The brilliant Let’s Make Out was the first single by Reading, UK-based dance-punk band Does It Offend You, Yeah? This track, and their subsequent, excellent 2008 debut album You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into… saw the band lauded by the music press as the future of both alternative rock and EDM for a time. But despite some high profile festival appearances – Glastonbury, Coachella, Lollapalooza, Reading/Leeds – and tours with The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails, the main perpetrators of the band James Rushent, Dan Coop and Rob Bloomfield never seemed to be taking the band that seriously. After all, they got their unwieldy name after deciding to use the first thing they heard when they switched on the TV; cue Ricky Gervais on the UK version of The Office – “My drinking, does it offend you, yeah?”.
Let’s Make Out is an atonal, rhythm-heavy, punk track, augmented with electronic squawks, a driving beat and a manic guest vocal from Sebastien Grainger of Death From Above 1979. It’s a song you could dance to or mosh to, depending on what’s your thing, and it has a killer, singalong chorus. While Let’s Make Out is the highlight of the band’s first album there’s plenty more to enjoy on You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into… and it’s well worth checking out.
The follow-up album Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You was released in 2011. It’s a solid collection but it never really hits the heights of its predecessor. By this time the individual band members were more focused on EDM, DJ-ing and successfully remixing and producing other acts. With the early momentum of the project gone, Does It Offend You, Yeah? played their last show in December 2015. The band was always more of a loose collaboration between mates than a conventional band with true ambitions, despite what the music press thought. They may never have taken themselves too seriously, but they still managed to produce some really excellent punk rock with an electronic twist, with Let’s Make Out the very best example of this.
