Bastille have shared their breathtaking video for incredible new album track, Those Nights, taken from their highly-anticipated third album Doom Days.
The brilliant, living tapestry one-take video, directed by Crooked Cynics, finds frontman Dan Smith deliver a captivating performance from an old sofa sitting atop a pile of unconscious people in an infinite black space. “Aren’t we all just looking for a little bit of hope these days?/Looking for somebody we can wake up with?” he asks, visibly craving human contact in these troubled times, as the night’s quest for escapism comes to an end. The camera sweeps and flips across the beautifully surreal scene, creating something incredibly beautiful and hypnotic. It feels both intimately personal and uncomfortably voyeuristic as the camera swoops in close and then flies away from the melange of different bodies that are piled up, unconscious.
Those Nights arrives as the penultimate track on Doom Days, between the bouncing, nocturnal pop of Another Place, which centers around a casual hook-up, and the euphoric and hopeful Joy. If the latter represents waking up on the kitchen floor as the demons of the mind are dispelled by a phone call from someone special, then Those Nights reflects the moments in the few hours before when the night is blurring out and you’re left with a sense of yearning – for something more, for the night not to end – as everyone is either leaving with someone or passing out on the tiles.
Those Nights shows a side to Bastille that some overlook, as they confidently incorporate a host of musical textures – layered saxophones, sampled gospel voices, 80s style piano riffs, elements of sound design, and a rave infused outro – yet the track manages to sounds effortless and subtle.
With the band at their most lyrically provocative, most accomplished, and most vital, Doom Days taps into globally held anxieties, while also working on a much more intimate level. It celebrates real human connections and urges us to keep searching for moments of elation. It also finds Bastille evolving sonically once again and continuing to push things forward, pulling instrumentation from their much-acclaimed Re- Orchestrated tour and mixing genres like gospel, house music and R&B.
Bastille’s unique sound – that cinematic, melancholic pop that sometimes masks the unusual subject matters reflected in their lyrics – has connected with audiences across the globe like no other British band in recent memory. Having sold over 8 million albums and with accumulated global streams reaching over 6.5 billion, the band continue to be one of Spotify’s top 40 most listened to artists in the world. Their previous albums both debuted at No.1 in the U.K. and charted top 10 in the U.S.