Glass Animals

According to legend, Glass Animals chose their name by picking two words out of the dictionary at random—but you couldn’t come up with a better combination for a group that toes the line between the pristine and primal. On their 2014 debut, Zaba, the Oxford quartet aligned themselves with a storied lineage of abstract alt-rock—the moody atmospheres of Radiohead, the tropical textures of Animal Collective—but in Dave Bayley, Glass Animals possess an uncommonly smooth singer (and genre-bending producer) who could mold those left-field influences into sultry, R&B-flavored pop songs. That sense of anything-goes openness fully flourished on 2016’s How to Be a Human Being, whose procession of freaky, funky anthems and synth-smeared slow jams earned Glass Animals their first Mercury Prize nomination. But after drummer Joe Seaward was nearly killed in a 2018 cycling accident, Glass Animals dialed down the eccentricity for 2020’s Dreamland, a more intimate record that further harmonized the art-rock/club-pop dialectic at the heart of their music. Played especially close to the chest was “Heat Waves,” a quiet song near the end of the album that became a sleeper hit and topped charts in more than 10 countries. It’s about not recognizing yourself after enough time in a relationship, which foreshadows Bayley’s intimate focus on the intricacies of human emotion across Glass Animals’ 2024 follow-up I Love You So F***ing Much. That album used outer space as an inspiration for both its sonic and lyrical motifs, weaving references to air locks and classic sci-fi novels into songs meditating on how the rawness of love and hate can come through in the smallest run-ins with others. “You realize how powerful those human interactions [are],” Bayley told Apple Music. “Those relationships and those feelings are much bigger than everything else. The little things right in front of you are actually more important.”