walking upstream…
Bastille
photo: robyn mack · cc by 2.0 ↗Bastille
Bastille are an English pop-rock band built around songwriter Dan Smith, whose cinematic, chant-like choruses and magpie use of samples and cultural references — from Pompeii's volcanic imagery to a running fascination with David Lynch's Twin Peaks — turned the project from a solo bedroom demo into a stadium-filling act. Formed in London in 2010, the band broke through worldwide with 2013's Bad Blood and its era-defining single "Pompeii," then kept widening the sound across Wild World, Doom Days, and Give Me the Future while Smith ran a parallel string of mixtapes, film work, and collaborations.
the sound in question
2013
PompeiiBastille
walk the tributaries ↓
Regina Spektor2000s · Anti-folk / Singer-songwriter / Art pop
Dan Smith has said hearing Regina Spektor's "Us" as a teenager is what made him believe he could write and record songs at all: he loved how she told "this quite weird story with her words" over spare piano, and her unique, unsmoothed voice made him think that if she could sing like that, he could "have a crack" with his own "weird annoying voice" instead of hiding it.
listen: upstream & heresource: Dan From Bastille Discusses The First Time He Heard A Specific Regina Spektor Song (MTV Music) ↗
2004
2013
OblivionBastille
listen forListen for Bastille building a song around one small, oddly specific scene rather than a general feeling — the same narrative-first, character-driven songwriting Spektor does over stripped-back piano, just dressed up with Bastille's cinematic synths and drums.
Simon & Garfunkel1960s · Folk rock / Folk / Pop
Smith has called Simon & Garfunkel "omnipresent" in his childhood home and picked "The Only Living Boy in New York" as one of the nine songs that shaped him, praising how completely the song's plainspoken storytelling and close harmony "transported" him — an early lesson in restraint he later carried into Bastille's quieter, unguarded moments.
listen: upstream & here
1970
The Only Living Boy in New YorkSimon & Garfunkel
2017
Bridge Over Troubled Water (Artists for Grenfell)Bastille
listen forListen for the close, unadorned vocal harmonies and gentle acoustic build — Bastille reached for that same well directly when the band recorded its own version of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" for the Grenfell charity single, letting the song's storytelling carry the arrangement instead of studio bombast.
Kate Bush1980s · Art pop / Progressive pop / Alternative rock
Smith grew up with Hounds of Love in the house without really hearing it until a deep dive in his twenties, when its "completely unique voice" and heavily reverbed, theatrical drums hit hard enough that he says he "listened to [it] loads... while making Bastille's albums" — a direct admission that Bush's cinematic, larger-than-life production shaped the band's own sound.
listen: upstream & here
1985
Hounds of LoveKate Bush
2013
Things We Lost In The FireBastille
listen forListen for the huge, reverb-soaked drums and the way a Bastille track can swing from a hushed verse to a full, string-swept, almost gothic chorus — the same widescreen drama Bush built into Hounds of Love, filtered through Bastille's electronic pop.