Two years ago, the gentle existence of Oxford wonky-pop band Glass Animals was turned upside down – all thanks to a blockbuster video game. “Quite often, I take my dog for a walk and people point and say: ’It's the FIFA guy!” laughs Dave Bayley, the band’s lead songwriter and vocalist.
In 2022, their single Heat Waves became the most popular FIFA soundtrack song of all time – beating artists like Billie Eilish, Blur and Bad Bunny – transforming it from a slow-burner into a full-blown hit, topping the US Billboard Charts after a record climb to the top lasting 59 weeks.
Added to its inclusion in one of the biggest video game franchises of all time, TikTok, and the song’s inclusion in a niche piece of fan-fiction about two YouTubers (yes, Bayley has read it), only fuelled the rise further.
No other song in history has had such remarkable longevity, making Glass Animals one of the UK’s most successful guitar bands.
Still, it’s not all glitz. “I’m in a very glamorous Southampton warehouse district,” Bayley says, setting the scene from the back of his tour van. “That’s a shopping trolley of tinnies,” he laughs. “They’re mine, actually.”
“Quite often, I take my dog for a walk and people point and say: ’it's the FIFA guy!”
He and the rest of Glass Animals – Drew MacFarlane, Edmund Irwin-Singe, and Joe Seaward – are currently on the road, in the middle of a “pre-tour” of smaller UK venues, where they’ve been treating fans to an advance preview of their fourth album I Love You So F***ing Much – which comes out today.
Though pineapples have been lighter on the ground this time (the fruit has been adopted as an unofficial mascot after a namecheck in their 2016 song Pork Soda; so many fans brought them along to shows that Reading and Leeds ended up banning them from the festival) the frontman has noticed a lot of “space cowboy” costumes, in keeping with the intergalactic imagery of the new record.
Though it all begins with space, I Love You So F***ing Much is primarily about another equally massive and universal theme: love. The “you” referenced in the title isn’t one particular person, and fuses together all manner of past relationships as Bayley explores how they’ve all helped to shape the person he is today.
“Space is often thought of as the biggest and most unconquerable thing in the universe, and a complete mystery,” he says, explaining how he landed on the concept. “It can spin you out into an existential crisis. I guess my argument for the record is that love, and the human connections we have, the relationships that we have, are way more complex, and more important. Those things are right here in front of us.”
“In Texas, we'd go on school trips to the slaughter house or the electric chair.”
This kind of deeply autobiographical songwriting feels like a relatively new development for Bayley, 35 who was previously far more interested in strangers’ lives than he was getting real about his feelings.
The singer and musician met the rest of Glass Animals at school in Oxford, but until he was in his mid-teens, he lived in Bryan, Texas. “I was brought up being told: ‘Don’t talk about yourself, help others.’ I never wanted to write anything personal, I thought it was selfish.”
Does he see that as a particularly Texan mentality? “I think it’s being a boy… in the South, it’s how it was: you keep your feelings to yourself.” Bayley has spoken before about how his childhood best friend attempted to take a gun into school; reflecting now, he also recalls a handful of school trips which were, in retrospect, pretty messed up. “ We'd go on school trips to the slaughter house or the electric chair. I feel like it's changed a lot, it’s not like that anymore.”
Accordingly, Glass Animal’s earliest music was rooted in a fantasy world. Their 2014 debut Zaba ignored emotional candour in favour of surrealist psychedelic imagery, all “peanut butter vibes” and talkative sloths.
Then, with 2016’s How To Be A Human Being, Glass Animals dedicated each song to a different fictional character’s story. Its deeply personal closer Agnes (written about a friend of Bayley’s who took their own life) felt like the only outlier, and paved the way for its far more personal follow-up Dreamland, released in the early days of lockdown.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that the record’s monumentally huge standout hit Heat Waves – which has been streamed more than 3 billion times, and gave Glass Animals their first Grammy nomination – stemmed from a similarly personal place. It is about missing a close friend who has died, and the spike of grief that occurs around their birthday each year. “Sometimes all I think about is you,” Bayley sings, “late nights in the middle of June.”
