Rating: ****
Despite its title, Bastille’s third studio album ‘Doom Days’ timelines a story of nostalgia, trepidation and joy, as it projects the darker moments of life and transforms them into a hopeful anthem, with the underlying message that you should always have a flicker of hope, despite what life is throwing at you.
I found the entire album captivating in a way that I didn’t expect, and found myself wanting to go back and listen to it again as it really drew me in.
Opening with ‘Quarter Past Midnight’, the need for distraction and escapism is detailed in the lyrics and seems to be a current theme throughout the album. The first half of the album is eloquently creating an imaginary story of seizing the night, being free and avoiding tomorrow. The song ‘Divide’ slowly starts shifting the tone of the album, with a slow yet foot tapping stripped back composition accompanied with lyrics that reflect the worlds current activity, “why would we divide, when we could come together?”, which is repeated consistently throughout the track.
Set across the span of one evening, the album brings mainstream concepts and turns them into personal and intimate stories. The song 4AM, tells the story of love, but rather focusing on romance, SMITH sings about the deep and meaningful connection amongst friends.
The final song to be released, ‘Those Nights’, tells the story of loneliness at the end of a night and the want for hope, which seamlessly blends into the final track on the album, ‘Joy’, a pop-track individually selected to be placed as the last song of the album to end Doom Days on a positive note, concluding the narrative that when dusk turns to dawn, we’ll all still be ok, if not slightly hungover.
Doom Days is an album that tries to delay the dawning of a new day for as long as possible by finding temporary distractions to waste the night away, leaving you wanting to live in the dusk for just that second longer.
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