Glass Animals on becoming the pandemic’s pop success story

When Glass Animals first let people outside the group hear their song “Heat Waves”, it didn’t seem the kind of track that might imprint itself on the world. It was ninth in their set at the Mod Club Theatre in Toronto on March 1 of last year — a song recorded for the group’s third album, Dreamland, but not yet released. The crowd that day weren’t all that fussed.

“It went down fine,” says Dave Bayley, the British band’s singer, songwriter and producer. “The track from the new record that went down really well was ‘Space Ghost Coast to Coast’.” A few days later, concern over the spread of Covid ended Glass Animals’ North American tour early, they flew back to the UK, and pop’s most surprising pandemic success story began.

It didn’t start off as a success story. First, the release of Dreamland was postponed. “I was told that this record was going to absolutely flop,” Bayley says, sitting on a park bench near his home in east London on a warm autumn afternoon. “But we should put it out and then start writing the next one . . . I was just really upset and trying to recognise the inevitable failure of this record, and just be OK with it.”

Dreamland, an album about nostalgia and community, was to emerge into a world atomised by events, where communities had ceased to function, and Bayley was terrified he had hit the wrong note at precisely the wrong time. “I got quite depressed for about two weeks and just locked myself in my room with my pants and cereal. And that was it.”

When Dreamland finally emerged in August 2020, it entered the UK charts at number two. That is not as big a hit as it may sound — it is possible to score a high chart placing these days if your family buy a few copies; the real business is in streaming. And it was streaming that changed everything, specifically the streaming of “Heat Waves”. 

On its initial release as a single in summer 2020, no one paid much attention to the song: a funny, melancholy thing, almost etiolated in its glassy sadness, coated in effects. But then, as Bayley puts it, “It started trickling its way up. It found a little pocket in loads of different places. The video gaming community embraced it. This amazing creative writing community really picked it up and ran with it. And there was Fifa [the song was featured in the bestselling football game] and that was a big thing. Minecraft then kind of had a little thing. And it just seemed like all of a sudden this song seemed to be doing things, and everywhere it got a little bite, it went and made a little bit of a wave.”

“Heat Waves” became the very essence of a viral hit, soundtracking TikToks the world over. And it just didn’t stop. As of now, it has chalked up 806m streams on Spotify alone and is still fourth in the platform’s weekly worldwide chart, adding another 30m streams per week.

Bayley seems astonished. “It’s still up there? I honestly don’t know why. I didn’t know it was going to change everything. You never do. I honestly thought it was a bit too sad to make it on to the radio: it’s quite moody, it’s a weird tempo, it’s got weird chords. It’s got more chords than any pop song I’ve heard on the radio. And I didn’t think it had a poppy vocal line. It’s bonkers.”

We went on tour and I immediately felt like I was on that bit of the rollercoaster pummelling downwards, and I just broke

The problem, of course, was that as “Heat Waves” was blowing up all over the world, Bayley and his bandmates were stuck at home. They had become one of the biggest bands in the world without stepping outside their front doors. “I was watching it from the house just over there, inside my four walls. In that position, you want to go and play some shows. You want to see the physical actualisation of those numbers you’re being sent. It’s very, very strange — you feel a bit like a spectator. Almost like you’re watching a rollercoaster and you’re not really on it.”

It was only at the end of this summer, when Glass Animals returned to the US to tour, that Bayley was able to experience the effects of the song’s success. “I immediately felt like I was on that bit of the rollercoaster pummelling downwards, and I just broke, I cried. It was that first couple of weeks touring when you finally see the reality of all these email updates you get — numbers on a screen don’t make you feel anything.”

Still, though, Bayley insists he is not a pop star. Nor does he look like one, with his round glasses and earnest manner. He doesn’t thrive in the limelight, he says. What he wanted to be, since his teens, was a producer, and he learned how to be one watching YouTube videos of UK artists such as Benga and Four Tet making music. He obsessed over the German experimental band Can, trying to work out how their records sounded the way they did (“I think you’ll definitely hear Can in the way that I record guitars and drums,” he tells me. I confess to being unconvinced).

What he is, more than anything, is an enthusiast — in love with the possibilities that pop music opens up. It was, perhaps, a role forced on him when his scientist parents transplanted him from Texas to Oxford as a child, and he sought solace in the companionship of other music-obsessed kids (“Your teens is when music hits the hardest”).

“I love me a pop star,” he says, “but I don’t think I want to be one. I like spending time — this is going to sound very lame — with my dog and my mum, and writing songs. I don’t feel the need to come out of The Ivy with Rita Ora and Harry Styles, as lovely as I’m sure they are. I spend all my time thinking about music.” He laughs as he contemplates all the money that will one day roll in from “Heat Waves”. “But speak to me again in a year and I might be a real arsehole.”

Tour of UK and Ireland begins today, glassanimals.com