The world was a much, much simpler place in 2015.
Or at least it seems like it was, as we look back on it in 2025, a 10 year stretch that has somehow felt like 40. COVID wasn’t a thing; the current president had just announced his ambition for the office; the Mets were in the World Series; LeBron James was getting beat in the Finals as a member of the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Finals MVP that year? Andre Iguodala.
So, while 10 years doesn’t seem that long of a time, it couldn’t feel further away. The following decade has aged us all in dog years. What better way to stay tethered back to those halcyon days than through music, specifically some albums that dropped during that blissful summer season? We certainly can’t go back (and who would want to, considering what you had to live through after?), but at least we can remember a simpler time with these five staples of summer 2015.
Here are five essential records 10 years on, that scorch like the June heat and hit as hard as they did way back when, 35—sorry, I mean 10—years ago.
Price: $27.98
Vince Staples has always been able to look at the past without a hint of overcooked nostalgia.
He’s hardened by his experiences, able to recollect without rose-tinted shades. It’s a perspective that has turned his debut LP, Summertime 06, into a certified California classic.
It’s an album that lures you in with the promise of long summer days and that endlessly good feeling of no homework, no bullies, no tests. But Staples’ classic also examines the violence that scarred him, the Long Beach community forever altered by tragedies made to seem generic by statistics and news coverage.
Vince, one of the greatest LA rappers of all time, puts faces and worlds to these stories.
Price: $32.99
It’s not really summertime if you don’t have any Tame Impala spinning on the turntable. Kevin Parker’s project has always been an excellent purveyor of chill vibes, the perfect music to queue up for a cookout with friends or a few beers on the back patio.
Parker’s third LP features a ton of hits, like the psych-prog “Let It Happen” and the sugary sweet “Cause I’m a Man.” This edition arrives on 2LP.
Price: $27.98
It really was a time to be alive, eh?
Despite what I said about the introduction about refusing to go back to 2015, here’s someone who might want to circle back 10 years and figure out how to alter the future. Imagine going back to the summer of 2015, after Drake and Future take over the world with What A Time To Be Alive, and telling Drake about 2024.
Drizzy was riding impossibly high. He couldn’t miss. “Jumpman” was everywhere, and Views was a year away. Save Drake from his seemingly inescapable future by bringing him back to this relatively calm era and, hopefully, leave him there.
Price: $38
Back in 2015, Lana Del Rey was in an interesting place. She was still recalibrating after Born To Die wasn’t thrillingly received by critics and Ultraviolence didn’t replicate the numbers of that former release. Honeymoon, widely considered an underrated classic in the Lana canon, finds the singer adjusting her sound closer to the style that would help her career resurgence on 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! and 2021’s Chemtrails over the Country Club.
Honeymoon signaled something we would all eventually learn about Lana: she was a tinkerer and experimenter, pushing her sound into new directions to create something perfect. Suffice it to say, she figured it out.
Price: $22.98
In 2015, Florida superstar Denzel Curry was still trying to find his footing in the game. A few years prior, he’d departed SpaceGhostPurrp’s Raider Klan and began making some noise on his own with 2013’s Nostalgic 64.
His true breakthrough came two years later, in the summer of 2015, when he dropped 32 Zel, a hard charging EP that showcased his now signature delivery: a breathless, aggressive barrage of bold declarations and philosophical musings.
