Glass Animals Unplugged: In Conversation with Dave Bayley

With British pop act Glass Animals winding up their Tour of Earth at Lollapalooza India 2025, Mumbai last week, we catch up with the band’s founder and singer-songwriter Dave Bayley about their journey so far, songwriting and more. Excerpts:

Rolling Stone India: Let’s begin at the beginning. How did this all happen and how did you arrive at the name Glass Animals?

Dave Bayley: Oh my gosh, that’s going back quite a long way. It’s been a long journey. I used to DJ for a little bit of pocket money when I was at college and I would get home and be wired because it’s a lot of adrenaline and so I started making a bit of music. I had a terrible little Casio keyboard and a really old laptop and I started making songs and shared them to the band. And they were like “This is cool, put it on the Internet!” That was the Golden Antlers era. The name actually came from the Glass Animals my grandma used to collect.

So, your grandma’s happy?

I hope so! She would never let me play with the glass animals…not allowed. You could only look at them.

It’s difficult to pin down your genre of music because every album sounds so different. What would you say is the genre Glass Animals falls into?

Oh my god! That’s hard. It’s just music, you know? It’s really tricky. To me, my voice just sounds weird (Laughs), like when you hear yourself on an answering machine. It’s just kind of hard to explain.

How does a song come to you? How do you catch it?

Well, I’m pretty lucky in that. I’ve never really had to force it. I quite often wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea, I’ll record it. Like a melody, words. That’s normally how it starts. I’ll record that. I used to have a tape thing and I have a little tiny studio in my house. So I can rush there in the middle of the night if I have an idea and develop it. Sometimes, I’ll listen to the voice memo in the morning and develop it that day. If it’s a good enough idea there’ll be a song at the end of it.

So, Dreamland was literally born from a dream?

Yeah, yeah… that’s the amazing thing about music. It’s magical; who knows where it comes from? Of course, there are tricks if you get stuck. If some are half finished, you can trigger your brain to finish it off.

Does your neuroscience background influence your music and creative process in any way?

Woah. There’s a bit of it there subconsciously, definitely. And also, when I was doing that degree, it taught me how to work hard. I’m a bit of a nerd (Laughs) and I kind of hide these little nerdy things in the music… little musical jokes. And it definitely changes the music in that way. The other thing is I was doing a lot of psychiatry stuff as well. And I used to meet lots of people and ask lots of different questions… you think about what makes people, people. What makes us all different and connects us all. You spend a lot of time thinking about that when you’re doing psychiatry. And I think that’s definitely bled into the music.

The album Zaba is really dark and abstract. Where does that come from? Is that from when you were researching?

There’s definitely an element of that, and there are references to that in the lyrics. But also ‘cause music was new and happening at the same time. I was kind of shy. You can tell Zaba was quite shy, listening back to it now. It’s kind of abstract and the vocals were quite mumbling and quiet. It sounds like a nerd who’s doing science and making music but kind of shy about it.

How to Be a Human Being, in contrast, was a lot less abstract. It’s like little stories condensed into a song…

Zaba happened. We ended up touring a lot. When you’re on tour, you meet people every day. All sorts of people. I used to walk around cities and bump into people on public transport, after the show and taxi drivers… you hear all sorts of stories and you relate to some of them strongly. And so, I kind of adapted those stories into songs.

And you hope it reaches them?

Yeah! There’s one song, “Pork Soda.” That was from someone I met after a show and she had a tattoo that had ‘Pork Soda’ on her wrist.

Dreamland felt a lot more personal than the previous albums. How did that transition happen?

You know…there’s a song at the end of How to Be a Human Being called “Agnes.” It was really personal and I didn’t really want to put it on the album. But I played it for the band and actually [drummer] Joe [Seward]’s dad — who has always kind of been there and supportive — started to cry and said “You have to put it on the album.” It was the most personal song I had written at that point. I tacked it on at the end of the album and the response to that song was so amazing. It gave me enough confidence to go in a more personal direction.

I Love You So F***ing Much feels like a raw version of Dreamland exposed. How did the inspiration of a space-themed album happen?

I love space. I love space movies, the retro space movies and I love the soundtracks in them. I always wanted to do something like that, set in space. Space is cold, space is really like vacuum, it’s pretty clinical. And I tried to do something with that in mind and it felt like that. Until I had the confidence to write something really personal at the core and use the space to frame it and that becomes quite a powerful tool to frame really personal things with an existential soundscape. It works!

There’s a lot of existential, cosmic dread that one often associates with space and it comes through here. Considering that the sound of space is vacuum, how did you capture the sound of space? It feels both retro and futuristic at the same time…

Well, I tried to do something more modern first. It felt too cold and the obvious route to go was retro future. I love Space Odyssey, the first Blade Runner, I love the old Doctor Who radio series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… so there’s lyrical references too and sound references. We’ve got the old sound synthesizers and guitar pedals that they used in making those kinds of retro soundtracks that were made to sound like the future. So, they have this warmth. It’s analog warmth and there’s a nostalgic comfort to a lot of the songs and soundtracks. And I had to lean into that heavily to make it feel not too cold.

What was the most difficult song on this album to write?

I think that “Show Pony” was the most difficult from a lyrical standpoint. [It has an] on the nose, honest and quite touchy subject matter. Everyone grows up witnessing love around them before they experience it. You see it in parents, you see it in friends, people around you, pets… And you build this idea of love and sadness as you grow up and everyone has a slightly different one… This is like my representation of my experience of love growing up.

So, the album was about different kinds of love. Which song was the most fun to write? And which one do you like performing the most?

“Wonderful Nothing” is really cheeky and kind of mean. It’s like a relationship between love and hate. “On the Run” is quite cheeky too, I like that. It’s like running away, being quite fearful. It’s an interesting side of love and fear. That’s quite fun, it’s like faking your own death. I just like that idea.

Since How to Be a Human Being was written while you were on tour, could we expect another tour album?

Maybe… I think there’ll definitely be a subconscious influence there because we spent so much time touring. I don’t think it will be quite as direct as How to Be a Human Being… [we’re] going to do something different.

If there was one song by someone else that you wish you’d written or sung, what would that be?

Oh, that’s hard. I really love Nina Simone; she has some incredible songs but I don’t think I would do it justice. Otis Redding did that song, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” I love that song and he didn’t quite finish it. So that would be a cool one.

Which version of “Lost in the Ocean“ do you like the most? Swamp version, gorge version, the normal version?

I like that it’s taking on different lives. Maybe there’ll be another version. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of what else we could do…maybe we could do something here… there could be a kind of version in India… I like mixing it up. I feel like playing live has made me realize that there’s not really a definitive version of anything. You can keep changing it.

Will we be getting the stripped-back releases of the songs on I Love You So F***ing Much?

Very interesting… we might be working on something. But I can’t say anymore.