If Dan Smith wasn’t in Bastille, he’d probably be somewhere in a bunker, doomscrolling headlines about the singularity. Or maybe he’d be drafting storyboards for a pop opera about our impending VR meltdown. Lucky for us, he’s doing both at once — and calling it Give Me The Future. “If it was a film it would be a science fiction,” Dan shrugs, like he’s just made a casual rom-com instead of a swirling digital panic attack disguised as a hook-heavy record.
The album is a glittering fever dream of what happens when humans, armed with phones and fantasies, decide that being present is overrated. “We wanted to make an album all about escapism and our relationship with technology — how it’s affecting our sense of self and our relationships with each other,” he says. If you thought that sounded like work for a philosophy grad student, Dan’s right there with you: “Let’s make our lives really easy and try and do a very nuanced, complex, retro-futuristic sci-fi album. You’re welcome.”
This is classic Bastille: big ideas, bigger metaphors, all dressed up like radio hits. Their last record, Doom Days, was basically a party at the end of the world — twelve hours of hedonism as the apocalypse crept in through the window. “It was all about this kind of French farce of trying to shut the curtains and ignore the fact that the world is crumbling outside,” Dan says, remembering it with the weariness of someone who lived through 2020 with a concept album for company.
But Give Me The Future goes bigger. Or maybe weirder. “It was initially a much bigger, more sprawling album,” Dan admits. “It became about maladaptive daydreaming and how we transport ourselves — books, TV, video games, VR. As time went on, that became more of a preoccupation.” Translation: he found a way to write club bangers about deep-faking your personality and living inside your phone. “If you can plug in or put a headset on and literally be anything, why would you necessarily want to go back to normal life?”
And because the future is never just about the future, Dan started reading. Orwell, Atwood, Afrofuturism, Ray Kurzweil, the whole sci-fi canon. He rattles off quotes like a walking Black Mirror episode: “You don’t predict the future, you imagine it.” He repeats that line like a mantra. “It’s so true — be that a science fiction writer or an activist trying to steer life in a better direction. It’s fascinating. There’s so much there.”
Of course, it’s Bastille — so they didn’t stop at making an album. They built a fake tech company too, a not-so-subtle wink at every corporate behemoth we scroll ourselves to sleep with. “We launched Future Inc., this amazing technology that allows you to go into the universe within your brain. It’s a step on from what VR currently is. Again, it’s just a way to hold the mirror up and poke fun at these tech monoliths,” Dan explains. Then he deadpans: “It was just a bit of fun for us. And a way to make the music live outside the album.”
This is not their first rodeo in world-building. He gleefully brings up their Wild World era, when they built an entire faux news conglomerate to roll out songs about political chaos. “It probably wasn’t great for our heads,” he laughs. “But it was interesting.” That theme continued with Doom Days and now this new “alternate sci-fi reality” that spills out into music videos, AR, and live shows. “It’s the biggest space outside of just the music to have more conversations around these topics — and obviously just a really fun opportunity to collaborate with other creatives and visual artists.”
Collaboration is the irony here: a record about virtual isolation, written in real-world lockdowns, that turned out to be Bastille’s most communal project yet. “Despite having made it in the most isolated time in our lives, it’s wound up being the most collaborative album we’ve ever made,” Dan says. “And weirdly fitting — we launched Future Inc. and then a few months later Facebook launched the metaverse. Makes us look way more prescient than we actually are.”
If you’re looking for an answer at the end of all this digital noise — if we’re doomed, if we’ll ever log off, if AI is the messiah or the grim reaper — you won’t get one. The record finishes with the line “Who knows what the future holds,” which Dan describes as both a joke and a reminder. “I thought it would be funny to spend the entire album worrying about the future and then subvert it right at the end with the person you’re with saying, ‘Shut the fuck up. Stop stressing about the future. Be here, now.’”
So is he optimistic? “Absolutely no one knows,” he says. “We all have the capacity to be absolutely amazing and absolutely awful at the same time.” The best we can do, maybe, is what he does: plug in for half an hour, get lost in the retro-futuristic pop bangers, and try to enjoy the ride — even if the car’s on fire.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below:
