Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley tells how his bandmate’s serious injury helped inspire their latest album

TWO years ago, Glass Animals drummer Joe Seaward collided with a lorry while cycling in Dublin – his leg was broken and he suffered a complex skull fracture.

But following neurosurgery, he made an astonishing recovery, regaining his speech and rejoining the psychedelic-pop band for a series of emotionally-charged gigs. Singer Dave Bayley studied neuroscience at university and so had some understanding of the seriousness of his friend’s injuries. He remained at his bedside in the weeks following the crash, and the collective trauma of that time permeates Glass Animals’ third album, Dreamland.

“I was lying to his parents for quite a long time,” he recalls.

“I was saying ‘Oh, it’s absolutely fine, he’s going to be totally fine, don’t worry.’ But really inside I was like ‘He’s probably never going to play the drums again’.”

Dave formed the indie four-piece in Oxford in 2010, with childhood friend Seaward, Ed Irwin-Singer and Drew MacFarlane. And it was these memories, as well as those from his early years living in the small city of College Station, Texas, that began to emerge as he found himself in stasis, bound to his friend’s hospital bed.

“You’re not doing anything new or having new experiences so what you start to do, with all the adrenaline of waiting for news, you end up going really deep into memory and the past, and reliving old experiences,” he recollects. No surprise then that Dreamland is more intimate than its Mercury Prize-nominated predecessor, 2016’s How To Be A Human Being.

It tackles the cost of toxic masculinity and documents the nervous excitement of a burgeoning relationship. Despite the personal subject matter, Dave doesn’t lose his knack for an absurdist lyric such as on Tangerine (“Hands, knees, please/ Tangerine, sugar, honey, sweet”). The question of whether Joe would ever play again forced the band to face existential questions. Could they continue to play as Glass Animals without him?

“We basically didn’t know whether he was going to survive, or even if he was going to recover enough to talk or walk again.

“That led to questions about the band continuing at all.

“The future seemed pretty bleak.” Dreamland however, is an album drenched in optimism and named