Glass Animals: ‘Our drummer nearly died. An absolutely genius surgeon in Dublin saved his life’

In November 2021, Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley stood under the spotlight at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, blinking away tears. Watching from one of the venue’s VIP boxes was a surgical team from Beaumont Hospital – medics who, three years previously, had saved the life of the group’s drummer, Joe Seaward, after he was struck by a lorry while cycling around the city.

“He lived in Dublin for a long time. He very nearly died. We thought it was over – that the band was over,” says Bayley. “There was an absolutely genius surgeon in Dublin who saved his life. The whole nursing and physio team there literally resurrected him. It was incredible to watch and I’m so grateful to them. They came to the show the last time we were in Dublin. In one box was Joe’s family and the doctors and the nurses who took care of him.”

Bayley, a chatty, bespectacled pop-nerd, is nattering over Zoom as Glass Animals prepare to release their dark and delirious fourth album, I Love You So F***ing Much. It’s a big moment for the Oxford group as they follow up their pandemic global mega-hit Heat Waves – a tune Bayley wrote during the white heat of confusion and fear that followed Seaward’s July 2018 biking crash, during which his skull collapsed, causing damage to the area of the brain responsible for speech (upon regaining consciousness Seaward could initially only say “I”).

Speaking about the crash is emotional for Bayley, who rushed to his friend’s bedside at Beaumont and poured his anxiety into Heat Waves (one line goes: “You look so broken when you cry/ One more and then I say goodbye”) and into the accompanying 2020 LP Dreamland.

“I got the news from his dad,” is how he remembers the aftermath of Seaward’s brush with tragedy. “I’d just landed in London and got a call. I could tell as soon as I heard the tone. He was like, ‘Joe’s been hit’. He was playing it down. I think he was playing it down to himself. I got the red-eye flight in the morning, got there, met his family. Then it dawned on me how severe it was.”

He “spent weeks” hanging around Beaumont, trying to sleep on waiting-room benches and living out of the vending machine. It was in those moments of intense solitude that Heat Waves and all the success that followed percolated.

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“Weirdly that is where the third album [began]… your brain goes to weird places,” says Bayley. “Your adrenaline level is 100 out of 100. You’re not sleeping a wink because you’re worried. You’re sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair in a waiting room – expecting bad news. In those situations, to comfort yourself, you go back in time and relive all these memories. Those memories ended up being the foundation of that third record – a very strange time. I’m so happy it went the way it did [that Seaward survived – not that he was hurt in the first place]. Literally unbelievable – it’s a miracle.”

Heat Waves was released in June 2020 and slowly took on a life of its own. A woozy, dystopian love song somewhere between The Weeknd, Frank Ocean and Kid A-vintage Radiohead, it reached number one in the US on March 12th, 2022, after 59 weeks in the charts. The success was life-changing, elevating Glass Animals from a popular but essentially underground band to an arena-level affair (they play 3Arena Dublin on October 30th).

Bayley tries to put the achievement in perspective. Reaching number one was a slow boil, and the trajectory of Heat Waves had been obvious for some time. It helped, moreover, that they’d been around the block already, with Bayley and schoolfriends from Oxford having started the project while the singer was studying neuroscience at university.

“It was relatively late in our career. We’re 10 years in now. We had two albums before that. We started small, in a Ford Ka, touring England. We built our little foundations – maybe it was harder to destabilise us than for other acts [who have an overnight hit]. Also we have each other. There are four of us. We know each other so well. It still feels like a DIY thing. It feels like we’re four kids doing what we always did – trying to make music we love.”

Everywhere was in lockdown as Heat Waves became a phenomenon. At the time, it all felt massively abstract, recalls Bayley. It took going out into the world again for the scale of what the group had achieved to fully hit him.

“It was hard to believe. When we finally came out and walked on stage and felt it, it hit me like a wall,” he says. “It knocked me for six. I started crying immediately. I was overwhelmed. That didn’t leave me for the first 10 shows – it was so bizarre. Because it was such a big jump it didn’t feel real. It took me a long time to believe it.”

He admits to losing his way in the molten glow of Heat Waves. A wallflower by inclination, after topping the charts he did what he felt a successful musician should: he went to parties, hung out with other artists. He didn’t hate it. But nor was it for him.

“I went out and did everything. Tried to be extroverted, sociable. Writing and producing other people’s records [he worked with Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch and Taylor Swift producer Jack Antonoff]. Going to parties, to the red carpet. Going to everything. That lasted about six months. I didn’t make enough time to do the things that make me feel like me. What makes me feel like me was sitting alone in a house making music.”

