Heat Waves

"Heat Waves" is a song by British experimental rock band Glass Animals, released as a single from their third studio album Dreamland on 29 June 2020. A sleeper hit, it is the band's signature song and biggest hit single to date. In addition to reaching number five on the UK Singles Chart and being a top-five hit in several other European countries, it reached number one in Australia, Canada, Lithuania, Switzerland and the United States, where it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks in early 2022 after a record-breaking 59-week climb to number one. At 91 weeks, it is the longest charting song on the Hot 100 of all time, surpassing "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd. By September 2022, the song had accumulated more than two billion streams on Spotify. At the 2022 Brit Awards, "Heat Waves" was nominated for Best British Single. Composition and other versions Bayley stated that "Heat Waves" "is about loss and longing, and ultimately realising you are unable to save something". He said that "Also, this song is about memories and it's very nostalgic, and sometimes people feel more of that in the winter. Maybe that's part of the reason this song's hung around for so bloody long – everyone's locked inside and trapped in their own thoughts." "Heat Waves" starts on a high and then drops into despair before rising again for a cheerful, optimistic finale, much like the crests and troughs of a real wave. Bayley came up with the chords one day while playing around on the guitar. He wrote the lyrics in just an hour, prompted by the death of a close friend whose birthday was in June. In March 2021, the podcast Song Exploder featured an interview with Dave Bayley that specifically discussed the creation of "Heat Waves". He says "weirdly, Johnny Depp was the first person to hear this song." In it, he says that after writing/performing the song late at night alone in the studio, he decided to go home when he realized a stranger was sitting behind him. It was Depp who had been working in another studio.