The Glow

The title track of DMA's 2020 album represents a significant widening of their sonic palette — "The Glow" moves through something more atmospheric and expansive than their earlier guitar-forward work, incorporating synthesizer textures that give the song a quality of open space, of standing somewhere vast. The production has genuine grandeur to it without tipping into bombast: the layers accumulate slowly, each addition adding emotional weight rather than volume. There's a nocturnal quality to the whole thing, a sense of darkness that isn't threatening but enormous — the glow of the title feels like distant city lights seen from a hillside, beautiful and remote. Tommy O'Dell's vocals here are perhaps the most considered of any DMA's recording: he reaches for notes that expose the edges of his range, and the slight effort in that reaching becomes its own emotional content. The song is about something ineffable — that sense of chasing a feeling or a version of yourself that keeps moving just ahead of you, always almost in reach. It works as a closing statement and as an opening, depending on where you are when it finds you. For a band sometimes pigeonholed as Britpop revivalists, this song argues for something more genuinely their own — the Australianness of big emotional sky, of wide landscape turned inward. Best heard at night, somewhere that lets you look out at something.