Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves” is a song about the end of a relationship – specifically, the grief of knowing you cannot make someone happy and letting them go anyway.
Dave Bayley, the band’s frontman and sole writer-producer, wrote it in roughly an hour, late at night, in May 2019.
It appeared as the fourth single from Dreamland, Glass Animals’ third studio album, released August 7, 2020. Bayley has described it as “my version of a dream pop song about love but it’s a bit f*cked.”
So what does “Heat Waves” actually mean? The answer is more specific – and more uncomfortable – than its TikTok life suggests.
The Origin of “Heat Waves”
Bayley has given several accounts of the song’s starting point, each framing the same event differently. In Genius notes, he identified the trigger plainly: “The whole thing is meant to feel really reflective, and it ends up focusing on one memory, which is about a certain person that I really missed.”
That person is no longer in his life. Their birthday is in June. He told Billboard: “Every time it gets to May I start thinking about this person and how they’re not in my life anymore… Their birthday is in June, by the way. It was coming up to that period and it was late at night.”
The composition was quick. He recalled hitting eight chords after roughly ten minutes with the guitar, then: “As soon as I had that, I started singing. Literally the first thing that came out was the hook.”
In Apple Music editor notes, the entry point shifts – a close friend changing beyond recognition under the influence of a relationship, then the realisation that the same had happened to him.
“It’s about realizing that it’s happened to you, that it’s you that’s changed. You’ve become someone that you aren’t… it’s about hitting a wall – a point where you can’t change anymore or you’ll lose the foundation of who you are.” On Twitter at release: “It’s about realising you can’t make everyone happy. And realising it’s ok to be defeated by something.”
None of these contradict each other. The personal loss, the identity dissolution, the acceptance of defeat sit in the same song.
Bayley has confirmed he wrote the lyrics loosely enough for listeners to project their own situation – the June detail is specific enough to feel real, everything else is open.
The song was written and produced by Bayley alone. Bayley cited Frank Ocean, Kanye West and Drake as influences.
He recorded some early vocals in his bathroom on his phone. The arrangement was mixed by David Wrench, Manny Maroquin and Derek “MixedbyAli” Ali.
What the Title Actually Means
The title is not about heat in the literal sense. Bayley uses “heat waves” to mean a heat haze – the wavy distortion that rises off asphalt on extremely hot days, sometimes called a highway mirage.
The term functions as a metaphor for failed promises: everything he tried to offer was like heat waves rising off hot tarmac, illusory and without substance. Heat waves been fakin’ me out is not nostalgia. It is a description of self-delusion.
The opening image establishes this before the first verse: road shimmer wigglin’ the vision / heat, heat waves, I’m swimmin’ in a mirror. The narrator is already inside distorted perception. What looks like something real is mirage.
The Lyrics
The lyrical architecture is straightforward and does not need much decoding. Verse one opens on avoidance – TV as domestic suppressant – and then the reflection that forces through it.
The pivot is in two lines: you just need a better life than this / you need somethin’ I can never give. The narrator is not hurt or accusatory. He is stating a fact about his own inadequacy, and the sadness sits entirely there.
Bayley described “Heat Waves” as the direct sequel to Your Love (Déjà Vu) from the same album. “‘Your Love’ is sort of realizing that person’s gonna keep hurting you, and that you can’t save this thing,” he told ABC Audio. “And ‘Heat Waves’ is kinda realizing that that’s OK.”
The second verse handles the moment of separation without resolution – two contradictory things are true simultaneously and the lyric leaves them that way.
The bridge contains the song’s most precise construction: that look that’s perfectly un-sad. Not happy. Not content. Un-sad – the desire to remove one specific thing, not to replace it with anything.
When the song first appeared on r/indieheads at release in 2020, one commenter called the line “stupid.” It is worth sitting with that reaction because it points at something real: the lyric resists the kind of feeling that most pop songs of this type court.
It does not reach for the profound. It reaches for the precise. Whether that lands as restraint or flatness probably depends less on the listener’s taste than on their familiarity with what it describes.
The chorus repeats seven times without variation in lyric, key, harmony or delivery.
Production and Arrangement
The production is where “Heat Waves” makes its argument most quietly, and it is the aspect most often misread as simplicity.
Bayley’s vocal sits close and dry in the mix – minimal reverb, almost no spatial treatment. It places him right at ear level, conversational rather than performed, which is the correct distance for a song about private admission.
There is no moment where the vocal swells or pushes into a more exposed register.
