Cool for the Summer

"Cool for the Summer" is Max Martin at his most aggressive, a rock-shaped pop record with a distorted guitar riff, a stomping four-on-the-floor pulse, and a pre-chorus that ratchets tension like a drumroll before the drop detonates into that whooping, chant-along hook. Demi Lovato sings it with real physical force — a belt with grit at the edges, vowels stretched and slightly snarled, the delivery of someone who came up singing rock rather than R&B. The lyric is a proposition and a secret at once: an invitation to a queer summer fling framed with a finger to the lips, "don't tell your mother," the coyness ("just something that we do") reading in 2015 as tabloid bait and reading now as a fairly clear-eyed portrait of experimentation nobody wants named. It borrows Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" premise and gives it teeth and genuine appetite instead of a wink. *Confident* was Lovato's reinvention record and this was the flare shot. Best heard loud in a car with the AC broken, at a pool at night, or in the specific ninety-minute window at a party when everyone has decided the night is going somewhere.