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He was moving too fast, he realises today. He needed to be true to himself and accept it is fine to take a back seat and not be the life of the party. He was never the attention-seeking type. The new record soundtracks his struggle to be his old, authentic self again.

“Being introverted and being okay with that,” he nods. “You’re told it’s not okay. With social media and things like that a lot of people are making these thin connections – getting little dopamine hits. This album is arguing for a deeper real connection. Even though sometimes it stings and can be painful. Love can hurt. It’s not this beautiful thing that is always positive. It is beautiful in a different way. It’s beautiful because it’s jagged and can cut you and scrape you and leave you bruised. You come out the other end stronger. It’s a complex beast.”

Glass Animals released their debut, Zaba, in June 2014, with a follow-up, How to Be a Human Being, arriving in 2016. As was later the case with Heat Waves, they were initially a slow-burn affair. But the reviews were positive: the NME praised Human Being’s “sci-fi synths and massive drum beats” and MixMag swooned the outfit for their “stadium-sized potential”. They were building a hard-core following, too – fans who, noting the recurring mentions of pineapples in Bayley’s lyrics, would arrive at gig with the fruit – leading the Reading Festival to institute a controversial “pineapple ban” in 2017.

All these years later, they are ready to once again take a step up. I Love You So F***ing Much is a worthy companion piece to Heat Waves that builds on the achievements of that smash while pushing forward artistically.

Steeped in hyper-saturated walls of synth, it is a meditation on love that finds Bayley poking through the ashes of old relationships (“I don’t think I realise/just how much I miss you sometimes” he sings on Blade Runner-goes-hip-hop stomper Creatures In Heaven) and trying to distinguish between emotional intimacy and desire (“Love, do you want love? Do you want lust?” he notes on chilly krautrock banger, A Tear In Space – Airlock).

It’s a fraught affair that makes human connection feel like a roller-coaster – fun, sure, but also stressful and stomach-flipping. “It’s meant to go to sadness, to anger, all the different sides of love. It maybe starts off cynical. Eventually you’re meant to reach the conclusion that it’s okay to feel those things,” Bayley says.

“It’s okay to be sad, angry, vulnerable – feel lonely and isolated at points. It’s not all perfect, pure happiness. That would suck. The world is in a strange place. It would be psychotic if you wrote an extremely happy record.”

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He put together the bones of the album in Los Angeles. The plan was to have a sojourn in sunny Southern California and find his creative bearings. That went up in smoke as the city was hit by an extreme weather event. Talk about a holiday from hell: Bayley’s Airbnb was built on stilts overlooking a sheer drop below Mulholland Drive. Buffeted by biblical winds, there was a genuine danger that everything – the album, the house, Bayley – might be cast into oblivion.

He then came down with a mind-bending case of Covid. Obviously, none of it was any fun. Yet, in hindsight, it strikes him as the perfect environment to write a record. There’s nothing like living through a disaster movie to get the gears clicking.

“It almost pushed me over the edge – like literally over the edge. It was what I needed, to let the existential crisis blossom into full magnitude. I needed that push. That enforced pressure cooker that started it [the new LP] rolling.”

The sense of the world caving in was exacerbated by his sickness, he says. “It made me feel so doomy. When I had Covid in the house, it felt as if I was having a bad trip at the same time as being in a situation that felt insane. It was surreal. It was like I had taken magic mushrooms. And then the house looked like it was going to fall down the cliff, with all the trees around it.”

Beloved in both the United States and Europe, Glass Animals are a transatlantic success story writ large. That is fitting since Bayley lived in Massachusetts and Texas until the age of 13 when he moved to Oxford with his family – a shift that was traumatic at the time but which, he feels, brought an outsider perspective to his songwriting.

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“It’s a big change. It’s an age where you’re working a lot out. It’s a complex time, internally. To have that big change externally is a lot. I hated it initially. I was 13. At that point you’ve a few good friends. I had done a bit of time at a big American high school. It was huge – a 3,500-kid high school in Texas [in the city of College Station]. It was massive – a football team, all the American high school things. I came to England. It was like a warped version of Harry Potter, very strange.”

Despite the often dark and stormy tone of I Love You So F***ng Much, he’s in good spirits. Four years on from Heat Waves he is looking forward to finally putting out new music – and to returning to Dublin, a city bound up, for better and worse, in the history of Glass Animals.

“I get a little anxious with touring. Crowds of people – it’s just natural. Your inner instinct, your reflex, is to be anxious when you see a horde of people. I get over that quite quickly after playing one song. You feel the warmth. It’s encouraging. It becomes beautiful. You realise togetherness and community are what it’s all about.”

I Love You So F***ing Much is released on July 19th. Glass Animals play 3Arena, Dublin, on October 30th