Formed in 2010 in Oxford, England, the indie-pop band Glass Animal simmered in modest popularity for a dozen years in the United States. Suddenly in 2022, the song “Heat Waves” exploded on TikTok. The band’s next concert tour of America intended to promote the band’s fourth studio album, I Love You So F***ing Much, which was released this past July 19. By this time, interest in Glass Animals had mushroomed to allow the band to become arena headliners, evidenced by a stop at Madison Square Garden.
On the previous U.S. tour, the stage set looked like the court of a resort hotel with a simulated swimming pool, basketball hoops, neon palm trees, and other visual props. This year’s set appeared much simpler and less defined, looking perhaps like the inside of a space station. The significance was that in the past, each of the four band members appeared to be on an equal plane; now the musicians, for most of the performance, were on a back platform, further distanced from the singer, who spent most of the MSG show near the edge of the stage. Vocalist Dave Bayley was now the primary focal point, as he danced and paced several feet in front of Drew MacFarlane (guitar, keyboards, backing vocals), Edmund Irwin-Singer (bass, keyboards, backing vocals), and Joe Seaward (drums).
As Glass Animals’ popularity grows, fans have been building a signature culture around the band’s identity. Along the front barricade, numerous fans held inflatable animals, the black and white dairy cows dominating. The band has associated itself with pineapples, and several fans along the front line wore sunglasses designed with pineapple images.
Bayley likewise did all he could to endear himself to the audience. Now performing without his trademark eyeglasses, the overhead video projections captured closeups of his perpetual smile. He professed several times his gratitude for the fans whose presence in the audience permitted Glass Animals to debut as headliners at The World’s Most Famous Arena. Midway through the concert, he ran into the audience to sing a song on what might have been a tiny platform placed in the middle of the arena floor, as fans balanced him by holding his legs and one of his hands while he sang into the microphone he held with his other hand. At a later moment in the concert, Bayley held a real pineapple and sought someone along the edge of the stage to whom he would gift it, eventually choosing a fan that he said he recognized as having attended Glass Animals concerts for years.
Otherwise, Glass Animals’ lyrics explored the mysteries of life, but the mixing of metaphors generated unsatisfactory conclusions. The repertoire went as far back as the first album with “Gooey,” which evoked youthful exploration and the desire to escape from the mundane, yet also touched on a bad relationship. The set included highlights from the band’s second and third albums, plus a whopping eight songs from the current album. The encore ended the night with “Heat Waves,” a song about a man who finds himself disappointed when his romantic relationship is not entirely reciprocal.
The songs latched onto simple, repetitive grooves. The audience bopped to the chill rhyths of the synth-dominated songs. Not much developed musically within the compositions, however. Bayley sang with a moderate tone, which he enhanced with modulating inflection. He injected a few impressive guitar solos, but they did not happen often enough. The rest of the band mostly provided a cinematic wash of monochromatic sound. In the end, the real mystery was not in the song lyrics but in how the band and its lukewarm performance is getting so popular so quickly.
Setlist
- whatthehellishappening?
- Life Itself
- Wonderful Nothing
- Space Ghost Coast to Coast
- A Tear in Space (Airlock)
- Creatures in Heaven
- Youth
- Lost in the Ocean
- Gooey
- How I Learned to Love the Bomb
- Show Pony
- On the Run
- Take a Slice
- Pork Soda
- Tokyo Drifting
Encore
- The Other Side of Paradise
- Heat Waves
