
Yu Su f. Seefeel, “One Place After Another”
Kali Malone & Leila Bourdreuil, “Endless Dance of Eternal Joy”
Erik Hall, “Reich: Music for 18 Musicians”
Streaming definitely has something unholy about it, and the best way I've found to forgo its temptations while preserving some ease is to embrace terrestrial radio. I got a great 80s Harman Kardon tuner for my living room sound stack for about $50. The digital tuning knob has a beautiful weight to it. I'd love to know what else is out there for smaller radios (outdoors, kitchen, bathroom, etc.). The Sony clock radio you highlighted in the past is very nice---what about radio radios? Sangean seems to be the dominant producer today.
And if I may plug, for when streaming is irresistible, Qobuz. It's highlights human curation and picks over the algorithm, has in-depth text (from Allmusic and elsewhere) for all releases and artists, and supposedly pays out a much higher rate per stream. It has a magazine tab with new writing. Plus it's French, to which I attribute its occasionally wonky user experience. And it's fun to say.
https://x.com/TalkingHeadsNet/status/1962009304111910986
also not sure how the plane feels about U2 but getting intense "mysterious ways" vibes from jay-z's phrasing of "it's alright"