Success came quickly and early for UK indie pop quartet Bastille, topping the album charts in their home territory with their 2013 debut. Top 5 accomplishments followed for each subsequent album; a run the band is looking to continue with their fourth album, Give Me The Future (EMI), a release that arrives with a fair dose of expectation. Predecessor, Doom Days, critically, didn’t hit the heights of the band’s first two full-length outings, but the lead-off singles from …Future gave assurance that all was back on track. 

It has long been an approach of Bastille to release a fair number of advance singles in the lead up to the release, so it is with electro-pop familiarity that ‘Distorted Light Beam’ shimmers in, introducing one of the core themes of the album… dreams and alternative reality and their lure and precedence over the day to day, and album four is smiling. 

Lyrically Give Me The Future doesn’t join in with the slick aural approach in simplicity or minimalism. References to 1984, Bladerunner, Total Recall, Aldous Huxley and anthropocene extinction (Cattle Decapitation want their concept album back!) aren’t your usual pop themes, with some deliberately immersion-shattering profanities (‘No More Bad Days’) also impacting. (Vocalist / song-writer) Daniel Smith has, much like former touring partners Muse have often done, ensured the words try to provoke thought, or at least exist for a purpose.

And like Muse’s last effort, there is a clear focus on slick, eighties-influenced alternative (and not so alternative) pop with a positive outlook to the music, even if some of the words are less definitively upbeat. Some of the sounds, such as interlude ‘Total Dissociation’ are straight from a Vangelis soundtrack, and this album sees Bastille fully embrace their pop side. As such, songs are lean, with musical and production hooks ensuring the verses aren’t wasted and the choruses stick around in your head.

Not everything is successful, mind. The vocal riffs drenched in auto-tune that proliferate do irritate, and are unnecessary production techniques for effect as Smith can clearly hit any note he needs to, and ‘Thelma and Louise’ is as lightweight and throwaway as the second track. But Smith and co have retained their knack of writing hooks that work without giving in to too many pop tropes. That said, while the funkadactyl of  ‘Back To The Future’ is just knowing enough to avoid slipping on the cheese, ‘Club 57’ is one step too far and slips in its absence of substance.

Smith’s distinctive voice leads and captures the ear as, on Give Me The Future, Bastille runs through a slew of catchy, infectious songs. The intelligence behind the music, the pointed references to the trappings of digital youth, and the clever balance of eighties influence and Right Now contemporary minimalism and chart production, such as on the sax-enhanced instant earworm ‘Shut Off The Lights’, means that Bastille will do very well indeed on this album.

Buy the album here: https://bastille.lnk.to/BastilleGMTFID

7 / 10

STEVE TOVEY