Around the world in six songs – a summer travel guide for those who navigate by listening first.
Travel often begins long before one’s arrival at a destination. A song comes on in a car, at an airport, at the wrong time of night…and suddenly the traveller is already somewhere else. Here is our guide to six cities for summer 2026, each unlocked by a track that says something true about the spirit of the place.
Lisbon – Riptide, Vance Joy
Lisbon has a way of dismantling itineraries. You come for the Jerónimos Monastery and end up spending three hours in a tasca in Mouraria because someone’s grandmother started singing and nobody left. The Number 28 tram climbs through Alfama past laundry lines and tiled façades and deposits you somewhere you were not expecting, which turns out to be precisely where you needed to be. The miradoros above the Tagus are built for the kind of aimless afternoon that Vance Joy captured in Riptide – golden, slightly dizzy, moving toward something without being entirely sure what. The azulejo tiles on every staircase and courtyard wall record floods and earthquakes and centuries of centuries of people who also arrived with one intention and stayed for another. Let the city take you so mewhere.
Kyoto – Weird Fishes, Radiohead
Weird Fishes is a song about surrendering to depth, about going under willingly, and finding clarity in the descent – and Kyoto is all about depth. The city’s garden culture is intentional, designed to produce a specific quality of silence that takes about twenty minutes to feel. Walk the stone paths of Fushimi Inari before eight in the morning when the crowds are yet to arrive, or sit at the edge of the moss garden at Saihō-ji and wait. The Manga Museum beckons too, for an equally immersive experience. The city rewards patience. So does the song.
Havana – Carry Me Away, John Mayer
Carry Me Away is the sonic equivalent of not checking your phone – unhurried, warm, entirely present… And Havana demands the same surrender. The city has no particular interest in moving faster, and any visitor who fights that will spend their trip frustrated. The ones who give in find something rarer – music coming out of a courtyard on Calle Obispo, totally unscheduled, an invitation to sit for what becomes an evening… Or an old Chevrolet that takes a longer route because the driver wants to show you something. Go in June. Bring nothing that needs charging urgently.
Nairobi – Birds of a Feather, Billie Eilish
The Westlands restaurant strip on a Friday night runs until 2am. Coffee farms produce single-origin beans that end up in Copenhagen and Tokyo roasteries, but they’re better sampled at source here in Nairobi, on a veranda, looking at the Ngong Hills. The Nairobi National Park sits seven kilometres from the central business district – ideal to spot lions, giraffes, zebras in the plains, the city skyline visible behind them. And the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute on Rosslyn Lane is showing work that London galleries are flying in to see. Birds of a Feather is a song about not wanting to leave something once you’ve found it. After you spend a few days in Nairobi, that feeling is not abstract at all.
Tbilisi – Messy, Lola Young
Lola Young’s Messy is controlled chaos, and Tbilisi in summer runs on the same principle. The sulphur baths in Abanotubani steam beneath pastel-painted balconies that look like they might fall off the buildings at any moment but somehow never do. By midnight, the city migrates underground to clubs built into the banks of the Mtkvari River where the music doesn’t stop until the sun makes the decision for everyone. There is glamour here, but it is never tidy – which is exactly the point.
Marrakech in the early morning belongs entirely to itself. The Medina souks are restocked before six, light hits the old city’s ochre walls at an angle that photographers fly in specifically to catch, and the smell from the tanneries in the Chouara quarter – saffron, cedar, pigeon droppings, leather – is unlike anything else on earth. Harry Styles wrote Golden overwhelmed by something he couldn’t quite name but couldn’t stop moving toward either. The Jemaa el-Fna at sunset produces exactly that feeling – snake charmers and food stalls and the call to prayer arriving simultaneously from six different minarets, the whole square operating at a frequency that is at once exhausting and completely alive.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF UNSPLASH
