Glass Animals photo © Drewby 2024
RELEASE “A TEAR IN SPACE (AIRLOCK)”
WATCH THE OFFICIAL VIDEO NOW
FOURTH ALBUM I LOVE YOU SO F***ING MUCH
TO BE RELEASED ON 19 JULY 2024
ANNOUNCE POP UP SHOW AT EARTH IN HACKNEY ON 11 JUNE
GLOBAL HEADLINE TOUR DATES FOR THE US, EUROPE & ENGLAND IN 2024
HEADLINING THE O2 ARENA, LONDON ON 7 NOVEMBER
Today, Grammy and BRIT-nominated, platinum-selling British band Glass Animals release new single “A Tear In Space (Airlock)” from their highly anticipated fourth studio album I Love You So F***ing Much. ILYSFM is an album about love in all its shapes and forms. “A Tear In Space (Airlock)” explores a love that is all consuming, forcing you to bend and stretch yourself around the other person to the point where you lose yourself, stretched so thin, squashed so small you are almost invisible. It is about control and dominance and the pleasure/pain of abandoning yourself to someone else’s desires. It also touches on the wider themes of scale and perspective that the album plays with – after all, what is a tear in space? So small that it is insignificant and yet so vast to the person shedding it. From a tiny teardrop in an airlock to a vast galaxy, I Love You So F***ing Much is an expansive, record with retro-futuristic production that travels in and out of the “shapelessness of love”, set to be released on 19 July 2024.
PRE-ORDER I LOVE YOU SO F***ING MUCH
LISTEN TO “A TEAR IN SPACE (AIRLOCK)”
On creating the video for “A Tear In Space (Airlock)”, directors Taylor Fauntleroy and Drew Kirsch say: “This concept really began with Dave’s idea to get himself in a wind tunnel and throw things at him, which sounded great until we realised we might kill him and/or get sued. That led to us to really work to visualise the emotional experience of A Tear in Space and find abstract techniques to tell this story which is about trying to get close to someone who’s pushing you away and tugging and pulling at you until you lose your identity entirely. We did also get to throw some things at Dave which was a highlight.”
Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley adds, “The roses, the dining table, the candles and the suit are all symbols of love and care. All juxtaposed by a big cold scientific machine made of blades that can only blow things away and destroy. The blades get faster as you get closer. It peels the layers off you until there are none left, and then it stretches you and pulls you apart until you’re obliterated. The irony I guess is that even if you do manage to push through the wind and make it to the core of the beast, it just chops you to bits anyway!”
This Spring, Glass Animals announced a mammoth 44-date tour, taking the four-piece band across North America, Europe and UK, kicking off in the USA this August and concluding at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena on 7 November 2024. But Glass Animals wanted super fans to hear the record for the first time live and last month embarked on a global pop-up tour, playing intimate venues in Mexico, Indonesia, California and Australia. The band have since announced a London pop up show at EartH in Hackney, taking place on 11 June, where they will play new songs for the first time. Revealing first single ‘Creatures in Heaven’ earlier this Spring, the song was a first glimpse into a sublime record telling ten intimate love stories, set against the backdrop of the vast universe.
LISTEN TO ‘CREATURES IN HEAVEN’
I Love You So F***ing Much is the follow-up to 2020’s critically revered Dreamland, which sold over 12 million copies globally and gave life to ‘Heat Waves’, the record-breaking song that became the biggest international hit from a British band in almost 30 years and is now Diamond Certified in the United States. It was the first song to reach No.1 with a single writer and producer since Pharrell’s ‘Happy,’ and led to the pop world’s biggest acts, including Florence Welch, all wanting to work with Dave. But the birth of I Love You So F***ing Much was rooted in an existential crisis. Dave found himself struggling to make sense of this newfound global stardom, having watched it all happen while the world was in lockdown. “Life can change dramatically, but sometimes you aren’t able to change as quickly on a personal level. You end up feeling like a spectator. And then you are asked and expected to be a certain type of person, a different person. But…I wasn’t sure how. It confused me to the point of not knowing who I was or if anything was real.” It took being stranded on a cliff in a wooden house on stilts during one of California’s biggest storms in history to push that feeling into a full existential crisis. In forced isolation, watching trees tumble down mountains and assuming “death was coming,” Dave began asking questions of himself, of the universe and of the human experience: namely, love. As he came to accept himself as an introvert, Dave realised that “human connection and the love between us is much bigger, more important, and more complex than anything else”
GLASS ANIMALS 2024 GLOBAL TOUR DATES
7 August – Charlotte, NC – PNC Music Pavillion
