Bastille Offer an Alternative Reality With Give Me The Future

Smith: I’d be lying if I said we mapped it out and wrote it chronologically, because I 100% didn’t. But I do quite a lot of mapping out of albums, and there are so many things I wanted to say. And I do quite a lot of rewriting, so a lot of the songs go through loads of different incarnations. So I will often just completely throw out all of the lyrics to a song and start again. And so yeah, I guess that’s kind of scripted, in a way. But in my head, it’s quite a clear journey. So putting the headset on and going back in and going forward and back in time, and in and out of reality. And I guess for me, the arc is … the endless possibilities of plugging in, while realizing he complications and addictive qualities of it, and how it can have a really colossal effect on your relationships, and who you are and your sense of self, and how you perceive yourself, and how you perceive the truth. And then there are those moments, halfway through, with “Promises” and “Shut Off the Light,” and then at the end with “Future Hours,” where the person that you’re with pulls you back into the physical world, and I guess implores you to try and worry less about the things you can’t change and be less anxious about the future and the state of the world. And to just kind of enjoy physical reality and intimacy, before … you know. Enjoy it while you’ve got it. So it’s about going slightly mad, crazy, with all these incomprehensibly big ideas, and then undermining them and undercutting them with these moments of reality and pedestrian normality. So yeah, I thought it would be kind of funny to spend the entire album worrying about the future, and then subvert it entirely at the end by being like, “Hey, stop it. Stop freaking out about the future! And try and enjoy whatever you have, because you could be dead tomorrow.” And obviously, that’s something that a lot of people already think, a lot of the time. But I just thought that might be a funny way of undercutting all those things that we’d started exploring.

Paste: And along the way, there are some sly lyrical references to Orwell, Huxley, and Philip K. Dick, circa Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Blade Runner.

Smith: Yes. And Philip K. Dick stories have kind of echoed through popular culture, and there’s a reason that these stories keep recurring and recurring in different forms. In everything from the short stories of Philip K. Dick to Black Mirror, to The Matrix, Brazil, 2001, The Handmaid’s Tale, Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I., and Gattaca, there are so many interesting versions of different futures that could exist that are there to draw upon and nod to, because they’re so provocative and so transportive, in and of themselves. But they’ve become part of the language of the album, and they’ve become ways of trying to get the listener into a certain headspace and take them to another place.

Paste: From Natalie Wood’s last film Brainstorm to a surreal recent episode of Black Mirror where two VR gaming avatars unexpectedly fall in lust with each other, it seems like virtual sex is already here, too.

Smith: Yeah. And I think of that film Her, which is fascinating, and a very near-future kind of sci-fi. I’m not much of a gamer, not really anymore, but loads of my friends are, and they are so happily content spending huge chunks of their lives living in these virtual worlds by living as someone else. And that can be really empowering for some people—I think of loads of kids who maybe struggle to have conversations in real life but can sit on Fortnite with a headset on and chat with their mates really openly for hours on end. And that can be vital for some people. It’s weird. I don’t have an Oculus, but I’ve got friends that do, and they’ve all got friends of a friend who watch VR porn on Oculus, and I’m like, “Yeah, right, I’m sure that’s your friend of a friend, mate!” But that’s our reality now. And you’ll see these mad articles about sex robots that actually exist, and the cultures that welcome them, and I think it’s fascinating. And the song on the album “Plug In” was trying to be a big, rambling rant about this almost unbelievable reality we live in now, from robot sex to virtual porn, to our ability to completely change how we look and the person w are and the truth that we can choose to either believe or not believe, to the billionaire space race. There are these bizarre realities of our life now that feel like they came out of some author’s brain. And I know that the phrase “stranger than fiction” is seen as some overused cliche, but there is so much of that, so much truth to that, in a lot of the world that we live in. And living through the time of the Internet world spilling out into real life, it’s affected everything, from politics to society to how we meet each other and how we talk to each other.

Paste: And how we hear the truth, or simple scientific fact.

Smith: Oh yeah, totally. And what’s also come at the same time is the fact that we now curate the versions of what we want to see, in the feeds that we subscribe to online and in the news that we want to read, and that’s the version of reality that we’re going to pick. I mean, we entirely curate the TV shows we watch and the music that we listen to, and all of the old models of monoculture have kind of started dissipating, so we’re living through the aftermath of that. And it’s simultaneously fascinating and fucking terrifying. And it speaks to so much about what we want to hear, and what we don’t want to hear, and how much of the truth we can handle. We’re now at a weird point in society and culture, where—if you don’t like the truth—a lot of people can just make up another one, or choose which version of the so-called “truth” they want to believe. It’s fucking insane. “Alternative facts” are not facts. It’s just so bizarre.

