Glass Animals - A rainbow of sounds

Glass Animals are an English band from Oxford, formed in 2010, who have managed to achieve huge popular success without sacrificing too much of their creativity. The core of the band is made up of four members who met back in high school: multi-instrumentalist frontman Dave Bayley; Drew MacFarlane (guitar, keyboards); Edmund Irwin-Singer (bass, keyboards); Joe Seaward (drums). They've forged a chameleonic musical style of psychedelic pop, with frequent electronic injections and other contaminations. Their sound recalls the elaborate melodic and rhythmic fantasies of Alt-J, but also evokes the sweetly hallucinated, vintage aesthetic of certain psychedelia of the era.
Like other acts with enormous popular success, their commercial strength lies in their ability to win over very different audiences: those drawn to psychedelia, but also those seeking sophisticated, ever-shifting contemporary pop, those who simply enjoy the relaxed atmospheres of their music, or those who just follow the hit. It would be a mistake to write them off as a one hit wonder, reducing them to the hugely famous "Heat Waves" alone: Glass Animals are far more than that enormously successful track.

The early EPs and the jungle psychedelia of "Zaba"

​The debut EP Leaflings (2012) offers four tracks that sketch out a soft, melodic and enchanting psychedelia from the very start, with the mysterious, subtly unsettling opener "Golden Antlers". It's warm music, a lucid dream that continues with "Cocoa Hooves", the more electronic "Dust In Your Pockets", and "Cocoa Hooves Part II". In 2013 the band released the short EP Black Mambo/Exxus in Europe and the self-titled EP Glass Animals, which essentially absorbs the previous one. Richly arranged, especially in its rhythms and vocals, it's a refinement of the ideas found on Leaflings. Above all, the nocturnal "Black Mambo", a fog-wrapped folk-pop-rock track inspired by "Breaking Bad", demonstrates the evocative power of this music and its lyrics.

“What’ll it be now, Mr. Mole?”
Whispers sloth in curls of smoke
“Take a back seat, or play pharaoh
Dance with me and shake your bones”

The debut album Zaba arrived in 2014 and formalised their psychedelic, melodic and evocative pop, produced using techniques drawn from electronic music and hip-hop. A melodic fabric led by the voice is laid over sumptuous tribal, exotic rhythms, born of Bayley's passion for the children's book "The Zabajaba Jungle". The songs are polished and alluring, thanks also to r'n'b and soul touches, tight dynamic control and velvety vocals.
"Flip" is a sweet dance with voices hypnotically intertwining over a jungle rhythm, building to a final explosion. The already familiar "Black Mambo" slots perfectly into the tracklist, leading into the jazzy sway of "Pools", built on drums and assorted rhythmic sounds. Synthesizers emerge from the fog at the start of "Gooey", before the voice and, naturally, the mysterious percussion join in; the vocal whispers as though trying to keep the lyrics secret, even as the arrangement grows more robust. "Gooey" became their first major hit, going double platinum at home and earning notable recognition in Australia and Canada.
With the formula established, all that's left is to play variations on it. Sometimes more sensual ("Walla Walla"), sometimes more atmospheric (the instrumental "Intruxx"), Glass Animals can also start from an elegant beat to weave contemporary soul textures, as on "Hazey", or head towards rockier shores, as on "Toes". Elsewhere they lean into more mechanical tribalism, as on "Wyrd". "JDNT" even winks at dub, with its evocative reverbs and the chimes of what sounds like a vibraphone. We also find, in a reworked version, "Cocoa Hooves", elegant and lush, a crescendo of sophisticated pop.

Zaba is psychedelic pop from the jungle, built on lush rhythms and seductive melodies. It's an album that occasionally leans towards different styles and musical traditions, while retaining a chameleonic, shifting identity that adds considerably to its appeal.
Promotional activity saw the band perform on major US television shows, as well as a massive 2015 tour comprising more than one hundred and thirty shows.

A rainbow of sounds: "How To Be A Human Being"

​The band's second studio chapter is How To Be A Human Being (2016). The whole album grew out of events Bayley experienced while on tour, with each track conceived to tell a different story. The cover art depicts the characters from the stories told across the album. Among the band's many promotional ideas was an interactive website dedicated to some of these characters.
Even livelier and more colourful than its predecessor, How To Be A Human Being is a rainbow of electronic, psychedelic pop, with particularly meticulous attention paid to rhythm. The melodic interplay of the debut has become even more elaborate, and the arrangements shift frequently, adding fresh elements that keep interest alive.
Jungle sounds remain central on the opener "Life Itself", packed with melodic detail but also driven by a sticky chorus. It tells a story of alienation and anxiety through sharp, cutting lyrics.

I can’t get a job, so I live with my mom
I take her money but not quite enough
I make my own fun in Grandmama’s basement
Said I look mad, she said I look wasted

The more nostalgic "Youth", another perfectly tuned rhythmic machine, sets up the bleeps and video-game sounds of "Season 2 Episode 3", a wildly colorful oddity that hides a faint unease. The hallucinated side of their electronic pop breaks loose on "Pork Soda", with the iconic pineapple line in the chorus:

Pineapples are in my head
(Pineapples are in my head)
Got nobody ‘cause I’m brain-dead
(Got nobody ‘cause I’m brain-dead)

The dark side of this dreamy music is fully revealed on "Mama's Gun", whose chorus obsessively repeats "In the summer silence, I was getting violent/ In the summer silence, I was doing nothing". A cocaine addict is at the centre of "Cane Shuga", a track with a rapped chorus, filtered vocals and a synthesizer up front. The band also takes harmonic risks, for instance on "The Other Side Of Paradise", an elaborate, hallucinated pop-rap piece. There's also room for a majestic, orchestral electronic rock track ("Take A Slice") as well as an emotional guitar-driven pop-rock number ("Poplar St").
The finale is another moment to remember: "Agnes" tells of the suicide of a friend, letting the pop drift over layers of synthesizers and circling around a choral refrain once again built on two repeated lines ("You're gone but you're on my mind/ I'm lost but I don't know why").

