Give Me The Future, Bastille’s wildly ambitious and brilliantly bold new album is set for release on February 4th, 2022. To celebrate the announcement, the band releases their new single “No Bad Days,” accompanied by the official video co-directed by Dan Smith, today—listen HERE and watch below.
Give Me The Future is a tribute to humanity in a tech age and reflects on the strangeness of living through times that can feel like science fiction. Exploring both the opportunities of new technology and the dark side of lives lived online, it’s as playful and fun as it is thought-provoking, as dystopian as it is dancefloor-friendly, and as electronic as Bastille have ever been.
Eerily, songwriter Dan Smith came up with the idea pre-pandemic. The album was already underway and the band on hiatus from touring when the world shut down, forcing interaction solely through screens.
“Working on these songs in such an apocalyptic period, with everyone stuck at home, glued to screens, fed into the feeling that what is real and what is not has become pretty difficult to discern sometimes,” says Dan. “We’re in the age of deep fake, fake news and lying world leaders. But online, you can be anyone. What that does to our sense of self and to our relationships is huge and it’s fascinating.”
Give Me The Future takes us into a sci-fi wonderland free from restrictions – each song a different danceable dreamscape, a place where you can travel back and forward in time to be anyone, do anything and embrace a new wave of technology which enables us to get lost inside our imagination. The album is laced with references to the world of science fiction film and literature, video games and VR.
It’s a record that takes the idea of the limitless possibilities of the future and journeys everywhere from a joyride of escapism on the uplifting, Thelma & Louise – a tribute to the iconic feminist film on its 20th anniversary, to ‘80s New York with the artist Keith Haring on the bright and whistling Club 57, to a hospital bed in Australia for the devastating but hopeful new single, No Bad Days; Co-directed for the first time by Smith, the music video for the track is set in a futuristic laboratory and sees Dan playing a character using technology to try and resurrect a lost loved one. Nodding to the classic science fiction of “Metropolis”, “Ex Machina” and “The Matrix”, the video paints an emotional and intimate story. Watch HERE.
“It’s really satisfying to have finally directed, and I’m really proud of the little film we made. I grew up with film as my main obsession, so this was a bit of a dream. I learned a shitload and it was good to be challenged in a new way.”
