Glass Animals deliver their latest single 'Creatures in Heaven', alongside the announcement of their fourth studio album.
I Love You So F***ing Much is set to be released on July 19 2024 on Polydor Records. It is the follow-up to 2020’s critically revered Dreamland, which sold over 12M copies globally and gave life to ‘Heat Waves’, the record-breaking song that became the biggest international hit from a British band in almost 30 years. It was the first song to reach #1 with a single writer and producer since Pharell’s ‘Happy’ and led to the pop world’s biggest acts, including Florence Welch, all wanting to work with Glass Animals frontman, songwriter and producer, Dave Bayley.
‘Creatures in Heaven’ is the sublime first glimpse into 10 intimate love stories set against the backdrop of the universe. Full of 70s analogue synths and a vast space-scale of production, ‘Creatures in Heaven’ tackles the moment: Are you here in the moment? Be in the moment. “It’s about a moment in time, be it a split second or a year or whatever, having the capacity to be enormously formative and life-changing. Even if it is over. Or if it doesn’t go as planned. Or if it dies too soon. It is still fucking beautiful. The love and care and the feeling in that moment lives forever. It never really dies. If that’s how you choose to see it,” says Dave.
Listen to ‘Creatures in Heaven’ by Glass Animals on the Premier League Playlist on Spotify.
The birth of I Love You So F***ing Much was an existential crisis. Dave found himself struggling to make sense of this newfound global stardom, having watched it all happen while the world was in lockdown. “Life can change dramatically, but sometimes you aren’t able to change as quickly on a personal level. You end up feeling like a spectator. And then you are asked and expected to be a certain type of person, a different person. But…I wasn’t sure how. It confused me to the point of not knowing who I was or if anything was real.”
It took being stranded on a cliff in a wooden house on stilts during one of California’s biggest storms in history to push that feeling into a full existential crisis. In forced isolation, watching trees tumble down mountains and assuming “death was coming,” Dave began asking questions of himself, of the universe and of the human experience: namely, love. As he came to accept himself as an introvert, Dave realised that “human connection and the love between us is much bigger, more important, and more complex than anything else”.
In the build-up to the album announcement cryptic flyposters, graffiti and billboards of the album’s title have been popping up globally since Valentine’s Day, with the band officially revealing the first visual taste of the album, the cosmic zoom, on socials earlier this month. Last week Dave began sharing “Desperately Seeking Dave” ads in local newspapers, prompting fans to find him for an exclusive play of the single before its release across London, NYC and Kansas City. Glass Animals have also announced intimate pop-up shows for this Spring, selling out instantly, they’ll be taking place in California (at the legendary Pappy + Harriet’s in The Mojave Desert) and Mexico City.
Having a bird’s-eye view of life is a view that Glass Animals have become comfortable with. Dreamland was released during the pandemic in 2020, and it was the album that elevated Glass Animals to mythical status. The single ‘Heat Waves’ broke records across the planet, becoming the first song by a British band since the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ in 1995, to claim #1 for five consecutive weeks in the Billboard 100. They also achieved Grammy and BRIT nominations, were crowned Triple J’s Hottest 100 winner, claimed over 44B global streams and becoming the first British band to achieve #1 in the Spotify global chart.
