Glass Animals ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’ review: Existential crises never sounded this good
This fourth album – laden with a distinctly 80s feel – proves that Glass Animals still have something important to say.
“The sequel’s gonna hurt,” Dave Bayley sings before ‘Show Pony’, the opening track of Glass Animals’ fourth album, bursts into life. I Love You So F***ing Much is a post-mortem of a few years that made the Oxford quartet the biggest British band in the US, breaking every record under the sun with mega-hit ‘Heat Waves’. Told through the prism of sci-fi and with a distinctly 80s feel, it’s a record that moves away from the tropical pop of the band’s biggest hits and towards crunchier rock sounds that reflect this recent turbulence.
“It was a beautiful rollercoaster ride that dumped us out the other end,” Bayley told Rolling Stone UK this year of the madness that surrounded the band’s 2020 album Dreamland. I Love You So F***ing Much was written unexpectedly over a two-week period that saw Bayley stranded in a creaking hilltop house in Los Angeles. “I’m so happy / This is just where I wanna be,” he sings with a side-eye on the aptly titled ‘whatthehellishappening’.
Narratively, the album sees Bayley stripping away the awards shows, pandemic-era touring and streaming stats and returning to the fundamentals, hence its bold title. Pitting an existential crisis against personal love stories through the prism of space, it plays out as a euphoria moment of clarity after a storm.
While this tension at the album’s heart comes through loud and clear at times — superb lead single ‘Creatures in Heaven’ tells a love story with power and tenderness — at others, it gets buried under (admittedly innovative and exciting) production.
After the success of ‘Heat Waves’, several producers offered their services for Glass Animals mk. 4, but Bayley kept the project close. It is written and produced entirely alone — and it proves a wise choice. His production style is unique and wide-ranging, and I Love You So F***ing Much keeps this charm intact. The album is dirtier and less idealistic than the hits that got Glass Animals to this point, but there is power and purpose in delving deep and sifting through the wreckage.