Dreamland

Dreamland is the third studio album by the British indie rock band Glass Animals. It was originally going to be released on Friday, July 10th, 2020, but was pushed back until Friday, August 7th, 2020.

Background and Recording
On July 2nd, 2018, Glass Animals drummer Joe Seaward was hit by a lorry while cycling in Dublin, Ireland and suffered a broken leg and fractured skull, and subsequently underwent brain surgery. The band cancelled their remaining tour dates for rest of the year as a result. With Seaward's fate unknown at the time, Dave Bayley said it was "difficult to look forwards" and he found himself looking backwards, thinking back to old memories and "finding comfort in them even if they were uncomfortable in themselves". In September 2018, Seaward posted an update detailing his recovery in having to learn to talk, read, and walk again, and revealed he started playing the drums again.

While Seaward was in recovery, Bayley travelled repeatedly to Los Angeles. He was providing songwriting and production contributions to the music of other artists, including 6lack, King Princess, Khalid and DJ Dahi. While writing for other artists, Bayley learned how other artists wrote about themselves and he began writing lyrics with more personal themes. The positive reception to his more personal songwriting inspired Bayley to do the same in his own music for Glass Animals. The second Glass Animals record, How to Be a Human Being, was a concept album featuring 11 songs with each song representing a person. The songs were inspired by people they met and stories they were told during their travels while promoting their debut album ZABA. Bayley had mostly refused to write autobiographical songs before, using other real and fictional characters as his inspiration. However, the final track on How to Be a Human Being, Agnes, was about a friend who committed suicide. Bayley told The Independent that writing Agnes "opened the door" to Dreamland.

Dreamland was recorded in London in 2019, with Seaward participating. Most of the album was formulated by Bayley, but his bandmates were responsible for some of the more technical performances on the album and were involved in deciding which songs to put on the album. Dreamland was almost entirely produced by Bayley, although he had assistance from the band's longtime mentor Paul Epworth. American hip hop record producer Mike Dean was also present during some of the album's recording. The album was mixed by Bayley, David Wrench, Manny Marroquin and MixedByAli.