Glass Animals interview

Indietronica outfit Glass Animals will release their début album Zaba on June 6th and will play Ireland this year as part of the forthcoming Electric Picnic festival. Joe Seaward speaks to theLastMixedTape.com about the band’s upcoming L.P and song-writing process.

How has recording a full-length album compared to working on your previous E.P releases?

The time difference it a definite factor. It’s also a different mindset to get yourself into and to prepare for. We started out by wanting the album to really fit together more, we were trying to make it a journey and sound cohesive. So it begins in one place and by the final track you feel it’s worked as a whole.

Did the group’s song-writing change during the making of the album?

Not really, Dave (Bayley) likes to write and produce the songs late at night. He wakes-up late at night with sudden ideas, which makes it hard for everyone to work on (laughs). He plants the seed and comes in with a beat or a hook or a vocal melody, and then we’ll all go off individually and work on ideas for it and then come back to the studio.

How do you as a musician approach working on these ideas?

It’s an interesting way of working and it’s really the only way I’ve ever experienced working on music, so I doesn’t feel strange to me but I do have friends in bands that don’t work this way at all. It’s cool to expand on the songs and put a personal touch to it, although not all the ideas work.

How has the group’s sound evolved with this album?

The earlier stuff was a lot more introverted and insular sounding. We spent a lot of time worrying about how loud everything was and polishing everything. This album is more confident sounding and bolder. We weren’t afraid to crank up the bass or the drums on this.

Did your process in the studio change on Zaba in comparison to recording your early E.P’s?

It wasn’t too different really. The initial phase of Dave working on the soundscapes is very important. But the studio is great place to work and conducive to doing what we do, we had a lot of great equipment to work with and feel into working patterns quickly with each of us pairing up at different times to work on different songs.

With the large-scale production of the album, how do you go about recreating that in live performances?

Working on translating that sound can be exciting. It’s an opportunity to give a new lease of life to the tracks. We try to find the important parts of the songs, the soul of it. Some songs come out a stripped down, while others have a lot more electronic parts to them. It’s important to take the production into consideration and try to translate that live.

Zaba by Glass Animals will be released on June 6th.