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. 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”.
Glass Animals toured Dreamland 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.