🎵 2022-03-12 00:35:00 – Paris/France.
On a damp day in late spring 2020, a sweaty Briton crawls down a deserted street in east London. It's dragging along what might as well be the weight of a pandemic-stricken world, but it turns out to be a wagon full of several heavy old tube TVs. The cameras capturing this feat by Sisyphus are socially distanced from the sweaty, unmasked man who, video drama aside, appears to have actually seen shit. Some of the video footage comes from locked-out Londoners using their phones to capture the man carrying a train carriage as they look anxiously out of the windows and doors of their quarantined flats. A nearly empty double-decker bus drives past the man, its side adorned with an advertisement for his band's new album, which he won't be promoting with a live gig anytime soon. Hammering this point, the man ends up dragging the TVs to the freight entrance of an empty theater and proceeds to set up the Trinitrons onstage by himself, one tube for each of his bandmates, who flash on the screens and start playing the song that was the soundtrack of this not very subtle but effective metaphor. The man then (in a trope borrowed from Bryan Adams in the 80s) grabs a mic and drinks to himself on stage, singing his heart out to his tube band mates, in the presence of a sea of unoccupied seats that won't have no cigarette ends in it until 2021 at the earliest.
Who can identify? Apparently all of us, as this video time capsule from the start of the pandemic launched a nearly two-year rise for his song. Only now, in March 2022, as we cross over to the other side of the Omicron wave (🤞🏼), is it the #1 song in America.
And speaking of waves… the song is “Heat Waves,” the artist is English alt-pop band Glass Animals, and the man in the video is its lead singer, lead songwriter and personality builder Dave Bayley. This week, the group's languid and slyly infectious "Waves" eject the Encanto 'We're not talking about Bruno' from the Hot 1 No. 100 spot cast. There was no Deus Ex machine that's led to this changing of the guard - no awards show appearance for Glass Animals, no TV sync placements or even a new burst of TikTok activity for 'Waves' (not this week, anyway) . In fact, Billboard reports that the song's radio audience and digital sales were actually down slightly, its flows are only a tiny amount. Truth be told, “Bruno” eventually weakened just enough, after five weeks at the top, for Glass Animals’ pop requiem to trade places with the Encanto fugue. But it was already wild for “Heat Waves” to be as high as No. 2 last week. Most of the time, what brought about the group's victory was the stubborn persistence of the song. To say the least, "Heat Waves" has been dragging on for a long time.
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How long? A record 59 weeks – the longest climb to No. 1 in Hot 100 history. The song debuted on the chart in mid-January 2021, and as indicated by my above clip clip video, shot in London around June 2020, the ditty is even older than that. What took so long? For one thing, "Heat Waves" wasn't the lead single from Glass Animals' 2020 album, Dreamland (the one that adorns this bus in the video). The group first tried several other singles. Much like "We Don't Talk About Bruno", no one involved in "Heat Waves" realized at first that ce would become the album's big hit – and with every turn, her rise up the charts seemed increasingly unlikely. The group itself is completely amazed. This kind of randomness is what makes graphics (and, by extension, this Slate series) fun.
Even making the pop charts was a feat for Glass Animals. This is the band's first-ever Hot 100 hit, and it might be the first time you've heard of the band if you don't listen to alt-rock radio. He's built a dedicated mid-level following in England and the US over the past decade, earning a UK Mercury Prize nomination for the 2016 album how to be human and playing venues the size of Radio City Music Hall five years ago. Between 2014 and mid-2020, Glass Animals scored half a dozen hits on Alternative Airplay (the venerable Billboard chart, formerly known as Modern Rock Tracks, which dates back to the 80s and boasted hits like The Cure, REM, and Foo Fighters). Glass Animals fit comfortably – perhaps too comfortably – into “alternative” “rock” playlists in the era of Imagine Dragons and Twenty One Pilots. His style is electro-pop fused with beatmaking, rock in trap clothes. A walk through the band's oeuvre from the '10s gives a glimpse of what it was like to be a mid-level rock band in the SoundCloud era: from the trippy "Gooey" (No. 19 Alternative, 2015 ) to the hard-hitting “Black Mambo”. (N°23 Alternative, 2015) to the percolating “Life Itself” (N°14 Alternative, 2016), the titles seemed random, the beats vaguely danceable, the songs insinuating but rather anonymous. In several of the videos, none of the band members appeared.
