Bastille: visualising the future

Bastille have started visualising the future with new album Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past and they tell us all at when we visited Boardmasters Festival 2022.

Ready to perform main stage and for the 50,000 attendees to sing along to every single hit, we met the London band backstage to discuss their latest album “Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past” out August 26th a complete version of their fourth studio album “Give Me The Future” they can’t wait to put out!

What has been the highlight of your career so far?

Kyle: From the beginning to now? Oh My God! That's impossible.

Dan: Glastonbury? South America and Hong Kong? I think we just feel so lucky to have been able to play them. And, you know, loads of the videos that we've been able to shoot or like the TV shows we've got to play on, Saturday Night Live was insane. But also, some of the opportunities, you know, to get to go on tours, visiting NASA and Kyle went to a rocket launch once which is nuts. To think that it's just for people that started making some songs in London, to have been able to travel the world, and even here today, like, just getting to go on a boiling hot day like today to get some water down to the beach at Boardmasters. We are grateful.

"Give Me The Future" is the latest album. You're releasing an extension in a couple of weeks, why now?

Kyle: So the album on the 26th, the full album will be out. The first instalment was what we released, that was kind of a sort of condensed down version. But this is now the full album.

Is it because you had so much material?

Dan: The intention had always been to put all this music out. And it kind of felt strange releasing a version of the album in March that was holding back all of the songs that we loved and that were such a big part of the record. I guess that was the first half and this is the second half. I guess we wanted to explore ideas that you know, in terms of escapism, and the things that people do to get out of their lives or get out of their heads for a minute. As we all need to appoints you know, of course it's looking at like how some some people would obsess over the future some people obsess over like fiction, some people obsess over nostalgia, for better or worse.

And some people just want pure escapism. So there's "Give Me The Future" which is obviously not into the kind of weird, slightly dystopian world that we seem to live in and how bizarre it is to be living to constantly changing evolving technologies that we will interact with. And then there's "Dreams Of The Past" which is a nod towards wanting to fall back into either memory or fiction or whatever you do to sort of maybe the hark back to idealised versions of the past that might be slightly walked through rose tinted glasses, and then there's "Other People's heartaches" which is one of our mixtapes and it's a sort of a space for us to collaborate and experiment. We have here the collaboration with Alok and the one with Tyde for example.

What was the process of experimenting the new album?

Dan: It was a real mix. We'd started the album before locked down. So I started some stuff, wrote some things that came from writing sessions that I'd been doing for other artists. Some stuff was done over zoom. It was a real mix. And then, when lockdowns broke, we were able to all get in the studio together, which was really nice. But then people also did stuff remotely like Kyle's recording vocals under the duvet in his flat.

Kyle: And then when we're able to like kind of start forming bubbles. I could like go to the studio and work on the tracks.

Did it feel like you were forced to write?

Kyle: I wouldn't say forced. Dan writes nonstop all of the time. All of the time. It's always the occasion where have too much. How can we deal with it? It's nice. We're quite lucky because Dan doesn't stop.

Dan: And also, I think, I don't know, in terms of having made some of the stuff on Zoom, having made some of it remotely, it kind of fits pretty perfectly with the themes of the album that are all about how we interact by technology and how it can be both really connecting and really isolating at the same time. So for us in terms of like, if we compare an album that we made with a period of our lives, like it couldn't really be more suited to this.

We're at Boardmasters and you're playing main stage tonight! What is your festival's set like?

Dan: It's kind of "Give Me The Future Tour". We are bringing the themes of the album and the visuals of the album to life. So it's been quite fun, using the idea of futuring. And this fictional technology that we sort of built around the album which escaping into your mind using technology. And it's, you know, a nod towards lots of science fiction that we love and think is interesting. So we've tried to sort of pull all of our music into that world. We've remade a bunch of older songs and put them into this musical era. I've just had fun with it. I hope that it will be a lot of fun for people. We've got an hour to hopefully just jump up and down like idiots and send you guys love.

What is next now?

Kyle: We've got a bunch of festivals, then we go to South America. We have a full European tour in November. Yeah. We've got a bunch more shows and just a bunch more stuff to do. And we're really, really excited about it all and then more stuff happening next year!

Give Me The Future + Dreams Of The Past is out now.

Article by Sal Fasone.