DREAMLAND IRL

This Is Now the Longest Charting Hot 100 Song of All Time

Hint: It’s an English indie rock band’s sleeper hit about late nights in the middle of June.

“Heat Waves,” the sleeper hit by alt-rock radio mainstays Glass Animals, hit 91 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 on Monday, making it the longest charting song in the six decades of the list’s existence. It breaks the 90-week record previously held by the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” which flew past the 87-week mark previously hit by Imagine Dragons’ ‘Radioactive’ last August. ‘Heat Waves,’ which was released in June 2020, only hitting its peak at the top of Billboard’s list in March 2022 in what remains a record-smashing 59-week climb to No. 1. “All I can say is wow,” Dave Bayley, the band’s frontman, told Billboard. “Many of you know when I wrote this song I was writing about missing someone I loved very dearly. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that it would lead to so much love and connection across the globe.” A powdery synth-pop reflection on the loss of Bayley’s close friend, “Heat Waves” was hanging in at No. 21 on the Hot 100 on Monday, suggesting it may be a while yet before it drops off the chart completely.