“Gooey” by Glass Animals

"Gooey" led the way for ZABA, Glass Animals' 2014 debut, and it's as slow and sticky as its name: a woozy, slinking crawl of a track that sounds like it was recorded underwater at half speed. Dave Bayley wrote and produced it, and his methods were suitably odd. He sang his parts clutching a pineapple he'd named "Sasha Fierce", then built the closing chorus's choir by overdubbing himself in eight different voices, from an old woman to a deliberately bad James Brown.

Critics liked it, and Triple J's listeners liked it even more: it came in at 12 on the station's Hottest 100 of 2014, a high-water mark for the band until "Heat Waves" topped the poll in 2020. They played it on Late Night with Seth Meyers that year and on David Letterman's Late Show in February 2015, and it later slid onto the Magic Mike XXL soundtrack.

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