While the British four-piece were in New York this summer, we spoke to them about Wild World (both the album and their whirlwind surroundings), their fan favorite cover (TLC’s “No Scrubs”), and their trips to CERN and NASA.

HALEY WEISS: Did your last album have any guitar?

DAN SMITH: No, we didn’t have any on the last one.

WILL FARQUARSON: I’ve played guitar for years, and wanted to play guitar, but we got halfway through the last one and realized we hadn’t used any. It became a bit of a challenge to make an album that is essentially quite alternative sounding, and has a lot of sounds that could be guitar—for instance on “Overjoyed,” there’s what sounds like guitar but is actually a lot of keys. For that album, it was a bit of a challenge to do it, so it was quite nice to get an opportunity to introduce on the second album something a bit fresh for us. For the rest of the world, perhaps it’s not, because guitar is quite ubiquitous, but for us it’s exciting to just have guitar on the record.

SMITH: I guess the guitar, like Will said, is kind of a novelty for us. We wanted this album to feel different from the first one, like a different set of work, and that allowed us to push what we do within the realms of BASTILLE in another direction—in the same way that the more hip-hop leaning production also pushed the album.

WEISS: Beyond your producer Mark Crew, is there a particular person or set of people that when you first make a song, or when you put an album together, you think, “Okay, I want them to listen to it before I make final decisions.”

KYLE SIMMONS: 90 percent is us and Mark. We have a great team behind us, but I think they know us well enough that they know we know what were doing; Dan’s got the creative path that we all kind of follow, and that’s why we work well. We were talking to people recently who have their A&R and their management team in the studio all of the time, and we don’t. We’re really lucky. It’s a good working environment because they know and they trust us creatively. They know that we can just let Dan write a song by himself and then come together, put parts on it, and make the right decisions basically.

SMITH: There’s definitely a couple of people I’ll play stuff to when it’s nearly finished just to see what they think. Mark, our producer, his wife is Australian and just listens to the radio—she’s awesome—and I guess is quite a casual music listener. So he’s always like, “Has it passed [her] test?” Everybody has their barometer. It was really interesting, I had people at my house and played a couple of [songs] for my friends from uni—who I imagine didn’t listen to our first album that much—but wanted to hear a bunch of tracks from the new one. I played it and it was quite nice. One was like, “Oh, fuck. I’d listen to this.” [laughs] I was like, “Oh, thanks, mate. That’s a massively backhanded compliment but thanks.”