Yes, summer is fading fast. But that doesn’t mean the vibe has to fade with it.

The D.C. area’s hip-hop and R&B scenes tend to heat up in the warmer months. This year, they haven’t disappointed. And while not all summer-ready songs interpret “summer” the same way, a general rule is that they don’t make us work too hard.

The songs in Bandwidth’s seasonal rotation have leaned toward the languid — from the syrupy and entracing to the classic, soul-steeped stuff — and they’re all fine for head-nodding, solo walking or bleary-eyed partying.

So a few Bandwidth contributors put their heads together to come up with a playlist of the most summer-ready songs out of the D.C. region this year. We limited it to tracks released in 2015, but not necessarily the summer; and we focused on hip-hop and R&B, but we weren’t draconian about style (you could argue Kali Uchis’ “Rush,” for example, is more pop than hip-hop or R&B).

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to local talent, here is your chance to catch up. For those of you who have, see if your summer playlists match up with ours. And as usual, let us know what we missed in the comments or on Twitter.

Check out Bandwidth’s other recent playlists, including our favorite D.C. songs of 2015 so far.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

Image by Flickr user Simon Thomas used under a Creative Commons license.

Growing up in D.C., rapper LilBigBrother knew what it meant to need money. But the bigger conflict, for him, was love — the yearning for love from his father.

“He went to jail when I was 3 and came out when I was 9, and I felt like ever since he came out — because he missed so much of my life — he kept trying to buy me and my brothers’ love a little bit because he wasn’t around,” LilBigBrother says. “That’s cool, that you giving us money, but I would rather have the time with you. Let’s spend that money together instead of you just sitting at the bar.”

The song “Mine,” which LilBigBrother calls his personal favorite among his tracks, details the effects of his father’s habit of substituting money for lost time.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

“And I been dealin’ with depression since an adolescent/Finna grab a Smith & Wesson/Put to my dome at any second/If it wasn’t for the love and my family blessings/I’d be all alone dead and gone with my family restin’,” he says.

The 22-year-old MC is the oldest but the smallest of his group of siblings, thus the name. In person, he has a calm demeanor — one very different from the emotional persona on “Mine,” which features fast rhyming and sudden tempo switches. Other tracks, like the smoother, more melodic and more stoner-oriented “Dopeman (Hootiehoo),” tap into his mellow side.

But despite those contrasts, all of his songs have one common characteristic, the rapper says.

“My music just got that bounce to it,” he says. “I can’t mess with a song unless I get that bounce feeling from it.”

The man born Sean Hamilton didn’t always have dreams of being a rapper. He was always artistically inclined — “I was a real theater nerd the first half of my life,” he says — but took awhile to realize that music was his main passion.

“My music just got that bounce to it. I can’t mess with a song unless I get that bounce feeling from it.”

“I went to Duke Ellington [School of the Arts], so I was around a bunch of musicians already,” he says. “We had a recording studio in our school, so a bunch of the people I was cool with made music. I wasn’t really trying to rap, I was trying to be a part of it as like, a label head. … One day they were like, ‘Sean, you should rap,’ but I had never thought about it. So I think I went and wrote a rap to ‘Lemonade’ by Gucci Mane, and that was the first rap I wrote.”

So far LilBigBrother’s musical output been released via a Soundcloud page, and he’s active on Twitter, but he hopes to expand on that exposure.

Warning: Explicit lyrics and adult imagery.

“I don’t care who listens to my music, as long as you listening to what I’m saying and understand where I’m coming from. As long as you know I’m not out here just making pointless music, then I embrace you as a fan,” he says. “All of my songs are a story from my personal life, someone that I know or things that I’ve witnessed people go through, and I just speak about it to maybe help someone else in that same situation.”

LilBigBrother’s immediate plans are to release his first official mixtape, Club Bounce, in conjunction with Nappy Nappa, another D.C.-area artist. The first single, “My Youth,” will have a video, the MC says.

As the interview ends, and he walks out of his favorite carryout in Columbia Heights, LilBigBrother has more immediate concerns, though.

“I just broke my cigarette,” he says, “and this weed brownie isn’t kicking in.”

Shy Glizzy has been on the rise locally for a few years, but he got his first national hit with his 2014 single “Awwsome.” GoldLink — whom we interviewed last year — popularized the sound of “future bounce” with his 2014 project The God Complex and has been ascendant ever since, recently working with superproducer Rick Rubin.

In the hip-hop industry, XXL‘s Freshman Class is a big deal. Locally grown artists have benefited from their inclusion on the cover in the past: Breakout D.C.-area rapper Wale made the list in 2009, and two years later inked a deal with Rick Ross’ major label Maybach Music Group. Gaithersburg, Maryland, native Logic appeared on the list in 2013, and announced a deal with Def Jam weeks later.

This year’s Freshman Class also includes “Trap Queen” singer/rapper Fetty Wap; Timbaland protégé Tink; underground favorite Vince Staples; “Try Me” crooner and MC DeJ Loaf; Atlantans K Camp, OG Maco and Raury; and G-Unit affiliate Kidd Kidd.