Escaping ‘Escapism’ in Bastille’s Latest Album

“Give Me the Future” upends reality and the meaning of ‘escape’

Alternative pop band Bastille’s newest album, “Give Me the Future'' guides listeners across many thresholds—virtual and physical, waking life and dreams, past and future. Over the course of this spiritual journey, the album shifts from the euphoric relief of escapism, to the underlying nightmarish aspects of reality that drive people to seek this escape in the first place and finally reconnects listeners to the tangible present moment.

Several songs in this album are explicitly about giving up on reality and escaping into virtual fantasy worlds and dreams. “Distorted Light Beam,” for instance, reflects a sense of disappointment with reality, saying “it isn’t enough, if this is real life / I’ll stick to dreaming.” “Back to the Future,” “Stay Awake,” and “Plug In…” echo similar themes.

These songs are catchy and energetic, and occasionally the electronic elements might remind listeners of dancing and nightclubs. Yet at the same time, their synthesized and distorted effects create a sense of instability and unease. Their jarring lyrics, including the following lines from “Plug In…” contribute to this sense of unease as well:

“Plug me right in, jump through the screen

Final frontier, I can be anything

Maddening scenes, Anthropocene

Blink and you'll miss us like we were a dream”

These lyrics in “Plug In…” feed into a self-aware commentary of the anxiety and horror underlying our culture’s failing attempts to deflect attention away from pressing societal problems, and onto attention-grabbing, escapist entertainment, including video games and “virtual porn.”

In other words, as the album’s fifth song, “Back to the Future” puts it, sometimes living in the present day can make us feel “like we danced into a nightmare.”

Although many of the songs in the album focus on newer, virtual forms of escapism, others also explore other forms of escape into vacations and memories of a nostalgic, idealized past. For example, “Thelma + Louise,” references the 1991 film about two friends who escape on a road trip and “Club 57,” which refers to a nightclub that existed in the 70s and 80s in New York City.

At times, this album’s heavy repetition of lyrics, impersonal themes and musical elements can border on tiring. The demoralizing nature of the album concept itself may also make it difficult to listen all the way through. This “tiring” nature of the album is somewhat ironic and perhaps purposeful, since listening to song after similar-sounding song about the depressing nature of escape and detachment creates a desire for an escape from escapism.

Indeed, the most satisfying and powerful songs in the album—“Shut Off the Lights” and “Future Holds” — deviate the most from the rest of the album, contributing to it new and refreshing angles. These are the songs that feel the most tangible, heartfelt and real.

However, before these two songs appear in the second half of “Give Me the Future,” there is a turning point that takes place in “Promises,” which is the seventh song of the album. “Promises'' is actually a spoken word poem rather than a song, featuring the voice of British rapper Riz Ahmed.

Throughout this poem, there are faint ambient notes humming and echoing, as well as a soft sound resembling the sigh of wind moving through a vast space. The faint noises, sense of stillness and lack of music in this poem contrast abruptly with earlier songs, therefore giving listeners the sense of being suspended in a void, outside of regular time and space.

The poem itself describes the transcendence of time, ending with the following lines: “Time is on a loop like the sun, that's its destiny / So the truth is how you lie here next to me is how we'll forever be.”

As Ahmed delivers these final words, the notes crescendo, as though signaling a re-entrance into time. In this way, the ending of “Promises” leads directly into the next song, “Shut Off the Lights,” with the sense that something has shifted.

That shift seems to be tied to a rediscovery of togetherness in the present moment. Although at the start of the song, the singer is “lost in [his] head again,” his partner manages to “pull [him] back down to earth,” the two of them “grace landing onto [their] bed.” The rest of the song describes the couple dancing and having sex in the darkness.

The gravity and heartfelt emotion of “Shut Off the Lights” provides a relieving moment of “escape” from the escapism captured in earlier songs in the album. “Shut Off the Lights” is a lifeline back to an immediate, physical reality. It describes two people feeling their way back into their bodies in the darkness, through the physical rhythms of drum beats, heartbeats and breathing, as illustrated in the rhythm and content of the following lyrics:

“In my head there's a beat, it's the beat that you make

When you're moving your body

You prove that I can't escape, I can't escape

Got my heart in your hands and your hands on my chest

And my chest is a breath, it's the breath that you take away”

In short, “Give Me the Future” is a breathtakingly ambitious work of art that integrates a vast array of interrelated topics and juxtapositions—future and past, fantasy and reality, euphoria and horror, dissociation and connection—all under the unifying theme of escapism as it relates uniquely to present-day society.