This summer heat is hitting drastic highs (*cough* climate change *cough*), but we’ve put together a list of ice-cold rock songs to cool you off. From snowstorm imagery, to chilled-out jams, to wishing and hoping that someday we’ll be cold again. Take a listen and chill out before you get heatstroke.
“Snow (Hey Oh)” by Red Hot Chili Peppers
What Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2006 hit “Snow (Hey Oh)” lacks in lyrical coldness, it makes up for in ambiance. Meaning, this song isn’t really about snow, or winter, or being cold. But its overall tone is tranquil like an untouched blanket of new snow. It stays pretty even-keeled for its almost six-minute runtime, creating a peaceful backdrop for lyrics that are actually quite frantic.
When it’s so hot outside that you can’t even think straight, a tranquil song is just the thing. “Snow (Hey Oh)” is evocative and deceptively light on its feet. The lines “Deep beneath the cover of another perfect wonder / Where it’s so white as snow” in the chorus paint a breathtaking picture. Even if it’s just supposed to be a metaphor, that image is incredibly clear, and it feels crisp as a glistening winter morning.
“Snowstorm” by Galaxie 500
The irony of Galaxie 500’s 1989 track “Snowstorm” is that it appeared on an album called On Fire. It has a loose narrative that opens in the depths of winter with a snowstorm approaching. “Narrative” is almost too strong a word for this song. There’s a speaker in a situation, but it pretty much covers one thing: going home before a snowstorm hits.
Still, “Snowstorm”, for all that it has only two verses, is so lyrically evocative. “And they’ve got nothing else to think of / And they’re letting me go home” conjures images of working late at a small town video store on a bleak night in the middle of winter. The weather report said there’s a snowstorm coming, “Only seven hours away“. So your boss lets everyone leave, and you walk home as it starts to snow, bathed orange under sodium-vapor street lights.
“Cold” by Static-X
This 2001 track by Static-X is more wishful thinking as the summer heatwave continues to cook us all alive. Lyrically, “Cold” is not particularly verbose. But that’s already asking a lot from nu-metal. The majority of the lyrics are “Cold / We’re so cold / We are so / Cold” and so on and so forth.
In the context of the movie Queen of the Damned, “Cold” takes on new meaning. An alternate version of the song was featured on the soundtrack for the 2002 vampire film. So a song that goes “We’re so cold” front and center in a vampire movie is pretty spot on. For this blistering summer, however, we’re using “We’re so cold” as more of a mantra instead. As in, we’re chanting “we’re so cold, please, we are so cold” with our fingers crossed, hoping it’ll magically become true.