Dreamland by Glass Animals

Dreamland, the third album from Oxford indie rockers Glass Animals, finally arrived on 7 August 2020 after being pushed back from July. It was born out of a near miss: in July 2018 drummer Joe Seaward was almost killed in a collision, and frontman Dave Bayley came out the other side writing and producing nearly the whole thing himself, aimed squarely at his own past.

So this is a memory palace of a record, woozy and warm, stitched together with snippets of Bayley's childhood home videos and soaked in the pop culture of a Texas kid growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s. The beats lean on the R&B and hip hop of that time, Denzel Curry drops in on "Tokyo Drifting", and "Heat Waves", a slow-burning shimmer of a song, went viral on TikTok and became the band's biggest hit.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.