New York, NY (Top40 Charts) No matter what limitless opportunities for escape modern technology presents us with, there's nothing quite like real, human connection. On new single, Shut Off The Lights,
Bastille pull themselves out of the metaverse to rediscover the joys of real life surrounded by loved ones.
Shut Of The
Lights is set to a gleaming guitar melody and infectious beat, embracing 80's influences whilst maintaining the catchy, euphoric alt-pop brilliance that's made
Bastille one of Britain's biggest bands. The future festival anthem offers a different perspective to much of Give Me The
Future instead asking us to step away from our screens and the escapism offered online, and join in with what's unfolding in front of us now - "Shut off the lights, you don't need them to dance."
Dan says,"Shut off the lights is about being pulled out of your future-fearing anxieties by the person you're lying next to. It's about intimacy and physical connection, rejecting our worries about life and the future for a minute, and unplugging from it all to really be present. It's a fun, real, human moment in the middle of this big album. But also, it's a song that nods back to Paul Simon's Graceland and a load of music we love. It made us want to dance around the studio and is ridiculously fun to play live"
Laced with references to sci-fi films and literature, video games and VR, Bastille's new album Give Me The
Future explores a futuristic 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.
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 80's 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 "No Bad Days". You'll hear disco bass lines, orchestras of synths, guitars, futuristic gospel, spaceship sounds, euphoric strings, vocoders, talk boxes, a choir of roadies and host of beats. The title track, Give Me The
Future tips its hat to
Phil Collins and The Police, Shut Off The
Lights is a sonic love letter to Paul Simon's Graceland and Stay Awake nods to
Daft Punk and
Quincy Jones.
"You don't predict the future, you imagine it." -
Future Inc.
