Bastille’s guide to the escapist thrills of new album Give Me The Future

If technology advanced to the stage that dreams and thoughts could be examined, Bastille's relentlessly creative leader Dan Smith would make a fascinating test subject. “Sometimes it can be slightly like a pathology, having all these songs in your head all the time,” the Bastille frontman tells The FADER over Zoom. “It can mean you're kind of half in and half out of reality at the best of times.” A solitary creator by nature, he poured this endless stream of music into the lyrical expanse of each of the bands three studio albums, 2013's Bad Blood, 2016's Wild World, and 2019 release Doom Days, on his own for the first decade of the band’s existence.

Smith only allowed longtime producer Mark Crew to breach the protective barrier he’d formed around the band’s musical identity. Early iterations of Bastille’s fourth studio album Give Me The Future presented as more of a grand collection of sci-fi inspired songs attempting to make sense of the world’s fast-moving venture into dystopia than a cohesive album. Needing to get out of his own head by letting someone else in, he opened himself up to collaboration on a broader scale for the first time and found clarity and confidence within that.

Smith shaped the futuristic conceptual identity of the record with pop maestro Ryan Tedder as executive producer. “Obviously I would be mad to not listen to what he had to say in some respects, but also, we are quite protective over our process,” Smith says. “So there was part of me that was like, ‘No, this feels wrong’ and another part of me was like, ‘Remember what you told yourself, be open, be collaborative.’”

Speaking with The FADER, Smith breaks down Give Me The Future one song at a time to reveal how he struck a balance between the internal and external – welcoming some of pop’s biggest songwriters into his world while still crafting his own conceptual commentary on the shared experience of seeking escapism and the uncertainty of our technological future through the lens of maladaptive dreaming.

The FADER: You bring up this idea, lyrically, of being able to be anyone, anywhere, anything. Trying on these new sounds and changing your collaborative process, does it feel like you’re trying on a new identity?

Dan Smith: I realized quite early on that I've always been frustrated and feeling like we can try a million different things and so many different forms of production and so many different styles, like heavy rock through to weird nighttime R&B and we can fuck around loads – but if it's my songwriting and my voice over something, it innately sounds like Bastille in a way that I think a lot of people can't really hear beyond, which has always been a bit of a challenge for us to try and upend.

I think that that's the one song on the album that we co-wrote and co-produced with Ryan. He really wanted to push it into the French dance territory and gave us the confidence to really fucking go there. We started the track with him and then we took it and worked on it ourselves and really went in on the synths and made the drums way harder, added the electro spit, nodding towards the Daft Punk and Kanye tunes that we love.

I heard a lot of Kanye on there, in the vein of “All of the Lights.”

Having come from a place where I made a whole album by myself on a laptop and did it all, wrote everything, getting to a point – and I'm not there yet – but looking to people like Kanye or how someone like Beyonce puts together an album that is incredible and culture shifting, that ultimately requires somebody with a huge sense of what they want to do and a real creative force at the helm to sort of to bring in and combine different writers and creative forces and producers and samples. I think obviously we are not anywhere there yet in terms of that collaborative process, but I think this album has felt like a big step in that direction for me, in terms of trying to do that a little bit.

Here, you’re repurposing these staples of '70s and '80s dance pop for this more futuristic landscape. How do you connect the past, present, and future musically?

For me, the label of science fiction for this album allowed us to look back in order to look forward, mining some of the eras and musical fashions of the past to try and create something new and something futuristic. A lot of the science fiction that we referenced has a kind of retro futuristic theme that runs through innately. It was a nice way to look to different musical styles and synthesizers and drum sounds of the past that sounded futuristic then and still sound futuristic, but we have that familiarity with them because of artists like Prince and producers like Quincy Jones and people like Daft Punk who still feel really modern and fresh, but loads of those sounds are actually quite old now. And that's fascinating.

There's an almost sinister aura to this song, like someone is being tempted with this escape. How do you set up this idea of how appealing that could be while also centering this realization that it's never that simple? It's a lot more emotionally complex than just letting go.

I mean that song for me is, it's incredibly raw and I have obviously a very strong sense of what it is and where it came from. And it's quite a sort of personal story to my family and quite a complex one. But as a song, it just fell out. I sat at the keyboard and sang through Harmony Engine, which is this vocoder synth that spits your voice out into those different voices. And yeah, the song just pulled out as it is. It is a complicated story to tell, and I think with our band, we always try and straddle that line between drawing you in with the music and the melodies and also hopefully being quite challenging with the lyrics and the ideas. And it's that Trojan horse thing that pop music can do really well. And I hope we're able to do it.

