Ahead of the weekend, Glass Animals released How To Be A Human Being, their much anticipated second album. As a follow up to their 2014 debut Zaba, this new collection of music has seen the Oxford group continue to pursue an ambitious approach to their craft and the final result has been a joy to listen to (check out our review HERE).
While in Australia a few months back for some east coast dates, we caught up with Joe Seaward and Dave Bayley in Melbourne to touch base and find out more about the album. The last time we saw the band play, we were in Germany for Lollapalooza Berlin, where we were smacked with the realisation that Glass Animals weren’t simply a ‘cool band of the month’ type. Huge crowds and an enviably growing international profile steering them through the festival circuit, Glass Animals’ live show has developed into something massive since Zaba‘s release.
Sitting down with the twosome back in July, they’re refreshed after having spent the last few months off the road and squirrelled away.
“These Australian shows are some of our first for ages; we’ve been locked away, not seeing humans, making music.”
On how new music worked its way into Glass Animals’ on-road schedule, both in terms of writing and recording, Bayley comments on the band’s defined move to make everything larger on album number two. Go hard.
“It happened quite naturally, I think, but at the same time I think when we were making that first record, we were pretty shy. We’d never made a record before, we’d never been in a band before. We had no clue what we were doing. We were like, “Oh – we have a chance to make a second record now, that’s great! Let’s just go properly go bolder.”…There’s weird stuff happening on this record, that we were a bit too shy to do last time. ”
“We had more fun, I think.” Joe agrees. “We were less scared of getting stuff wrong. I feel like it was quite a natural progression. We didn’t set out to radically change anything, but it kind of happened.”
Watch the full interview below!
How To Be A Human Being is out now via Caroline Australia.
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Images by Briana Davis.
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