Not feeling the heat.

[Video]
[4.62]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: “Gooey” this is not. If you tempered lo-fi hip hop with absolutely flavorless, mainstream, Diet Coke sponsored pop, you still might come out with something more interesting than this. “Heat Waves” sounds like it was designed to get on Top 40 radio ten years ago, and Glass Animals just now remembered to release it. And yet yesterday, when I started writing this blurb, it was twice as long, and a complete pan. But now, having listened to it four or five times, I find I can’t stop. It’s unimaginative but undeniably catchy. It’s ingratiated itself to me, made me happy to hear it. It feels like going to Little Caesar’s even when there’s a local pizzeria closer to you, because you don’t want the good pizza, you want the greasy cardboard that only costs five bucks. Is it nostalgia? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? Do I need to send a cease and desist to Glass Animals in light of the crimes they’ve perpetrated against my tastes and desires? Torn by this pitch shifted conflict as I am, my body and soul saying [8] and my mind saying [2], there is only one score I can give. 
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: As far as sad Glass Animals songs go, it was always going to be hard to follow their second album. Not everything has to be as colossal as “Agnes,” but even so, Dave Bayley’s dam-bursting dive into the personal on Dreamland doesn’t hit half as hard as it might have done. Case in point is “Heat Waves,” which, while mellow, and with a riff that could wooze its way into whatever nostalgia piece you wish (“Smalltown Boy” is a snug enough fit), mostly treads water. Perhaps it’s unfair to ask for more invention from something that is already idiosyncratic, but perhaps that could also have afforded it more power.
[7]

Oliver Maier: Weird how Dave Bayley doesn’t get the same flack as his female indie contemporaries for affecting an exaggerated singing accent, even though his is infinitely more annoying. Like most Glass Animals songs this sounds as if it was engineered to operate at maximum VPS (Vibes Per Second), and the diet “Smalltown Boy” riff and cardboard 808s don’t do much to improve it beyond H&M playlist tier.
[2]

Juana Giaimo: Sometimes you are alone cleaning your room while you mumble and invent melodies and suddenly one sticks and you keep repeating it because it’s catchy and fun, but given that you’re not a songwriter, you soon forget about it. That’s how I feel about the vocal hook of “Heat Waves”: it’s the same melody line repeated four times with different lyrics which makes it catchy and fun, but pop is not just that. Glass Animals is not the first indie band to make this mistake. The hip hop beat is quite generic, the falsetto backing vocals quite annoying, the deep manipulated twenty one pilots-style vocals of the beginning and the end have no place here, and the melody of the verses too forgettable. The fact that Dave Bayley, inspired by Beyonce’s Sasha Fierce, jokingly (or at least I hope he didn’t take it too seriously) created an alter ego for this album called Davey Wavey that represents a version of himself who is self-confident and comfortable with doing anything he wants, again proves that indie bands don’t understand that there is a lot of vulnerability in pop music too.
[4]

Jeffrey Brister: Jamie Woon with harder knocking production. I like the smooth soulfulness in his voice, but there’s not much here. Pleasant, inoffensive, filled with enough modern pop flourishes to keep things moderately interesting, but it passes by without consequence.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Befitting a song titled “Heat Waves,” there’s a languor to this indie-pop song that results in me nodding my head and just plugging into the rhythm. And singer Dave Bayley’s voice is pleasantly wimpy, which makes sense on this record as well. 
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The last time I checked in on these guys they were making faux-indie stadium rock with extremely lite hip-hop beats — now they’re doing Maroon 5-core? What a lateral move.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: I had never heard “Heat Waves” when it topped Triple J’s Hottest 100 listener poll this past weekend, but I had a vague idea of its genre and I do know what that radio station’s listeners respond to. A friend suggested I write my blurb without listening to the track. And so: “Heat Waves” longs for the humidity suggested by its title, but the dance Glass Animals are able to produce evinces only a sterile aridity, like the too-cold air conditioning in a shopping mall you escape to on a broiling day. Synth chirrups attempt to compensate for the lethargy of the beats but the best they can do is distract from the doleful singing of an (I assume) wan gentleman who needs to figure out how to slide into a guest vocalist’s DMs. That main riff might lodge itself in your head but only at times when you have literally nothing more complex to think about than “what’s for dinner?” UPDATE: I have now listened to the song, and I have no changes to make to my blurb.
[4]

Alfred Soto: To go through the motions of a Justin Timberlake song in 2012 is an achievement based on their pedigree.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: The opening five seconds or so of this really rub me the wrong way, like a mid-00s lite pop-R&B beat underwater with a whingey Adam Levine (but I repeat myself) on it. The song immediately gets better when it dispenses with the tricks and begins throbbing politely. It’s warm, it’s hooky, it’s professional, and it is those things without being gross and sticky, things one associates with actual heat waves and are not required just in songs about them. Once more I am baffled as to its popularity amongst the Triple J demographic, but it’s certainly about as good as the average Rubens single.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Blow out your candles, for nowadays the world is lit by Adam Levine.
[3]

Vikram Joseph: Glass Animals are an eminently likeable band; it’s just a shame they’re not better. “Heat Waves” feels like it has the right ingredients in the wrong proportions, over-compressed and clumsily-produced, the whole thing ending up more over-saturated than it should have been. With its woozy R’n’B shuffle and late-night yearning for lost connections, I guess I was hoping for Channel Orange and instead got Channel 5. Still, I found the video — filmed on east London streets close to where I live in the warm, strange, empty light of the spring 2020 lockdown — quite moving, especially now, stuck inside its unwanted, darker, more claustrophobic sequel.
[5]

Aaron Bergstrom: Narrator: “Covid-19 has changed our world forever, and its tragic consequences will reverberate for years to come. That’s why we started the International Foundation For Bands Whose Sound Really Only Makes Sense In A Festival Context. Here at IFFBWSROMSIAFC, our mission is to raise awareness of bands like Glass Animals, who seem to have triangulated the perfect midpoint between Tame Impala and Portugal. The Man, and simply cannot survive outside of a tent in Indio or a farm in Somerset. Forced from their natural habitat, Glass Animals have been forced to resort to sea shanties and Australia ass tattoos. The situation is critical. Your support can make a difference. Please act now.”
[5]