There was a point in 2022 when Glass Animals could reasonably describe themselves as the biggest British band in the world. Their single Heat Waves was certainly the biggest-selling track in the world: it spent six weeks in May that year at the top of Billboard’s Global 200 chart and wound up the second-biggest song of the year overall, beaten only by Harry Styles’ As It Was. No song has ever spent longer than Heat Waves on the US singles chart (91 weeks). In Australia it enjoyed a staggering 86 weeks in the Top 10. It went multi-platinum in 17 countries.
It’s all the more surprising because Glass Animals are a band who – to borrow Peter Cook’s waspish old line about David Frost – rose without trace. Their other big hit, 2014’s Gooey, went double platinum in the US without ever breaching the Billboard Hot 100 – the sign of a song that has been streamed consistently over a long period of time without making a big splash – while a Guardian report could find no obvious explanation for Heat Waves’ overwhelming success, despite quizzing Glass Animals’ record label and indeed their frontman, Dave Bayley. He made a vague suggestion about its melancholy fitting a TikTok trend involving videos about absent loved ones, but then shrugged that he’d also seen it soundtracking videos “where it’s just someone putting mustard on a watermelon or jumping over milk crates”.
