Glass Animals Release New Video for “Life Itself”

Ever since the English psych-pop group Glass Animals smoked the indie scene with their debut record, Zaba, in 2014, the four-piece band has been biding their time in preparation for their next release.

Coming off a genre-blending collaboration with NY-based hip-hop artist Joey Bada$$ on the track ‘Lost Control’, which was dropped back in October, Glass Animals recently announced that their second album would be dubbed How to Be a Human Being. To start off the week, the band has unveiled the video for the first single off of their forthcoming LP, which is called "Life Itself".

Much like the music from their previous album, Glass Animals blend a number of worldly sounds to create their latest track. The song begins with a tribal-influenced percussion, and slowly morphs into a hybrid funk-infused song. The foot stomp-inducing and catchy track, which was first unveiled a couple of weeks ago, has just gotten an equally mysterious music video today.

The video starts with a flurry of pink smoke, but soon turns into a strange mission to save a child from an ambiguously pretty woman clad in all white. The music video features the band’s frontman, Dave Bayley, traveling at top speed with an older, plumpish woman (who is holding stalks of celery for some reason), both of whom are determined to set this presumably kidnapped child free to her worried mother, who is stuck working in a dingy restaurant at the time the white-dressed woman calls her.

Mixing fantasy with a grimish reality, the child eventually escapes the clutches of his captor, and Bayley and his strange partner fill the hotel room up with gas to sedate the villain. The video itself fits in with the determination Bayley expresses in the chorus of the song, “Come back down to my knees, got to get back, got to get free.” In the conclusion of the video, the young child is shown walking alone down a barren road, seemingly breaking free from the grasp of the woman in white, who personally struck me as a symbol for societal pressures to become a ‘mature’ member of society.