Bastille: Dan goes solo, but under the band name

Bastille: Dan goes solo, but under the band name

The differentiation is a little awkward, but necessary. “&”, the new Bastille album, is presented as “Bastille presents”. It comes out under the band name, but it’s not really a new album from the group British who, after his debut in 2013 with “Bad blood”, containing the hit “Pompeii” (over 1 million copies sold in the United Kingdom alone, in addition to the various gold and platinum records collected throughout Europe), became a little lost. It is a project created only by the frontman, Dan Smith, who however decided to continue using the name of the band he founded: “I grew up listening to Sufjan Stevens, Anohni, Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Laura Marling and a lot of music that was slightly warmer and more minimal than maybe Bastille produced.

This record was born out of a desire to do something outside of that,” he says. “&”, pronounced “ampersand”, will arrive in stores and on streaming platforms tomorrow, Friday 25 October. It will be presented by Dan Smith with a tour that will start on November 10th from La Cigale in Paris and then stop in Brussels (November 11th, Ciruque Royal), Amsterdam (November 13th, Royal Theater Carré), Berlin (November 14th, Theater Des Westens) and London (17 November, Shepherd’s Bush Empire), before arriving on the other side of the Atlantic: no date in Italy, despite the success that the group has had in our country over the years (the single “Happier” won two platinum discs, “Good grief” won a platinum disc, “Pompeii” even reached triple platinum).

The “&” in the title has a precise meaning. The “ampersand” is the common thread that links all the songs on the album. “Leonard & Marianne” is about the relationship between Cohen and his muse Marianne Ihlen, “Blue Sky & the painter” recounts Edvard Munch’s struggle with depression, and so on: “I wanted these songs to feel really human. I think one of the purposes of making them was to take these people who in the eyes of many look like a cartoon and try to humanize them. I thought it would be interesting to make something that felt really organic and warm, but also perfect and complicated,” Smith told Rolling Stone UK. I wanted to do something that was smaller sonically and that was just creatively fascinating to me. I’ve wanted to do this for years and when we finished the tour at the end of last year, I came home and ended up completing these songs that I had made. I finally had time to really think about the people they were talking about and explore their stories.”

To do so, the singer-songwriter took advantage of the break who decided to take over Bastille after the long tour linked to the album “Give me the future”, released in 2022: “I knew that Bastille would take a break and once I got back to normality a bit, I looked at the songs again and started rewriting them,” Dan Smith told British magazine New Musical Express. He worked on the album together with Mark Crewalongside Bastille since day zero (but has also worked with Rag’n’Bone Man, James Arthur, James Blunt, the former One Direction Louis Tomlinson and Tears For Fears): “In January we agreed with Mark and other friends to record this record.

I knew I wanted to do it in a new and different way. H.or wrote these songs at my kitchen table, so they had to sound homemade, intimate and warm. I reached out to a lot of amazing, creative people: musicians, artists and more, inviting them all to be part of this storytelling project. For me, it was the most brilliant, fun and relaxed process, while also trying to do justice to the lives and stories of these amazing people.”

Bastille’s future is an unknown. Dan Smith says he has a lot of new ideas for the band’s next projects, but at the moment his attentions are all focused on this solo project: “I just know that I’ve had a very productive year and I have a lot of ideas about what we’ll do Bastille next because I love making those records. I think it’s always about trying to do something a little different each time. I think it’s going to be really exciting, but at the moment I’m just living in this exciting and incredibly fulfilling creative space.”.