Australia has always embraced Glass Animals, even since the days when the charmingly eccentric four-piece was struggling to draw in big enough crowds to cover the cost of their rider. Frontman Dave Bayley tells Time Out Melbourne that just days after playing to a completely empty room in Liverpool early in the band’s history, they arrived in Australia and sold out their first venues.
“We just asked for bread and hummus, that was our whole rider,” he says. But the five pound spread was too much to ask for when they’d sold a grand total of zero tickets.
Fast forward around a decade and things couldn’t be more different for the band. A Grammy nomination, a viral hit of the highest order and a Triple J Hottest 100 win all came off the back of their third album Dreamland, depositing Glass Animals in the peculiar position of reaching a new peak in a pandemic.
“It was quite a weird experience,” says Bayley. Afterwards, he tried to make up for lost time by “doing everything”, only to remember he’s deeply introverted.
“The world wants you to be an extravert, but I’m not really that. I had a bit of an existential crisis.”
That inflection point looked like falling ill and ending up locked in a house for two weeks, trying to “work out the meaning of life”. And of course, the prospect of getting to work on album number four loomed over the band like a cosmic cloud.
The world wants you to be an extravert
In the absence of distraction, the album “just spilled out” in a fortnight, in a process Bayley describes as lucky. And the answer to his hell of a question? Love. The result? Glass Animals’ fourth album I Love You So F***ing Much, a record packed with big feelings, bops and… references to outer space.
“Even if it’s sometimes sad and dark, love is a very complex and beautiful thing, and it swallows everything else whole,” says Bayley.
“The biggest thing in the universe, aside from that, is the universe,” he stresses. “It’s also a great representation of an existential crisis – a vacuum of cold, hard nothingness.”
For longtime fans, the new album reads as another twist down the road Bayley turned on with Dreamland: one towards sonic expansiveness and embracing the intimate.
“I’ve always felt a bit selfish writing personal songs,” says Bayley, before explaining his revelation that, counterintuitively, they’re often the most relatable. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all about “romantic, lovey dovey love”.
Take the opening track ‘Show Pony’, a meditation on the relationships Bayley saw growing up.
“We all have this blueprint of love that we form as a child, before we’ve worked out that love is even a word. We’re watching these things around us and these interactions between people around us and forming this idea of what an ideal love looks like.
“Watching our parents, watching our uncles, our neighbours, people in restaurants, people on the street, even with our pets as kids we’re forming these ideas.”
We all have this blueprint of love that we form as a child
If almost everything has changed for Glass Animals in the past decade (their status, their songwriting approach, their sound) the band's affinity with Australia has remained the same. If anything, it’s only grown, as evidenced by the fact that Bayley followed through on a promise to get the country tattooed on his behind if ‘Heatwaves’ won the Hottest 100.
As the band returns to Australia for another round of shows, Bayley assures us he doesn’t regret the ink.
“It’s healed great, no regrets,” he laughs. “Sometimes it scares me, I forget it’s there and I catch a little glimpse of it in the mirror and freak out. I think there’s a spider on my arse or something.”
But most of all, he says “it makes me smile”.
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