When Dave Bayley was brainstorming his ideal album release show to launch his band Glass Animals’ third album, dreamland, last week’s two shows at the 6,000-capacity Brooklyn Mirage were everything he could have dreamed of and more: thousands of fans shouting back every word, so loud on crossover smash “Heat Waves” you’ll have Bayley couldn’t even hear them sing. A video screen bigger than you could see at the edge. Multiple rooms connected to the venue bring to life the album cover aesthetic and stage design.
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But Bayley, who was already working on plans to release albums in early 2020, probably didn’t expect them to take place in August 2022 — almost exactly two years after the album was released.
The COVID-19 pandemic struck as the English indie pop quartet toured the US through small venues, testing some of the tracks on the road that would end on dreamland. At the time, they were finalizing plans for a much larger tour to coincide with the album’s release, complete with an ambitious set-up and design – but the band, like the rest of us, was forced into quarantine.
“I really thought it would take two weeks,” Bayley recalls. “We put everything in a truck and asked the truck to wait until we got back. We didn’t come back.”
Things were just getting started for that bigger tour, says Dan Hill, a design partner at Cassius Creative, a lighting and production agency that worked with the band to develop their stage design for the tour. Hill has also collaborated with partner Chris “Squib” Swain with Liam Gallagher, Dua Lipa, Foals, Arlo Parks and others.
“It got to the point with manufacturing and design where it was all custom and about to be made,” says Hill. “I think it was about a week away from making an arena of big set pieces, like huge, large-scale things.”
Glass Animals
Drew Perez
On May 10, 2020 Bayley wrote on Instagram upon the announcement of Glass Animals’ third album, “I was devastated for weeks that our grand plans to bring this album to a real-life stage were shattered.” The band didn’t even get a chance to finally play the songs from dreamland a year and a half in front of a real, personal audience.
Announced a few weeks in advance, the band’s first show ended up being on a makeshift stage in the parking lot behind a bar in Carrboro, North Carolina, a small town of 21,000. The performance was intended as a sort of test show ahead of a major North American tour that kicked off in August 2021, the goldilocks period after the COVID-19 vaccine was first available. But after a year in which the band’s profile began to rise significantly, it was also the first time they got to see how fans would react live to the album’s not-so-new songs. It wasn’t how they planned it, but it was extremely emotional.
“We just wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible, just dip our toes back in the water,” Bayley says. “I think this was the first show for a lot of people. It was just a concrete space and there were buildings all around us. I don’t think there’s a lot going on in Carrboro, North Carolina, and all the people were crammed on top of the buildings. I think we sold a few hundred tickets, but the whole town showed up. You could see people dancing on rooftops for miles.”
Although the Brooklyn Mirage shows, called Dreamland.IRL, were a lot bigger than the one in Carrboro last year, that kind of energy has only gotten more contagious. Bayley, guitarist Drew MacFarlane, bassist Edmund Irwin-Singer and drummer Joe Seaward fed on the crowd, running and dancing across the stage as their fans ate it all.
It wasn’t just the band that raised the bar for these two performances, but the band’s crew as well. In a space connected to the venue, they brought the audience directly into the world of dreamland, with multiple rooms suffused with purple and pink hues that showcase the objects that typically grace the stage — some even straight from the album cover, such as a giant neon basketball hoop and pool backboard — for fans to take photos with. It was a way to bring the band’s vision, which was initially created through 3D printing, to life. “It had to be real and compelling,” Hill says.
Perhaps even more impressive was the hall’s enveloping video screen during the show, directed by Alex Noel, the band’s live touring director. Because Glass Animals don’t use backing tracks during their shows, the video programming was all done live, using technology that no one had ever used on this scale.
“Basically, they said it would be too much for a large number of computers,” says Noel. “All of the video content was created in real time as the show was taking place, from a built-in scene essentially running in a video game. All elements in all video content were controlled from a live lighting table that I operated.
The shows capped off a magical and frustrating two years for Glass Animals, as the group achieved popularity they could never have dreamed of as they battled a deadly pandemic. But one thing is for sure, the Dreamland.IRL shows were more sweeping than what they planned to be in 2020: “In a way, it’s great to have it at the end because we were able to make it bigger and more ambitious than we initially imagined.” suggested,” says the band’s manager Amy Morgan. “But originally it was a lot smaller and we planned to take it to more places. I hope we can do that next time.”
Obviously, these shows wouldn’t have been as great were it not for the risks the band and its team were willing to take as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing Bayley and Morgan to be creative and take ideas to the next level. the wall, almost all of which came out on a staggering scale.
“Nobody left a guidebook on how to release an album in a pandemic,” Bayley says. “But also because there was no rulebook, there was no road that was normally taken. Nobody at the label knew how to release an album during a pandemic, so they said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I could do crazy things like put all the stems for all the songs on the internet for free and they’d say, ‘Fuck it, we’re out of ideas right now. We don’t know how to do this, so you have free rein.’ And it was kind of amazing.”
The band and Morgan were able to try what Bayley calls “experiments,” anything from quarantine cover sessions on Instagram Live to release a song with facial recognition software, giving fans access to the same 3D-printed objects on the album cover (which later graced the Dreamland tour stage and immersive Dreamland.IRL experience) to performing a carefully designed livestream set.
“When you get that kind of creative energy and feedback from people, that’s what kept me going,” Bayley says. “I would be so excited to wake up and see what people had made with the artwork.”
Much of the band’s reach to fans grew out of the darkest months of the pandemic. Like the rest of us, Bayley lacked the human connection, leading to an ever-deeper relationship with the band’s growing fans. That led to the band reaching higher peaks than ever before, including the gradual, stunning rise of their biggest song ever, “Heat Waves.”
The band knew the song — somehow the album’s fourth single — was doing well, as it was their first single to ever hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart. But the slow rise to No. 1 after 59 weeks on the chart, the longest climb in chart history, was unexpected to say the least. Currently at number 14 on the Hot 100, it has enjoyed the fifth longest top 10 run in chart history — and is currently just nine weeks away from breaking the record for longest time on the chart overall, after staying 82 total weeks to date.
It doesn’t even get through to the band: “I certainly didn’t sit still for a second and thought about how that song [changed] and will change our lives,” Bayley says.
The group was also nominated for Best New Artist at the 2022 Grammys, a nomination they heard about for a show in Dublin, the same city where drummer Seaward suffered a catastrophic bicycle accident three and a half years earlier, which left the band’s tour on the time to help him recover and directly influence later dreamland. But Bayley tested positive for COVID-19 on the morning of the awards ceremony and the band ended up not attending. (She lost to Olivia Rodrigo.)
The last two and a half years of Glass Animals have proven that good things come to those who wait: Bayley talks at length about feeling like everyone was in a pressure cooker that year plus no shows, just warming up, waiting to finally let go, dance and sing one more time. “The pressure cooker exploded and the volume of the voices singing every word touched me,” he recalls, recalling those first handful of shows on last year’s tour.
That fan energy only intensifies as the crowd continues to swell and the band’s profile continues to grow. On the first night of the Brooklyn Mirage “Dreamland.IRL” shows last week, Bayley spent time between songs to take it all in and bask in the glow of 6,000 adoring fans.
“I’m so glad we were finally able to do this!” exclaimed Bayley onstage after thanking the band’s crew, label, and manager (even asking for an “AMY! AMY! AMY!” chant for Morgan). “We will never forget this one!”
“I felt like I was floating the whole time,” he says two days later. And with the band’s massive success coming out of the pandemic, it’s safe to say it probably won’t be coming anytime soon.
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