The delivery stays at the same controlled level throughout, which means the emotional weight has nowhere to hide except in the lyrics themselves.
The synth texture underneath operates in a warm mid-range, soft-attack patches that decay slowly rather than cutting. They sustain rather than pulse.
The effect is not shimmer – it is thickness without movement, the sonic equivalent of air that does not circulate.
The bass sits low and largely unintrusive, holding the root without pulling focus. What makes the arrangement unusual is not what is in it but what is deliberately absent: no build, no breakdown, no moment where the instrumentation opens up or recedes to create contrast. The kick drum is metronomic throughout.
This is a production that enacts the heat haze metaphor rather than illustrating it. The song sounds like being inside something you cannot see the edges of.
The early r/indieheads criticism – that it built toward another chorus rather than anything else – was accurate as a description and identified something real. What those listeners were responding to was a structural decision to refuse the expected release.
The repetition is the uncomfortable part of the song wearing the comfortable part’s clothes.
Why This Song, Why Then
“Heat Waves” was released June 26, 2020. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 six months later at number 100, fell off for two weeks, and then began a climb that took 59 weeks to reach number one – breaking the record for the longest ascent in the chart’s history.
At 91 weeks total it became the longest-charting Hot 100 song ever, surpassing The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” – a record that stood until Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” surpassed it in May 2025.
The song topped 12 Billboard charts, reached number one in 11 countries, peaked at number five in the UK, received Grammy nominations for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance, and won Song of the Year at the 2021 NME Awards.
These numbers describe a chart trajectory that mirrors the song’s internal structure. Both refuse to resolve quickly. Both accumulate through repetition rather than breakthrough.
The song spent two years slowly accruing audience rather than breaking in a week, which is unusual for a track this sonically accessible and is the thing that makes its chart history genuinely strange.
The TikTok acceleration brought over 1.1 million videos using the original audio, predominantly as a vehicle for nostalgic montages – school corridors, student flats, summers that no longer exist. A further 76,000 used slowed versions. The hook was almost entirely decoupled from its actual subject in how it was used.
Bayley’s own explanation for the song’s pandemic reach: “No one was going out and creating new memories, they were all reliving the old ones. This song is about that – it’s about memories, it’s about missing someone, everyone’s been missing people in this age.”
This is the real story of “Heat Waves.” A song about accepting inadequacy – about the specific grief of knowing you are not enough and releasing someone because of it – became a container for collective nostalgia during a period when people had nothing but old memories to inhabit.
The song’s refusal to resolve, which early listeners heard as a limitation, turned out to match the mood of a two-year period in which nothing resolved.
The stasis that felt like a structural weakness in June 2020 felt like honest description by March 2022.
The song was originally offered to Rihanna. Bayley sat in the Roc Nation offices and played it for her manager. They never responded, so he kept it.
The chorus repeats in the same key, at the same tempo, with the same phrasing, seven times. The song ends where it begins. That is not a failure of imagination.
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Heat Waves Glass Animals lyrics
Intro
(Last night, all I think about is you)
(Don’t stop, baby, you can walk through)
(Don’t want, baby, think about you)
(You know that I’m never gonna lose)
Road shimmer wigglin’ the vision
Heat, heat waves, I’m swimmin’ in a mirror
Road shimmer wigglin’ the vision
Heat, heat waves, I’m swimmin’ in a—
Chorus
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Can’t make you happier now
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Can’t make you happier now
Verse 1
Usually, I put somethin’ on TV
So we never think about you and me
But today, I see our reflections clearly
In Hollywood, layin’ on the screen
You just need a better life than this
You need somethin’ I can never give
Fake water all across the road
It’s gone now, the night has come, but
Chorus
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Can’t make you happier now
Verse 2
You can’t fight it, you can’t breathe
You say somethin’ so lovin’, but
Now I gotta let you go
You’ll be better off in someone new
I don’t wanna be alone
You know it hurts me too
You look so broken when you cry
One more and then I say goodbye
Chorus
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Can’t make you happier now
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Can’t make you happier now
Bridge
I just wonder what you’re dreamin’ of
When you sleep and smile so comfortable
I just wish that I could give you that
That look that’s perfectly un-sad
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Chorus
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Can’t make you happier now
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Late nights in the middle of June
Heat waves been fakin’ me out
Can’t make you happier now
Outro
Road shimmer wigglin’ the vision
Heat, heat waves, I’m swimmin’ in a mirror
Road shimmer wigglin’ the vision
Heat, heat waves, I’m swimmin’ in a mirror
