The future Bastille imagine on their new album, Give Me the Future, dates at least as far back as 1951, when Ray Bradbury published his short story “The Veldt.” Among the first entrants in a rich vein of science fiction about the perils of virtual reality, it concerns a family whose children become so attached to a VR room in their house that they murder mom and dad when the parents attempt to tear them away. Seventy years—and many stories, novels, films, and television episodes—later, with Facebook investing billions in its “Reality Labs” metaverse division, the question of what happens when people start to like a simulated world better than the real thing is more urgent than ever. If an extremely popular band had anything new or interesting to say on the matter, now would be a good time to say it.
Readers of this website probably know Bastille’s slick synth-driven rock best via “Pompeii” and the Marshmello collaboration “Happier,” two songs you would almost certainly recognize, even if you couldn’t necessarily place where from, or who’s singing. To an outsider, they’re one of those hugely successful artists whose success seems to flow from machinations bigger and more mysterious than such petty concerns as, “Does anyone actually choose to listen to this stuff?” But singer and songwriter Dan Smith has more idiosyncratic ambitions than the caricature of the faceless yet hugely popular rock band suggests. Give Me the Future is a full-fledged concept album (not Bastille’s first, incidentally) with an elaborate backstory involving a fictitious company called Future Inc, whose products allow users to escape into virtual worlds limited only by their own imaginations.
Bastille clearly approached their subject matter with the right critiques in mind. In a promotional interview outlining the Future Inc concept, Smith talked about how tech companies advertise themselves with earnest appeals to humanity while making big money by harvesting personal data. And the shopworn nature of the concept isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker; as recently as 2016, the television series Black Mirror found a new angle on the simulated reality problem by drawing out the pathos of a relationship between two people living in computer-assisted bliss. There’s no reason Bastille shouldn’t be able to find their own spin on the story. But Give Me the Future is almost perverse in its inability or unwillingness to develop its premise beyond the most basic and obvious elements.
Drop the needle at any point in the album, and hear Smith’s proclamations that he is in the future, and he can do anything, and be anyone, and the simulation is like a dream, a dream that is good but perhaps so good that it’s also bad. The songs are virtually interchangeable.
Here’s the chorus to “Distorted Light Beam,” delivered over pumping drum machine and noir-disco synth: “When I’m dreaming tonight, I can do anything/When I’m dreaming tonight, I can go anywhere/When I’m dreaming tonight, I can be anyone.”
Here’s the chorus to “Back to the Future,” delivered over pumping drum machine and noir-disco guitar: “In the middle of the night, I can dream away/I can change what I like, and go back to the future again.”
Here’s the chorus of “Give Me the Future,” whose drum machine, to be fair, pumps a little more slowly than the other two: “Give me the future/It’s golden and bright/Catch a fever dream/In the flash of the lights.” If that one isn’t similar enough to the other two, don’t worry; Smith reminds us he can “be anything” in the song’s third line.
The arrangements are stuffed with ear candy: Giorgio Moroder-sequenced synths, Daft Punk vocoders, palm-muted guitars played with mechanistic precision—a sound that gestures at commonly accepted ideas of what the future might sound like, but is actually pretty old-fashioned in 2022. Everything is executed with the utmost professionalism, and there are a few undeniably big moments, like the way a cluttered mix clears out to almost nothing for the chorus of “Thelma+Louise,” or the sax solo of “Shut Off the Lights,” which wiggles like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. But on the whole, the sound is plagued with the same lack of specificity as the songs.
Smith seems to want every track to be a thesis statement, encompassing every theme and sound he has in mind for the album, and as a result, they all sound the same. His constant sloganeering and sci-fi references—there are namedrops in two separate songs for Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in addition to nods towards 1984 and Aldous Huxley—leave little room for the unpredictable texture of humanity. One conspicuous exception is “Promises,” an interlude featuring a spoken-word verse from Riz Ahmed. To my reading, he seems to rap from the perspective of a post-apocalyptic cad, professing his love for a former one-night stand now that she’s the only partner available: “Babe, you were just my best lay, and I never planned to hold hands/Until the whole of human history aligned so we could slow dance.” Kind of skeezy, but also kind of beautiful. Most importantly, it sounds like it came from the strange and flawed mind of an actual person, not a neural network trained on Twitter trending topics and Philip K. Dick titles.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Give Me the Future’s best song is “Shut Off the Lights,” the one with the most tenuous ties to the larger concept, sonically or lyrically. “Close off your hands around, hands around me/Grace-landing onto your bed, there you are,” Smith sings to a paramour in the first verse. Given the way the music sounds—jubilant, lighthearted, with perhaps a touch of South Africa in the backing vocals—it’s fairly safe to assume that the slightly awkward portmanteau is intended as a nod to Graceland, Paul Simon’s global fusion masterpiece, about as far away as possible from the neon-lit doom and gloom of the other songs. (Elsewhere, Smith also paraphrases the opening line from “The Sound of Silence,” for whatever that’s worth.) Unburdened with the need to deliver a message, and genuinely fun, “Shut Off the Lights” is everything the larger album is not. Smith, addressing his partner in a romance that might not last past the night, at one point urges “no talk about the future.” He manages to keep his promise, if only for the rest of the song.
Buy: Rough Trade
