The Number Ones: Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves”

March 12, 2022STAYED AT #1:5 WeeksIn The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.Australia got there first. I don't know why. Glass Animals, the British studio-rock project, were always pretty big in Australia. In March 2021, a full year before the song topped the Billboard Hot 100, Glass Animals' "Heat Waves" reached #1 in Australia. "Heat Waves" wasn't even brand new then. Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley wrote the song in 2018, and the band released the track during the early days of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Thanks in part to its video and to its inherent sense of unspecified longing, "Heat Waves" became a kind of lockdown standard, and it took off all over the world. But in America, "Heat Waves" took a very, very long time to rise to #1.It would be great to sit here and tell you that the long-gestating triumph of "Heat Waves" represented a subtle shift in the way...