Bastille invites listeners to escape in ‘Give Me The Future’

Even when there was studio time, no one was ever in the same room.

“I think looking back at our career, it will feel like the most fitting setting for an album like that,” said Smith.

As the days in lockdown increased so too did the appeal of escapism.

“Feeling like if this is life/I’m choosing fiction,” sings Smith on the opening track, “Distorted Light Beam.” In “Thelma + Louise” he sings, “Days like these you want to get away/Close our eyes pretend we’re miles away.”

“We were really drawn to this sort of sci-fi, tech-leaning stuff about escapism, I think just because of the world that we all lived through the last year or so,” said Smith.

“Give Me the Future” isn’t Bastille’s first go at a concept album. Their last one, “Doom Days,” was as well. In fact, Smith says he likes the parameters a concept album gives him when he’s writing.

“There’s always a sense of autobiography in our work, but I always find it much more fun and interesting to write about the things that I’m obsessed with at that point,” said Smith. “It becomes a mix of sort of our lives and like a research project.”

In creating “Give Me the Future,” Smith not only relied on classic science fiction influences like “1984,” “The Matrix,” “Total Recall,” Aldous Huxley’s “Island,” “Minority Report” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but also Afrofuturism, escapist films like “Thelma and Louise” and art from Keith Haring. Musically, he drew from artists like Daft Punk, Genesis, Paul Simon and Quincy Jones. The album even includes spoken word poetry from British actor Riz Ahmed.