Broken Glass Animals - Weird Text + wild Sound Effects = smarter Indie-Pop
Can one combine Pink Floyd, Dr. Dre, and a picture book classic named "The Zabajaba Jungle" to make good pop music? Indie-Band Glass Animals managed it. Ten years ago, they created their debut "Zaba" using these ingredients, blending their electropop with bizarre texts and sound experiments. Singer Dave Bayley recorded natural sounds near his house. The videos were fantastical, featuring plants sprouting and animals creeping in a psychedelic jungle and underwater world made of clay.
Dave Bayley, now 35, moved from Texas, USA, to Oxford, England, with his parents as a teenager. Later, he studied Neurosciences, formed a band, began writing songs in sleepless nights. For albums two and three, he thought up storylines. For "How To Be A Human Being," he invented various characters. There was a song about a girl who spent days on the sofa meowing and playing with mayonnaise from a glass. In another, Bayley sang about having a pineapple in his head. Fans loved the line, bringing the fruit to the band's concerts. Glass Animals were known for quirky art-pop, for intelligent fun.
They went from niche to high in the charts: Since their 2020 album "Dreamland," Glass Animals are considered one of the most important British bands, with the single "Heat Waves" spending record-breaking time in worldwide hit parades. The song has over three billion streams on Spotify. Fans eagerly awaited what strange world the Glass Animals would come up with next. On "I Love You So F***ing Much," another concept album, love is the theme, which initially doesn't sound very original. But of course, there's a twist: The band shoots heartfelt matters into space.
Dave Bayley answers the video call from his London home. He's just moved, things are lying on the floor, unpacked crates stand around. The chaos makes him nervous, he says: "I'm an order freak." Bayley talks about how doors opened after the success of "Heat Waves." He wrote for other musicians, produced albums, walked over many red carpets. And got lost in the process. "I'm an introverted person, I enjoy spending time alone, making music in my bedroom."
In the spring of 2022, he was supposed to go to the Grammy Awards but got Covid. He was in an Airbnb room in California when a storm approached, threatening to blow the wooden house off a cliff. "As I watched from the window as trees next to me were falling from the mountain, I thought I was going to die," Bayley recalls.
Where existential questions expand in the mind, those about the universe are not far behind. And since Bayley had always wanted to make music from star dust, he brought together two theme worlds that could not be more complex: the universe and love.
One of the ten new songs is about the childlike perspective on adult relationships, another about the moment that changed the way we look at love. "The universe gives us the feeling of being overwhelmingly small, but we have this human connection that is much more powerful and deeper," Bayley says.
To generate space-age Sound effects, Bayley searched the Internet and flea markets for old analog equipment "that sound like the future", built a new studio. Bassist Edmund Irwin-Singer and he worked on the instruments for a long time until they achieved a galactic sound. "I could talk for the next one and a half hours about the references hidden in the album", he says. "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", but also the textbook "Cosmic View" from 1957. In it, there is an illustration of the Earth being zoomed in on from space in 42 images, on a girl with a cat. The zoom goes deeper and deeper, from astronomically large to atomically small.
While the pop world of today doesn't always stand for surprises and originality, Glass Animals continue to spread a touch of magic. Unfortunately, the songs on the new album no longer enchant like the earlier works of the band. There are too few irritations, some songs sound smooth as a space capsule.
However, good pop remains, especially when one delves deeper into the matter.
Dave Bayley, drawing inspiration from his fascination with the universe and love, crafted lyrics for their new album that explore the contrast between our smallness in the cosmos and the powerful human connection. To capture the space-age sound he envisioned, Bayley scoured the Internet and flea markets for vintage analog equipment to create a futuristic tone.
Bayley grew curious about incorporating elements from iconic works like "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" into their music, alongside references from the 1957 textbook "Cosmic View" with its illustration of a girl and a cat, revealing the Earth's scale from the cosmos to the atomically small.
