Certain bands may have been hogging the hype train in recent days and weeks, but they’re not the only ones building the buzz in preparation for a brand new release.
Eagle eyed readers may remember we’re also in the teasing zone for Bastille, who are working up to the release of something new. Kicking off last week with a bunch of images featuring hidden digital clocks, Dan Smith then dropped fifteen more overt teasers, one a minute, after midnight.
Smart types searched the internet and found reference to a new song, ‘Quarter Past Midnight’, that’s supposedly set to be with us this week. Given we know the band have finished work on their third album, and are preparing to give us the fourth instalment of their Really Bloody Good mixtape series ‘Other People’s Heartache’, it’s fair to say we’re probably on the verge of a big rest of 2018 for indie’s most anthemic arena fillers.
But this is a news update, so we’ve got more. As luck would have it, our Dan is sitting in for Annie Mac on her BBC Radio 1 show over the next couple of days, helming the desk with Nick Grimshaw. That feels like awfully convenient timing for anyone hoping to hear that new track, eh?
The band’s website has also been updated, featuring a pair of phone numbers – one in the US, one in the UK. If you give them a buzz, there’s the option to leave a message. As Reddit noticed, one fan suggested Dan would never pick up the phone, for which he gave the one word reply “wrong”. So that’s a thing.
And then there’s the teaser video. Featuring a snippet of new music, the chances are it’s our first short taste of ‘Quarter Past Midnight”
https://t.co/rmPwPRezWJ pic.twitter.com/ROf12peL5O
— BASTILLE (@bastille) May 4, 2018
Speaking to Dork about the new album and mixtape earlier this year, Dan suggested they’d “probably be released all at once, [but] who knows. I see them as two slightly separate spaces but it allows us to try things we maybe wouldn’t do in our own records. At times, they totally overlap. It’s a nice opportunity to collaborate with other people. It’s a much easier conversation, ‘We’re doing this song with a bunch of people for a mixtape, we’d love to have you on it’, than ‘Lets do a single together’.
“The whole point of the mixtape, and I think I’m there in my head with the album too, is to obviously care a lot about it, but not treat it so seriously. And to fuck with people’s expectations a little bit; it’s fun to do that. It’s nice in the studio, if you’re stuck on a track for the record, to be able to jump across to a mixtape thing and it forces us to work with other people. We’re quite independent in how we work, so it’s a nice opportunity to bring other people into our little musical world for a minute. We’ve always felt like we’ve got a strong identity and we’ve always collaborated loads. The first things we put online, it was our songs, our mixtapes and us working with us other people. That’s been a part of who we are as a band and what we’ve been about all this time.”
It looks like we’re about to get a big week for Bastille fans. Keep ‘em peeled.