Glass Animals - Dreamland

Pitchfork 57

The UK psych-pop band stretches out to embrace hip-hop production and personal biography. It comes across like a guy trying to tell you his life story in a packed Coachella tent.

The Guardian 0

(Polydor)
Trauma has triggered a more inward-looking exploration of the Oxford quartet’s grandstanding, hallucinogenic sound

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.