With each album,
Glass Animals' bright, ear-catching music has gotten more revealing and approachable. On 2014's ZABA, their bubbly mix of indie, electronic, R&B, and hip-hop influences sounded like pop from another planet, with abstract lyrics to match (who can forget "Gooey"'s "peanut butter vibes"?). They got a little more down-to-earth with the character studies of 2016's Mercury Prize-nominated
How to Be a Human Being; now, on
Dreamland, singer/songwriter Dave Bayley lets his listeners get even closer by studying his own character. It's a change that was years in the making: Bayley began writing more autobiographical songs with
How to Be a Human Being's closing track, "Agnes," a tribute to a dear friend whose suicide affected him deeply. When
Glass Animals' drummer
Joe Seaward was seriously injured in a 2018 cycling accident, the band paused as he spent months learning how to talk, walk, and play music again. During this time, Bayley sharpened his songwriting and production skills by collaborating with
Flume and
6LACK, and his growing experience -- as well as the emotions stirred by
Seaward's healing process -- convinced him to dig into his own life and feelings for inspiration. His transformation into a more specific songwriter only makes
Dreamland's music richer, grounding his band's genre-defying approach with his own chameleonic past. Before moving to England, Bayley spent his early adolescence in Texas and immersed himself in '90s American pop culture that pops up in unexpected ways on these songs. On "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," he juxtaposes cartoon imagery, the sound of 2000s hip-hop, and memories of a childhood friend who later attempted a school shooting. Once again, Bayley's fluency at melding R&B and hip-hop elements into
Glass Animals' music makes it clear how deep his love for those genres is. The martial beat of "Your Love (Déjà Vu)" was inspired by
Timbaland and
the Neptunes as well as
Beyoncé's Coachella performance, while "Tokyo Drifting," a low-slung collaboration with
Denzel Curry, introduces Bayley's own Sasha Fierce, a character called Wavey Davey. Elsewhere,
Dreamland is just as musically layered and engaging as ever, with plenty of wiggly synths and bouncy beats on tracks such as "Tangerine" and "Melon and the Coconut" and slinky sensuality on "Hot Sugar."
Glass Animals' most cohesive and satisfying album to date,
Dreamland is a well-deserved triumph that's as rewarding for fans to hear as it was for the band to make. ~ Heather Phares