Roll the windows down. Twenty-year-old singer-songwriter Madden Metcalf has dropped “Sound Of The Summer,” an adrenaline-charged new song out now via Wexler Records/MCA that doubles as a portrait of summer romance and a love letter to the season itself. Listen here.
The track is rooted in a specific place. Metcalf wrote it about St. George Island, Florida, capturing the feeling of being young and in love in his home state, with all his favorite memories of summer on the Forgotten Coast. He said he can’t wait for fans to hear it.
The production pedigree is strong. Paul Sikes (Lainey Wilson, Cody Johnson) and Grammy-nominated songwriter-producer Freddy Wexler (Billy Joel, Post Malone) handled the boards, and Metcalf co-wrote the song with Wexler, Sikes and J.T. Harding (Kenny Chesney, Cole Swindell), fully capturing the heart-on-fire intensity of young love in the summertime.
The songwriting is full of cinematic detail, opening with blue Gatorade rolling across the floorboard and empty beer cans rattling in the truck bed. Lit up by scorching guitar riffs, lush B3 organ and shimmering pedal steel, the country-pop track shows off the warmth and power of Metcalf’s voice as it builds to an exhilarating chorus. The push and pull between real-time nostalgia and pure sensation makes it the kind of song you carry with you.
This is the first new music since his acclaimed debut EP ‘Saltwater Southern’, a March release that landed on All Country News’ “Best of the Week,” with the outlet noting the Florida native is carving his own shoreline rather than chasing country’s current wave. That record’s “Kinda Paradise” hit top placements on Spotify’s New Boots and Coming Up Country playlists and took Holler’s “Best New Country Song of the Week.”
The sound traces straight back to his roots. Metcalf hails from Panacea, Florida, a Gulf Coast fishing town of fewer than a thousand people, raised between mornings on the crab boat and nights at a local restaurant, with Johnny Cash, Jimmy Buffett and Kenny Chesney always playing in his dad’s pole barn. With more new music on the way, he keeps charting his own course as a singular new voice in modern country.