Glass Animals is a band that revels in a sense of The Other. Under their wide-eyed blur of trippy, childish innocence, lie sinews of whispered vocals, disco-lite droplets and howling synths. Sensitively blending feathery trip hop, electronica, krautrock and R&B influenced bass lines, they have been described as “G-funk made by choirboys.”

The shadowy, dreamlike atmosphere of their sound partly reflects how it was brought forth; in the middle of the night in a small, student room in Elephant and Castle when Dave Bayley, wired from late lab nights at medical school, began suffering from insomnia and turned to writing music. Bayley tentatively showed the bare bones of his tracks to three friends he’d grown up with from home, who helped him flesh out the songs for release on Myspace. Within only a few days they had been contacted by managers, artists, promoters and shortly after news of their intriguing first EP, Leaflings, they pricked the ears of British power-house producer Paul Epworth. He attended their first London gig and soon after Glass Animals became the inaugural act to sign to his new label Wolf Tone. With an amazingly fast rise in prominence, the band now find themselves standing, sort of accidentally, in the midst of the Music Industry.

They have a reeling list of influences which wanders from the likes of Radiohead and Animal Collective to Dr Dre, and even strays into the literary world of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Heart of Darkness and J.R. Tolkein and Lewis Caroll’s fantasy lands. The album was also named after William Steig’s children’s book The Zabajaba Jungle, and the songs are like familiar tales, replete with personified animals and “peanut butter vibes”. Their sound also never quite escapes the influence of the ‘cave’ in the midst of the Oxfordshire woods, in which they rehearse. Its tonality seeps into their album, full of percussion critters and even rabbits nibbling on microphone covers; “you get this really weird sound like someone’s tapping on your ear drum, it’s such a bizarre sound.”

The band have a refreshingly playful approach to their songs and the bizarre sounds they create: “Joe, our drummer, filled a pot up half with water and wiggled it over his head and as he hit it with a stick it made different pitches as the water moved around. We also included samples of Drew eating an apple, someone throwing a crisp packet at a wall – all sorts of stuff.” This even includes a range of children’s instruments; in ‘Pools’, ‘boomwhackers’ (which are essentially big, multicoloured plastic tubes) provide a lively balearic hook that runs throughout. Bayley somewhat humbly puts this innovation down to the band’s lack of experience: “The first couple of EPs were made on a kind of relic of a laptop with garage band and a ten dollar microphone and all of a sudden we had these new things that we had never seen before and it was like being in a playground … we were just wandering around, twisting knobs.”

Beneath this childlike persona however, runs a darker sense of retrospection which stops it from becoming trite or gimmicky. The music appears more like a backwards, guilty glance on innocence and the lyrics, which also include lines like “my naked fool, fresh out of an icky gooey womb / A woozy you, dopes upon a silky smooth perfume,” lend themselves more to Freud than Milne.

Key to the attraction of their first album, Zaba, released this June, is the way in which it functions as a continuous whole. Played from beginning to end, tracks are intentionally melded together as the album forms a humid landscape of sound. Bayley explains he wanted it to work like Dark Side of the Moon; “you can listen to it from start to finish and you can feel like you’ve gone to space for the entire of it” or Merriweather Post Pavillion “which takes you off into this weird electronic forest… That was the goal with this record at least – to take you away from reality.” With the striking aesthetics of their record covers (which Bayley made himself on only a fiver) and the work they have done with Raphael Bonilla Junior in compulsively disturbing music videos, it’s hard not to feel engulfed in the dark world Glass Animals have created.

Having just announced a series of big shows across the UK in March 2015, Glass Animals are set to polish off their roller coaster year with several more singles, alongside some of Bayley’s remixes (for those of you who were a fan of his pre-Glass Animals DJ-ing). And with the singer getting even less sleep now than he did at medical school, they hold the promise of being rawer and more bizarre than ever before.