My Feelings on Bastille's 2022 Give Me The Future
(Kind Of An Album Review)

When I was 17, I started listening to Bastille a lot. It was 2017, Wild World was still a new release. He's British, I'm American. He wrote the album about Brexit, and I was listening to it in the wake of Donald Trump being elected president. They were two different events, but I listened to Wild World and I got it. The lyrics about needing some kind of comfort while the world goes to shit in so many ways hit for me. From then on, I called myself a big Bastille fan, because why wouldn't I be?

Time passed. Their next album, Doom Days, came and went, and it took me a while to listen to it. It didn't hit as hard, not at first. I thought it was okay, with a few standout tracks, and some odd commentary about ooooo technology bad. But I didn't think much of it.

Then, y'know… COVID hit. I was listening to a lot more music, especially because I had started making playlists (for Kingdom Hearts characters), and was going through all the music backlogs I had, revisiting things and judging them in the then-present day. I relistened to Doom Days, and found that it hit way harder during the pandemic. The theoretical apocalypse he talked about didn't seem applicable in 2019, but boy did it in 2020. The title track Doom Days seemed more accurate than ever, what with the term "doomscrolling" really taking off when all people could do was sit in their houses and scroll. It became a fantasy of being in the party at the end of the world, instead of having to watch it play out slowly.

The "pandemic year" went by, with people all too ready to throw away their masks and go right back to "normal life" despite the ever-looming threat of permanent respiratory and/or brain damage. 2021-into-2022 became miserable in a different way, watching America refuse to admit that COVID was still a problem after the vaccines were out. And online, horrific ways to make money and scams were only growing, with NFTs surfacing and that being the main topic for months. Even if the people shilling them had been onto something technology-wise (they weren't), everything on offer was ugly and horrendously expensive, not to mention the technology actively making global warming worse. It was an attempt to make everything on the internet into money, into placing more control where there hadn't been, and the future of the internet seemed bleak.

And then I heard that Bastille were coming out with a new album, called "Give Me The Future"! It was a futuristic, sci-fi kind of concept about future technology. And I went, oh! This could be really cool, I bet it'll be good, I bet it'll help me process my emotions like his last two albums have!

The album released in 2022, and as I do with new albums, I looped it a lot. (This doesn't really have anything to do with the actual quality/my final opinion on the album, I looped Fall Out Boy's MANIA when that came out, and ultimately I think that was kind of a flop.) And the tunes are there! It sounds great. A lot of the songs hit in a musical way, I have some on my playlist and I'll groove a bit when they come on.

What didn't hit was the commentary. Although there were exceptions, like Thelma + Louise— because god damn, who doesn't want to get away from the current day somehow— it felt too fictional to fit into reality. Back To The Future is just this, namedropping dystopian sci-fi novels and movies all over the place. There's a time and place for a good reference in a song (I'm a sucker for Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights), but this is… deeply not it. It feels like the entire song is lazily throwing around the concept of a sci-fi dystopia while doing nothing to comment on the one we're currently in. And I am all for talking about replacing reality with fiction, I'm autistic, I feel deeply about fiction. As I've detailed, Bastille's previous albums helped me deal with reality over the past 5 years. Of course I want a break from reality. But that can't… be all the song is. Maybe if the rest of the album hit, I would forgive this, but… well.

The next song (more of an interlude) is Plug In…, which Dan Smith admits is a combination of the themes on the album. It namedrops many current events, like global warming and dumbass billionaires thinking it's a good idea to be building rockets to Mars right now, while also throwing in… y'know… what if we started having relationships with robots? That'd be wild, man. And somehow, when I was in the middle of hearing about NFTs and their rampant art theft, I wasn't interested in such a typical sci-fi cliché. My technological worries were too down-to-Earth to worry about… oooooo what if ROBOTS. And while I write this, in 2023, AI is a major topic, but it's never like sci-fi, the reality of them is so much more boring. You can feed a million words into a machine and have it talk to you like it's a real person, but that's not consciousness. No computer today is able to escape the biases of the people who coded it.

I think Stay Awake and title track Give Me The Future are the best-sounding songs on the album, which is a shame because it means I hear them the most, and think about my problems with them the most. They're the climax of the album, the point where you should really go in on what your thoughts on the modern horror show of technology are. But what it goes in on is… sex with robots again. As someone who does share my soul on the internet, I don't feel like I "rule" anything. You can say "freaks and geeks can rule the world, have everything/Doesn't matter if it's real," but you don't mean the software engineers of the world. Social awareness, at this point, means you have to know the "geeks" in positions of power are billionaires. Maybe they founded the company, maybe they had ideas at one point, but they're more of a spokesperson than the person on the ground coding their systems. Maybe they're even stealing credit for things that aren't theirs. (Can you tell I'm haunted by the current failing Twitter owner?)

Geek culture is certainly mainstream now, if that's what he meant. But Marvel movies, the stuff based on the peak nerd media that is comic books, still gets government funding to promote the American military. When you look into it, when you see the forces behind what's popular, it doesn't feel like the once-downtrodden "geek" "class" is ruling anything. It's the same executives as before, seeing that these things are getting popular, and pushing them through a generic mold before they're given to the mainstream media. If something truly good comes out of this, it's a surprise.

"Why would we leave? Why would we leave?" Dan asks ominously during Give Me The Future. But really, why would he leave? In promoting this album, the band has adopted all sorts of futuristic tech, with headlines tying it to "the metaverse" (although, honestly, it doesn't seem to actually be… the metaverse). The band is working hand-in-hand with higher-ups at their record label EMI, and their very corporate excitement is really what this album ends up sounding like. There's definitely futuristic ways to connect with audiences, but it's hard to feel like they're doing any of it out of true excitement for future technology.

The album ends with a cheerful song, like how Doom Days did. But instead of feeling hopeful, it feels… like they're giving up. Who knows what the future holds? Maybe it'll all be fine! Maybe we can have sex with robots! That'd be pretty swell. Maybe it'll be a hellish dystopia where everything, every song, every piece of art, is now considered "money", and something to "invest" in, instead of appreciate. Maybe it'll be a lack of technology, where there was a choice to make public places safer, but the cost was too high for corporations who only want to keep making money, so they throw the disabled under the bus. But maybe it'll be the sex robots!

I give a lot of credit for these thoughts to Spectrum Pulse's album review, his thoughts were what solidified my feelings on the album.

(PS. The "ovaries and gonads" line in the spoken word song Promises is what put me over the edge. Absolutely awful line. I started skipping it when I listened to the album. It's just gross. Not in a problematic way, just gross.)

Created	Last Updated
February 22nd, 2023	February 13th, 2024