From Cowley Road to conquering the world

I've got mixed feelings about seeing Glass Animals improbably hailed as "the biggest British band in the world".

On the one hand, it's nice to see an underdog outfit from my old manor Oxford gradually go global - especially one whose cause has been championed by Nightshift's Ronan Munro.

But on the other, their music - including/especially big hit lockdown anthem 'Heat Waves' - does absolutely nothing for me. Rolling Stone's Hannah Ewens is spot on in describing it as "fairly close to being what's been called Spotify-core: quite electronic, catchy, mid-tempo, muted, pensive but neutral in mood. The sort of inoffensive sound that could live on lots of playlists." And for those reasons, precisely the sort of thing I'm predisposed to find genuinely offensive. It's proper watching-beige-paint-dry stuff.

I also found Rachel Aroesti's article depressing in the way that it lays out all of the hoops that contemporary artists have to leap through to achieve success. Admittedly, simply writing and recording a good song was never enough to score a hit single, but the sheer amount of extraneous bullshit - TikTok popularity, inclusion on computer game soundtracks, facilitating fan-created content - that Glass Animals have "leaned into" (to borrow an odious phrase from their marketing manager) awakened my inner grumpy old man. That said, it doesn't take much - he's a particularly light sleeper these days.