Today, global and platinum diamond-selling British band Glass Animals announce details of their fourth studio album, I Love You So F***ing Much, to be released on 19 July 2024 on Polydor Records/Universal Music Canada. 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. But 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”. ‘Creatures in Heaven’ is the sublime first glimpse into 10 intimate love stories set against the backdrop of the universe.
“I love you so f***ing much, I LOVE YOU SO F***ING MUCH, I love you SO f***ing MUCH, I love you so F***ING much, I LOVE you so f***ing MUCH. These words take on a different meaning every time you say them. The universe may make us feel overwhelmingly small, but we have this human connection that is far vaster and more mysterious. Love comes in an infinite number of forms and shapes and sizes. It is so complex, and so powerful that even witnessing the tiniest instance of it can change your life forever.” – Dave Bayley
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.
Wanting to bring fans into the sci-fi-inspired world of I Love You So F***ing Much early, Glass Animals set up a landing page that simply read “Panic. Answer the Question please” (a nod to Douglas Adams’ infamous Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy). With 15,000 questions posed to the band within the first couple of days, they set about trawling through them: What’s going on (existentially)? Will Glass Animals perform in Space? Are we hitchhiking the universe? What is the meaning of life? To Dave, it’s a continuation of the Open Source website the band started in the pandemic. A site where fans could download jpegs and mp3s from the band, share them and create their own artwork and tunes. Engaging with each other and Glass Animals in a deeper way, this modernist iteration of “Ask Me Anything” sparked a conversation around the power of love in a-what-can-sometimes-feel-like-a cold and loveless world.
In the build-up to today’s 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. More shows are due to be announced soon.
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 5 consecutive weeks in the Billboard 100. Having achieved Grammy and BRIT nominations, being crowned Triple J’s Hottest 100 winner, claiming over 44B global streams and becoming the first British band to achieve #1 in the Spotify global chart, whilst holding space in the Billboard Hot 100 for longer than the Weekends Blinding Lights. But the backdrop of this critical success was a band locked in their separate homes; a form of “detachment”.
Glass Animals toured the album when the world was just emerging from the pandemic. There was still so much unknown, and artists couldn’t get insurance for tours. “It was survival mode. We had to frontload the tour. We had no insurance on the shows. We just had to make them happen and be very careful. My manager and I wrote a manual that other artists ended up using at venues. Dreamland became the dream. We were basically jumping on stage, doing the show, then back in this silent metal tube [the bus]. It was quite odd. We were like, is this real?”. The four-piece; Dave, Drew MacFarlane (guitar, keys), Edmund Irwin-Singer (bass, keys) and Joe Seaward (drums) who all met at school, saw huge flashes of how far their music had come – from crowds outside buses to post-show street parties after the show spilling out of the New York subway – but all from the confines of the metal tube. This detachment was heightened when the band made it to the Grammys, only to be stopped before the event by Dave getting Covid. They had come so close to the tangible but were still so far away from it. Having sold well over 340K tickets globally, Glass Animals commenced their UK tour, headlining Alexandra Palace in a triumphant show to mark the end of 2021, and the end of a rollercoaster time that changed their lives forever. Finding sense in that chaos is where I Love You So F***ing Much begins. Join the love space odyssey today.
Live Pop-Ups
11 April – Pappy + Harriet’s, CA, USA
15 April – Mexico City
I Love You So F***ing Much Tracklist:
Show Pony
whatthehellishappening
Creatures in Heaven
Wonderful Nothing
A Tear in Space (Airlock)
ICMYFILA
How I Learned To Love Bomb
White Roses
On the Run
Lost in the Ocean
