Bastille’s songs have wide-ranging appeal. “They draw on pop culture and literature to a degree,” he says. “Mainly, though, they touch on that feeling of being at the end of your teens and start of your twenties, and the worries you have as a young adult.” He wants his as-yet-untitled debut album proper to reflect the music he loved when he was growing up, the records played to him by his South African parents. It was a musical upbringing, what with his mum being a folk singer. He’s always trying to come up with new songs and new sounds – he’s just written a track called These Streets featuring marimba and his own vocal multitracked and effected until it sounds like a “weird and warped choir”. Bastille’s debut would like to seem like a compilation of peak moments, of all their best songs to date. He wants to make an album where “each song is totally memorable and sonically stands out”. The album will comprise, he says, personal songs that are melancholic yet euphoric. “When pop music gets it right,” he contends, “what is being said has the potential to be devastating even when the music is totally uplifting.” It will, he anticipates, be an album that you can dance to and think to, with powerful vocals and mammoth hooks. Or, as one magazine so succinctly put it, “Bastille seem to have mastered the craft of perfect pop music.”
