Like The 1975, Bastille make clever pop music with big ambition. And like The 1975, this year they delivered a second album that improved on the debut in every way. Not so much a concept album as a concept campaign, with marketing via a sinister WWCOMMS corporation, the album dealt with the big things: life, death and politics. Never a band you could accuse of subtlety, Bastille here dialed everything up to 11: ‘Send Them Off’ – a very 2016 song about tolerance – stomped in with Imperial Death March-like trumpets. Meanwhile, tricks learned from their infrequent mixtapes here saw songs sewn together with samples and quotes. For a band who sold 10m copies of their debut, this was an exercise in not fucking it all up.

