Rock

The story of Glass Animals’ 2020 slow-burning smash “Heat Waves” had a miraculous ending: The fourth single from the British band’s third album Dreamland landed at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 2022, following a record-breaking 59-week rise on the charts. 

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The sleeper hit ruled the charts for 5 weeks, and following its 91st week, “Heat Waves” became the longest-charting song on the Hot 100 of all time, dethroning The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”; it currently sits at three billion streams on Spotify alone. Since the millennium, only two U.K. groups have reached the Hot 100 summit: Coldplay and Glass Animals. The song’s origins are equally engrossing, proof that doors can almost slide shut as quickly as they open.

“Heat Waves”, which features Glass Animals’ trademark fusion of indie-rock, R&B and pop, was written and produced solely by frontman Dave Bayley. Its lyrics reference the death of a close friend and the pain when the subject’s birthday rolls around: “Sometimes, all I think about is you/ Late nights in the middle of June/ Heat waves been fakin’ me out”.

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“Even before I released it, I felt that “Heat Waves” was a bit too personal and too sad,” Bayley tells Billboard on Zoom from London. He was in the process of selling the song to another artist, though picked it back up when he learned the potential buyer wasn’t going to record it. “It’s really easy to write something personal and to give it to someone else as you have a little bit of distance from it and you can be more honest.”

He continues: “When [the song’s success] started happening, it felt weird. It was like walking outside naked – I felt exposed. It’s a personal song and it has an optimism, but hearing it out and about… it was haunting me in a way.”

The campaign around Dreamland, their first album released in conjunction with Polydor after years on indie label Wolfe Tone, was equally disorientating. Bayley, who grew up in the U.S. until he was 12, built a nostalgic mood board inspired by his ‘90s childhood memories for the autobiographical songs: NBC’s hit sitcom Friends, early internet communities and the dominance of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. By the time Dreamland was released in August 2020, the world was deep in lockdown, the online and IRL worlds one blurry mess. We were back online and reliving Jordan’s prowess through ESPN’s documentary The Last Dance.

Glass Animals’ new record I Love You So F***ing Much, due July 19, is informed by this “head f–k” period. Bayley sought to juxtapose the personal songwriting with existential sonics, and sought inspiration in the cosmos. The LP’s artwork – a close-up of Bayley’s eyes surrounded by pitch-black nothingness – presents either an intimate message from the outer reaches of humanity, or, depending on your viewpoint, a detached, lost soul searching for salvation.

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The Oxford band – completed by Drew MacFarlane (guitar), Edmund Irwin-Singer (bass) and Joe Seaward (drums) – had flirted with commercial and critical success in the past. “Gooey,” from the group’s 2014 debut Zaba, was certified two-times platinum by the RIAA, and sophomore record How To Be A Human Being was nominated for the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize in 2017. Along the way, the group collaborated with hip-hop heavyweights like Denzel Curry and Joey Bada$$, with the material charting globally in Australia, Canada and the U.S.

In 2018, the band cancelled a string of live dates when Seaward was hit by a lorry while cycling in Dublin; he suffered a broken leg, fractured skull and neurological injuries. Speaking to NME in 2020, Bayley said that Seaward returning to the stage “felt like a miracle”.

Months after its first shows back with Seaward, however, the band was pulled off the road due to the developing COVID pandemic. It eventually began booking shows again in 2021 – including a performance at the Billboard Music Awards – but the experience of success still felt at an arm’s reach. The band kept its own touring bubble and shunned parties to avoid scuppering any live dates with a positive test. 

“It was a very strange time. We were watching everything happen from a distance and feeling quite detached from it,” Bayley says. “We would see Instagram stories of people dancing in the park to [“Heat Waves”], which was wonderful… but there was also a disconnect.”

In 2022, Glass Animals was nominated for best new artist at the Grammys (ultimately losing to Olivia Rodrigo) just as “Heat Waves” was peaking at No.1. In the days leading up to the April 4 event, though, Bayley returned a positive test and had to miss the ceremony, the biggest dip on the most bizarre of roller coasters. 

“It might sound melodramatic, but I had a lot pinned on going to that and absorbing the moment,” Bayley says. “It felt like a unifying opportunity for our fans, and a chance to experience everything that had happened in the real world. It would have been a tangible thing, and it didn’t happen. That spun me out a bit.”

To counteract these missed opportunities, Bayley put himself into situations where he thought he ought to be: at parties, socialising and in the studio with external writers and producers. He gained writing and production credits on Florence + The Machine’s 2023 LP Dance Fever alongside Jack Antonoff, including on lead single “My Love”. 

But it was due to another positive COVID test a year later that forced Bayley to quarantine for a fortnight in a rented AirBnB in Los Angeles. He turned to his pen, and the songs came fast in a fit of inspiration. “I was in this massive doom hole and feeling s–t about everything. I was trying to make sense of it all and the writing felt good,” he says. The uncertainty and unrealness of the era eventually became the motor: “That chaos is actually really exciting and beautiful – there’s sadness, hate, happiness and love, and you need all of them in your life.”

He paired the intimacy with the expanse of space, building a “retro futuristic” recording studio in London, kitting it out with gear from the 1950s and ‘60s to give the electronics an appropriate warmth. He gleefully reels of the disparate sonic inspirations on his personal “S–t I Like” playlist, including Throbbing Gristle, Suicide, My Bloody Valentine, Frankie Valli and British electronic pioneer Delia Derbyshire.

This grandeur and ambition collides with yearning confessions on their new album. “ICMYFILA” – short for “I Can’t Make You Fall In Love Again” – sings of someone who “walked out of my life” without a proper farewell, the chiming synths behind it reminiscent of Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolan’s space epic Interstellar. On “White Roses”, Bayley’s bouncing vocals meet the booming rap-inspired beat behind it: “I’ll just be the ghost on photos on your phone”, he warns.

It all makes for a fitting coda to a period of such confusion and chaos, a band caught up in the dizzying nature of success. “There was a huge sense of perspective and questions and it led to this existential theme to the record,” Bayley says. “It doesn’t have a whole lot of answers, other than that it’s OK to be lost and not really understanding what’s going on.” 

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But could history be about to repeat itself? “Take a Slice”, an album track from 2016’s How To Be a Human Being, is currently surging up the Shazam charts and streams of the song are spiking on DSPs. The song has reached No. 22 on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 after the app’s users connected it to a scene from Pixar’s Inside Out 2, pairing its squealing guitar breakdown with frenetic imagery. Fresh releases and catalogue releases are now at the mercy of unpredictable users and growth, but Bayley is familiar with and accepting of the terrain now.

“It’s really beautiful [to have these moments], but you have to be careful as the temptation is to stop releasing bodies of work,” he says. “I love cohesive bodies of work where the end result is greater than the sum of its parts, but that can get lost if you start thinking too much and chasing virality.”

As “Heat Waves” – a paean to a lost friend – proves, the conviction of the message is what remains. 

“A lot of these platforms are great, but eventually there’ll be a new one and something different and what matters is the song,” he says as a smile spreads across his face. “The thing that’s proven itself over and over again is that if you write something that is meaningful and honest, it hopefully stands the test of time.”