How To Be A Human Being is an electronic, psychedelic, shape-shifting pop album that proves more ambitious than what we heard on Zaba. Not only do the compositions feel more sophisticated, but the lyrics have become more ambiguous and nuanced, as mutable as the arrangements themselves. Rhythm remains central, a lush backdrop against which every track moves and on which the melodic elements rest.
Sadly, in July 2018 drummer Joe Seaward was seriously injured after being hit by a truck while cycling in Dublin, an accident that forced the group to cancel all remaining live commitments to allow for his lengthy recovery.

The huge success of "Heat Waves" and "Dreamland"

​It was precisely during the long hours spent by Seaward's hospital bedside that Dave Bayley began jotting down notes and digging into his own childhood memories, laying the groundwork for the band's third studio album, Dreamland, released in 2020. Conceived as a decidedly more autobiographical work, it leans more heavily on the pop and r'n'b sound of the turn of the millennium, always filtered through a psychedelic, nostalgic lens. The vaporwave aesthetic and the neon colours used on the cover and other visual material tied to the album confirm this pull towards a past of wistful memories, complete with references to the pop culture of the era: from Pokémon to "Street Fighter", from Michael Jordan to "Friends". Reinforcing all this, the album intersperses its songs with home movie footage of Bayley's own childhood, shot by his mother. "Dreamland: The Home Movies", posted on YouTube and also made available to the public on VHS, shows this childhood footage.
It remains difficult to pin down their style with precision, but it's clear that Dreamland leans further towards r'n'b and hip-hop, especially that of artists like Missy Elliott, Dr. Dre, Eminem and Timbaland.
The melancholic texture of the opening "Dreamland" introduces this nostalgic journey, produced with great attention to detail. Softer and more relaxed, at times drowsy, it's an album that feels almost too smoothed out. The lively rhythmic richness of the past is now toned down and wrapped in layers of melody and atmospheric synths. Still, tracks like "Hot Sugar", with a beat worthy of Timbaland, the menacing Dr. Dre-style r'n'b of "Space Ghost Coast To Coast" and the futuristic hip-hop of "Tokyo Drifting", featuring a notable contribution from Denzel Curry, enrich the first half of the album.
The livelier "Your Love (Déjà Vu)", another Timbaland-esque moment, and the psychedelic carousel of "Waterfalls Coming Out Your Mouth" provide further jolts of life on an album otherwise sedated by nostalgia. Their electronic pop veers dangerously close to the more generic, recent output of Coldplay. Fortunately, lighting up the final stretch of the tracklist is "Heat Waves". The decade's most famous piece of psychedelic pop didn't find success straight away, winning over audiences slowly but with absolutely extraordinary results. Its epic climb to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 took a staggering 59 weeks. Its 91-week stay on the chart stood, for three years between 2022 and 2025, as an all-time record. In 2024 the song passed 3 billion streams on Spotify. Its commercial certifications are record-breaking: triple diamond in Brazil and diamond single status in Canada, France, Germany, Poland and the United States, along with more than 120 platinum awards collected around the world, from New Zealand to Italy.
Centred on the theme of loss and the psychological processing that follows, and tied to the painful memory of a friend of Bayley's who died in June — hence the references to that month in the lyrics — it's a classic case of an immensely popular song concealing a far more complex construction. For example, a pitched-down voice functions as the bass. The vocals, layered multiple times, create an enveloping, dreamlike choir effect, most striking in the chorus. The old jungle sounds are now replaced by a drum machine. Despite the dramatic lyrics, the song remains thoroughly engaging thanks to an arrangement that knows how to shift gears, opening with lo-fi sounds, for instance, and closing with a skeletal beat.

With Dreamland, Glass Animals gained access to a much wider audience but lost some of their defining vitality, replaced by a nostalgic melancholy and songs that are more melodic and less rhythmic. Despite its excessive polish, this third album nonetheless retains some of the elements that made the project matter in the first place.

The weight of success and the flop of "I Love You So F***ing Much"

Despite heavy promotion, the fourth album, I Love You So F***ing Much (2024), is a flop. Commercially, nothing comes close to the success of "Heat Waves". Critically, too, the response has been decidedly lukewarm. Centred on the theme of love — not exactly an inspired creative choice — it's an album poisoned by boredom, one that retreats dangerously into generic pop-rock territory.
The opener "Show Pony" falls far short of the band's once-complex mechanisms, sounding instead like background music, and rather dated background music at that. This negative impression is confirmed, unfortunately, by the mediocre tracks that follow, worthy of the cut-rate sound of the worst Maroon 5.
When "Wonderful Nothing" rediscovers their blend of electronics, pop, r'n'b and hip-hop, it sounds like a ray of light in the dark. Sadly, there's then room for the overly straightforward electronics of "A Tear In Space (Airlock)" or for a half-hearted rehash of their biggest hit in the far more banal "White Roses".

The impression is that the already precarious balance of Dreamland has led to a total creative derailment, perhaps conceived to cash in on their dazzling success. All that's left is to hope for a change of course.

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