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”.
Meanwhile, the band themselves are weirdly anonymous. Close your eyes and try to picture the four members, or conjure up a fact about them that isn’t related to their sales figures: you can’t, can you? Perhaps that makes them the perfect group for an era in which music has become decontextualised, thanks to a strip-mined music press and streaming platforms which remove an album’s liner notes to leave a two-inch image of the cover and – at a pinch – a few seconds of looping video.
Certainly Glass Animals’ fourth album is the work of a big act, as signified by its backstory – an existential crisis brought about by overwhelming success, which played out in a rented house on a cliff in the Los Angeles area – and the fact that, despite the aforementioned death of liner notes, they have commissioned some from bestselling novelist Gabrielle Zevin. These turn out to be the very definition of a mixed blessing (“You are a sock. You are an earplug. You are a miniature glass horse. You are easy to misplace,” she offers of the single A Tear in Space), but clearly bestselling novelists don’t get involved with just anyone.
Nevertheless, listening to I Love You So F***ing Much, you are struck by the sense that everything about Glass Animals, not only the members’ faces, is hard to place. They present as a band but seem to be essentially a solo project. Bayley isn’t just the frontman; he writes and produces everything and handles the interviews. Their sound encompasses a lot of different things: mainstream electronic pop, psych-y alt-rock guitars, occasional trap beats and rap-influenced vocal cadences, Coldplay-esque stadium-scale anthemics, and both the mid-tempo chug and echoing high-pitched vocal samples of tropical house. But rather than flitting between diverse styles, it smooshes everything into pleasant homogeneity.
There are nice sounds and touches. Whatthehellishappening, a song in which the protagonist imagines himself trapped in a car boot, ends suddenly with a thump as if someone has slammed the lid. The doo-wop-influenced vocals that open On the Run suggest someone has been listening to the Flamingos’ otherworldly 1959 version of I Only Have Eyes For You. And there’s clearly real skill involved in marshalling everything into something cohesive. But as the album glides along, conjuring a mood of vaguely nostalgic sadness as it goes – nothing too wrenching, more a kind of Instagram-filtered melancholy – you do find yourself wondering if there’s anything really characteristic about the end result, beyond the occasional odd lyric (“Sometimes I find, every time, that I shit the bed anyway,” Bayley sings at one juncture, thus ruling himself out as an overnight guest). Lacking the kind of big hooks that anchored Heat Waves, it doesn’t feel eclectic so much as nonspecific.
Glass Animals’ anonymity didn’t matter in 2022 when pop culture was still gathering itself together after Covid. In 2024, though, it feels like a problem, dominated as pop is by big, fun personalities – Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, Chappell Roan et al. Glass Animals’ new music seems destined to be ignored by active listeners and instead to be played by those doing something else or wanting something unchallenging (just look at those asterisks in the album title). It’s telling that the band’s success sprang in part from soundtracking TikTok videos – an accompaniment rather than an end in itself. “You just want something nice,” sings Bayley on Wonderful Nothing. It’s intended as an admonition, but it sounds as if he’s addressing I Love You So F***ing Much’s target market.
This week Alexis listened to
Tom Noble – Times Are Changing
A perfectly turned summer night soundtrack: just on the cusp of disco and house, with live instrumentation, and a bit of the late Patrick Adams’ productions in its DNA.