There's a real sense of ascension and serenity in the strings here, what headspace is this song transitioning us into?

We really wanted to sort of take you out of that moment and almost imagine that someone's grabbed your head and is dragging you back through time to drag you forward again. We wanted it to feel like old Hollywood, the silver screen, black and white – the reference to Huxley in the title. It's almost like a snippet from a lost, forgotten love theme. We wanted it to just really sweep you up in a kind of Hollywood way that sonically was in contrast to the hard beats of “No Bad Days” and “Thelma and Louise” and “Distorted Light Beam.” And it signals another little chapter within the album.

How do you view the relationship between film and escapism?

I wanted to reference a lot of the sci-fi that we've kind of as a society surpassed because it just hammers home how much our reality at the moment could be some bizarre sci-fi of the past so easily. It's so interesting the way that we are, as entertainment has become so streamable and our expectation is just that we will be entertained in every single spare minute of the day, because we can be, and that exists now for a lot of people with the privilege to have the access to that stuff.

Does it make it difficult to find escape when so many of these dystopian elements are more reflective of our reality now?

It's interesting that you say that, I think there's still a real fascination with science fiction. Just because we are living it, it doesn't make it any less relevant. Black Mirror, I sometimes can't watch because it's too big, it's so fucking on the nose and we know it is. And I guess challenging entertainment is effective when it makes you uncomfortable because it puts you on edge.

You bring up this idea of willful denial until it becomes personal, which I think most people are guilty of. What type of self-examination happens when you're writing about such a distorted shared reality?

I think the voice of that song and the voice of the album is very much intended to not be a judgemental one, because I think we are all guilty of hypocrisies on small and big levels. This is a weird example, but our tour manager is the most militant vegan in the world and he's so passionate about it, but he also drives a gas guzzling car. We're all flawed and we're all limited in what we can think about and care about. I can understand that my relationship with my phone is totally unhealthy, but I also can't give it up. And that's just like the human condition, isn't it? With that song, what I wanted to try and get was all of the ways that society and people are changing. And I don't believe that everyone's innately bad, but life in the world is too complicated to be able to judge everyone and anyone in any kind of way.

Riz Ahmed really tackles that self-examination head on here. What did those conversations look like getting him involved?

As a rapper and as an activist and as an actor, [Riz] has a really interesting voice and isn't scared to say exactly what he thinks. I sent him a bunch of the tracks from the album, including “Plug In” to just give him a sense of what it was. I referenced the track on Blonde where Andre 3000 takes over. I love how it's almost like, "Hey, Andre, here's the mic. And you just run with it." And I said that to Riz, but also that we were keen for it to be quite an intimate and calm moment.

He just came back with this ridiculously incredible poem and totally blew us all away. I couldn't really have imagined that it would be as amazing as it was. Sometimes, I don't know, collaboration is weird, particularly if you're not in the same room and you never quite know what you're going to get back. And it does such a brilliant job unconsciously, of taking you out of all of the paranoia of “Plug In” and pulling you back down to humanity and he so evocatively describes what it is to have intimacy, but in the context of all of this technology and all of these worries.

When you’re looking at music and dance as an escape, how do you get your mind to slow down enough to block out all of the more sinister realities you bring to the surface before this?

I’m terrible at it, but take solace in going for a bike ride with my friends, or just going to the pub or drinking or playing games, or chilling out – the stuff where your phone isn't there and you're not thinking about the news and you're not thinking about any of those problems of life. It's kind of obvious and sounds a bit trite, but it's the simple things. I guess in “Shut off the Lights,” it's about sex and it's about trying to get out of your own head and just be fully present in a physical moment. And we wanted to make the song just really fun and I wanted it to make you want to dance instantly.

That's what struck me about “Stay Awake,” because it opens with this AI voice and it reminded me of this idea that there just has to be something there. It’s not even like a guiding force, but company in a way, or a presence.

