"I love you so f***ing much, I LOVE YOU SO F***ING MUCH, I love you SO f***ing MUCH, I love you so F***ING much, I LOVE you so f***ing MUCH. These words take on a different meaning every time you say them. The universe may make us feel overwhelmingly small, but we have this human connection that is far vaster and more mysterious. Love comes in an infinite number of forms and shapes and sizes. It is so complex, and so powerful that even witnessing the tiniest instance of it can change your life forever." - Dave Bayley

The birth of I Love You So F***ing Much started with an existential crisis. Glass Animals frontman, songwriter, and producer Dave Bayley found himself on the precipice last summer, quite literally. He had picked to stay in a wooden house on stilts, high up in the hills in Los Angeles. Intense periods of isolation was a through-line to Dreamland, the band's critically acclaimed global album that was released during the pandemic, elevating 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 #1 for five consecutive weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, and the first song to reach #1 with a single writer and producer (Dave Bayley) since Pharrell Williams' "Happy." "The never-ending song," Dave jokes, having achieved GRAMMY and BRIT nominations, crowned triple j's Hottest 100 winner, claiming over 44 billion global streams and the first British band to achieve #1 on the Spotify Global Chart.  But the backdrop of this critical success was a band locked in their separate homes; a form of "detachment."

Glass Animals toured the album when the world was just emerging from the pandemic. There was still so much unknown, and artists couldn't get insurance for tours. "It was survival mode. We had to frontload the tour. We had no insurance on the shows. We just had to make them happen and be very careful. My manager and I wrote a manual that other artists ended up using at venues. Hand Sanitizer, wipe the door handles, special kinds of masks...etc. Dreamland became the dream. We were basically jumping on stage, doing the show, then back in this silent metal tube [the bus]. It was quite odd. We were like, is this real?" The four piece-Dave, Drew MacFarlane (guitar, keys), Edmund Irwin-Singer (bass, keys), and Joe Seaward (drums)-who all met in high school more than a decade ago, saw huge flashes of how far their music had come, from street parties after the show on the New York subway, but all from the confines of the metal tube. This detachment was heightened when the band made it to the 2022 GRAMMY Awards, only to be stopped before the event by Dave getting Covid. They had come so close to the tangible but were still so far away from it. "I had to work myself up for the award show and red carpet because that stuff doesn't come naturally. Then I got ill, and we were all confined to our hotel rooms whilst watching it on the TV. The whole experience was a rollercoaster of emotions."

Following the success of Dreamland and Florence Welch's Dance Fever (which Dave co-wrote and co-produced), the biggest acts in the pop world wanted to work with Dave. During a period of "session hopping," Dave had set up a humble 'production station' in the window of an isolated Airbnb in the Los Angeles hills, surrounded by trees and overlooking houses, far away from other people. At the time, he was struggling to make sense of his newfound global success. "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. I put pressure on myself to do everything and take every new opportunity, and 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. But there was so much going on that it was very easy to push that feeling to one side and distract myself with work instead of facing the situation head-on." 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. 

"I got stuck in this stilt-house during a giant storm. Flood warnings were everywhere. I saw a tree tumble down the mountain, and I thought 'that's going to be me in about ten minutes.' I slept on the floor closest to the door just in case the house came down. I assumed death was coming." After years of forced isolation, Dave found himself to be all alone again. "But there was a comfort in my isolation. I am an introvert. It took that forced isolation to realise that being an introvert is kind of just who I am. We are so often asked to be the opposite of that and to constantly share and communicate. But it's not who I am. I love shows and amazing moments of community and togetherness. I feel so, so lucky to have that. But I also like writing things alone and having the comfort of being able to experiment and make mistakes and letting flaws come out. You can't be self-conscious when you're alone. You can let your mind go to places it can't when the rest of the world is watching. And that's quite powerful sometimes."

The storm soon started to clear up, however Dave's sense of futility didn't. "I started trying to pull myself out of that doom-state and began writing." He adds, "I've always loved the idea of writing a space album. But every time I tried the songs came out quite cold and lacked a warmth and humanness that I think is vital to songwriting. I was scared of writing a love album. You think about those Beach Boys records, and they're just full of perfect love songs. But looking down over the city from the house, it felt like space. You can almost see the curvature of the earth against the stars above it. And when you see all the tiny people on the phone, laughing, walking down the street helping each other. Someone crying, families together. I pictured those intimate micro moments. And I realised that those moments are far more complex than all that infinite space above them. It all sank in, and I realized that framing the most beautiful human love stories with space could actually be a powerful thing. It could be a powerful way to argue that love and human connection is the biggest thing in the universe, and everything else pales in comparison."

