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Jun 30, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Glass Animals

British four-piece Glass Animals are releasing a new album, Dreamland, on August 7 via Republic. Now they have shared another song from it, “Heat Waves,” via a video partially filmed on phones by neighbors of frontman Dave Bayley during the pandemic lockdown. Colin Reed directed the video and it features Bayley walking down an East London street pulling a wagon featuring AV equipment, while being filmed by neighbors from inside their homes. Watch it below.

Bayley had this to say about the video in a press release: “The ‘Heat Waves’ video is a love letter to live music and the culture and togetherness surrounding it. It was filmed at the peak of the lockdown in my neighborhood in East London by the lovely people who live around me, just using their phones. These are people who are usually out at shows, in galleries, going to cinemas, etc. These venues are left empty now, and many of them will not survive. The song is about loss and longing, and ultimately realizing you are unable to save something…and this video is about that but for art, being together and human contact. Huge love and thank you’s to everyone who got involved and helped out. When everyone was leaning out of their windows filming, I felt that same sense of togetherness and spine-tingling energy that happened at live shows. It made the coldness of performing to an empty room with the band stuck on screens feel even more heart-breaking.”

Previously the band shared the album’s first single, title track “Dreamland,” via a video made by Bayley while under quarantine via instructions from director Colin Read. “Dreamland” was one of our Songs of the Week. The album also includes “Your Love (Déjà vu),” a new song the band shared in February that was one of our Songs of the Week.

Dreamland is the follow-up to 2016’s How to Be a Human Being. It’s the band’s first album since drummer Joe Seaward was hit by a truck while cycling in Dublin in 2018, forcing them to cancel their remaining tour dates that year. The band also features guitarist/keyboardist Drew MacFarlane and bassist/keyboardist Ed Irwin-Singer.

Bayley had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “The idea for this album came at a time of confusion and uncertainty. My best friend was in the hospital. I didn’t know if he’d make it. The future was damn scary and completely unknown. During those weeks in the hospital, it was so difficult to look forwards that I found myself looking backwards. Digging around in my mind, pulling up old memories, finding comfort in them even if they were uncomfortable in themselves. Speaking to friends and family, I’ve realized that a lot of people are experiencing a similar sort of confusion now. Everything that we thought we could see clearly in front of us has been thrown into the air, and all the while, we can’t be out finding our footing. We can’t be out creating new memories, so…we’re diving back head-first into the old ones. I hear that in conversations. I see it in what people are watching on TV. In what we’re listening to. In what we’re eating. In dreams.”

Speaking about the themes on the album, Bayley had this to say: “This album goes through many of the most confusing moments in my life. It’s about growing up, from my first memories as a little kid to now. Quite often those moments are funny, sometimes awkward, sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes it’s about love or hate or sexuality. It’s about realizing it’s ok to not have answers and it’s ok to not know how you feel about things and that it’s ok to be and look vulnerable. In fact, all of that is quite exciting. So often life asks us for binary yes or no answers. It asks us to conform and to fit in. But the world is so much more interesting and colorful than that…it’s a much more fluid and uncertain place.”

With Seaward recovered, Glass Animals returned to touring earlier this year, but obviously the rest of their touring plans for 2020 are up in the air due to COVID-19. Bayley commented in the previous press release: “I spent weeks devastated that our big plans to bring this album to you in real life on a stage were shattered…but, somehow, in all the uncertainty and before all the unknowns…right now seems like the most insane, but also the most apt time to reveal this record. Growing up is a strange time, the hospital was a strange time and here we are in a strange time again.”

Glass Animals also recently launched the Quarantine Covers series, where they have covered such songs as Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” and Lana Del Rey’s “Young & Beautiful.”

Read our review of How to Be a Human Being here.

Read our 2016 interview with Glass Animals here.

Read our 2016 Artist Survey interview with Glass Animals here.

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