Glass Animals: How the indie rockers transport us back to middle school

Cheeky actually: You don’t even have private pension insurance – and it’s already vintage. As a middle-aged millennial, I look on in amazement at the rapid pace at which my own youth is being historicized, even – for heaven’s sake – throwing up new retro trends. Artists like Willow and Machine Gun Kelly are bringing back the noughties emo aesthetic in all its kohl-laced glory. On TikTok, teens either celebrate standard clothes from my middle school days or the adventurous low-waist jeans and giant hoop experiments of the early Xtinas and Paris Hiltons as the look of the hour. It’s called “Y2k” style. The fashion bible “Vogue” recently even announced: “The 2014 Tumblr Girl Is Back”.

The present is a cyborg of set pieces that were the hottest shit yesterday. Kind of fitting that a group is having a crazy momentum right now that sounds like they’ve taken a handful of music trends from the last, say, 15 years – and cobbled together a sound that somehow sounds like now, but also strangely faceless, eh a computer simulation of the zeitgeist.

Oxford-based indie group Glass Animals already had a solid hit in the US with “Gooey” from their 2014 debut ZABA. With their song “Heat Waves”, which was released in June 2020, they recently reached the podium of the international Spotify streaming charts. As the first British band ever.

Perhaps because the song is such an ingenious compromise piece: “Heat Waves” combines the electrified indie, with which bands like alt-J ended the era of pure guitar rock theory at the end of the noughties, with the synthetic beats and the tropical lightness of contemporary hip-hop productions. It’s a sound that’s reminiscent of the recent past: the future promises of the millennium – and the pre-pandemic recent past. Apparently this is the formula for success for the present. The only question is how long it will last.

This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 04/2022.

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