And that's something we expand upon outside of the album, we invented this tech company called Future Inc., it's kind of gestured towards in the beginning of “Stay Awake.” I'm fascinated by where voice mimicking technology is going, both musically and in terms of spoken word. We toyed with the idea of promoting this album entirely using deep fake and me ingesting my voice into AI. I really wanted a very digital voice on the record to sort of give us that moment and absolutely that song questions: if you can live happier in another environment, even though that was a digital one, unless you absolutely have to, what would your incentive be to come back to reality if you're happier somewhere else?

What does the future look like to you?

It's the person next to you, if you're lucky enough to have someone next to you, pulling you out of your own head, pulling you out of your fears for the future and grounding you in reality, and basically, it's a potentially obvious message, but just saying just try really hard to find some kind of happiness in what you have because you could be dead tomorrow. I'm not someone that thinks that far in the future. Maybe it comes from having been in a band for 10 years, but I guess it's impossible to think that far ahead and I'm not particularly organized. I'm not someone that plans. So I'm so lucky to get to write songs and I just think about what I'm working on next and I'm able to escape in that way and immerse myself in songs in that world. Sometimes it can be slightly like a pathology, having all these songs in your head all the time, it can mean you're kind of half in and half out of reality at the best of times.

What keeps you hopeful?

Every time things feel really bleak, I basically look to young activists and the amazingly intelligent, thoughtful scientists and inventors who are just producing ideas and technologies to make other people's lives better and to try and make other people's futures easier and more enjoyable.

You're asking a ton of questions throughout this record that feel much more philosophical than literal and there's this air of justified cynicism almost because we don't have the answers. Even the function of the whistling here, it paints this picture of aimlessly wandering around a city – not lost, necessarily, but searching.

I've always really liked [asking questions] as a device in songs because I'm a fucking idiot that writes songs, but it's nice to pose questions and see what people come back with and see what that evokes from them. With “Club 57,” it was me imagining traveling back in time and arriving in New York, arriving in the kind of '80s art scene and all of its issues and all of its inclusivity and all of its complexity and all of its hedonism and the darkness and the creativity and all of those things intermeshed.

And it's essentially a song about Keith Haring. I love how much you can try to bring art to everybody and his sort of single minded vision as well, obviously a life massively cut short, but he just seemed like a really wonderful progressive person in so many ways, an activist and somebody who saw social injustice and really wanted to try and make a change in any way that he could.

It was this naivete of arriving in a new place as a creative with a sort of a brain full of ideas and optimism. It's that Trojan horse thing again. And I thought that with this song, people will hear the airy acoustic guitar and the word love a lot in the chorus, and maybe think that's what it was. And then hopefully dig a bit deeper and be like, okay.

We're reaching the end and it sounds like either a reboot or a total shutdown with this distorted medley. Where are we going from here?

That interlude for me was giving over entirely to escapism. The lyric is very distorted, but it's: “Now I'm gone, I've gone away.” It's imagining falling backwards and entirely surrendering to whatever escapist digital state you might be searching for and the open endedness of that almost having sunk into a coma state or something. And again, it goes very cinematic. It goes from the futuristic into dream-like.

BIM adds this transcendent choir effect, what was the function of wrapping the album on this note?

It was important to me that my voice didn't end the album. I really wanted the impact of BIM and her incredible vocals to round it off. I like the idea that I just slip out towards the end and just as the track remixes itself at the end, let them take the reins. I thought it would be funny to end an album that's entirely concerned with what the future might look like by having someone say, stop. If you're lucky enough to have someone by your side and you can have small moments of happiness, in some way, in some part of life, that's enough and that should be enough. It can be so easy to be consumed in these swirling thoughts of everything, because there's so much that's fucked up in the world, that it could be really, you can lose yourself in worrying about that and worrying about those things and potentially rightly so, but it's definitely not good for anyone's sense of happiness.

I always associate choirs with this idea of hope and faith in a way. This song sounds more hopeful than anything else on the album. There’s a lightness to it.

Some would argue that's another form of escapism. These are narratives that we immerse ourselves in to give us hope and to rationalize the things in life that can seem so wildly unfair. And yeah, there's a real comfort in that sort of church sound because it's so obviously different for different people, but it's such a familiar comforting and inspiring sound.

The futuristic choir thing, it's maybe like the clouds parting moment and it's that you've just had that wonderful and incredibly strong first coffee of the day and you slept alright the night before and actually the stuff that was keeping you awake all night doesn't seem quite so bad. If you defuse yourself from those thoughts in your head and have a bit of distance and perspective, they can not seem quite so apocalyptic sometimes.