LISTENING to the lyrics of Glass Animals’ breakout single Life Itself, you might be slightly concerned about singer and lyricist Dave Bayley.

“I can’t get a job, so I live with my mum...I sit in the car and I listen to static” are two early snippets and the alarm rather escalates from there. “I’m waking up, lost in boxes outside Tesco... looking like a bum, sipping Codeine Coca-Cola.”

All this before the moody, hip-hop influenced verse gives way to a euphoric rush of a chorus. It is a Glass Animals trademark – merging together contrasting emotional tones and textures.

Bayley’s lyrics throughout this year’s sophomore record How to Be a Human Being are partly built around tidbits of conversation and background chatter he overheard while on tour. While there are autobiographical elements to the album, Bayley, who studied neuroscience at university, says he thinks “writing about other people is infinitely more interesting than writing about yourself”. So perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into his lyrics and be too worried about him.

“A lot of these people were talking about loss and sadness but the sad story might be told with a happy face. If you look past that, though, there is a lot of unhappiness going on. One woman told me a story and she was crying all through it but she was also being very positive about life.”

Was he ever caught in the act of secretly recording these people revealing their inner lives? “Yeah, sometimes, and you just have to say ‘sorry’. It was probably quite a strange thing to do, looking back on it.” A lot of journalists have drawn seemingly reductive lines between neuroscience and the art of musicmaking but Bayley reckons that his subject of study might have influenced him more than meets the eye.

“In fact, I’m 100 per cent sure that the science has had an impact. Neuroscience is about rules and following them and you have that with music. You learn the classic side of it but then when you get into a studio the instinctive side kicks in. If you channelled that instinct when working on people’s brains, though, you might be in trouble.”

There is certainly no sign of trouble in the Glass Animals camp right now, with the band gearing up to play such a prestigious venue as Brighton Dome. I speak to Bayley on the eve of a performance in Nashville where the stage props include 15ft cactuses and a disco ball bigger than a normal-sized man. Because of his father’s job, Bayley lived in Texas between the ages of seven and eight and he says his hip-hop obsession while in the States has some part to play in Glass Animals’ success in America now.

“I’m sure that that sound has wormed its way into our ours a little bit. My mum didn’t like me listening to hip-hop so I used to secretly listen to it on MTV before she got home from work.”

The band were the first act to be signed to mega producer Paul Epworth’s label Wolf Tone. “It was amazing,” says the singer of the link-up with the man behind the sound of Adele and Coldplay. “He identified influences in our music that I didn’t even know myself were there.” With such lyrical and musical nuance, it seems unlikely that Glass Animals’ rise in profile will halt anytime soon.

Glass Animals, The Brighton Dome, Church Street, Saturday, October 22, 7.30pm, £16.50, 01273 709709, For more information visit: brightondome.org