Glass Animals’ début album Zaba, released in 2014, has sold nearly half a million copies worldwide and gained over 200 million Spotify streams so far, exceeding all the initial expectations placed on the band. This unprecedented rise to popularity came primarily through keen fans who have been sharing the record primarily via word of mouth, rather than a souped-up PR campaign. Of course extensive touring across both hemispheres hasn't hurt either, maximising their opportunities to convert those all-important fans. By all accounts, Glass Animals are a captivating live band, and that live energy has been a prime inspiration for much of their highly-anticipated second album How To Be A Human Being, which will be released by Caroline International/Wolf Tone on 26th August, steering the band towards heavier beats and bigger bass: the sort of tracks that have been getting the crowd going.

The album has been foreshadowed by the single 'Life Itself', with its hip-hop-influenced tribal beats, exotic flavour and catchy hooks, it has been boosting their reputation to new heights. It sets the tone for the new record and has become a serious ear-worm for the summer – I've been hearing it everywhere! It tells the story of an outcast, living off his mum, making his own fun in his grandma's basement. Dave Bayley's distinctive breathy, and often American-accented vocal, might give you the impression this track belongs to the open highways of the States, but pay a little closer attention to the lyrics and you'll notice the tragic English heart to it all, especially when the song's outsider protagonist awakes in a pile of boxes outside Tesco: “Thought that I was northern Camden's own Flash Gordon”!

The juxtaposition of mundane, routine, real-life lyrical themes set against the exotic sweep of the musical backdrop, implies a spirit of adventure found in the most unlikely places. Apparently Bayley gained inspiration for the lyrics by recording hours of incidental conversations on his phone while the band were on their extensive tours, “I try to sneakily record people, and I have hours and hours of these amazing rants from taxi drivers, strange people we met outside of shows, people at parties. People say the strangest shit when they don’t think they’re ever gonna see you again.” Bayley's master-stroke is taking these snippets of conversation and crafting them into the narrative story-lines that work so well throughout the album, giving the whole record a sense of pace and purpose that takes you back to the road (and the drink) time and time again. I also suspect that some of these phone recordings may have been sampled and made it onto the album, in some of the seg-way sections between tracks. A great example is the pitched down rant of '[Premade Sandwiches]', which seems a good candidate for a real-life monologue that's been messed with in the studio to create an odd atmospheric interlude.

Second track, 'Youth', follows on from 'Life Itself' at a similar pace, up-beat but mid-tempo, with plenty of that tribal percussion. Dave delivers a softer, lilting melody for the verses and then the chorus kicks in sounding a little reminiscent of Outkast, with a densely layered vocal with playful synthetic flutes fluttering above. Changing the mode a little 'Season 2, Episode 3' has a luxuriously lavish gospel-tinged vocal intro before stripping down to a funky, soulful electric piano line, punctuated by what sound like computer game sounds. It's kind of a ballad and a nice let-up from the dense beats of the first two tunes, a great marriage of modern R’n’B with playful glitchy production. There are sinister overtones to the soft falsetto vocal lines though, as the lyrics sing about a washed-up lover who eats mayonnaise straight from the jar while getting wasted, “don't you need me, your baby boy? Cos I'm so happy without your noise.”

'Pork Soda' picks things up again, taking the same kind of debauchery that made 'Season 2…' seem melancholy and making it a little more celebratory. Although there's undoubtedly darkness here too, it's upbeat and lyrics about pineapples make it seem more fun than perhaps it is! 'Moma's Gun', an album highlight, takes things back down a step, with Dave back to his sinister hushed falsetto narrative style. The track opens with a near classical flute line, keeping things stripped while the vocal takes us on a journey, full of tinkling expectation. Weirdly it sounds like there's a synth cat mewling and a synth owl hooting in the distance at different points, which might give you a sense of the density of the production. It's a real builder of a track, and when it hits the final chorus there's a real buoyant fullness, as all the synth melodies they've introduced combine, playing off each other.

'Cane Shuga' starts with a synth line that sounds like it is half Outkast's 'Ms Jackson' and half Justin Timberlake's version of 'Cry Me A River'. The track takes a different angle when it kicks in though, they make it their own and have plenty of fun with vocoder sounds along the way. 'The Other Side Of Paradise' is a slow hip-hop builder, that reminds me a little of some of the textures of Unknown Mortal Orchestra's last record. Glass Animals made a point of avoiding listening to their contemporaries whilst working on this album, which apparently came together very quickly over an intense set of sessions towards the end of last year, but I can't help but notice a slight similarity in approach and feel to some of Multi-Love, particularly in that soulful vocal delivery and the embracing of electronics. Another unlikely band that I find myself thinking about for comparison is Prefab Sprout. On a track like 'The king of Rock'N'Roll' you have almost got an 80s prototype version of a lot of the key elements of the Glass Animals sound: a breathy, almost saccharine vocal delivering a darkly surreal narrative, against a musical backdrop that's shiny, poppy and fun.

'Agnes' has quite a different vibe to the rest of the album, there's a slightness to the percussion track in the verses, with layers of building, sweeping synth ambience. It all coalesces into a pleasing, uplifting chorus of 'oohs', with a shuffling beat, which comes back later with a catchy refrain. It's got more of a conventional pop feel to it than most of the album, although the idiosyncrasies that characterise the Glass Animals sound are there, they're dialled back a little here, allowing this track to achieve a bit of the epic-pop feel that someone like – dare I say it – Coldplay, do so regularly. Still there's a cool synthetic edge, the odd bluesy key-change, an unchecked tongue and other such devices that keep this from descending into the out and out cheese-fest it could have been.

So our next saviours of British guitar music sound like their heaviest influence has come from modern American music: hip hop, R’n’B and a touch of nu soul, and they seem to have barely touched a guitar whilst putting the record together. Sure the guitars are there, but they are buried beneath layers of synths, or often use effects that make them sound like synthetic instruments until they show up sounding a little more conventional on 'Take A Slice' and 'Poplar St', towards the end of the album. Maybe things have turned full circle since The Beatles started a UK pop revolution inspired by American blues greats like Chuck Berry? Maybe we're back to taking our cues from across the pond, and running with them, in order to reinvent the wheel. On the evidence of How To Be A Human Being, I'm fine with that! It's worth noting that Glass Animals are young, this is the first band these friends from Oxford ever formed and their first album was forged on the small stages of their local scene, playing to eager fans who just got what they were doing, excited to discover them, returning time and time again. How To Be A Human Being takes those humble origins and blows them up to giant-sized proportions. The world is their stage now, rather than just Oxfordshire, and the group seem to be taking it in their stride. They also seem to me to be a well-spring of bottomless potential, if these first two albums are anything to go by. I hope they continue in this vein, I hope they get weirder and stranger and continue to defy expectations by getting ever more popular at the same time (like another Oxford band who come to mind). The future is for the innovators and I believe that, on the strength of this second album, Glass Animals are going to be around interesting us for quite some time to come.
Adam Kidd

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