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 screaming back every word, so loud on crossover smash “Heat Waves” that you couldn’t even hear Bayley sing. A video screen bigger than you could see peripherally. Multiple rooms connected to the venue bringing the album’s cover art aesthetic and stage design to life.
But Bayley, who was working on album release show plans as far back as early 2020, probably wasn’t expecting them to take place in August 2022 – almost exactly two years after the album was released.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit as the English indie pop quartet were on a U.S. tour of small venues, which saw them road-testing some of the songs that would end up 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 stage setup and design – but the band, like the rest of us, were forced into quarantine.
“I honestly thought it was going to be two weeks,” Bayley remembers. “We put everything in a truck and asked the truck to wait until we got back. We didn’t come back.”
Things were just starting to kick into gear for that larger 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, along with partner Chris “Squib” Swain, has also worked with Liam Gallagher, Dua Lipa, Foals, Arlo Parks and others.
“It got to the point with production and design that it was all custom and about to be made,” Hill says. “I think it was about a week away from making an arena’s worth of big set pieces, like huge, large-scale stuff.”
Glass Animals
On May 10, 2020, Bayley wrote on Instagram when announcing Glass Animals’ third album, “I spent weeks devastated that our big plans to bring this album to you in real life on a stage were shattered.” The band didn’t even get to finally play the songs from Dreamland in front of a real, in-person audience for a year and a half.
Announced a couple weeks beforehand, the band’s first show back ended up being on a makeshift stage in the parking lot in the back of a bar in Carrboro, North Carolina, a small town of 21,000. The gig was meant to be a test show of sorts ahead of a major North American tour kicking off in August 2021, the goldilocks period after the COVID-19 vaccine was first available. But after a year that saw the band’s profile begin to rise considerably, it was also the first time they got to see how fans would react live to the then not-so-new-anymore album’s tracks. It wasn’t how they planned it, but it was extremely emotional.
“We just wanted to be as low profile as possible, just dip our toes back in the water,” Bayley says. “I think that was the first show back for a lot of people. It was just a concrete space and there were buildings all around us. I don’t think a huge amount happens in Carrboro, North Carolina, and all the people were crammed on top of the buildings. I think we sold a couple hundred tickets, but the whole town turned up. You could see people dancing on rooftops miles off.”
Though the Brooklyn Mirage shows, dubbed Dreamland.IRL, were much bigger than the one in Carrboro last year, that sort of energy has only gotten more infectious. Bayley, guitarist Drew MacFarlane, bassist Edmund Irwin-Singer and drummer Joe Seaward fed off the crowd, running and dancing all over the stage as their fans ate it all up.
It wasn’t just the band that upped the ante for these two gigs, but also 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 doused in purple and pink hues showcasing the objects typically adorning the stage — some even straight from the album cover art, like a giant neon basketball hoop and pool sign — for fans to take pictures with. It was a way to turn the band’s vision, initially created via 3D printing, to life. “It needed to be real and immersive,” Hill says.
Perhaps even more impressive was the venue’s wraparound video screen during the show, controlled by Alex Noel, the band’s touring live director. Because Glass Animals don’t use backing tracks during their shows, the video programming all happened live, using technology that no one had ever used on this scale.
“Basically they said it was going to be too much for any large number of computers to handle,” Noel says. “All of the video content was created in real time as the show was happening, from a built scene running in essentially a video game. All of the elements within all of the video content was controlled from a live lighting desk that I was operating.”
The shows capped off a magical and frustrating two years for Glass Animals, as the group reached levels of popularity they could never have dreamed of, all while contending with a deadly pandemic. But one thing’s for sure, the Dreamland.IRL shows were more far-reaching than what they were planning in 2020: “In a way, it’s great having it at the end because we could make it bigger and more ambitious than we ever initially imagined,” the band’s manager Amy Morgan says. “But originally, it was a lot smaller and we planned to bring it to more places. I hope we can do that next time.”
It’s clear that these shows wouldn’t have been this massive if 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 throw ideas at the wall, almost all of which worked out on a staggering scale.
“No one’s left a guidebook behind 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. No one at the label knew how to put out an album in a pandemic so they were like, ‘What do you want to do?’ I could do mad things like put all the stems for all the songs on the internet for free and they were like, ‘Fuck it, we don’t have any ideas right now. We don’t know how to do this, so you have free rein.’ And it was sort of amazing.”
The band and Morgan were able to try what Bayley calls “experiments,” everything from quarantine cover sessions on Instagram Live to releasing a song with facial recognition software, giving fans access to the same 3D printed objects on the album’s cover art (which later graced the stage of the Dreamland tour and the immersive Dreamland.IRL experience) to performing a meticulously designed livestreamed set.
“When you get back that kind of creative energy and feedback from people, that’s what was keeping me going,” Bayley says. “I’d be so excited to wake up and see what people had made with the artwork.”
A lot of the band’s outreach to fans was borne from the darkest months of the pandemic. Like the rest of us, Bayley missed human connection, channeling it into an ever-deepening 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-ever song, “Heat Waves.”
The band knew the song — somehow the fourth single from the album — was doing well, seeing as it was their first single to ever hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart. But its 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 No. 14 on the Hot 100, it’s enjoyed the fifth-longest top 10 run in chart history — and is currently just nine weeks away from breaking the record for longest amount of time on the chart in general, having stuck around for 82 total weeks so far.
It hasn’t really even sunk in for the band: “I certainly haven’t sat down for a second and thought about how that song has [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 before a show in Dublin, the same city where, three and a half years earlier, drummer Seaward suffered a catastrophic bicycle accident, derailing the band’s tour at the time to help him recover and later directly influencing Dreamland. But Bayley tested positive for COVID-19 the morning of the awards ceremony and the band didn’t end up attending. (They lost to Olivia Rodrigo.)
Glass Animals’ last two and a half years have proven that good things really do come to those who wait: Bayley talks at length about feeling like everyone was in a pressure cooker for that year plus without shows, just heating up, waiting to finally let loose, dance and sing once again. “The pressure cooker exploded and the volume of the voices singing every word, it floored me,” he remembers when thinking back to those first handful of shows on last year’s tour.
That energy from the fans just gets more and more intense as the crowds continue to swell and the band’s profile keeps rising. At the first night of the Brooklyn Mirage “Dreamland.IRL” shows last week, Bayley spent time between multiple songs just soaking it all in and basking in the glow of 6,000 adoring fans.
“I’m so glad we finally got to do this!” Bayley exclaimed onstage after thanking the band’s crew, label and manager (even prompting an “AMY! AMY! AMY!” chant for Morgan). “We’ll 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 clawing out of the pandemic, it’s safe to say he probably won’t be coming down anytime soon.
