If you’ve listened to any radio station in the last few years, you would recognise the voice of Dave Bayley, the frontman for English indie rock band Glass Animals. Their 2020 hit, Heat Waves, dominated airplay – becoming the first-ever song to stay in the ARIA Charts Top 10 for over a year.
But, with super-stardom hitting the group during a global pandemic, the celebrations were muted at best.
Now they’re back for more.
Glass Animals’ fourth album, I Love You So F***ing Much, dropped today, ahead of their Australian tour in November.
“It’s my version of a space album,” Bayley admits over a Zoom call with The Music. “I’ve always wanted to make a space album, and I’ve tried in the past and thrown them away because they always end up being quite cold.
“I thought space would be a really interesting way to frame this record, which is really about love because space is a great representation of existentialism… existential dread. It’s an empty vacuum that can never be filled.”
Existentialism is a significant theme throughout I Love You So F***ing Much – spurred on by Bayley’s almost apocalyptic Airbnb stay in one of California’s biggest storms.
Heading to Los Angeles to do some writing and production work, he found himself bed-ridden with COVID-19, stuck in a house on the edge of a cliff, A Series of Unfortunate Events-style, while landslides and gale-force winds raged around him.
“That was the peak. That was when the flower of existential dread bloomed,” Bayley says. “I’m looking outside, and there’s, like, people’s cars sliding down the road, and… trees going down the road. And I was like, ‘I’m dead. This is it.’ And that sense of doom penetrated deep.
“While I was in that situation, I was quite doomed out, as you can imagine. I really felt this, like, existential dread. And I think I kind of formulated the backbone of the album in that time. I was trying to work out what’s actually important in life and why. It’s like, why anything? That was the big question.”
Pulling himself out of his self-proclaimed “doom hole” after the storm, Bayley got to work, writing Track 2 of the album – whatthehellishappening?
“It’s about waking up, being thrown to the boot of a car and shut in and driven at 150 miles an hour down a motorway, not knowing what’s happening. But you realise, for the course of the song, that that feeling of helplessness is actually really wonderful, and you’re alone for the first time in a long time, and you can’t do anything about it. And there’s actually a real beauty to it.”
The album itself follows a similar arc, starting with more introspective and questioning songs and ending with a more hopeful tone—though that wasn’t necessarily Bayley’s intention.
“It was almost like a therapeutic process, writing the record, and I’m still working out what some of it means. But, in the first couple of songs, there are a lot of questions. I didn’t really realise that until I went and listened back to it, a lot of questions in the lyrics and asking myself a lot of questions.
“Then I think that comes to a bit of a resolve later in the album, where, like, Lost In The Ocean is like you’ve gone up to space, and then you come back down to Earth and land on the ocean, and it’s kind of like, everything is going to be okay. So it’s a planned arc. I got to the top of the arc and realised, ‘Oh, I have to finish the arc.’ So, [it was] slightly unplanned on the way up and then planned on the way down.
“I feel like it goes on a bit of a ride, like Show Pony is your blueprint of it all,” Bayley continues. “We all form these different ideas of love growing up when we don’t even know what love is. We experience the relationships around us, like watching the neighbours across the street. We see people in restaurants, interacting couples, and your family and your uncles and aunts, and you’re forming this blueprint of what love is without really even realising it. And we all have a bit of a slightly different blueprint, and that is meant to set the context of the record.”
How do intimate love stories fit within a space-themed album, you ask? Well, it’s quite simple, according to Bayley.
“They’re bigger than the universe and swallow the universe whole. They’re so important and so complicated and so, well, beautiful, even if they’re sad or dark or angry. I feel like the universe kind of pales in comparison to the relationships that we have around us. And that’s the whole argument of the record.”
But making that argument sonically was another challenge altogether. So Bayley brought in some old-fashioned help in the form of 70’s analog synths.
“The only way I could find to do it was to imagine we were making the album in the ‘60s or ‘70s and use all of this equipment that is naturally very warm. So, I built a studio that was meant to sound like the future in the ‘70s – all ‘70s equipment was meant to sound like the future and used to soundtrack a lot of old space films.
“Because they’re old, they had this warmth and a kind of sad soul to them that a lot of modern instruments don’t have. The digital stuff just feels cold.”
And you know what else feels cold? Filming in an abandoned Air Force wind tunnel in England. Bayley knows that firsthand, thanks to the A Tear In Space (Airlock) music video, which dropped a month ago.
The video includes a range of objects shattering on Bayley in the tunnel, which he admits was “exfoliating”.
“That song is about being stretched a little bit and basically trying to reach someone but never quite being able to. They’re always pushing you away. So, I wanted to do that – make a visual representation of the song.
“There are a few little shards of glass and a few cuts and scrapes. I think it was quite dangerous. It goes with the song, you know, because even, like in the song if you finally did reach this person, you’d just be sawn to shreds anyway.”
Before A Tear In Space (Airlock) was dropped, Glass Animals treated Sydney fans to a taste of the new single, playing it at a one-off intimate pop-up show at Liberty Hall – which Bayley thoroughly enjoyed.
“The intimate pop-up shows are great little sweat boxes, and I like seeing the expressions on people’s faces and feeling the energy, like feeling the heat of the crowd and things like that,” he said.
However, the rest of Australia need not be disappointed if they missed out on the pop-up gig because Glass Animals are coming back to Australia this November, hitting up much bigger venues in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney.
“We’re just gonna try and bring that same intimate energy to those big spaces. We love those big spaces. They feel like festivals, our own festival.
“I’m looking forward to being back in Australia. Australian crowds are notoriously the best, so I’m actually very, very excited about just being back with that energy, the loudest, the danciest crowds,” Bayley continued. “It’s fun to come to Australia because we get to make everything quite big and high energy. There’s some cities and places around the world that are, like, very cool, and you gotta play this slow, cool version. But we won’t in Australia. We’re just gonna go for it.”
Not only are Glass Animals promising high-intensity shows, but they’re also promising a stage set that is “nuts”.
“What can I say? There’s an element of hologram, and there is a spaceship element. I can’t say anything else.”
But after writing and recording a space album, Bayley still isn’t sure he’d want to actually check out that final frontier for himself.
“I feel like going to space is, like, fucking ridiculous, to be honest. I love the idea of it. I would love to go to space. But also, like, look at the people who are going to space, like all these people who get loads of money, like, that’s what they do. I’m not that close to Bezos in mentality.”
In the end, though, I Love You So F***ing Much isn’t really about space.
“Well, the whole point of the space album is that the best part of space is probably what’s happening right here, right in front of you. Like it’s not going to get more important than that.”
I Love You So F***ing Much is out now via Universal Music Australia. You can listen to the album here. Glass Animals are touring Australia in November.
GLASS ANIMALS
TOUR OF EARTH 2024 – AUSTRALIA DATES
Wednesday 20 November – Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne
Friday 22 November – Riverstage, Brisbane
Tuesday 26 November – Sydney Opera House Forecourt, Sydney
Wednesday 27 November – Sydney Opera House Forecourt, Sydney – NEW SHOW
Tickets on sale now via Live Nation
