I hate "Heat Waves." The line "you look so broken when you cry" (Dave Bayley must be an empath), the shrill, near-intolerable vocals, the goofy trap beat. The only reason this thing got such widespread airplay is because everyone lent the song their less discerning ear as it Frankensteined popular elements of many genres for a hideous piece of cynicism.
In fact, Glass Animals have rubbed me the wrong way even when they were borderline experimental pop in their early years. Why they changed course straight off a cliff into a now more mainstream sphere can be simply explained with a dollar sign. But there's something to be said about the quality of mercy, and worse bands have made better albums after a product like 2020's Dreamland.
Perhaps the only saving grace in the wake of "Heat Waves" is more money funnelled into their pit: enter I Love You So F***ing Much, their fourth album. "Heat Waves" was stunning in its success partially because it sounds bad on a technical level. Newfound exposure and a four-year sabbatical means song structures don't feel so slipshod this time around, and Billy Joel-style laundry lists of pop references are (mostly) omitted.
But that's about as effusive as I can be in my praise. I Love You So F***ing Much is a bad record, and not the fun kind where its ambitions are greater than its reach. The band adopt a quasi-astronomical approach here with references to airlocks and their admittedly pleasing B-movie cover art, but it'll be many years before leading scientists find a way to stack shit that high. Whatever melodies are present here are not granted a single moment in the sun, buried in a mix adamant on you retaining two or three quaint suburban verses for your Instagram captions.
It's crazy how much of I Love You So F***ing Much blends together into a bundle of overwrought choruses and synth brick walls, even when you hit shuffle. "Show Pony" is likely only distinctive because it starts us off, and "Wonderful Nothing" is the only conceivable moment of inspiration, laced with an uncharacteristically unique and buzzing EDM groove. Also, it's the only time where Bayley's patented bedroom rap style feels somewhat congruous. The rest of the album is the same tedious cycle of lyricism informed by a lifetime spent watching television, all over royalty-free beats. And sometimes, they're not even in control of their own twisted imagery. Presenting the Worst Line of the Year award to "I found the hole where the happiness goes." Just be glad that's not the same track where Bayley lays down some eyebrow-raising lines that would make Oedipus blush.
I Love You So F***ing Much is a perfectly formless, anodyne diamond and the pure manifestation of a label's publishing schedule. You can almost picture the glib Polydor exec explaining to the board how this will strategically hold the bottom of the Billboard 100 until Ice Spice drops her new album. If this assessment seems masturbatory in its harshness, just know that inoffensive music Iike this is an affront to the very idea of what makes music so worthy of obsession and analysis. It's the antithesis of self-expression; this ain't no victimless crime. For the first time, I understand the term: this is pure co-worker music.