What Summer Sounds Like When It’s Already Gone

Outside it’s gray and the temperature dropped overnight and you’re not ready for it. You’re never ready for it. That’s what Heatwave is for—Amber Mark’s song arrives like a message from someone you spent August with, specific and warm in a way that the actual weather refuses to be.

Mark is a songwriter, singer, and DJ out of New York who built her reputation with the EP 3:33am and had Trees On Fire named a Best New Track by Pitchfork. She writes, produces, and releases through her own label, Jasmine Records—the full stack, everything under her control. That level of self-sufficiency tends to produce either focused, singular work or a mess; with Mark it produces the former. Heatwave is clean and unhurried, the kind of track that doesn’t announce itself.

There’s something about late-summer R&B that works precisely because it resists the obvious—it doesn’t peak and drop, it just settles into warmth and asks you to do the same. Mark pulls that off here. Put it on when autumn turns insufferable and close your eyes for a few minutes.