Nachdem das letzte Bastille Album „Dooms Day“ den perfekten Soundtrack für die darauffolgende Pandemie-Zeit lieferte, klingt das neue Album hoffnungsvoller – zumindest, wenn es nach dem Titel geht. Mit Frontsänger Dan Smith sprechen wir über die Entstehung von „Give Me the Future“, was hinter dem immer-präsenten Zukunftsthema in den Songtexten steckt und wieso die Band jetzt ihren großen Science Fiction-Moment feiert.

Dan, how has your 2022 been so far?
It’s been mad busy getting ready to release the album. Which is really nice, you know, it can felt quite strange releasing music over the last sort of year. So a lot of the usual markers of what makes things feel normal and satisfying in the old world obviously have disappeared for many reasons. How you release music and how people consume it obviously is always changing.

But it’s been a strange since we released Distorted Light Beam, because I’m used to be on tour all the time, bubbling along, playing songs every night to people and see their reaction. So it’s been surreal releasing music into the ether and just being able to look online and see if there’s a reaction — it’s kind of intangible and just different. Going into the album, we’re gonna play some shows in the UK and a couple of weeks. That is exciting. And speaking to lots of people about the album, even though it’s all over zoom. It’s nice, it’s tangible.

You were always on tour and tested out songs before you put them on albums. You didn’t have that chance this time. I guess that made a difference in the album process?
It does. I’d be writing and we try things in soundcheck and see how it feels on stage. I write a lot of music all the time, but I’m not the kind of person that sits around with a guitar and the piano, singing stuff. Unless we’re on tour and unless we’re in rehearsals, I’m not testing them out or practicing singing them. That’s gone away as well.

At the end of last year, we started rehearsing the whole new album and we suddenly had that process of being: „oh my god, that was amazing to play live!“. Seeing what works and what doesn’t, those things have been separated. It’s quite odd. It has left us really hungry to play the songs live and see what it’s like in a room with real people.

Yeeees, I cannot wait! Especially now that you released Shut Off the Lights – such a freaking good song.
It’s hard to decide what songs to release and when and why. The songs are all quite different and so there are loads of different avenues into an album. There’s a lot of darkness and challenging themes in our music as well. I can sometimes forget the „how does this song make me feel?“. I think with Shut Off the Lights, there’s something just quite uncomplicated about it.

Because you’re so literal with what you’re describing, you’re straight in this particular moment. And when you listen to it, you yourself want to be in this moment too. It doesn’t need a lot of metaphors to describe it. It’s so simple and easy in a way but looking back on the last two years, it’s something that wasn’t so easy at all.
Right! It’s been, for everyone in the world, a really complicated couple of years of course. And I think it was important for me and for that album, to have a couple of moments of levity and lightness. Both to kind of poke fun at ourselves. When an album gets too serious, I can be like „Hold on, stop! Pull yourself out of that for a minute“.

That’s something that I have to remind myself of as well. You can go down the rabbit hole of making music or watching the news too much, reading too much of the same things and you can start to lose perspective a little bit every now and then. So I guess it’s a kind of helpful for the narrative of the album — but also just in general to remind myself.

Throughout your whole discography, this future topic has been there all along, while I think so much music predominantly focuses on the past longing for easier times and memories. Is this your anxiety speaking because my anxiety feels seen!
A lot of it is about how we’re constantly confronted by different versions of what the future might be. Society pushes us to all constantly think about the next day and it’s thinking about to get to achieve and not achieve, what’s next. It’s really easy to fall into worrying about that. But also, we’re confronted with what the future might look like in terms of the planet that we live on because you’re seeing the effects of climate change or communities all over the world, in the news every day. That’s really real, this thing that was maybe positioned as a sort of distant future isn’t at all now, and to see the real-world impact that it’s having right now.

So that’s forcing everyone to think about what the future might be, the immediate future in that respect. And there’s also the voices of a lot of activists and thought leaders and scientists who are all shouting very loudly, about what needs to change and the things they’re doing, working hard to try and guide things in a slightly better direction. That’s another version of the future that those people are imagining. It exists in so many different forms.

And also part of the reason for doing this album as science fiction, it’s a way to talk about the world that we live in now. Science fiction writers have always done that, imagined different futures to comment on the now. But also just life at the moment feels like some mad upside-down science fiction. Not to mention the pandemic and living online and living through our screens for two years. But talk about the crazy, speedy advancement of technology and the way that it infiltrates every single corner of our waking lives. Every aspect of your human existence is kind of fascinating, and it’s obviously all inspiring, it’s also really fucking weird and sometimes terrifying.

