Glass Animals implore us to live ‘in the moment’ on their emotionally-charged song “Creatures in Heaven,” an achingly intimate exploration of presence, perspective, human connection, and the eternal power of love – and the impassioned lead single off the band’s highly anticipated fourth album, ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’!
Stream: “Creatures in Heaven” – Glass Animals
Be in the moment, here in the moment, free in the moment…
Smash a Baccarat elephant on the ground and it will irrevocably break into countless tiny shards.
You can pick up the pieces and try to fit them back together, but they’ll never be the same as they were before. Call it wear and tear, call it erosion, call it weathering, call it damage; the symptoms show differently in everyone and everything, but the end result is largely the same: You can’t be unscarred. And while crystal figurines are certainly delicate, London’s Glass Animals capture a deeper kind of fragility in their music – the kind that often goes unseen, but not unheard.
Not all wounds are visible, and in “Creatures in Heaven,” the band’s first bit of new music in two years’ time, they explore the timeless power of love and the impact of a single moment in your life: How a deep, intimate, meaningful connection, however brief, can forever change you for better or worse.
Three in the morning, making love
Laid on the floor of your apartment
Bird’s eye view of the two of us
Face in make-up and cheap fake blood
What do you think about
when you think about love?
I’m dumbstruck when you’re tender, but
It’s three in the morning, be in the moment
Here in the moment, free in the moment
“What do you think about when you think about love?” sings Dave Bayley, his voice warm, worn, and weary as he relives sepia-toned memories from a bittersweet past. “I’m dumbstruck when you’re tender, but it’s three in the morning, be in the moment, here in the moment, free in the moment…”
A cinematic analog synthscape steadily grows around him as reckons with the ghosts of old love, replaying special moments and reminiscing on things that could have gone better – ways he could have done better.
It tears through my head, does it haunt you too?
Diamonds in the dark in your old bedroom
You held me like my mother made me just for you
You held me so close that I brokе in two
It tears through my head, does it haunt you too?
Nеver really said that I loved you too
Lucky, lucky you ’cause I’m fortune’s fool
Such small words but they hit so huge
Bayley’s voice aches with increasing veracity as the turmoil within him spills out in a cathartic, impassioned, and emotionally charged chorus.
It’s a time-tested, hard-won lesson; only with hindsight can he fully appreciate what (who) he had when he had it (them). “I don’t think I realize just how much I miss you sometimes,” he confesses in a feverish, visceral haze. “We were young and so in love; we were just creatures in heaven.” One might say he’s on the other side of paradise, singing from a place of unbridled guilt, regret, and longing:
I don’t think I realize
Just how much I miss you sometimes
We were young and so in love
We were just creatures in heaven
I don’t think I realize
Just how much I miss you sometimes
For a moment we were just
We were just creatures in heaven
“It’s about a moment in time, be it a split second or a year or whatever, having the capacity to be enormously formative and life-changing,” Bayley tells Atwood Magazine. “Even if it is over. Or if it doesn’t go as planned. Or if it dies too soon. It is still f*ing 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.”
In other words, “Creatures in Heaven” is as much a philosophy as it is one heavy heart and fractured soul working through fracture and licking bare, lovesick wounds. Be in the moment, here in the moment, free in the moment. What does it mean to so wholeheartedly (and wholemindedly) exist in this world? Is it aspirational thinking, or a conscious, deliberate switch in perspective?
And when Bayley later sings, “It’s merely a moment, here for a moment, here is the moment, here for a moment,” is that reductionist thinking, a dose of realism injected into his dreamland, or something else entirely?
Three in the morning, safe inside
Bury me here in your laundry pile, at
Three in the morning, be in the moment
Here in the moment, free in the moment
Three in the morning, over like that
Go slow-motion, cut it to black
‘Cause it’s merely a moment, here for a moment
Here is the moment, here for a moment
It’s all so incredibly loud – the emotions rushing back up with relentless, unforgiving intensity, painful and poignant scenes tearing through Bayley’s head, feelings hitting like a tidal wave as that heavy inner tension boils to the surface once more. Such small words but they hit so huge.
It tears through my head, does it haunt you too?
Diamonds in the dark in your old bedroom
You held me like my mother made me just for you
Held me so close that I broke in two
It tears through my head, does it haunt you too?
Never really said that I loved you too
Lucky, lucky you ’cause I’m fortune’s fool
Such small words but they hit so huge
I don’t think I realize
Just how much I miss you sometimes
We were young and so in love
We were just creatures in heaven
I don’t think I realize
Just how much I miss you sometimes
For a moment we were just
We were just creatures in heaven
Released April 3, 2024 via Republic Records, “Creatures in Heaven” is the lead single off Glass Animals’ forthcoming fourth studio album, I Love You So F***ing Much (out July 19th).
The new LP follows the unprecedented (and wholly unexpected) success of 2020’s Dreamland, which sold over 12 million copies worldwide and spawned the #1 hit single “Heat Waves,” which broke innumerable records across the planet and currently sits at just shy of 3 billion streams on Spotify alone.
Yet all that excitement and activity came in the midst of a once-in-a-generation global pandemic.
Glass Animals’ four members – school mates and best friends Dave Bayley, Drew MacFarlane (guitar, keys), Edmund Irwin-Singer (bass, keys), and Joe Seaward (drums) – felt a sense of detachment, reckoning with their newfound global stardom and a world in lockdown.
“Life can change dramatically, but sometimes you aren’t able to change as quickly on a personal level,” Bayley explains. “You end up feeling like a spectator. And then you are asked and expected 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.”
Bayley describes I Love You So F***ing Much as a set of ten “intimate love stories” set against the backdrop of the universe: “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,” he explains. Ultimately, “human connection and the love between us is much bigger, more important, and more complex than anything else.”
And thus, “Creatures in Heaven” was born.
It’s a heartfelt song paying homage to life’s little, big moments; an ode to being in the moment, to being here in the moment, to being free in the moment. Aching from the inside out, Glass Animals have returned with what may very possibly be one of their most fragile – and their most romantic – songs.
I don’t see the point in a subtle romance
Ten tonne heartache sitting on your back
Scared of the crack where the light comes through
I’m only really me when I’m here with you
And it gets into your head like a cosmic zoom
Coat on the door like an old space suit
So long, cowboy, you’re so cool
Cash in hand with a memory of you
I don’t think I realize
Just how much I miss you sometimes
We were young and so in love
We were just creatures in heaven
I don’t think I realize
Just how much I miss you sometimes
For a moment we were just
We were just creatures in heaven
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Stream: “Creatures in Heaven” – Glass Animals
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