8 August – Alpharetta GA, – Ameris Bank Amphitheatre
10 August – Philadelphia, PA – Mann Center for the Performing Arts, TD Pavillion
11 August – Mansfield, MA – Xfinity Center
13 August – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden
16 August – Raleigh, NC – Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek
17 August – Columbia, MD – Merriweather Post Pavillion
20 August – Toronto, ON – Budweiser Stage
21 August – Cuyahoga Falls, OH – Blossom Music Center
23 August – Noblesville, IN – Ruoff Music Center
24 August – Clarkson, MI – Pine Know Music Center
25 August – Cincinnati, OH – Riverbend Music Center
27 August – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone, Arena
28 August – Chicago, IL – Huntington Bank Pavillion at Northerly Island
31 August – Bonner Springs, KS – Azura Amphitheater
3 September – Morrison, CO – Red Rocks Amphitheatre
4 September – Morrison, CO – Red Rocks Amphitheatre
5 September – Salt Lake City, UT – USANA Amphitheatre
7 September – Quincy, WA – The Gorge Amphitheatre
8 September – Vancouver, BC – Pepsi Live at Rogers Arena
11 September – Mountain View, CA – Shoreline Amphitheatre
13 September – Chula Vista, CA – North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre
14 September – Inglewood, CA – Kia Forum
17 September – Phoenix, AZ – Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre
20 September – Dallas, TX – Dos Equis Pavillion
21 September – The Woodlands, TX – The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavillion
22 September – Austin, TX – Moody Center
–
15 October – Paris – Zenith
16 October – Brussels – Forest National
17 October – Düsseldorf – Mitsubishi Electric Halle
19 October – Warsaw – Expo XXI
20 October – Berlin – Max Schmeling Halle
22 October – Milan – Alcatraz
23 October – Zurich – The Hall
24 October – Munich, Zenith
26 October – Amsterdam – AFAS Live
27 October – Amsterdam – AFAS Live
30 October – Dublin – 3Arena
–
1 November – Glasgow – OVO Hydro
2 November – Manchester – Co-Op Live
3 November – Nottingham – Motorpoint Arena
5 November – Cardiff – Utilita Arena
7 November – London – The O2 Arena
Wanting to bring fans into the sci-fi-inspired world of I Love You So F***ing Much early, Glass Animals set up a landing page that simply read “Panic. Answer the Question please” (a nod to Douglas Adams’ infamous Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy). With 15,000 questions posed to the band within the first couple of days, they set about trawling through them: What’s going on (existentially)? Will Glass Animals perform in space? Are we hitchhiking the universe? What is the meaning of life? To Dave, it’s a continuation of the Open Source website the band started in the pandemic. A site where fans could download jpegs and mp3s from the band, share them and create their own artwork and tunes. Engaging with each other and Glass Animals in a deeper way, this modernist iteration of “Ask Me Anything” sparked a conversation around the power of love in what-can-sometimes-feel-like-a cold-and-loveless-world.
Having a bird’s-eye view of life is a view with which Glass Animals have become comfortable. Dreamland was released during the pandemic in 2020, and it was the album that elevated Glass Animals to mythical status. The single ‘Heat Waves’ broke records across the planet, becoming the first song by a British band since the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ in 1995, to claim No.1 for five consecutive weeks in the Billboard Hot 100. The four-piece were also crowned Triple J’s Hottest 100 winner, claiming over 44 billion global streams and became the first British band to achieve No.1 in the Spotify Global Chart, whilst holding space in the Billboard Hot 100 for longer than The Weeknd’s ’Blinding Lights’.
Making sense of the chaos of being one of the biggest British contemporary bands is where I Love You So F***ing Much begins. It is an album full of questions about complex human situations. However vast space is, deep human connections make the void seem less empty. “There is no real answer,” says Dave. “Do I understand love more or less now that I’ve written this? No. I just realise that it is ok to not understand it. Understanding it is impossible. There will be times that love will make you exceptionally happy. But it is important to know that it is going to hurt too. It is going to make you angry. It is going to make you sad. But all those feelings are important and necessary and have beauty on their own. They are what make us human.” From one infinite song, that set the stage for the biggest British contemporary band to break records and tour the globe, in isolation, to the infinite possibility of their profound cosmic fourth studio album, Glass Animals are ready to tell their millions of fans, and perhaps themselves: I Love You So F***king Much.
I Love You So F***ing Much Album Tracklisting:
- Show Pony
- whatthehellishappening
- Creatures in Heaven
- Wonderful Nothing
- A Tear in Space (Airlock)
- ICMYFILA
- How I Learned To Love The Bomb
- White Roses
- On the Run
- Lost in the Ocean
