Glass Animals’ ‘Heat Waves’ basks at No. 1
Late January is hardly the time you’d expect a song called “Heat Waves” to top the charts. But that’s precisely what has happened for British psychedelic pop band Glass Animals, whose hazy, bassheavy anthem reached No. 1 on the Top 40 radio chart this week.
“I’ve wondered about” the track’s popularity, frontman Dave Bayley says. “But it’s always summery somewhere (in the world). Also, this song is about memories and it’s very nostalgic, and sometimes people feel more of that in the winter. Maybe that’s part of the reason this song’s hung around for so bloody long – everyone’s locked inside and trapped in their own thoughts.”
Taken from Glass Animals’ glimmering, hip-hop-infused third album, 2020’s “Dreamland,” “Heat Waves” broke the record this month for the longest climb to the top 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart – taking 51 weeks to reach No. 3, where it still sits.
“I feel like it’s been both the longest time and also no time at all. It’s quite strange,” Bayley says. “So much has happened when you think backwards that it starts to make your brain twitch.”
As in many recent hits, the appetite for “Heat Waves” has been driven in large part by Spotify (1.1 billion streams) and Tiktok (622,000 videos), with many fans re-creating the song’s do-ityourself music video. The original clip was filmed by Bayley’s neighbors at the height of quarantine using their smartphones as he wandered the streets of East London with a wagon.
“I literally just put little pieces of paper through all of their mail slots saying, ‘Will you film me at 7 o’clock on Wednesday from your phone and then upload the video to this Dropbox?’ Everyone was leaning out of their windows filming – it was magic.”
“Dreamland” was born of Bayley’s desire to go “much deeper” lyrically than he had on Glass Animals’ previous two albums, 2014’s “Zaba” and 2016’s “How to Be a Human Being.” With “Heat Waves” in particular, he had been listening to movie scores and was inspired by
the ways they can tell a story.
“I had this phase of listening to John Williams scores when I went and did really mundane things,” Bayley says. “Like when I went (grocery) shopping, I would listen to the ‘Jurassic Park’ theme song and it would make it feel so epic. Every time I’d pick up an onion, it was like, the most important onion.”
“Heat Waves” begins on a high and falls into despair before rising again. Bayley came up with the chords while messing around on the guitar; within an hour, he had written the lyrics, which were inspired by the death of a close friend whose birthday was in June.
“Every time June starts to roll around, I just remember this specific person and what they meant to me. That’s where that lyric comes from: ‘Late nights in the middle of June.’ ”
Glass Animals is nominated alongside Olivia Rodrigo and Saweetie for best new artist at the Grammys. The band’s first nomination was particularly emotional after drummer Joe Seaward was involved in a life-threatening bike accident in 2018. Bayley, bassist Edmund Irwin-singer and guitarist Drew Macfarlane put everything on hold.
“Just as he was making his recovery, the pandemic hit. Oh, my God, it was chaos,” Bayley says. “So all of this just means a million times as much.”
As they look ahead to touring the U.S. this spring, Glass Animals aren’t putting any pressure on themselves to top the success of “Heat Waves.”
“You can’t try to repeat what you’ve done before – you’ll never quite match it,” Bayley says. Instead, “we always try our hardest to sound like a new band and do something completely different.”