Dave Bayley, frontman of Oxford psych-pop quartet Glass Animals, has always embraced the fantastical. The group’s debut set Lewis Carroll-worthy lyrics over R&B production, while their follow-up – 2016’s How to Be a Human Being, the album that turned them into Radio 1 stars and Mercury nominees – filtered other people’s life stories through Bayley’s technicolour imagination. But the very end of that record marked a shift, with the quiet ballad Agnes exploring his own experience of grief. Following that album, the band experienced a collective trauma when their drummer, Joe Seaward, suffered a near-fatal brain injury. As he began his long recovery, his bandmates started to dig deeper than ever before.
The result is Dreamland: an intimate record interspersed with home recordings. It retains their hallucinogenic sound but injects it with more glimmers of autobiography than they’ve ever previously shared. On the sombre, slow It’s All So Incredibly Loud, Bayley sings about those terrible silent seconds after something hurtful has been said (“Whispers would deafen me now”) over a rush of synths that build to a blinding crescendo. Alongside reflective moments like these, some of Glass Animals’ usual bombast – like the swaggering production on Tokyo Drifting and the nonsensical chorus of Tangerine (“Hands, knees, please, tangerine”) begins to feel a little like self-pastiche. But nothing can take away the power of tracks like Domestic Bliss: a strings-assisted story of domestic violence that’s both soft and searing.