Though the warm response to Agnes encouraged Bayley to share more of himself in his music – ultimately paving the way to Heat Waves and this vulnerable new album – he explains that a devastating tragedy also played a crucial role in shaping his approach to music now.
In 2018, the band’s drummer Joe Seaward was critically injured after he collided with a lorry while cycling in Dublin. “He had a really bad accident, and nearly died,” Bayley says, “and we thought it was over.” Seaward broke his leg, fractured his skull, and was left with neurological injuries following the accident.
In a past life, prior to rising to fame with Glass Animals, Bayley studied medicine at King's College before switching to a degree in neuroscience. Was it difficult for Bayley, given that he understood the true severity of the situation better than any other family or friends supporting Seaward through that time?
“His parents had an amazing optimism that I think they needed to have,” he says. “Joe’s dad called me first, and was very optimistic about the whole situation, but when I got there, I knew….” he says, trailing off. “I didn’t realise until I saw him [Seaward], and then it was like, oh, this is 95 per cent going to end incredibly badly, be it a serious disability or something even worse,” he says, his voice faltering. “Sorry, I’m getting quite emotional thinking about it. It made it hard, because it felt like I was lying to his parents. It's very complex.”
“Our drummer, Joe, had a really bad accident, and nearly died - we thought it was over.”
Thanks to what Bayley calls the “miracle work” of the medical team, Seaward survived; he had two lengthy and incredibly complex operations to repair the damage to his skull and brain, and began the painstaking task of recovery, relearning how to speak, walk, eat, and play drums all over again.
Incredibly, two years later Seaward was able to return to touring with Glass Animals, and was greeted with the wildest cheers imaginable as he walked on stage in Manchester. “We played in Ireland not that long ago, and it was magic,” Bayley says. “Joe’s medical team came, the surgeon was there… it was so special.”
The giddyingly huge impact of Heat Waves – the song that transformed Glass Animals from a band of Oxford oddballs into one of the UK’s biggest and most successful bands, virtually overnight – has also been complicated to reckon with. Coincidentally, Dreamland — and Heat Waves — were both heavily influenced by nostalgia, which many people were instinctively reaching for during that period.
“It did something amazing and wonderful and took us to a really, really unexpected place. But while it was off doing that I was stuck at home in my pants, eating cereal, it was so weird,” Bayley laughs. “I couldn't be part of it. I couldn't witness it, except through emails, WhatsApp and TikTok… just watching numbers on a phone.” When Glass Animals were nominated for their first Grammy, a positive COVID test meant he couldn’t attend the ceremony.
When restrictions were lifted, “I said yes to everything, and all these amazing doors that opened.” Bayley began striking out as a collaborator, working with everyone from Joey Bada$$ to Florence and The Machine, co-producing the latter’s most recent album Dance Fever.
While he’s enjoyed all of these new experiences, he says that he was briefly swept up with all of the sales stats and fancy, celeb-heavy ‘dos. In the meantime, he lost sight of the thing he loves most of all: “sitting alone and writing songs”.
Bayley doesn’t want to rule out collaborating with the right names in the future; he’s been back in the studio with Florence Welch again, and beyond that there’s “some cool stuff bouncing around… I shouldn’t say anything else”.
So instead, I ask Bayley who’s on his bucket list. “I think Lana [Del Rey] is incredible,” he says. “I think it would be really fun to do something,” he says, with what appears to be a slight smirk.
I ask him if he is purposefully wiggling his eyebrows in a vaguely suggestive manner, but he chooses to ignore the question, instead continuing: “I’m a huge fan of Mitski. I’ve been listening to a lot of Blondshell, I love her record. I love Kevin Abstract…. and Lorde! That would be really cool.”
I Love You So F***ing Much meanwhile, is Bayley’s way of returning to a simpler, much more solitary creative place away from all of that. “The title,” he says, “is a very short love letter to an album that did a lot for me, and pulled me out of quite a strange place.”
