England's indie poppers

Glass Animals: The search for love and normality

Where do you go when a song conquers the whole world? It took the Glass Animals a whole four years to come up with a hopefully satisfactory answer.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Universal Music, Lillie Eiger)

With the song "Heat Waves", British indie pop band Glass Animals scored a virtual global hit during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Now life has returned and frontman Dave Bayley and his band are looking for a permanent place in it. In the "Krone" interview, the singer talks about worries and fears - along with the release of the new album "I Love You So Fu***ng Much".

Dave Bayley is the somewhat different musician of the indie pop scene. When he does research for the music of his band Glass Animals, he doesn't settle for half measures. For his second album "How To Be A Human Being", released in 2016, the then little-known Brit approached complete strangers on the street to ask them intimate questions and process them in his music. His big breakthrough followed in 2020 with "Dreamland". Before that, drummer Joe Seaward almost lost his life after a cycling accident and first had to learn to eat, speak and walk again. The former medical student Bayley kept a watchful eye at his friend's bedside and, in the meantime, got the troubles of his own past off his chest. Growing up in Texas, surrounded by rednecks and toxic masculinity. "Dreamland" contained the single "Heat Waves", which became perhaps the biggest song of the coronavirus years worldwide.

Overnight global success
It was the first song by a British band since "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls in 1995 to occupy the number one position in the American Billboard charts for five weeks, was nominated for a BRIT Award, conquered the charts around the globe and has been streamed almost 50 billion times on all possible platforms to date. The gentle indie pop track struck at the heart of a young generation forced to stand still and was exemplary for a pioneering early success of the video platform TikTok, which was not yet booming at the time. A group of music-loving nerds suddenly became global stars who had to watch their rapidly rising fame from their living rooms because of lockdown. "I still don't know exactly what to make of it," laughs Bayley in the "Krone" talk, "I don't think I'm quite finished processing this success yet."

The Glass Animals toured as early as possible with the top hit behind them. The safety concept for touring during the pandemic, which Bayley and his band management had drawn up as well as possible, was gratefully used as a blueprint by other bands. "It was crazy. We were playing all these big shows, being enthusiastic and then being strictly ushered back into the tour bus. The album 'Dreamland' really became a dream where we often wondered if what was happening to us was actually real." The incredible success of "Heat Waves" made Bayley an indie darling. Florence Welch from Florence + The Machine secured his songwriting services and the next Glass Animals album had to wait. The unbridled success of "Heat Waves" could not be shaken off and, unsurprisingly, served as the main motivation to write new songs for the band again.

Observer of himself
"Sometimes in life it's impossible to adapt as quickly as success actually demands of you." The success that the Glass Animals have experienced in recent years has felt alienating for the introverted Bayley. "You feel a bit like an observer of yourself, somehow feeling like you have to behave in a special way or fulfill outside expectations. Sometimes that confused me so much that nothing really felt real anymore." When a wild storm hit California, Bayley was isolated in a house near a cliff. The carousel of thoughts began to spin and the singer realized that "the human connection and the love between all of us is much stronger, more important and more complex than anything else". This realization ultimately led to the new single "Creatures In Heaven", which, accompanied by 70s synthesizers, is considered the most important of the new ten song chapters and lives fully in the moment. "Whatever is happening right now, life is damn beautiful. That's what I wanted to remind myself of."

The fourth album "I Love You So Fu***ng Much" is the result of Bayley's existential crisis, which subsumed the strange mixture of forced isolation and burgeoning international fame online. The Glass Animals once again relied on direct proximity to their fans. Even during the pandemic, they opened an open source website where fans could download, edit and make images and mp3 files their own. During the preparation phase for the new album, a landing page was launched where fans and interested parties could ask questions. There were around 15,000 after just a few days. These included questions such as "Will the Glass Animals ever perform in space?" and "What is the meaning of life?" It was a feast for a passionate nerd like Dave Bayley, who turned this long-distance discussion into a rough concept about existential love in all its facets.

Criticism as a compliment
"The best music always comes out of the most difficult situations," says Bayley, "I have to go deep inside myself and feel uncomfortable. Only then does something really come out of it". I Love You So Fu***ng Much" is another album that is actually three different albums. Songs like the extraterrestrial "A Tear In Space (Airlock)" are vehemently different from the self-referential opener "Show Pony" or the dystopian mindset banger "How I Learned To Love The Bomb". "We were always criticized for the fact that the songs on an album often sounded too different. I always saw that as a compliment. I couldn't imagine anything more boring than repeating myself. When you write a new album, you always have to forget everything that came before. You start from scratch, there is no before. That's the approach I go back to every few years."

The Glass Animals not only give Bayley a way to express his feelings and emotions, but also to foster an intrinsic desire for community and connection with his listeners. "The craziest, best things often come out of a community. You just have to dare and let yourself fall into that collective. As people, we are always stronger and more powerful together than alone. Especially after the corona years, I feel this particularly intensely, it gives me strength. And what gives us the certainty that everything will remain as relaxed and open as we feel and experience it again now?" Bayley is a constant doubter who is not seduced by the successes of the present or the praise of the past. This is one of the main reasons why the Glass Animals still show no signs of wear and tear on "I Love You So Fu***ng Much". Pop won't sound any warmer this summer.