 Painting ten portraits of love in all its messy forms, I Love You So F***ing Much is the most personal record Dave has written. From the existential to the intimate, from the first love we witness around us as children, to romance, hate and heartbreak, each song is dedicated to a different side of love, "It took everything to make this record. It feels like a child to me. It was painful at times. I had to look at all the different types of love, and everything that comes with that, from happiness to the mundane, regret to hate and loss. All of these stories are set against a backdrop of the other biggest thing in the universe: The Universe. It's arguing that human connection and the love between us is much bigger, more important, and more complex. Nothing else matters." Dave wanted to start at the very beginning, with the opening track "Show Pony," a lucid tale of a relationship from start to finish. "Our first blueprints of love are the relationships we see and experience growing up. They aren't always perfect, but they completely shape our understanding of love. That's why I wanted 'Show Pony' to open the album. it throws you in at the deep end, but that's life."

 Having been reluctant to write in first person, Dave addresses the omnipresent "You" across the record. First single "Creatures in Heaven" was not a romantic song to begin with. "I toyed with the second line and kept flip flopping between 'making love' and 'waking up,' as I thought 'making love' made it immediately about romantic love. But it had this hook to it I couldn't change. I like the idea of creating love. It doesn't have to be sexual." Full of 70's analogue synths and vast retro futuristic production, the song tackles the moment: Are you here in the moment? Be in the moment. "It's about a moment in time, be it a split second or a year, having the capacity to be enormously formative and life changing. Even if something is over. Or if it doesn't go as planned. Or if it dies too soon. It is still fucking beautiful. The love and care and the feeling in that moment lives forever. It never really dies. If that's how you choose to see it." 

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 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). With 15,000 questions posed to the band within the first few 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?, Dave came across one question that stuck: "Where does heartache go?" "I love your question, it has broken my heart," replied Dave. "It aches now. Maybe heartache never really goes away. It just weaves itself into the fabric of our being. We reshape ourselves around it and grow over it, like nature might grow over a house left empty for too long."

 The question "Where does heartache go?" reminded Dave of the story behind the song "A Tear in Space (Airlock)." "Where does a tear in space actually go? Well, that's the thing. Can you have a tear in space? It's so small in the context of the universe. Does it mean anything? The lyrics paint a picture of being pulled so thin you can fit, like a spider's legs, in between the cracks in the walls. You crawl there to leave space for the other person. But it feels like an airlock. Where you wait for the vacuum to be switched on, or off." From a tiny airlock to a vast galaxy, the album travels in and out of the "shapelessness" of love. "I Can't Make You Fall in Love Again" is the most painful track for Dave to listen back to. "It makes me want to cry listening to it. Looking back at all those details of a relationship is uncomfortable for me. It takes me back to that specific time. I love and hate it."

"How I Learned To Love The Bomb" is about being in love with a monster inside a lover, a monster that you allow to destroy you, because you're intoxicated by them, whilst "White Roses," a symbol of love at a funeral, is about wishing you could make someone happy, but you can't. "whatthehellishappening?" might be about being kidnapped, but it delves into the thought process of when you think it's all over, who do you find yourself thinking about? All the people you love. This quiet existentialism runs through the entire record. "On the Run" concludes that it's probably best to "fake your own death and fuck off forever. But that makes you sad because everything you love is gone," which leads into album finisher "Lost in the Ocean," where you come back to yourself, back to earth, after your space odyssey into love, "the 'you' in this song applies to myself, just about as much as the other person it is about."

With a scientific brain, having studied medicine at university, Dave brings these forensic elements to his production. "Towards the end of the process, you're really dealing with very technical details in the same way that a doctor probably sees a patient, like a bag of plumbing and chemistry. I stopped seeing the songs and hearing and feeling the emotion in them and started hearing the transient of the kick drum and the frequencies in the guitar and where I needed to move a microphone or EQ or something." The marriage of a methodical approach stir-fried with the intense emotions of love and passion bore similarities to Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a best-selling book about gaming and love and how the two intersect. Dave read the book after he finished recording the album. "It was serendipitous. It was exploring so many of the same concepts. That story is also dealing with the emotional turmoil of public vulnerability and letting go of a creation that comes from the heart. I just wish all of the characters had taken a moment and said, I Love You So F***ing Much to each other! But we are all afraid for different reasons. It is strangely difficult." The parallels between the album and Gabrielle's book helped Dave visualise his work and understand it. He reached out to Gabrielle online, and the pair started writing long email exchanges about the subject matters in their work. "She listened to the album and had some amazing questions." Dave sent her a track-by-track, and Gabrielle started writing short stories for each song. "We were writing long letters back and forth, but we never met. But when I do, I just want to embrace, and maybe stand in silence." Growing a new narrative together, Gabrielle wrote the liner notes for I Love You So F***ing Much for fans to mull over and enter new worlds.  

I Love You So F***ing Much 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 realize 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***ing Much.

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