Hospitals aren’t normally known for producing excellent music, but in the case of Glass Animals, a medical emergency for one of its members resulted in a breakthrough record and a Grammy nomination.
Joe Seaward, a drummer, was hit by a truck while riding his bike in Dublin in 2018, leaving him fighting for his life. Under the harsh florescent lights, Dave Bayley, the quartet’s lyricist, singer, and producer, spent many hours next to his friend in the hospital, the future unknown.
“Hospitals are strange places, and I suppose that’s why they make you nostalgic.” You’re seeking solace in the past. So that was the album’s beginnings,” Bayley explains. “I started writing these memories down and looking for more, and some of them were fantastic. Some of them are quite unsettling.”
On Oct. 29, 2021, Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley performs at the Outside Lands Music Festival in San Francisco. The group has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of best new artist. (Image courtesy of Amy Harris/Invision/AP/File)
The result was the extremely personal “Dreamland,” which was steeped in Bailey’s past. There are jokes about Scooby-Doo, Fruit Loops, Pepsi Blue, and Mr. Miyagi, but there’s also a song about domestic abuse (“Domestic Bliss”) and a song about an old acquaintance who plotted but never carried out a school massacre (“Space Ghost Coast to Coast”).
“Heat Waves,” a dreamy, hazy track that remembers a dead buddy whose birthday brings pain each June, is the album’s standout single. It was a slow-burning smash, only reaching the top ten of Billboard’s Hot 100 after 42 weeks on the chart, the longest climb to the top ten in chart history in the United States. The song has surpassed 1 billion Spotify streams, putting it alongside Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” and BTS’ “Dynamite.”
“‘Dreamland’ was written before we heard about COVID-19, but it was written during a time of personal turmoil for Dave and the band — in the aftermath of Joe’s injury,” Amy Morgan, the band’s manager, explains.
“‘Heat Waves,’ for example, is a very personal love song about loss, but it resonated with me because I believe it expresses a really universal sense of loss — which, unfortunately, is at the forefront of all of our hearts right now.”
Glass Animals were also nominated for a Grammy Award for best new artist, which is a little surprising for a band whose debut album was released in 2014. They’ll compete against Olivia Rodrigo, Saweetie, Finneas, Japanese Breakfast, The Kid Laroi, and Arlo Parks later this month. The band has also been nominated for two Brit Awards.
Bayley feels the epidemic is to blame for some of the album’s success. Many listeners, seeing the future as dismal, sought solace in the past, just as he had done in the hospital.
“They were in a situation comparable to mine when I was writing a lot of this record,” he explains. “Everyone was cooped up indoors.” They were listening to songs from their childhood. They were eating the meal with which they had grown up. They were looking for solace in those settings and recreating old experiences since they couldn’t be out making new ones.”
The introspective roots of “Dreamland” may be found on the band’s previous album, “How to Be a Human Being,” on which Bailey wrote each song from the perspective of someone else. The most recent, “Agnes,” was about a band member who committed suicide. It was Bayley’s most intimate song, and it signaled a shift in his creative style.
He refused to include it on the CD. He played it for the rest of the band, who insisted it be included on the record right away. Later, fans wrote letters to Bayley, expressing their gratitude for the song and encouraging her to focus more on herself.
“It gave me a lot of courage to write more personal things after that answer,” he says. “The songs of my favorite writers that have meant the most to me are when they speak about something personal and make you feel less alone.”
There was something missing when the songs were finished — “a little glue,” he explains. Bayley looked for a common thread that connected everything and concluded it was his mother. He’d recently scanned old camcorder films she’d made when he and his brother were youngsters, and he blended some of her narrations into album interludes to make “Dreamland” even more intimate.
For hard-core fans, he also added some subliminal messages — there’s something in Morse Code in the midst of the vinyl record, and another message that can be heard on a different track if you reverse it. The CD was finally finished, but the band’s tour plans were canceled due to the epidemic.
“Everything had to be fully rethought.” And in some ways, it made us more open-minded,” Bailey says. “No one left a handbook on how to release an album in a pandemic during the Spanish flu.”
Glass Animals began giving the CD out — literally — with the consent of their record label. Fans could download each piece of the songs and artwork from an open source website. Their song was used in TikTok videos and by Minecrafters after they invited remixes. Submissions of fan stories and artwork inspired by “Dreamland” flooded in.
“Every morning, I’d be excited to see what was coming in.” “That was my gasoline,” Bailey explains. “I was like, ‘We don’t know what to do,'” she said. This is beneficial to me. ‘Perhaps it will be of assistance to others.’
The band, their labels, and their reps were adaptable and imaginative, according to Avery Lipman, president, co-founder, and chief operating officer of Republic Records. “In a historic way, Glass Animals have defied gravity,” he explains.