It seemed like a mirage but it really happened. In 2022, two years after its release, Glass Animals’ woozy belter “Heat Waves” topped the US singles charts. A quartet of bespectacled indie nerds from Oxford had climbed to the summit of the music industry.
Many musicians would have struggled to follow that level of success. As it happened, Glass Animals frontman David Bayley had bigger things to worry about as he composed what would become their addictively keyed-up fourth album, I Love You So F***ing Much.
In 2023, seeking fresh inspiration, he went to Los Angeles on a songwriting retreat, only for the city to be struck by a series of apocalyptic storms. Awkwardly, Bayley had rented an Airbnb built on creaking stilts overlooking a canyon. Even more awkwardly, he was struck down by a reality-warping dose of Covid. He felt he was about to go over the edge – in a figurative but also very literal sense.
With all that melodrama gusting about, it’s not surprising the tunes he wrote on a psychological precipice high above LA should have a feverish, neon-lit quality. Yet amid the mania, this new record also transmits an impressive calm in the face of heightened expectations.
The chart-topping breakthrough of “Heat Waves” was a lot to deal with for a group previously best known for smuggling pineapple references into their lyrics. Bayley has admitted it took a while for him to work it out of his system – explaining that he did so largely by attending movie premieres and pretending to be an extrovert.
But work it out he has. On I Love You So F***ing Much, he sounds cheerily oblivious to the pressures placed on a band soon to embark on their first arena tour. Rather than buckle, they have carried on where they left off by taking the “Heat Waves” formula of Day-Glo electro-pop and giving it a super-sized reboot.
The defining tone is a sort of frazzled propulsion. Driven by Bayley’s Thom Yorke-esque vocals, opening track “Show Pony” has a squelchy throb that suggests The Weeknd covering “Fake Plastic Trees” and realising halfway through he’s rather enjoying himself.
Bayley describes the record as celebrating every aspect of love – whether that be infatuation, platonic camaraderie or heartache. True to the sales pitch, his lyrics are explicit and a touch toe-curling (“three in the morning, making love”, the pasty-faced pop wizard croons over yacht-rock arrangements on “Creatures in Heaven”).
Yet the steamy wordplay often pushes up against bare-boned melodies – the minimalist “A Tear in Space (Airlock)” sounds like Philip Glass just back from his first warehouse party.
Cringe couplets aside, the only negative is that the singer’s pronunciation is occasionally affected – on the aforementioned “Creatures in Heaven”, for instance, “apartment” becomes “aportmooooont”. Yet it’s just passing irritation on an album that, for all the pressure created by “Heat Waves”, stays ice cool, delivers one epic pop payoff after another – and shimmers with transparent radiation.
Stream: “Show Pony”, “A Tear in Space (Airlock)”