There’s something time-warped about Dreamland, but Dave Bayley isn’t trying to trick you into thinking you’re back in 1996. He’s just been living there mentally. “It’s like tourism of nostalgia,” the Glass Animals frontman tells me. “You’re not seeing the past the same way—you’re a voyeur in your own memories.”
Bayley has always played the long game with concepts, but Dreamland may be his most emotionally intricate work yet—a mixtape of childhood memory, self-critique, and warped TV static, scored with the gear of The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and Dr. Dre, then resampled through the cracked lens of Ableton. It’s all part of a project that started with trauma—his best friend and bandmate Joe Seaward was nearly killed in an accident—and blossomed into something tender, expansive, and weirdly comforting.
“I didn’t know if he’d survive,” Bayley says. “And when something like that happens, your brain just shuts off the future. You go backwards. You dig through every memory, every bit of your past, and that’s where I ended up.”
From there, Dreamland emerged as a full concept album—a “table of contents” was even written first. “I kind of write like I’m making a weird essay plan,” he explains. “The first track was the summary, the overture. I started it, shelved it, finished the rest of the record, then came back to wrap it up.”
What unravels is an intricate layering of time, pop culture, and personal anxiety. “Who we are, who we’re not, and how it relates to our relationships,” is how I offered it. “That’s pretty spot on,” he nodded. “There’s no apology in the lyrics—but there is discomfort. It’s a kind of acceptance.”
And then there’s Space Ghost Coast to Coast, a nod to that glorious pocket of mid-90s to early-2000s adult swim chaos. “It was like, SeaLab, Space Ghost, Aqua Teen... we didn’t even understand most of it. But it was jokes,” Bayley says, laughing. “That stuff really shaped me—music and weird TV. I didn’t fit in as a kid in Texas. I didn’t do sports. I was a year younger than everyone else. I found refuge in weirdness.”
The sonics match the sentiment. “I went out and got all the gear—old Beach Boys gear, Beatles basses, Mellotron, the stuff Dre would use—and ran it through modern rigs. I didn’t want it to sound like a throwback record. I wanted it to feel like now, with the DNA of then.”
As for swagger, that’s where alter ego Wavy Davey comes in. “Some stuff I just can’t pull off as... me. Wavy’s my Sasha Fierce,” he says, referencing Beyoncé’s famed persona. “Especially on Tokyo Drifting. I didn’t have the swagger for that. Denzel Curry did. He brought the real fire.”
What’s maybe most refreshing is how Bayley speaks of writing for others, and the liberation in pretending the music isn’t for you. “You sit down and say, ‘I’m writing this for BTS’ or whoever. You drop the boundaries. It’s freeing.”
And the collaborations haven’t stopped. With no touring during the early Dreamland era, Glass Animals became a cottage industry of context—Dreamland shoes, Dreamland candles, even Dreamland PEZ dispensers. “It all ties back to the nostalgic world we built,” Bayley shrugs. “If it smells like my childhood and sounds like my teenage years, it fits.”
So it would seem they are only steps away from a full-blown rock opera. “You joke,” he says, “but wait for the next one.” He says it with a smile, but he’s also got a Jupiter-6 space synth parked behind him.
Bayley might still be figuring out the future, but he’s made peace with the past—at least enough to remix it into something strange, human, and utterly his own.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
