Glass Animals' "Heat Waves" Celebrated as a Number One Hit

March 12, 2022

- STAYED AT #1: 5 Weeks

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music .

Australia got there first. I don't know why. Glass Animals, the British studio-rock project, were always pretty big in Australia. In March 2021, a full year before the song topped the Billboard Hot 100, Glass Animals' "Heat Waves" reached #1 in Australia. "Heat Waves" wasn't even brand new then . Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley wrote the song in 2018, and the band released the track during the early days of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Thanks in part to its video and to its inherent sense of unspecified longing, "Heat Waves" became a kind of lockdown standard, and it took off all over the world. But in America, "Heat Waves" took a very, very long time to rise to #1.

It would be great to sit here and tell you that the long-gestating triumph of "Heat Waves" represented a subtle shift in the way Americans listened to music or that it showed the world the true power of a sleeper hit. Glass Animals are a UK act with two members who mostly grew up in the US. Over here, their music first broke through on alternative rock radio, but it was hugely influenced by rap and pop production methods, as well as the streamlined, interlocking-parts process of building tracks on digital workstations. "Heat Waves" is a song that sounds like everything and nothing, existing at a strange node of genre intersection. If this were a different column, maybe I could frame the popularity of "Heat Waves" as a rejection of boundaries, a sign of a beautiful future where any song could cross over gradually, picking up new fans as it rolls along.

Unfortunately, I can't really do any of that. Instead, it's my grim duty to report that "Heat Waves" took off because of Minecraft YouTubers and stuck around because American radio eventually caught on and ran the song into the ground. Maybe that's just this decade's version of old stories about obscure radio station managers falling in love with songs and then playing them until those songs become local hits, then regional hits, then national hits. We don't have those people anymore. On the pop charts, radio's main function is to keep pushing the same tiny handful of tracks until everyone gets sick of seeing them on the Hot 100. Instead, our true tastemakers are people like Minecraft YouTubers and the folks who write fan fiction about them. So it goes.

_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2510720/the-number-ones-glass-animals-heat-waves/columns/the-number-ones/)._