It’s a strange environment to live in, isn’t it? But it’s also just everyone’s boring everyday reality. So there were just loads in this world to explore. Revisiting a lot of science fiction films, books, and podcasts, just really immersing ourselves in that genre, because it’s not necessarily my favorite genre, but it is really interesting. It was a fun world to occupy for a bit. Deciding on a sci-fi theme allowed us sonically to really go for a different kind of futuristic sound to nod back to the music that we love or don’t love and just thought was interesting. To try and make something that sounds retro and really modern at the same time.

And even though the music on the album sounds very different from what you did before, for me as a fan for so long, it kind of feels like coming home in a way I cannot explain why.
We kind of approach this album as if it was a bit of a fresh start. And it was way more collaborative than I normally am, which was great. It was nice to be challenged, and that was the point. Bits of it were collaborative, and then the majority of it was kind of how we normally do things, just me and Mark [Crew] together in the studio, working on all the stuff that we’ve recorded.

It was fun to write a bunch of songs we were really happy with and then spend like a year fucking with them, deconstructing them, reconstructing them, re-recording them and rewriting the lyrics, and all of that. It was a nice healthy mix of doing things really differently and then using the parts of our process that really work to finish it in a way that we were really happy with and felt comfortable with. I think it does feel new, but also anything that I sing on and write on is going to feel a certain way.

There is a quote from you I wanted to talk about: “I’m not interested in easy or straightforward commercial success”. I mean, you blew up so fast with your debut and you went through so many phases, but right now it feels like you’re in a really happy place with what you’re doing. And I think that reflects what you said before.
I guess how it works with me, and I’m sure a lot of people that make music or make anything, is you’re always so invested in the thing that we’re doing at that moment. I would never pursue something if I didn’t think it was really good or interesting. I guess I’m always so concerned with the thing that we’re working on.

We finished the new album last summer. And I’ve been able to put it aside and now coming back to it. Listening to it again, knowing that there’s gonna be a lot to talk about. It’s quite nice going back to the album that is new to so many people and kind of old to me, and just quite excited by hearing it from top to bottom. I think it’s a really interesting album, but it’s batshit crazy in places and I’m really happy that it says quite a lot and it’s having some interesting conversations.

You were always a big storyteller with albums… and I mean records themselves are something that gets rarer these days. But I think it’s so exciting how it still evolves in your albums — like now you have interludes and spoken word art and also things like Future Inc., you had Wild World Communications before. You’re taking music to a much broader level than just music.
We’ve always wanted it to feel really immersive. There’s so much you can say in the music. For me, I always think about songs or albums I could feel in my head. Using the lyrics and the production and the melodies to take the listener somewhere. I’m lucky that we get to make music videos and can add to that world a bit more. You’ve got the artwork we can add again another dimension and then yeah like you said, Wild World Communications and Future Inc. — how can we build a world around this music? Because for us, it’s really fun and interesting, it’s like pretending to write a film or a TV show.

I hope for our fans, it just adds a whole other layer if you have the time, or the inclination to care, or if you’re interested in what we’re doing. It’s lots of fun little mysteries to unpack, extra threads to pull out. And it allows us to talk about things in more detail than we maybe can in the song. There might be something that was part of a phrase from one line and you’re like “that’s really interesting!”, but because it’s a three-minute song, I can’t really go into it and that depth. So we can use the album campaign to explore these ideas even more and poke fun at society, different companies and poke fun at ourselves. Yeah, I love that bit!

You know, it’s a lot of work. I often think about other lead singers in bands, they just can easily make songs, live their life, and then occasionally go on tour. When we’re busy with Bastille stuff, we kind of live and breathe it 24/7 – which is a lot but I think it’s worth it, if people are getting something out of it and if it’s interesting for us. And if I can use it as a way to do research into other things or explore ideas that I wouldn’t have had been able to, collaborate with people who are just really interesting, and learn a bit from them, that’s fucking awesome!

Dan, it’s so nice to hear your thoughts and to see how happy it makes you to make music. I mean, you’re doing this for a very long time…
It does! I mean, also elements of it made me really stressed. But the writing and recording process, making songs, that’s so satisfying to me. We’re 10 years into this band now and I feel really lucky to have made four albums and four mixtapes and done things like the Orchestrated project, done MTV Unplugged and written for other people, and done all these collaborations. I’m realizing now that an album is like a little phase. I wouldn’t want to do this forever. This is our science fiction moment. We’ve gotten there, we’ve done that. And the next thing that I’m working on is completely opposite and I love that we can go from one to the other.