Bastille at the Manchester Arena (Gary Mather for Live4ever)
Bastille have released their second track of the year – entitled ‘survivin’ in that 2020, lower-case fashion – after teaming up with Graham Coxon during the summer on WHAT YOU GONNA DO??? (very much not in that fashion).
That song started a new era for the band as they apparently saw 2019’s Doom Days album as the final part of a trilogy which started with their debut Bad Blood six years earlier, and it continues here with Dan Smith reflecting on times when, ‘he felt like he’d been in a washing machine and on a conveyor belt at the same time’. “But when people asked me how I was doing, the answer was always the British cliché: ‘Yep, all good, fine’,” he adds.
“At the start of lockdown I felt very self-conscious about having written a song that felt relevant when it wasn’t intended to be, but then I also think 2020 is the year we all stopped pretending everything’s fine.”