8 Podcasts We Can’t Wait to Listen to This Summer
Collective hallucination, Japanese city pop, and everything in between.
It’s been a pretty bizarro year for podcasting so far, at least in terms of headlines. Underscoring the medium’s continued turn toward talk radio and celebrity, we’re still talking about Katt Williams’s nuclear-grade appearance on Club Shay Shay, which happened five months ago; meanwhile, three presidents popped up on Smartless at the end of April and the episode barely registered. But if you’re still hankering for narrative stuff, there’s room for that too: We’ve welcomed a largely underappreciated new season of Serial, plus a genuine true-crime hit, Beyond All Repair.
More interesting releases lie ahead. This summer sees new projects from two great audio documentarians, a maximally fun effort to introduce audiences to musical styles from around the world, and a pair of shows about the weird, wonderful world of animals. My picks here mostly (but not completely) skew to narrative releases, because that’s the stuff you can actually plan for — and that really needs to be previewed, anyway.
May
Primer (Maximum Fun, Late May)
In the age of algorithms and mega-musicians gaming the streaming charts at the expense of every other artist in existence, it can be hard to discover new music — let alone learn about genres and traditions from far-flung places you may well turn out to love. Enter Primer, a show that deigns to be a starter kit specifically for all sorts of non-English-language music. Each season is set to revolve around a different genre, while each episode will drill down into a different totemic album in that genre. The first season will focus on city pop, the glitzy Japanese genre popular in the ’70s and ’80s, with hosting duties held by Christian Dueña and Yosuke Kitazawa. Aiding them are a gallery of special guests, including Devendra Banhart, Umi, and Dam-Funk.
Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs (Slate, May 22)
For the show’s ninth season, host Christine Cauterucci brings Slow Burn back to the late ’70s, when a California state senator, John Briggs, mounted a ballot proposition that would ban gays and lesbians from working in public schools. The move sparked a massive political battle: On one side, there was a right-wing movement riling up fears about gays “indoctrinating” children, and on the other, a gay-rights movement that emerged to combat the initiative. History ensues.
Lemme Say This (Wondery, May 22)
Hosted by culture writers Peyton Dix and Hunter Harris, Lemme Say This is stepping up to serve your terminally online needs. The pop-culture podcast will see the two longtime friends tackle some of the world’s most important questions, like “Who is Hollywood’s most divorced man?” Or “What’s the best celebrity Notes app apology?” If you’re barely hanging onto the latest pieces of Hollywood drama (because, these days, everything moves so quickly), consider outsourcing the work to enterprises like this one — an Axios for the Love Island set.
June
Animal (New York Times Audio, June 2)
As the great American band known as Bloodhound Gang once attested, “You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals.” So it goes with Animal, this upcoming six-part piece that comes out of a collaboration between the Times’ audio team and The New York Times Magazine. The series sees the veteran reporter Sam Anderson chewing on big questions as he journeys around the world and encounters an array of animals and the people who care deeply for them. Expect meditations on life, love, and wonder. Also: death, climate change, and mass extinction.
Pack One Bag (Lemonada, June 5)
Family histories are always fertile territory, and this upcoming series, which expands upon an episode-length piece that won the Jury Award for Nonfiction Audio at the Tribeca Festival last year, will be digging deep. Pack One Bag follows the filmmaker David Modigliani, whose grandfather is the Nobel Prize–winning Italian economist Franco Modigliani, as he travels back to Europe to trace his late grandparents’ perilous escape from Italy amid the rise of fascism and Nazi control. Expect tragedy, a love story, and a fundamental question raised in times of terrifying history: Should you stay or should you go?
A Field Guide to Gay Animals (CANADALAND, June 15)
Curiously enough, there are two notable podcast releases coming this summer concerning animals, and this is the second. Owen Ever and Laine Kaplan-Levenson are your chaperones in this series exploring the notion of gender, sexuality, and queerness in the animal kingdom, which are subjects that run far and wide whether we’re talking about the canopies above or the deep blue seas down below. If you’re looking for a little Planet Earth to go with your morning runs, or if you’re ever wanted to get a master’s in animal studies but weren’t able to for whatever reason, this will probably be the show for you.
July
Question Everything (KCRW and Placement Theory, July)
Brian Reed, of S-Town and The Trojan Horse Affair renown, is now running his own production company alongside fellow This American Life veteran Robyn Semien, and his first release as an independent producer possesses the air of a meta-project. In Question Everything, he sets out to interrogate every journalistic principle he’s held at a time when the very practice seems to be teetering on the edge of the abyss, and he does this by revisiting a peculiar experience that happened to him not long ago: when someone took legal action against him, with the claim that what he does isn’t journalism.
Hysteria (Wondery and Pineapple Street, July 22)
After a brief break, Dan Taberski (Running From Cops, Missing Richard Simmons, 9/12) returns with a new project that carries a striking hook. How might a strange illness that tore through a group of high-school girls in upstate New York connect to the so-called “Havana syndrome” phenomenon that plagued American state personnel around the world? The clue, of course, lies in the title. These may well be expressions of psychosomatic responses, but that raises a whole other question: What does it mean if we can collectively hallucinate?