BASTILLE

WILD WORLD

Dan Smith, lead vocalist and songwriter for Brit band Bastille, finds that inspiration for his work just sort of pops into his head. Which can be inconvenient. “I try not to look too weird,” says the 30-year-old Londoner. “I find a corner somewhere and put ideas into my phone.”

Those ideas—pulled from “the stuff I’m listening to or reading or watching”—morph their way into Bastille’s cinematic pop, anchored by Smith’s distinctive voice. “It’s really fun to have this little four-minute window to tell as much [of a story] as you can.” What they’re not about, however, is Smith’s or the band’s “relationship problems.” “I choose not to write about love and breakups and heartache,” says Smith. “People have been doing that for years, and there are a million versions of it.”

So what did Smith (and the rest of the fourpiece outfit) tackle for Wild World, their second album, out now? “On this album, I tried to articulate that feeling you get when you’re watching the news and events are unfolding in the world in front of you, and it feels quite overwhelming and confusing and you’re trying to figure out, on a human level, what the fuck you are doing.” Smith doesn’t claim to have any answers—“we’re just four idiots in a band”— but he says that he couldn’t help thinking about it all after being “massively affected by all the crazy shit that’s happening.”

The success of Bastille, who topped charts with an ode to Vesuvius (“Pompeii”) in 2013, still seems to surprise (in a very English, very understated way) Smith: “We make all of our music in a tiny windowless basement. It’s been quite interesting to see these things that we literally made on our laptops do quite well.”