

“Woozy” paired Glass Animals with Chicago MC Jean Deaux, who delivered sighing, melodic bars over the band’s subtly intense psych-funk production. More EPs followed in 2013, including a self-titled release that spawned the band’s first collaboration with a rapper. Glass Animals became one of the first signings to Epworth’s new imprint, Wolf Tone. Within the year, they’d come to the attention of super-producer Paul Epworth, who at the time was riding high off his work for Adele and Florence + The Machine. The project’s most enduring track was “Cocoa Hooves,” a floaty, minimal electronic track that laid Bayley’s soft falsetto croon on a bed of jazzy guitar, icy keyboards, finger snaps, and depth-charge synth-bass. Some of their earliest music attracted enough attention online that the band decided to pull it down until they finished their degrees, but by 2012 they’d signed a recording contract and put out a debut EP, Leaflings.

In the early years of his medical studies at King’s College London, Bayley’s insomnia begat pre-dawn writing sessions with production software, leading to the formation of Glass Animals. Edwards School, including with future Glass Animals bandmates Joe Seaward, Drew MacFarlane, and Edmund Irwin-Singer.įast forward to 2010. Despite being the new kid in town, Bayley formed friendships that would last him all the way into adulthood at St. When he was 13, the family again relocated, this time all the way to Oxford, UK. Although based in a college football hub, Bayley grew up entranced by pop culture, particularly the electric and eccentric hip-hop acts of the Y2K era, from the Neptunes to Dr. Bayley, the genre-melding band’s lead singer, primary songwriter, and producer, was born in Massachusetts in 1989 to Welsh and Israeli parents and moved as a child to Bryan, Texas, just north of Texas A&M University.

Glass Animals are from England, but Dave Bayley was formed by America.
