Interview: Glass Animals Bring ‘Gooey’ Holiday Cheer to Soundcheck Party
Are you satisfied with the reception of your debut album, Zaba?
Yeah, I guess so. It’s kind of hard to tell. People have been turning up to shows and buying tickets. From that perspective, it’s been good. The response when we’ve spoken to people has been positive. I think it’s been organic growth, a pretty natural spread via word of mouth.
We’re really happy and very proud of the record. There’s nothing we’d change even now looking back on it. It was a really nice snapshot of who we were when we made the record and what we were able to do. When I look back at it, I’m very proud it it.
What are your plans for Christmas?
I’m going to go home and sleep. We get back from America on the 21st. I’m going to eat turkey, watch films and stuff. I have the most boring, very lazy Christmas planned. We have five days [home], and then we’re off to Australia again. I’m definitely going to maximize the sofa and bed department of my life.
How can you best describe the band’s creative process?
This record was very much Dave’s coming out from the beginning with some songs. Normally, he’s quite hard to work with because he writes most of his stuff in the middle of the night. He’ll wake up with an idea and obviously I’m not with him and he’ll pour stuff from his head out into a computer. It will be a seed of an idea. It might be a really simple drum beat and cords, or a guitar hook. He’ll put it all together, build it into a nugget, and then send it along to us.
We’ll all think about it, build upon it, change it, and send it back. It starts with Dave. It becomes a more collaborative thing after that. That’s not a very normal way of making music, but it’s the nature of the beast. Dave works at quite strange hours. I’m glad its not me, because I would just go straight back to sleep.
How did the band recover from getting robbed in Brussels?
It was a bit of a raw deal. To be fair to the people that robbed us, they robbed us well. There was an element of us that said we got done properly. It happened the night before the show and we had a morning to run around to buy new laptops and sound cards to create a makeshift setup. It was actually OK.
Do you have plans to make more covers or remixes after your nods to Banks’ “Drowning” and Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown”?
Yeah, there’s always stuff in the pipeline. I can’t say specifically. It’s one of those things that’s naturally evolving. We’re plugging away and ideas are flying around. My feeling about covers is that playing them live is cool for awhile, but it’s a trick. Once we’ve used that trick, we’ve already played that one.
