Klaxons

Klaxons are a British alternative band who spearheaded the nu-rave scene during the mid-2000s. The group have released four studio albums and won the 2007 Mercury Music Prize for their debut LP ‘Myths Of The Near Future’.

Klaxons were formed when school friends Simon Taylor-Davis and James Righton met Jamie Reynolds in London. Righton, who had been working as a teacher, used his redundancy money to buy studio equipment. Taking their name from the Futurist Manifesto, a literary movement fronted by Italian writer Filippo Marinetti, the band signed with Angular Records in 2006 and released ‘Myths Of The Near Future’ the following year. In addition to winning the Mercury Music Prize, the LP was Number Two on the UK Albums Chart and also won the Best Album prize at the NME Awards 2007.

However, the band’s follow-up ‘Surfing The Void’ was not released until mid-2010: although Klaxons began working on the LP in 2008 with original producer James Ford with a 2009 release in mind, their label, Polydor, said that the album was too experimental and demanded it be re-recorded. Klaxons complied and, although the LP received mostly positive reviews including an 8/10 review from NME, it failed to perform as well commercially as ‘Myths Of The Near Future’: it debuted at Number 10 on the UK Albums Chart.

After a long hiatus, Klaxons announced in 2012 that they were working on a new album and that producers on the record would include LCD Soundystem’s James Murphy and Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands. The LP, titled ‘Love Frequency’, was released in June 2014.