PASO ROBLES, CA – JANUARY 14, 2022 – Today, Bastille drops their latest single “Shut Off The Lights” from their fourth studio album Give Me The Future out February 4th—listen to “Shut Off The Lights” HERE. To celebrate the upcoming album, today, Bastille announces their 2022 US tour dates as part of their upcoming “Give Me The Future Tour.” The US leg kicks off on May 14th in Memphis, TN and will include a stop at Vina Robles Amphitheatre, May 21, as well as stops in Los Angeles, New York, more—see the full list of tour dates below. Tickets will be available via pre-sale starting on Tuesday, January 18th and via general on-sale on Friday, January 21st at 10AM local time at https://www.bastillebastille.com/. Tickets for Vina Robles Amphitheatre, are available via Ticketmaster.
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 pulls 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 Smith 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 basslines, 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.
To celebrate the release of Give Me The Future out on February 4th, Bastille will perform a series of intimate outdoor shows across the UK, in partnership with the UK’s independent record stores. Then in April, the band will return to arenas for the first leg of their Give Me The Future Tour (with many dates already sold out) before heading out to the US for dates in May and June.
Having thrown themselves into co-writing for other artists in recent years, for the first time ever on a Bastille album, the band inched open the door to collaborators. Although primarily produced by Dan Smith and long-term production partner Mark Crew, the band also worked with a handful of writers and producers to expand the world. “Distorted Light Beam” was co-written and produced with Ryan Tedder (Adele, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift), who also helped as a sounding board and executive producer for the album. “Thelma + Louise,” “Stay Awake,” and “Back To The Future” were co-written with legendary songwriter Rami Yacoub (Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time”, Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Album). They also worked with British writers Jonny Coffer, Plested, and Dan Priddy to bring the album to life.
You’ll also hear the voice of award-winning actor, musician, writer, creator, producer, director, and activist Riz Ahmed on a spell-binding and evocative spoken word piece called “Promises.” Riz’s piece was a response the album and brings its overarching themes into sharp focus.
Over the course of their previous three albums, Bastille have cemented a reputation for building whole worlds around their releases, often doing so with innovative, award-winning creativity. Give Me The Future is no different, this time accompanied by a fictional, but familiar, tech giant called Future Inc., the creators of an invention called “Futurescape”—a device which allows users to live out their dreams virtually. It’s weaved through every element of the campaign and can be seen in the videos for the previous singles— “Distorted Light Beam,” “Thelma & Louise,” and “No Bad Days.” Watch Bastille talk about the inspiration behind Future Inc. HERE.