Cover Feature Glass Animals: Up, Up, And Away…

All the while, he kept receiving emails and WhatsApps filled with the growing statistics surrounding a mournful, affecting synth-pop number from ‘Dreamland’ titled ‘Heat Waves’. Built around a syncopated groove, minor chord guitar pattern and an impossibly infectious hook, ‘Heat Waves’ was going interstellar, racking up streaming numbers topping a billion and eventually going to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100. But here was Bayley being forced to keep the outside world at arm’s length. He thought that maybe going to the GRAMMYs, where Glass Animals were nominated for Best New Act in 2022, might help him snap out of it but he got Covid and spent the ceremony seriously ill in a hotel room. Still no reality check. Was any of this really happening?

“I had this huge detachment from the world and from the album itself, which is strange because it’s your baby, your child,” says Bayley. “I felt like I was watching this other life.” He’s sat on a sofa inside his east London studio, his dog Woody sound asleep next to him. “He’s pooped, we went on a long run this morning,” Bayley explains. It’s a lovely sunny Monday morning in late May but you wouldn’t know that. Daylight does not make its way into Dave Bayley’s studio. “It’s a black hole of time in here,” he smiles.

Perhaps that’s why he opted to keep set hours of 10am to 6pm during the two months that he made Glass Animals’ excellent new album ‘I Love You So F***king Much’ here: a record that melds the lithe, left-of-centre indie-pop of their previous output with expansive sci-fi atmospherics and shoegazing-in-space guitars, and one that they’re preparing to release into their most hungry-for-it fanbase yet.

At their centre is Bayley, a creative dynamo who was born and raised in the US and moved to the UK as a teenager. The rest of the band (guitarist and keyboardist Drew MacFarlane, bassist Edwin Irwin-Singer and drummer Joe Seaward) do play their part on Glass Animals’ albums but it’s mostly all Bayley, who also writes and produces. The songs on the new record are rooted in the unsettling disconnection that Bayley felt around the success of ‘Dreamland’, a period that culminated in the 35-year-old experiencing what he describes as an “existential crisis”.

“I was in this very weird place where I’d lost my footing in the world,” he continues. When touring had ended, Bayley had a fire in his belly, fuelled by the feeling that he had a lot of lost time to make up for. “I was like, ‘I need to do everything I can to catch up, I need to go through every open door’,” he says. “Because it opened a lot of doors, that record, there were a lot of opportunities on the table – working on other people’s records, working on film music, working with other writers and producers. I was like, ‘I’m gonna do all of it’ and I don’t think I took the time to re-ground myself at any point.”

He co-produced Florence + The Machine’s jubilant 2022 album ‘Dance Fever’, worked with Hans Zimmer protégé Henry Jackman and pinballed from writing room to writing room in LA, collaborating with Rihanna and Travis Scott foil Starrah. He also went into the studio with Elton John (more on that later), but it was an era of rampant productivity built on unsteady ground. Bayley would have to come back to base at some point, and he was eventually forced to.

“I got Covid again and got stuck in this house that I’d rented,” he states. “It was an amazing Airbnb that was very cheap to rent and I found out why when I got there – it was kind of falling off a mountain. Beautiful view though! I was forced into this isolation, finally. I guess I had been putting off spending time alone and thinking about why I felt so detached and strange. I was locked in this house and there was this massive storm, I could see landslides happening, and this existential crisis really blossomed, like, ‘What is the point of all this?!’”

Fate’s scriptwriters had given Bayley a doozy. After all, if you’re going to embark on a night of hefty contemplation about fame and success and the meaning of life, then do it properly – do it in a plush pad threatening to topple off the top of a mountain overlooking Los Angeles while a big fuck-off storm rages outside.

The next morning, the house was still standing and so was Bayley, now with an idea about how to find his way out of the fug because he’d worked out what had got him into it in the first place. “I think it was a lack of realising what life is really about,” he says, “and losing that sense of what’s important to me in life.”

What followed was an intense, chaotic period where the songs came flooding out of him. “I spent about two weeks going deep into my own mind-hole,” he says. “It was all systems go, just coming out in this vomit. I ended up writing about 50 or 60 tracks.” He emerged with the beginnings of a record where he wanted to wrap the theme of love around the concept of space. “I used the universe to juxtapose these really loving moments,” he says, before reconsidering himself for a moment: “I say ‘loving’ and people would probably take that in a positive way, but throughout the record it explores all the different sides of love and sadness and loss. It’s trying to find beauty in those things too.”

The record begins with a breezy, strummed number called ‘Show Pony’ - one that sounds a bit like Beck, if he dressed up as a cowboy. Of all the tracks on ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’, these lyrics mean the most to Bayley, acting as a sort of taster menu for all the emotional places that Glass Animals’ fourth album is going to take you. “Everyone’s blueprints for love are the relationships that they witness growing up,” he says. “Even if you don’t realise what love is at that point, you’re still forming your own idea of it. The intention of ‘Show Pony’ was to say, ‘This is the experience, this is the blueprint that I had – and it’s not necessarily about one relationship, that song. It’s an amalgamation of everything I witnessed growing up and, thinking back about it, this table of contents showing all the facets of love.”

He'd wanted to make what he calls “a space record” before but he’d always end up with sonics and songs that sounded too icy and lacking in emotion. Here, he cracked it, melding the idea of space’s abyss with the widescreen panoramas you’d see in a Western film. It’s why the cosmic maximalism of recent single ‘A Tear In Space’ begins with sweeping strings that resemble composer supreme Ennio Morricone. “That was a big influence,” says Bayley. “It’s why there’s a lyrical reference to The Good, The Bad & The Ugly in ‘A Tear In Space’ too. There’s a lot of space sounds on this record, but also the vast expanses in those old Western films definitely have that, searching those huge vacuums of space.”

