It’s been a while since we heard new music from Glass Animals – but after much speculation from fans who spotted hidden graphics and messages across their socials and then the appearance of an interactive website (www.glassanimals.com) they’ve dropped the incendiary, bass-heavy “Tokyo Drifting” – a brand new track which features American rapper Denzel Curry. ‘Tokyo Drifting’ is part of the band’s Fresh Fruit series of collaborations.
On making ‘Toyko Drifitng’, Dave Bayley says – “The first thing Denzel said to me about the track was “this is fire.” Then he said, “Is this you flexin’?” and I said – “Yeh…it is…sort of. It’s an ironic internal flex – me as a narrator describing/taking the piss out of an extreme alter ego version of myself; a version of me that can do things that I’m uncomfortable doing. Wavey Davey is my fucked-up Sasha Fierce; he’s a geezer, a street fighter, he can dance, he parties hard, he’s spontaneous. He can take hits and be told he is shit and not care because he’s confident. He can fight everything the world throws at him.”
“I think this kind of character is someone we all create for ourselves now to some extent. We have these curated versions of ourselves on the internet – beautiful, edited, cool, distilled versions of us, all slightly super human. You can push and push and push yourself to hide and ignore your vulnerabilities like that…but it comes at a cost. It’s not real and it isn’t sustainable.”
Glass Animals are a British four-piece project led by singer, songwriter and producer Dave Bayley with his bandmates and childhood friends Joe Seaward, Ed Irwin-Singer and Drew Macfarlane. Their second album ‘How To Be A Human Being’ was one of the most critically acclaimed and widely adored records of 2016 and went on to be nominated for the Mercury Album Of The Year Award in 2017. As well as producing both ‘ZABA’ and ‘How to be a Human Being’ Dave has worked with a number of artists outside of the band including 6lack, Khalid, Joey Bada$$, DJ Dahi, Flume and MorMor.
Earlier this month, Glass Animals played a surprise show at Oxford’s The Bullingdon which (unsurprisingly) sold out in 37 seconds. Stay tuned for a lot more live plans from Glass Animals in the new year…