Staying Power
Illustration: Leonhard Rothmoser.
The idea of instant success is alluring. Soaring to the top of a bestseller list or going viral overnight – these are the things that modern dreams are made of. But when the British indie rock band Glass Animals released ‘Heat Waves’ into the world in 2020, the song was anything but an immediate hit.
Its nostalgic vibes and catchy tune contained all the right ingredients to shoot it to the top, but alas, they failed to catch. In part, the problem was timing. “I thought in the storm of the pandemic that this album would get blown away like a fart on the wind,” said Dave Bayley, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, in an interview with NME. Instead, the song and its album proved to be a fart that creeps up on you, violently greeting your nose long after the deed is done. A fart, so to speak, with staying power. With this in mind, it is perhaps fitting that, from the outset, the song’s music video contained a hint that success is often a case of simply sticking around.
Directed by Colin Read, the video follows Bayley pulling a cartload of boxy Sony ProFeel Pro televisions through the back streets of Hackney in London. Colloquially known as “Sony Cubes”, these high-spec monitors launched in 1986. They went on to enjoy a lengthy manufacturing run of 21 years, thanks to their popularity in medical, scientific and domestic settings. Despite not having been produced since 2007, the TV remains a steadfast heavyweight in the cultural sector, particularly in exhibition design. You may have spotted models in the likes of Noguchi (2021) at the Barbican or Charlotte Prodger: Blanks and Preforms (2021) at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, or hundreds of other shows in recent years (as documented by theblock.art). ‘Heat Waves’, then, is not the Sony TV’s first cultural rodeo. Its enduring success is largely linked to its practical, versatile form. While other TVs of this era taper inwards at the back, the ProFeel Pro’s casing is all right-angles and sharp corners, allowing it to be mounted flush against a wall, sit smartly on a plinth, or be tilted or stacked in any number of arrangements including multi-screen video walls. Its retro-cool vibes also lend it to a variety of curatorial narratives.
‘Heat Waves’, too, nimbly offers itself to many uses and arrangements. It has featured on a hugely popular (and reportedly frisky) Minecraft fan fiction series, as well as well-known video games, such as FIFA 2021 and The Sims 4; TikTokers use its chop-up-able lyrics to accompany a broad range of content; and it has been widely remixed – an activity kick-started when Glass Animals released individual audio files online as part of a remix competition in 2020.
This multi-format appeal has led the song’s initially lukewarm reception to slowly heat up. In 2021 it topped the Australian charts. In 2022, nearly two years after being released, it reached #5 in the UK and #1 in the US after a record- breakingly slow 59-week ascent. Two more years on, and the (heat) waves of success roll on. While the sleeper hit may have some distance to travel to match the cultural staying power of the Sony Cube, it is already well on its way. To date, it has been streamed over 2.8bn times on Spotify and 659m on YouTube, where hordes of fans praise its enduring appeal. “It’s already 2024,” comments @eriksonbornales4568 for instance, “but this song is still on my soundtrack 🙌.”
Words Lara Chapman
Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser
This article was originally published in Disegno #37. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.