More than three years after their multi-platinum debut, the band Bastille was releasing their sophomore album, Wild World. So we set out to help them reactivate their passionate fans around the globe – collectively known as The Stormers – and motivate them to support the album release by creating music-streaming “storms” of their own.

For passionate fans, it’s not enough to consume a band’s music. They want to feel a part of the band’s success. So we launched “Eye of the Stormers,” a virtual wild world that visualized in real-time where the new album was being streamed most – via swirling, raging, data-driven “storms.”

Fans took pride in creating the biggest storms in their city, and called on others to join via social. And for good reason – the city with the most engaged Bastille fans got a private performance by the band.

The design language balanced the aesthetic of both the band and the Spotify brand, embracing a color palette that reflected the passion of the fans.

We developed real-time storms by writing shaders utilizing fractal brownian motion and simplex noise to generate convincing clouds. WebGL post-processing effects, CSS3D UI, and Canvas round out the technology used to build the data visualization.

30 second previews of the band’s latest songs were embedded in the experience, using Spotify’s API.