Paste: What’s your take on A.I. with, or without, Kurzweil’s predicted Singularity, when machine basically becomes SkyNet clever, and smarter than mankind?

Smith: I think A.I. is way more slipped into so much of the technology we use than maybe people are aware of. Even in music software, there’s A.I., monitoring and helping to edit and change things. It’s in so many of the plug-ins that we use, but it’s not necessarily A.I. that’s like a cyborg, something living like a human being. It’s way more specific and microcosmic than that. I mean, over here, most of the supermarkets and grocery stores that you go into have their own little self-service checkout, and it’s kind of interesting—a lot of places in society where you would normally have face to face contact with a person have been replaced by some form of A.I., however advanced or primitive it may be. We’re living through that reality, and over the last few years, it’s forced us all to spend so much more time online. And what’s weird is that loads of reality now just sounds like a conspiracy theory, and obviously, it’s important to care about these things. But you could also drive yourself completely mad, and some people do. Which is why we live in such a heightened reality, where people are so … I dunno. These are really divided times, where people pick their cause, and they care so passionately about very, very different things. A nice weird sort of topic try and make a little half-hour album into!

Paste: Vocally and tonally, Give Me the Future hearkens back to E.L.O., and their futuristic concept record Time.

Smith: Yeah. I guess a bunch of music on the album is nodding towards the ‘80s. And in the vocal sounds and the vocal productions, E.L.O. wasn’t a conscious touchstone, but fucking hell—the conceptual element of [Time] was fucking amazing. You have inspired me to go back and listen to that even more. But with time swelling and compressing as it has for a lot of us over the past year, we went into a lot of detail on the songs on this album. I mean, we got to mix it in spatial audio, which was a really interesting experience. We’d just finished the album, and then I got to stand in a room for three days and hear all of the stems, moving in 3-D around us. And I’m so used to stereo that to mix it in 3-D was so bizarre. But it was also a mind-bending experience, so that was a lot of fun. But as our albums have progressed, I’ve always tried to think a bit more narrowly and more conceptually, so this album very much has a beginning, a middle, and and for me.

Paste: And then again, The Sex Pistols warned us that we had “no future.” We should have paid more attention to the Situationists.

Smith: Yeah, totally. But what do you think of Riz Ahmed’s poem [the spoken-word “Promises,”] on the album?

Paste: It perfectly bisects the record in two. But he wrote it as a response after you let him hear the entire album?

Smith: Yeah> When we did our second mixtape, I worked with Kae Tempest and I played them “Bad Blood,” and they basically reacted to it and spat out this amazing poem that re-articulated what I’d said in a much more beautiful, perfect way. And I loved that experience so much that when I started thinking about this album, and all of its complicated, overarching themes, I thought how important it felt to me to have somebody else’s voice and somebody else’s brain on the record. And I love Riz Ahmed’s albums—as a rapper, I think he’s brilliant, and obviously, he’s a very thoughtful guy and has an interesting view on the world, and an interesting perspective. So I sent him the album, or most of it, about nine tracks, and he digested it and said he really liked what we were doing, and how we were trying to subvert pop music and talk about uncomfortable topics in these songs. And he really liked what we were getting at. And he just came back with this poem that I think beautifully and colloquially says what it means to be a person, a physical being, in the context of all the technology that’s the surreal reality of now. I love that track so much, and for me it’s a bridge from “Plug In,” which is almost hyper-anxious and gets huge in scale and quite ridiculous, into “Shut Off the Lights.” He dials it back down into reality, into the corporeal and the real, in a song about being in bed with someone and them telling you to get out of your head and back into the sheets. It quite perfectly takes you between those two points in the story.

Paste: In the next number, “Stay Awake,” you counter the Biblical meek-shall-inherit-the-Earth adage by swearing that it belongs to the “freaks and geeks” now.

Smith: Yeah. I just thought about where the power lies now, as in, who are the most powerful people in the world? And we have these so-called “Freaks and Geeks” who are more powerful than most nations, and have more influence and more money than the old guard, as well as the ability to manipulate elections and change the version of the world that we see. And who would have ever thought that? It’s amazing.

Paste: If we accept the axiom that mankind in its arrogance in thinking it’s the end product of evolution has summarily doomed itself to extinction, you could probably add the corollary that whatever species comes next will see all our scattered 12 Monkeys-era devices and go, “look at how busy they all were!”

Smith: I know, I know. There are so many shiny things to distract us. And it’s hard, because sometimes those distractions can be so gloriously addictive and delicious, and they can make you feel fucking amazing. But then you might miss what’s really happening. What’s happening when you look the other way? That’s what’s really scary …

Revisit Bastille’s 2012 Daytrotter session below.