Bastille

“We’ve come a bit of a way from me making songs by myself on my laptop in my bedroom,” Bastille founder Dan Smith told Apple Music in 2022. Indeed, the band’s anthems serve as the heavy, haunting—sometimes hedonistic—soundtrack to a world slipping and sliding into dystopia. Such ambitious sounds are fitting for a quartet named after the French anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille, a date that also happens to be Smith’s birthday (July 14). Formed in 2010 after the Leeds-born singer-songwriter moved to London and connected with keyboardist Kyle Simmons, guitarist/bassist Will Farquarson, and drummer Chris Wood, Bastille quickly rose from indie darlings to one of the biggest bands on the planet. Their takeover began with “Pompeii”—from their 2013 debut album, Bad Blood—a boisterous blend of glossy synth-pop and arena rock where Smith lays out a challenge in the face of societal doom: “How am I gonna be an optimist about this?” he asks. Through gloomy lyrics—especially on 2016’s Wild World and 2019’s Doom Days—the answer surfaces in their sound, an ever-expansive mix of moody electro-pop, euphoric house, falsetto-laced R&B, and glorious gospel. After the unofficial trilogy of their first three albums, the group launched the ambitious, personal Give Me the Future in 2022 (“We just wanted to f**k with the process and try new things,” Smith said of the album). And the stories of historical and mythological figures took the forefront in their four-part series &, which began in 2024. “I’ve always used someone else’s story to write about the themes I want to address in my music,” he said. “Now I’ve collected these story-songs to celebrate a group of people who pushed against the times they lived in and who displayed all the complexities of being human.”