Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Starwood Preferred GuestBastille is currently hard at work on the follow-up to their 2013 debut Bad Blood, which featured the band's massive breakthrough single, "Pompeii." In fact, according to frontman Dan Smith, Bastille has already "written a whole album."
"We've got 25 songs, give or take," Smith tells Billboard. "We're kind of just finishing everything off and finessing what tunes are gonna make it cause it could literally be one of three or four very different records, so we're just figuring out which one it is."
As for what the album might sound like, Smith says that it's already taken on many different directions.
"When we started the album, this is more than a year ago, it was alternative R&B, a lot more electronic, then we went down a heavier rock route as well, then we almost came full circle back around to what we did the first record, more cinematic, then we did a load of horns," he explains. "So it could be a lot of different things."
Smith also told ABC Radio over the summer that Bastille was messing with different genres for album number two.
"We straddle this weird line between kind of alternative and pop and elements of other genres as well," he told ABC Radio. "So we're just kind of trying to have fun with that and see where it takes us."
Smith did reveal one key difference between Bad Blood and its prospective follow-up, however.
"We've been using guitar on this record, we didn't have any guitar on the first one," he told ABC Radio.
Smith tells Billboard that we can expect the new Bastille album to arrive in 2016, and that the band has already started to come up with names for the record.
"We've got the concept, I think thematically, in the last few months, it really came together and that's nice 'cause a lot of the songs are quite narrative," he says. "There's a gangster-related song, so we've found the thing that brings it all together and that's quite satisfying."
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