Glass Animals
Before they were a band, the boys of Glass Animals were a bunch of music-loving juvenile delinquents.
“We would sort of run out of school and go in stores during lunch time at the local music shop,” says frontman Dave Bayley. Along with friends Drew MacFarlane, Edmund Irwin-Singer and Joe Seaward, Bayley plays psychedelic English rock.
The band was the first to sign to Wolf Tone, Paul Epworth’s label. Epworth’s credits include Adele, Coldplay, Bruno Mars and others; his resume is topped off with a handful Grammys and an Academy Award. For Bayley, the meaning of signing with Epworth is a little more personal than just a connection to his critically acclaimed production work.
“He kind of soundtracked our youth,” Bayley says. “We’d always go to the local club together and see our favorite bands. Most of those bands we went to see were produced by him.” These bands included Bloc Party and The Rapture, among the other Epworth-produced “indie guitar” bands Bayley and his friends grew up listening to.
Although the band ran together growing up, they didn’t really become a group until after university. Bayley originally went to medical school but switched to a bachelor’s in neuroscience when he decided to pursue his career as a musician. He started playing shows, and with his friends right there in the audience, he saw an opportunity.
“I kinda told them, ‘You’re in a band’ and they said ‘OK!’ It worked out pretty well,” Bayley says. It seems to be going alright for them so far, with new album Zaba released in June.
The guys struck up a friendship based on similar tastes in music, which has carried over into their success, Bayley says. Before shows, they throw back to old school hip-hop, a little Nas, a little Biggie. Bayley is “obsessed with Animal Collective” and draws from Hendrix and The Velvet Underground.
You’d think Bayley’s medical background influences the articulate, science-psychedelic sounds of Glass Animals, but he thinks it does quite the opposite. Making music and practicing science are, after all, very different, he says. “It’s very much based on gut instinct in music,” Bayley explains. “You can’t really do that with medicine. You have to apply your knowledge all the time. Whereas music is just about forgetting everything you’ve learned about music and just going with it.” Bayley was interested in psychiatry when he was in school, though, and draws lyrical ideas from the patients he met and their stories.
Creative storytelling shines in their music videos, like the claymation-animated track Psylla. Little blob creatures meld into other little blob creatures to the peppy-trippy tune.
Bayley’s excited to play LouFest after an out-of-control festival experience at South by Southwest earlier this year. “It was carnage, but it was amazing. Like a fun kind of carnage,” Bayley says of playing a festival. “You basically throw everything—all of your equipment—on stage, plug it all in, and hope to God it works.”
But live shows aren’t about the hectic feel, Bayley says. They’re about relying on the elements of performance, like feeling out the crowd. If they’re playing a tame afternoon crowd, they can go for a more ambient, mellow feel, and chill out.
“If we’re playing a 1 a.m. slot, and everyone’s taken ecstasy, and everyone in the front row has pupils the size of golf balls,” he says that those are the conditions in which they can “go a bit crazier.” It’s all about keeping the music malleable, and themselves flexible as well.
“You just have to embrace the mess, and go with it,” he says.
