LFO — "Summer Girls"

"Summer Girls" was never supposed to be a hit. Rich Cronin — lead singer and songwriter of the Massachusetts trio LFO ("Lyte Funky Ones," with Brad Fischetti and Devin Lima) — wrote it as a demo-tape goof stuffed with inside jokes, daydreaming about a girl from a Cape Cod summer: "I just thought back to when I was young, happy, no worries," he later said. An unmixed copy landed at a Washington, D.C. top-40 station whose program director added it on the spot; a New York Z100 DJ heard it while driving through D.C., and by June 29, 1999, Arista had rushed it out as a single. It peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 that August and hit number one on the singles sales chart, its Coney Island video in constant rotation.

The brand at the center of the chorus wanted no part of it. Abercrombie & Fitch never paid for, endorsed, or even acknowledged the greatest free advertising of its life — by the band's account, the company's total compensation was a box or two of clothes. The song remains the purest time capsule of its exact summer: Billboard later ranked it among the biggest summer songs of all time, and it made LFO the textbook one-hit wonder — the group was done by 2002.

The afterlife is bittersweet. Rich Cronin died on September 8, 2010, at 36, from complications of the leukemia he'd fought since 2005, and Devin Lima died of cancer in 2018 — leaving Fischetti the band's sole survivor and "Summer Girls" a goofy, deathless monument to the last summer of the 90s.