"I HAD TO GET OUT OF THIS DOOM HOLE"

After breaking every record imaginable with mega-hit 'Heat Waves', Glass Animals' Dave Bayley came back down to earth with a bump. Fourth album I Love You So F***ing Much sees him sift through the existential wreckage and focus on the fundamentals

- WILL RICHARDS

GLASS ANIMALS' DAVE Bayley is a few minutes late for our video call but has a better excuse than most. “Sorry, there was an earthquake,” he says with half a smile from his Manhattan hotel room, moments after a 4.8-magnitude tremor rippled across New Jersey and into the city in early April.

Bayley has a strange ability to summon the elements. During a show at the legendary Red Rocks in Colorado back in 2017, he sang the lyrics “my thunder shook him down” from ‘The Other Side of Paradise’ at the exact moment thunder and lightning exploded in the sky in a coincidence genuinely too good to script. Suitably, the band’s fourth album, I Love You So F***ing Much, was also concocted during an ungodly storm.

In April 2023, the band’s singer and producer was in Los Angeles for writing sessions to create a follow-up for the band’s 2020 album, Dreamland, before a positive COVID test left him stranded in a hilltop AirBnB for a fortnight. Then a mighty storm arrived.

“The house was shaking in the wind,” he remembers. “I was wondering why the place was so cheap… and I got there, and it all clicked! I thought I could handle it, but when the rain came, it was a lot. The roads were flooded, and I would have had to walk down the mountain to safety. I just couldn’t hack it.”

In those two weeks, Bayley wrote the entirety of