How do you follow up the biggest international hit by a British artist since the mid-1990s? That was the conundrum facing Oxford four-piece Glass Animals in the wake of the extraordinary success of slow-burning viral track Heat Waves, which topped the US charts for five weeks in 2022. The answer is an album that is precision-tooled not so much as to appeal to the maximum number of people, more to offend as few as possible – indeed, its title is the edgiest thing here by a distance.
The moodboard is the Frank Ocean-inflected, focus-group-friendly, Coldplay-lite pop-rock that made their name, all immaculately constructed but ultimately unengaging. That’s not helped by Dave Bayley’s treated vocals being buried deep in the mix and frequently hard to decipher, which is suboptimal if you’re trying to convey your intimate thoughts about coming to terms with superstar-level fame. There are odd moments that cut through – there’s a pleasingly succinct guitar solo on opener Show Pony, and A Tear in Space (Airlock) does a nice line in polite euphoria – but as a whole this is very much a case of all surface, no feeling.
