Glass Animals - A natural knack for detail

On the occasion of the release of their debut album, "Zaba", we spoke on the phone with Joe Seaward, drummer of Glass Animals. From his answers, it's clear that the band takes great care over every detail of their work, but also that this desire doesn't stop them from feeling free to follow their own inspiration, without necessarily having to think about the reasons behind everything they decide to do.

I couldn't find any biographical notes online about how you all met and started out as a band. I wonder whether you're simply not interested in publicly explaining these things, perhaps because you think no one cares, but if it's not a problem I'd like to ask you to tell me something about it.

We met when we were 12, maybe 13 years old, we all went to school together and became friends because we already shared the same musical tastes back then, and we used to go to gigs together to see the bands we liked. We never thought about making music together until ten years after we first met, and then the band officially started once we'd finished university: Dave (vocals) turned up with some songs he'd written and we all said yes, we wanted to start a band. We'd never really thought much about it, but suddenly everything became very serious.

How do the songs come together? Does someone bring an idea to the band, like a melody or a structure, and then you all work on it together, or is the process more collective from the start?

Usually, Dave wakes up in the middle of the night, when there's no one around, and an idea for a song comes to him, and he puts it down - it might be some chords, or a vocal melody, or a simple rhythmic pattern; at that point he sends it to the rest of us and everyone works on it alone, then we get together and work on it all together. So it's always Dave who has the initial idea, but then we all work on it together.

Listening to your music, I get the impression of a balance between the huge number of elements present in the sound and the fact that the result is very immediate and easy to listen to right from the first listen. Is this a predetermined goal for you, or does it happen naturally?

I think it happens naturally, we've never sat down thinking we need to write a song that's catchy or whatever, I think we have very few songs that we've written and then never used. In general I find this a hard question to answer precisely because we never think too much about what we're doing, we just want to write songs that are good enough to be listened to by the whole world, and we realise that some of them have the merit of being catchy while others, for instance, focus more on atmosphere and filling space, but we simply notice these things once we already have them, our songwriting process is never something fully conscious.

In your work in particular, I notice a lot of attention to detail. I find that the rhythmic parts feature a lot of different sounds from one song to another. Do you work on this whole range of different sounds only when you rehearse with the band, or do you also do something on your own, or maybe just you and the bassist?

I spend a huge amount of time listening to music that I find rhythmically interesting. As a music fan I really like to always search for different things that I can find stimulating from a rhythmic point of view. I also make the others listen to songs that they don't like because they're not great melodically but have an interesting rhythmic part. I find hard rock very interesting rhythmically, and I also like what Radiohead do in that respect. Sometimes Dave takes inspiration from what I make him listen to and later comes up with sounds that suit that kind of rhythmic part, or other times we start from his sound and we imagine how to make it rhythmically interesting. So our rhythmic side is a combination of collective work, work I do on my own, and work that Dave and I do together. I put a huge amount of time into this, but I also have a lot of fun with it.

I imagine that for the first time you had to face the moment of choosing the singles to release before the album came out. How did you approach this task? Did you choose the singles yourselves or did the label? I find that all your songs could potentially be singles, so "Pools" and "Gooey" weren't necessarily the obvious choices, which is why I'd like to know if there were particular reasons why these two were chosen and not, for example, "Hazey", which has a really brilliant melody.

Part of the reasoning behind choosing "Gooey" is down to the fact that it was one of the first songs we worked on seriously in a proper studio, so it was the one we had in mind more than any other, because we'd spent more time on it, and so it felt natural to think of it as the single. We also thought that, compared to the EPs that had already come out, "Gooey" could offer listeners a different perspective on our sound while they waited for the whole album to arrive. You mention "Hazey", but actually there were already songs of that kind on the EPs, whereas by letting people hear "Gooey" before the album came out, we made it clear that our sound had more to offer. "Pools", on the other hand, we chose because it's the most pop and immediate moment on the record, and since we knew the album would come out in summer, we wanted there to already be a summery atmosphere in the single, which I think is a kind of Balearic song. Given the season, we needed a single that would grab people's attention straight away. Anyway, we thought about all this together with the label, but they never made us do anything, they just gave us advice and let us choose. As for "Hazey", though, it could never have been a single, because it was the last song we made, right at the end of the album-making process. Only two days before the date the album was supposed to be finished, Dave turned up with a new song asking what we thought of it, and that was "Hazey", so, given how late we made it, there was no way it could be a single.

Another issue you had to deal with for the first time as a band was choosing the tracklist. I get the impression that you decided to put the more upbeat, colourful songs in the first half of the album, while in the second half you put the more velvety ones, somewhat influenced by black music. Am I right?

Yes, you're right, but that's not the reason why we chose this order. We told ourselves that the album should be like a journey for the listener, and really every song can take you into different worlds, so we spent a long time, a really long time, deciding the order of the songs. I find that the album can be experienced as a journey, because from one song to the next you go up and down in terms of rhythm, and also because the songs themselves are different types - there are scary ones, calm ones, "Pools" is fun, "Wyrd" is one of the scary ones, there's a lot of feeling in general. So I don't really know why the more fun-oriented songs ended up in the first half and the more moody ones in the second half, but I like to think this is a good way of giving the listener energy.

How did you come to the decision to rearrange two songs that had already been released for the album? Did you go back to playing them together, or did someone suggest rearranging them for the record?

Initially, when we started recording the album, we didn't want to include any song that had already been released. But then, once we'd finished making the record, we realised that "Black Mambo" and "Cocoa Hooves" could offer two kinds of worlds and atmospheres that the album, as it stood, didn't have. So we went back to those two songs and told ourselves that, if we really wanted to put them on the record, it would be better if they were a bit different, otherwise people could just listen to them without having to get the album. So we redid the vocal parts and the drums and added some bass lines.

As for the videos, I've noticed that so far you've only released animations or footage without the classic presentation of the band actually playing. Is it that you simply don't like the idea of a video with the band playing, or did you just think it was better this way without ruling it out completely?

No, I don't think I can say we'll never appear in one of our videos. It's just that so far we've always wanted the videos to capture the essence of the song, and we feel the guy who's worked on our videos has really understood perfectly what we wanted. He's been great at always giving the songs an interesting perspective through the videos. We have no objection to appearing in videos, but it will only happen if we find a way to do it that respects our idea, which is that the video should capture the essence of the song.

What can we expect from your live shows after hearing the album? What are the similarities and differences between your songs in the studio and live?

The live version is quite different, it has a higher energy, it's faster. To decide how to reproduce the songs live, we sat down and tried to figure out what the core of each track was, which aspect was best represented in each one. Sometimes it's the electronic part, other times it's the part played with traditional instruments, it could be the bass or the guitar riffs or the drums. We start from what we consider the most important part and strip away what seems less relevant. I find this part of our work really fun, I like thinking about how to translate the songs as they appear on record into a live setting. Of course, it's impossible to recreate everything that's on the record live, but that's exactly why I think the live show is interesting, because it presents the songs in a different way.

Do you already know if there's a European tour planned for the band, maybe with some dates in Italy?

I really hope so, I love Italy, I've been there several times. At the moment we haven't been told anything about it yet, but I really hope so, I think there will be some shows in Europe after the summer, anyway.

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