He's a restless spirit. The worst thing you could say to him about his music would be, “It sounds the same as the last one.” “I can’t think of anything more boring than repeating yourself,” he declares. “I think when you stop taking risks and stop trying to do something different and just start treading water, why bother?” He would rather make music that elicits passionate reactions: “If someone says it’s shit, that’s cool. At least I made them feel something.”

The disarray in which he wrote the songs that make up ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’ was followed by a period of order and routine when it came to refining them. It’s no surprise that Bayley makes music that interpolates electronic pop, R&B, alt-rock, anthemic indie, tropical beats and sumptuous psychedelia – his upbringing similarly took in many different scenes and sounds. Allow him to paint the picture of what his accent sounded like when he arrived on British shores aged 13: “I’d grown up in Massachusetts, which has quite a strong accent, a really intense north-eastern accent. And then I moved to Texas – very strong accent – and my dad is Welsh and he spent a lot of time in New York so I had a New York accent as well. I came to England and went to school and they were like, ‘What are you?!’ I pushed a reset button and went for a very neutral accent.”

He has different studio temperaments for different occasions. Working on Glass Animals’ music on his own, he says he’s very erratic. “I try a lot of things very fast and throw a huge amount of things away and I talk to myself and say, ‘That’s fucking shit!’,” he laughs. He was reassured when working with Elton, realising the Rocket Man works in exactly the same manner. “He does that and it was so funny,” Bayley recalls. “He didn’t have that self-consciousness that I have so he sits down and plays something and goes, ‘That’s fucking shit!’ I’m like, ‘That is exactly what I do!’” The music they worked on is yet to be released but he says it was an amazing experience. “He’s just a genius and to be able to learn from that was priceless. I’m very thankful to him.”

He taps into a different side of himself when he’s producing other artists. Looking back to the work he did with Florence on ‘Dance Fever’ (Bayley produced half the record, with Jack Antonoff handling the other half), he says his job was to “facilitate and support her in every way possible”. “She’s a genius, she can do it on her own, she doesn’t need me there, but I am there to help and to push when she asks for it,” he says. “I think sometimes you get on a level with someone where they’re comfortable throwing down the ideas and slightly letting someone else be the sieve and the organiser, so I’m sitting there trying to organise all these ideas she’s throwing down in the most efficient and wonderful way possible.”

At a few years’ distance, Bayley still looks back on the ‘Heat Waves’ phenomenon as a surreal experience, but one with two notable takeaways: firstly, that it was a song he’d written and produced all on his own and, secondly, that it was one of his most candid efforts. “It was probably the most honest song I’d done up to that point in writing and it was encouraging for that reason,” he says of the track, which explores loss and nostalgia. “I always felt very selfish writing personal things, it’s the household I grew up in; ‘Don’t talk about how you’re feeling and get on with it’. Now I’ve realised it’s OK, now I’m whining all over the place! I finally made the connection that it’s not so selfish, it’s actually that there’s a selflessness to it, you’re donating a piece of yourself.”

As well as the song prompting both Florence and Elton to get in touch, Bayley also heard from Lana Del Rey, another of his idols. “Lana is a big songwriting hero of mine,” he says. “Those people have all been so amazingly kind about something I never expected anyone to be kind about. It’s wonderful.”

Recently, he arrived at a friend’s house at precisely the moment the pal’s 12-year-old and her posse were doing ‘Heat Waves’ as their karaoke selection. “They were all screaming it and I was like, ‘This is too weird’,” he laughs. “They passed me the mic and I was like, ‘No fucking way!’”

Perhaps one aspect of ‘Heat Waves’’ success is how it flies in the face of most huge pop songs over the past few years. There’s nothing muscular and immediately grabbing about it. If anything, it sounds like it’s about to fall over, its hypnotic spell only really kicking in after a few listens. Bayley thinks there’s a lot of pop music being made at the moment that’s built on making an instant impression. “There’s a lot in the world that’s surface at the minute, a lot of very quick, very fast dopamine hits, a lot of fast gratification, and I think music that is made for that is often lacking that depth… it might not stand the test of time,” he says.

As for bands starting out, he says they need to spend time honing their craft. “They need to play live a lot,” he says. When it’s put to him that the pipeline of small venues to play is ever declining, he says he knows it’s getting “very tricky” out there but he’s heard enough new bands recently to make him excited about the next wave of emerging artists. He’s an optimist. To prove it, he gets out his phone and scans his current faves. “I’ve been listening to Lip Critic, fucking brilliant, diving back into Amaarae, Blondshell – banger,” he says. “Royal Otis, BERWYN, Blessed Madonna, new Little Simz’s record, this artist called Ali, John Williams soundtracks, I’ve been listening to Monobloc and Suicide too.”

And then, of course, there’s his own record as well. Perhaps Bayley will be in a better place to savour the inevitable success this time. What he needs to remember, he says, is to put some me-time in among all the star-studded collaborating. “I love those offers. I love helping people with their records, I love writing with people,” he says. “I’m never going to say no to it, I’m just gonna make time to learn stuff on my own as well. I don’t think I’m particularly good at opening up in front of other people, and that’s what I need to make time for – to go into that place which I’m only really comfortable doing on my own.”

Bayley recently moved to a house on the outskirts of London, a place where he can shut himself off from the world and work on music by himself, the antithesis of the house on top of a big hill in LA. He got through the storm, though. Dave Bayley lost his footing there for a moment, now he’s got his swagger back.

‘I Love You So F***ing Much’ is out 19th July via Polydor. 

Tags: Glass Animals, From The Magazine, Features, Cover Features