OTW #443: Glass Animals

Dark electronica from Oxford

The internet can be a cavernous place, daunting even. Therefore, you don’t blame Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley and co. for shying away from the www. “I don’t think any of us are into social networking that much,” he says. “We’ve never used Twitter and I never use Facebook. It didn’t really come naturally to us to have these big online presences.”The Oxford quartet did, however, find a collective passion for bunking off school in favour of attending gigs for adolescent kicks.

Still in university, the guys started weaving together their own brand of moody and psychedelic electronica and 2010 did spawn a mini online spark. “It got rolling pretty quickly and we were all still at university so we thought we might as well finish uni before we do it properly,” admits the newly degree-bestowed neuroscientist.

Now with the burdens of dissertations and the like behind, they’re once more marauding through the murky waters of post-dubstep and it’s similarly skeletal contemporaries. Debut EP ‘Leaflings’ captivates the woody nostalgia of Bayley’s childhood in the forests, “pretending to hunt scary monsters and making little weapons to throw around”. Hints of the awesomely spacious cuts regularly moulded by Burial and Four Tet seep into the hypnotic chants of Wild Beasts here to astounding effect.

The sounds all fall under XL Records’ newish offspring label, Kaya Kaya Records, of which Glass Animals are the first signing. “It’s great to be a part of XL because they have a lot of artists that I respect and they all tend to have long and exciting careers,” he adds.A mixtape of old bits and bobs are also in the works for a release somewhere down the line. Let’s hope they’ll get Firefox-friendly enough to share it with us pretty soon.

Words by Errol Anderson
Photo by Samuel John Butt

Where: Oxford
What: Dark electronica
Get 3 songs: ‘Golden Antlers’, ‘Cocoa Hooves’, ‘Slikk Furr’
Unique fact: One of the members is a black belt in karate. He’s a ninja.

Glass Animals play live at the next Clash party at The Shacklewell Arms on Friday 3rd August. Find out more about the event, which also features Gang Colours and Amirali, on Facebook HERE

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