The song appears on the group’s forthcoming studio album
Grammy and BRIT-nominated, Ddiamond-selling British band Glass Animals releases its new single “A Tear In Space (Airlock)” from their highly anticipated fourth studio album I Love You So F***ing Much, set to be released on July 19th via Republic Records. Alongside the release of the new song and music video, it is officially announced that Glass Animals’ record-breaking global hit “Heat Waves” is now RIAA diamond certified, making it the 15th diamond alternative song of all time and the first diamond alternative song by an international band.
I Love You So F***ing Much is an album about love in all its shapes and forms. “A Tear In Space (Airlock)” explores a love that is all-consuming, forcing you to bend and stretch yourself around the other person to the point where you lose yourself, stretched so thin, squashed so small, you are almost invisible. It is about control and dominance and the pleasure/pain of abandoning yourself to someone else’s desires. It also touches on the wider themes of scale and perspective that the album plays with—after all, what is a tear in space? So small that it is insignificant, and yet so vast to the person shedding it. From a tiny teardrop in an airlock to a vast galaxy, I Love You So F***ing Much is an expansive record with retro-futuristic production that travels in and out of the “shapelessness of love.”
On creating the video for “A Tear In Space (Airlock),” directors Taylor Fauntleroy and Drew Kirsch say, “This concept really began with Dave’s idea to get himself in a wind tunnel and throw things at him, which sounded great until we realized we might kill him and/or get sued. That led to us to really work to visualize the emotional experience of ‘A Tear in Space’ and find abstract techniques to tell this story, which is about trying to get close to someone who’s pushing you away and tugging and pulling at you until you lose your identity entirely. We did also get to throw some things at Dave, which was a highlight.”
Dave adds, “The roses, the dining table, the candles, and the suit are all symbols of love and care. All juxtaposed by a big cold scientific machine made of blades that can only blow things away and destroy. The blades get faster as you get closer. It peels the layers off you until there are none left, and then it stretches you and pulls you apart until you’re obliterated. The irony I guess is that even if you do manage to push through the wind and make it to the core of the beast, it just chops you to bits anyway!”
In April, Glass Animals announced a mammoth 44-date world tour dubbed Human Music Group Sensations Glass Animals: Tour of Earth, taking the four-piece band across North America, Europe, and the UK, kicking off in the US this August and concluding at London’s 20,000-capacity The O2 Arena on November 7th. The tour will see the band headlining the biggest venues of their career thus far, playing many iconic sites around the world for the first time, including Madison Square Garden in New York, Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, The Gorge Amphitheatre in Seattle, Kia Forum in Inglewood, 3Arena in Dublin, The O2 Arena in London, and many more. But Glass Animals wanted super fans to hear the record for the first time live, so last month, they embarked on a global pop-up tour, playing intimate venues in California, Mexico, Australia, and Indonesia. The band has since announced a London pop-up show at EartH in Hackney on June 11th, where they will play new songs for the first time. Revealing their first single “Creatures in Heaven” in April, the song was a first glimpse into a sublime record telling 10 intimate love stories, set against the backdrop of the vast universe.
I Love You So F***ing Much is the follow-up to 2020’s critically revered Dreamland, which sold over 12 million copies globally and gave life to “Heat Waves,” the record-breaking song that became the biggest international hit from a British band in almost 30 years. It was the first song to reach No. 1 with a single writer and producer since Pharrell’s “Happy,” and led to the pop world’s biggest acts, including Florence Welch, all wanting to work with Bayley. But the birth of I Love You So F***ing Much was rooted in an existential crisis. Dave found himself struggling to make sense of this newfound global stardom, having watched it all happen while the world was in lockdown. “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. 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.” 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. In forced isolation, watching trees tumble down mountains and assuming “death was coming,” Dave began asking questions of himself, of the universe, and of the human experience: namely, love. As he came to accept himself as an introvert, Dave realized that “human connection and the love between us is much bigger, more important, and more complex than anything else.”
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 PLS.” (a nod to Douglas Adams’ infamous The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). With 15,000 questions posed to the band within the first couple of 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? To Dave, it’s a continuation of the Open Source website the band started in the pandemic, a site where fans could download jpegs and MP3s from the band, share them, and create their own artwork and tunes. Engaging with each other and Glass Animals more deeply, this modernist iteration of “Ask Me Anything” sparked a conversation around the power of love in a-what-can-sometimes-feel-like-a cold and loveless world.
Making sense of the chaos of being one of the biggest British contemporary bands is where I Love You So F***ing Much begins. It 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 realized that it is ok to not understand it. Understanding it is impossible. There will be times when 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 is ready to tell their millions of fans, and perhaps themselves: I Love You So F***king Much.
