A glass act

WHEN they finish touring with their debut album Zaba in the autumn, Glass Animals drummer Joe Seaward has one ambition – to sit down alone and listen to the record again with fresh ears.

“I think it will be an interesting thing to do,” he says. “That record was like a snapshot of who we were then.”

Oxford’s Glass Animals have come a long way in a very short time.

Seaward was a student at the University Of Sussex for three years – but his life changed in an unexpected way when he came home for the summer and met up with old schoolfriend Dave Bayley.

“Dave was big into DJing and had got really good,” says Seaward. “We always used to hang out in Oxford, listen to music and go to festivals together.

“When he went to uni he started fiddling about with DJing and producing electronic stuff, which he used to play to me. Then one day he said he had written a proper actual song.

“It wasn’t 100 million per cent out of the blue, but it was still quite a surprise – I had never heard him sing, or even thought about him singing.”

Soon Seaward and fellow schoolmates Drew MacFarlane and Edmund Irwin-Singer were helping Bayley develop his songs – many of which had been written in the middle of the night during long periods of insomnia.

“Dave has this crazy knack of writing things that I really relate to very strongly,” says Seaward. “It’s an amazing skill.”

So the story goes the band put their first songs up on the internet just to see what happened. All hell broke loose with millions of SoundCloud plays – particularly for lead single Gooey – and offers of record deals.

“Being in a band hadn’t occurred to me as something that was possible,” says Seaward. “I had never really thought about it – which makes everything we’re doing now even more exciting.”

The band finally signed with Adele producer Paul Epworth as the first band on his Wolf Tone label. They recorded their debut album Zaba at the Wolf Tone studios, with Epworth himself as executive producer.

“He had this room with everything that a band would need – amps, bass, guitar and drums – plus all these other instruments Paul had been adding to over the years,” says Seaward.

“We ended up using really bizarre stuff that we had never seen before. There were lots of children’s instruments lying around, so we would use these really expensive microphones to record all sorts of sounds. It was really hard to stop – we could have gone on fiddling and tinkering with things for eternity.”

The resultant album has a dense sound – packed with unusual percussion over laidback soundscapes, interspersed with fingersnaps, nagging keyboard riffs and Bayley’s simple hushed but layered vocals, which rarely raise above an indoors voice.

As for lyrical content the songs feel more about creating an atmosphere than making sense – packed with creatures including moles, voles, goats and birds, and infamously including a reference to “peanut butter vibes” in Gooey.

“The songs can be whatever you want them to mean,” says Seaward, adding the album title Zaba was chosen as a nonsense word with no other connotations.

The artwork of a slightly murky jungle scene, interspersed with flying carpets, monkeys and a Rubik’s Cube, underlines that feeling.

Overlaying the whole of the album was the idea of turning it into a unified whole, taking the listener onto a trip into the Glass Animals world.

“There are a lot of records I love where you can turn it on at the beginning of a bus trip somewhere, and the album finishes as the bus spits you out at the other end,” says Seaward.

“Albums like Dark Side Of The Moon do that – stretching a record in that way is really clever and interesting.

“We thought it would be cool to try to do our own version.

“Each song was like a different chapter of this world, or a different vision.

“When we finished making the album we tied it together with lots of field recordings to make the songs flow together and keep the listener in that world.”

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