Last month I called June the door - the threshold between wanting the season and being inside it, the point where the mind stops leaning toward what comes next and lets the present catch up. Well. We’re through it now, and on the other side of that door is the long afternoon that is July: the heat at its full weight, the light stretched to its limit, the day so wide open it seems to stop moving altogether. June arrives. July stays. It is the one month that feels less like a passage than a plateau - a held note, a chord left ringing, a groove that has stopped needing to arrive, content to circle the same few bars until the circling itself becomes the place you meant to be. Which is a strange and quietly beautiful thing, because July is also the first month of the retreat. The solstice comes and goes in the last days of June, and from that moment the light begins, without announcing it, to pull back.
And so, in the way the best afternoons hold, underneath the warmth, a small ache you can’t quite name, the fullest part of summer is already carrying the faint outline of its own ending. That is the feeling I built this month’s curation around. Not the arrival of summer, and not yet its close. The middle. The sustain. The part where you stop counting the days because, for once, none of them seem to be in any hurry.
There’s something else new this month, and it isn’t a change in what CP Radio is so much as the next thing it was always going to become. For as long as this series has existed, it has lived in two places - the playlist, and these words. Now there’s a third. CP Radio is becoming a show. A room with turntables and an on-air light and a needle that goes down at the top of every transmission; the songs you’ve only listened to and read about, said out loud, in a voice, on camera. It won’t arrive all at once. It comes the way a broadcast finds its audience - one signal at a time, a new piece each week - with the full-length show still somewhere up ahead. Think of what’s coming over the next stretch as dispatches from a station that’s already on the air. You’ll recognize some of the songs below when they surface there. That’s on purpose.
But today, the first song I want to hand you for the month of July arrived the way the best ones always seem to - not from a search bar, but from a room. I heard “I, I, I” at Gabriela on a Friday night, put on by someone whose whole craft is knowing what should play next, and I had the luck of being there when it did. Only afterward did I learn who made it. The Osmonds - yes, those Osmonds, the wholesome Utah family act behind the “Love Me for a Reason” harmonies half of America owned on vinyl. What almost nobody remembers is that by 1979 the same brothers had walked straight onto the disco floor and cut a record called Steppin’ Out, and “I, I, I” is tucked into the back half of it: a genuine, unembarrassed boogie track, all four-on-the-floor pulse and slick falsetto. It’s the sound of a band remaking itself while most of the world had stopped paying attention. These are the same people who, seven years earlier, made “Crazy Horses” - a proper hard-rock stomp, heavy and howling, the kind of record that still makes people double-take when they find out who cut it. The Osmonds, it turns out, were always keeping something under the wholesomeness. This is what taste is for - not the songs everyone already agrees are good, but the ones sitting in plain sight that nobody thought to check. It rides, it grooves, it never once tries to impress you. Which is the whole July mood in a single track.
Deeper into the month there’s “Sunset Breaker,” the title track of a 2025 album by Mystic Jungle - the alias of Dario di Pace, a producer out of Naples who works in the orbit of Periodica Records, the label quietly turning the southern-Italian coastline into its own genre of dub-soaked, sun-drunk disco. The record almost didn’t happen; it was assembled over years, through studio closures and a string of different rooms, but you would never guess it, for what came out sounds like the most unhurried thing alive - a slow Mediterranean dub, half Sade and half warm salt air, a groove that hangs at the horizon and refuses to drop below it. That’s why it’s here, and why it sits near the bottom of the list, where the light goes gold. “Sunset Breaker” is that exact moment set to music - the day at its fullest, holding, right before it tips. Play it when the sun is low and let it do what the title promises.
And finally, there’s a track here whose words tell you one thing, but whose melody tells you the opposite. “Shoot You Down,” by the Stone Roses, off their 1989 debut - the album that handed a generation of British guitar bands their template. Whatever Ian Brown is murmuring, the song itself is a pure warm evening: John Squire’s guitar unspooling in slow, sunlit loops, the rhythm swaying easy and unhurried, the whole thing made for a long July dusk with the windows open and nowhere you have to be. It’s one of the most beautiful grooves on a record full of them - the kind of song that turns a hot, slow hour into something you want to hold onto. Don’t read the lyrics too closely. Just let it glow.
A few more, quickly - and two of them you’ll watch come to life on camera over the weeks ahead. “Oh Timbaland” is on this list because it sounds so completely like the city that just won something it had waited fifty-three years for; a New York record for a New York month, built, improbably, on the bones of the great Nina Simone. And “No Te Quiero Más,” by Los Dangers - 1960s Venezuelan surf rock, dug back up decades later and still dripping with the sunlight it was recorded in. All reverb, salt spray, and a farewell that, going by the sound alone, you’d swear was a love song. The title means “I don’t want you anymore”, but I never got the memo.
That’s the country this month - thirty-odd tracks, the whole map, up now. But if you take only the feeling, take this one: July is not going anywhere in a hurry, and neither should you. Find the low light. Let the groove ride. The afternoon is long on purpose.