The British band’s fourth album smooshes interesting influences into pleasant homogeneity that won’t wash in today’s personality-led pop world
here was a point in 2022 when Glass Animals could reasonably describe themselves as the biggest British band in the world. Their singlewas 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 . In Australia it enjoyed a staggering 86 weeks in the Top 10.
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. These turn out to be the very definition of a mixed blessing , but clearly bestselling novelists don’t get involved with just anyone.
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,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 .
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