The most identifiable Glass Animal – the only one to get any appreciable camera time – is Dave Bayley, who not only is the singer but also the writer of virtually every song (when there are co-writers, that is usually not another member of the group). Bespectacled and bird-like, Bayley exudes a kind of Lightning Seeds energy, if Ian Broudie started listening to more Timbaland and trap music. Bayley personifies the band so deeply that it's tempting to think of Glass Animals as an individual project, like Tame Impala, or a "band" led by a single instigator, like Nine Inch Nails, or even a legitimate band that morphs into a facade for a single personality, like the last days of Maroon 5 aka Adam Levine and his army of song doctors. To me, Glass Animals is more like Coldplay with Chris Martin: Overwhelmingly defined by the lead singer-songwriter, but playing and presenting as a believable band. In interviews, the band speaks fondly of their bond, and non-Bayley members matter. In 2018, a devastating bicycle accident that nearly killed drummer Joe Seaward really threw Glass Animals into a loop, delaying their next album by more than a year.
This is where the story of Glass Animals gets interesting. By the dawn of the '20s, a solemn Bayley was writing songs after Seaward's brush with death, and the band was ready for the big moment. In 2016, how to be human had managed to break into the Top 20 of the album chart, which allowed the group to make a breakthrough on their next LP, Dreamland. This is when a label (in this case, Universal Music's Republic Records) usually starts throwing bold names at an act to take it to the next level. The funniest part is where the label invested its firepower – everywhere but the possible blow. For the album's lead single "Your Love (Déjà Vu)", Glass Animals had Paul Epworth, famous for his work with Adele, as co-producer; as a result, the rhythmic pop tune (pictured Adele in her casual banger mode) reached #7 on Alternative Airplay. (To be fair, in the summer of 2020 it was a big deal for the hit-seeking band, which had never cracked the Top 10 on the alt-rock chart before.) For the eventual second single, the fellow songwriter Brittany Hazzard, aka Starrah (co-writer of hits by Rihanna, Camila Cabello, Drake and Maroon 5), co-wrote with Bayley; this collaboration, “Tangerine,” a bassy thumper with trap energy, peaked at No. 12 on the alternative chart. Speaking of trap, there was even a track on the album, “Tokyo Drifting,” with guest rapper Miami MC Denzel Curry, which might as well have been a single if the label had decided to push in that direction. Republic was going to get through Glass Animals by any means necessary.
But the song that would take Bayley's band to the top of the Hot 100 had no guests, was written and produced by him alone, and was buried in the back half of the album. Say this for “Heat Waves”: The label thought about it enough in mid-2020 to commission this video of a sweaty Dave hoisting the TVs up this London street. But it was one of many music videos they shot at the same time, along with several other album cuts, taking advantage of a limited window at the height of the pandemic to limit the company's COVID exposure. crew and make up for the band not being able to tour. The label and the group were rewarded for their efforts with a first number 7 for Dreamland on the Billboard 200, America's top Glass Animals show, in August 2020. That same month, a Billboard profile of the band revealed all the creative workarounds they'd come up with to promote Dreamland— but the article doesn't even mention "Heat Waves," because no one knew it was a single yet.
Bayley says he wrote "Heat Waves" after 10 minutes of noodles on his guitar late at night, when an eight-chord pattern suddenly emerged and he decided to stick with just that. Essentially, this hypnotic pattern is the whole song, which would be boring if it weren't so infectious; he pulls off the Velvet Underground “Sweet Jane” trick of evoking a whole world from variations on a repeated riff. This riff also goes well with the enigmatic lyrics of the chorus: "Sometimes all I think about is yoooou / Late nights in the middle of Juuune / Heat waves make me pretend ouuut / I can't give you back happier nowwww. Bailey's production, informed by her hip-hop fandom, adds sonic sweeteners — opening vocals that are muted and mushy, Houston rap-style; lively, gently plucked guitar counterpoint that keeps coming back like a sample; tic-tac 808, paired with a deep bass drum that resets the beat every few bars – to give the illusion that there's a lot more going on.
And in a way, a lot is happens: On the surface, the song reads like a romantic bop, a typical story of a relationship on the rocks (“Now I gotta let you go / You'll be better off with someone new”). But Bayley, still reeling from the anguish of nearly losing her bandmate and friend, and also reflecting on the death of another friend years earlier (a bestie who had died “in mid-June "), merged all those woozy little hours ruminating in a song that anticipated the existential despair of the pandemic: "You look so broken when you cry / One more and then I'll say goodbye. Despite being a millennial, Bayley, 32 — just 30 when he wrote “Heat Waves” — has captured both the genderless musical sensibilities and social media angst of Gen Z.
Alors of course the song became a hit on TikTok…eventually. But Minecraft players – another massive half-world of very online Zoomers – got there first. In the fall of 2020, a long-running fanfiction in the mega-popular sandbox video game – between two huge Minecraft YouTubers named Dream and Georgenotfound, who had been cast in the romance slash #Dreamnotfound – merged with “Heat Waves” in a wave of “I burn you? » Intrigue « You make me melt ».
// dnf , heat waves
“I burn you? »
" You make me melt. #dreamnotfound #dreamnotfoundfanart pic.twitter.com/2sPGPR5EMP– ar…
SOURCE: Reviews News
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