Glass Animals, review: if Chris Martin and Elton John wrote the ultimate Eurovision jingle
By some metrics, Glass Animals are currently Britain’s most successful band. The quartet formed at St Edward’s public school, Oxford, around 2010, before creeping up a cool electro-indie lane. Their colourful, lyrically clever synth-pop drew comparisons to the nerdy progressive pop of Alt J and Hot Chip and earned them a nomination for the 2017 Mercury Prize.
Then cute earworm 2020 single Heat Waves went viral on TikTok. A sweet little ditty addressing hazy memories of better times with an undercurrent of melancholy, it became part of the soundtrack of the pandemic era, creeping up international charts to spend five weeks at number 1 in the US and garner over three billion streams worldwide. Along the way, it dragged their third album, Dreamland, into the American top 10 (it reached number two in the UK) and made this slightly precious enterprise a mainstream commercial concern.
I Love You So F***ing Much is the follow up, and Glass Animals sound determined not to wind up as one-hit-wonders. It is essentially Heat Wave with the temperature turned up – thick with bright synth hooks, densely compressed hip hop and dance beats beneath lean, repetitive melodies. These songs are so tightly focussed on the battleground of young love and lust you can almost smell the pheromones.
It doesn’t let up for a moment: all 10 songs open with clever soundbite hooks as they push hard into verses that sound like choruses, bridges that sounds like anthems, and choruses that sound like Chris Martin, Ed Sheeran and Elton John got together to write the ultimate Eurovision jingle. For better or worse, this is pop in the third decade of the 21st century: punchy, processed and gleaming.
Frontman Dave Bayley’s penchant for psychodrama offering hints of something more tart to offset the sugar rush. Bayley (who writes and produces solo, making this more of a one-man show) is a clever and heartfelt lyricist, and the emotional terrain his songs cover is deeper than first impressions might suggest. Opening track, Show Pony, sounds like a giddy love song but unfolds to depict the aftermath of an adulterous marriage through the eyes of a damaged child. There’s an almost sadomasochistic viciousness to Wonderful Nothing that cuts nastily through its purring bass synth groove: “you just want something nice/you just want substance/I just want to cut out both your eyes”. White Roses reaches wildly melodramatic heights recalling the positives of a doomed affair.
Bayley’s flair for nursery rhyme melodies all but overpowers the subtlety and nuance in his storytelling. This is an album that feels like bittersweet arthouse romance fighting for space inside a Hollywood blockbuster, offering bruised vignettes of delicate outsider relationships buried under a ton of CGI. But Britain’s struggling music business certainly needs its pop superheroes to step up right now. Cometh the hour, cometh the band.
Best New Songs
By Poppie Platt
Primal Scream, Love Insurrection
Bobby Gillespie and co. return with their first new song since 2016 – it’s a foot-stomping slice of jazz-tinged balladry, caught somewhere between the hedonistic excess of their opus, Screamadelica, and the crooning of Joss Stone.
Soft Play, Everything and Nothing
The band formerly known as Slaves had one of the strongest sets at this year’s Glastonbury – I can still feel the sweat on my skin – and this latest offering goes some way to explaining why: frontman Isaac Holman snarling his way through politically charged lyrics, set against a pleasingly folk-like backing instrumental.
Wunderhorse, Silver
The latest single from the much-hyped English grunge outfit – taken from their forthcoming album, Midas, which was recorded at Minnesota’s lauded Pachyderm Studio (birthplace of Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me) – leans heavily into that messy, incomplete Steve Albini sound, and is centred on feelings of poor self-worth and split-personalities.