Animal Nightlife

According to legend, Glass Animals chose their name by picking two words out of the dictionary at random—but you couldn’t come up with a better combination for a group that toes the line between the pristine and primal.

On their 2014 debut, Zaba, the Oxford quartet aligned themselves with a storied lineage of abstract alt-rock—the moody atmospheres of Radiohead, the tropical textures of Animal Collective—but in Dave Bayley, Glass Animals possess an uncommonly smooth singer (and genre-bending producer) who could mold those left-field influences into sultry, R&B-flavored pop songs.

That sense of anything-goes openness fully flourished on 2016’s How to Be a Human Being, whose procession of freaky, funky anthems and synth-smeared slow jams earned Glass Animals their first Mercury Prize nomination.