Bastille frontman Dan Smith admits the pandemic changed plans for a sci-fi album.
The ‘Pompeii’ hitmakers – whose new LP ‘Give Me The Future’ was released on Friday (04.02.22) – started working on the record as a piece of fiction, but they realised “the reality of now is stranger” than a lot of classic science fiction.
Dan told the Daily Star newspaper’s Wired column: “We set out to make a sci-fi album and in doing so, ended up making an album about now.
“Pre-pandemic we wrote a huge amount of songs about dreams and how we live online, but then we ditched all the future-leaning stuff because, to use a cliche, the reality of now is stranger than any sci-fi of the past in a lot of ways.
“Lyrically, that allowed us to go deep on the bizarreness of our reality at the moment.”
To develop the idea, the band – completed by Kyle Simmons, Will Farquarson and Chris ‘Woody’ Wood – delved into “old sci-fi” to see how previous ideas about the future match up to the real deal.
Dan added: “We revisited old sci-fi to check out retro versions of the future, some of which we have surpassed, some of which we avoided and some we have sadly seen come true recently.”
Although they scrapped the sci-fi lyrics, focusing on the heavier subject matter of the pandemic meant the group focused on “escapism” through the music itself.
Dan explained: “It’s about escapism and we wanted it to be fun.
“Some of the topics are quite heavy but the sci-fi aspect allowed us to have fun with analogue synths, melodies and push things sonically further than I would have been comfortable with before.”