Songfacts®:

• "Give Me The Future" is the title track of Bastille's fourth studio album, which is based around a sci-fi theme exploring our relationship with technology. The '80s-inspired tune explores the allure of living in a virtual reality world. "'Give Me The Future' is a song about plugging into endless possibilities," frontman Dan Smith said. "Literally, feels like everything is out there for the taking, all tastes catered for."
• Dan Smith is a big movie fan and "Give Me The Future" paints a sci-fi-inspired picture, inspired by imagery from such motion pictures as Blade Runner and Minority Report. The reality we live in at the moment was the science fiction of not that long ago," said Smith. "Take a film like Minority Report. The technology in that seemed so far off, a fantasy. But it's here, we're way beyond it already. Had someone told you that 20 years ago, when the film came out... you'd have laughed. Or been terrified."
• Smith wrote "Give Me The Future" with Ralph Pelleymounter, frontman of the indie-pop outfit To Kill A King. "We sat down and wrote it one afternoon," Smith told Apple Music, "and wanted to make something that nodded to Phil Collins and epic, strings-based, midtempo with big drums."
• Pelleymounter was Dan Smith's roommate at Leeds University, and they've remained good friends. "I guess we were just thinking about the tempting allure of living in a digital world, where you can be anyone and do anything, and how addictive that can be," Smith told HMV of the song. "There are endless possibilities, but there's a darkness in there as well. So wanted to write something that felt expansive and cinematic, and that song just came really easily."
• "Give Me The Future" was the song that got the ball rolling for all the other tracks on the album. "We loved that song," said Smith, "and all the others fall into place."
• Dan Smith came up with the album's futuristic tech themes pre-pandemic. Things took an eerily prescient turn when COVID shut the world down, forcing interaction through screens. "Working on these songs in such an apocalyptic period, with everyone stuck at home, glued to screens, fed into the feeling that what is real and what is not has become pretty difficult to discern sometimes," said Smith. "We're in the age of deep fake, fake news and lying world leaders. But online, you can be anyone. What that does to our sense of self and to our relationships is huge and it's fascinating."
• Bastille scored their third UK #1 album when Give Me The Future debuted at the top spot. They'd previously reached the peak position with Bad Blood (2013) and Wild World (2016).