The plague came early this year: a distant chirping borne aloft on a hot, sluggish wind—the ominous harbinger of a season of blight and misery. I am talking, of course, about songs with whistling in them. They’re something of a summer ritual, and they are, officially, The Worst.

Imagine, for a moment, a festival crowd’s upturned faces as their idols launch into the year’s sibilant summer hit: a wheezy field of tunelessness, a Pied Piper pipsqueak riot. Sour notes droop like wilted petals. Saliva flies; germs rejoice.

Did anything good ever come out of a song with whistling in it? Could anything positive result—at least, in pop music’s contemporary, perkily puckered form?

It wasn't always this way. Whistling gave Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down By the School Yard” its insouciant spark, and whistling lent Cold War shivers to Peter Gabriel's “Games Without Frontiers.” But where Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly conjured the leathery élan of high-desert solitude, today’s whistled refrains are merely cut-rate gimmicks meant to signify breezy ease. The whistle in contemporary pop music is packaged pep, forced jauntiness, spray-can whimsy. It’s a fake smile that flips into a sneer behind your back. And two new songs—Lost Frequencies’ “Beautiful Life” and ZHU’s “Generationwhy”—underscore the spit-flecked horror of the genre.

You may recall Belgian DJ Lost Frequencies from his country-tinged tropical house abomination “Are You With Me,” a simpering catalog of south-of-the-border clichés that has racked up hundreds of millions of plays since its 2014 release—and sparked a bizarre, international roll-call meme in its YouTube comments along the way. “Beautiful Life” follows the same format: strummy acoustic guitars, a rudimentary tick-tock beat, and mind-numbing lyrical platitudes, this time delivered in a quavering falsetto by the Swedish singer (and Avicii collaborator) Sandro Cavazza, The video, which could easily be mistaken for a car commercial, hews to a well-established formula of the genre, with good-looking white people cavorting in sunny luxury destinations (in this case, Ibiza). The song’s whistled refrain is a perfect distillation of the whole project’s smarmy worldview, piped on like overly sweet, store-bought frosting.

ZHU’s “Generationwhy” might be even worse, which is really saying something. The production is in line with all of the Los Angeles electronic musician’s work so far: a standard house groove kitted out with self-consciously sultry touches and the artist’s own reedy falsetto. If you’re planning to click on that “play” button, it’s only fair to warn you: Once you’ve heard him sing, “I’m-a wake up to my nakedness/‘Cause I’m walking on the beat, yeah,” you won't be able to unhear that shit. Ever. “Generationwhy” is apparently a tribute to millennials—but it’s unclear what, exactly, “All the kids are wakin’ up/And they’re naked when the beat drops,” is supposed to mean in demographic terms. But there’s no mistaking the fact that when it comes to the song’s chorus—“Hey, h-h-hey, hey/We are the people of this generation”—the whistled accompaniment serves as the most unctuous sort of lubricant for the most vacuous sort of sentiment. I mean, seriously: “We are the people of this generation”? Why not cut right to the chase with “Millennio, ergo sum”?

That the two songs should arrive so close to the beginning of the summer bodes ill. Surely there will be more, because previous years have delivered bumper crops full of breathy tooting. Last year gave us Adam Lambert’s “Ghost Town,” Hilary Duff’s “Sparks,” and Owl City’s “Verge.” In 2014, we got Enrique Iglesias’ “I Like How It Feels” featuring Pitbull, whistle-masters Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ “All Wash Out,” and a trifecta of Chapstick-assisted, seasonally appropriate country-pop: Florida Georgia Line’s “Sun Daze,” Lee Brice’s “Girls in Bikinis,” and Little Big Town’s “Day Drinking.” Beyond that, 2013 was a huge year for pursed lips on the pop charts (Fitz and the Tantrums” “The Walker,” Cody Simpson’s “Summertime of Our Lives,” Ke$ha’s “Crazy Kids” feat. Will.i.am, Britney Spears’ “Don't Cry,” Jack Johnson’s “I Got You,” McFly’s “Love Is Easy”), but perhaps not as pivotal as the one-two punch of 2010 and 2011, which gave us the Black Keys’ “Tighten Up, the Drums’ “Let's Go Surfing,” Brad Paisley’s “Eastwood,” Jason Derulo’s “It Girl,” Britney Spears’ “I Wanna Go,” and two of the windiest windbags that ever broke wind through their mouth-holes, Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” and Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks.”