Does it Offend You Yeah are set to release their second full-length studio album, ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ on March 14th on Cooking Vinyl.
To celebrate the release the band have just confirmed a massive 19 date UK tour starting on March 2nd in Cardiff and finishing on April 4th at Heaven in London.
The band will be performing tracks from the forthcoming album ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’, an album that surprises and astounds at every turn; unpredictability is king, no barrier is left un-demolished. It’s a spectacular rebirth, a breaking out of boxes.
It is the follow up to 2008’s ‘You Have Know Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into’, an album that was too spikey-around-the-edges to fit into any genre and saw the band confounding expectations at every turn. But DIOY,Y? blew up big, making a huge impact on the gig scene with their incendiary live performances, remixing everyone from Muse to Bloc Party to The White Stripes, and damn near breaking America, going on missions of electro conversion across North America in support of The Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails and Linkin Park and their own sold-out headline tour.
Their new album, ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ is compiled from the “million” songs that DIOY,Y? self-recorded – over six months in a tiny studio in Reading towards the end of 2009 and in piecemeal bedroom’n’kitchen sessions throughout 2010.
“Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You” opens with the resurrection march of ‘We Are The Dead’, a zombie barn-dance interspersed with 60s-psych acoustic interludes and is currently available as free download online. “It’s about reincarnation and regeneration,” grins frontman, James Rushent “Coming back from the dead that’s why we picked it as our first free giveaway, to say we’re still alive.”
The anarcho-Prodigy ‘The Wrestler (This Is The Dance)’ includes a sample from 1999 wrestling movie Beyond The Mat which summed up the band’s feelings: “we’re too extreme, we’re too wild, we’re too out of control… fuck you you’re wrong! Fuck you, we’re right!”. The fantastic electro-pop ‘Pull Out My Insides’ (“Stay with me while I make mistakes”) is an attack on the soulful-yet-soulless mainstream pap, riddled with fantasies about their mass cultural cull at the hands of the righteous underground. A cull forseen in ‘The Monkeys Are Coming’, a real rave-rock shit-flinger that resets the spring-loaded spike trap at the heart of DIOY,Y? and asserts their position as the prickliest tech-rock punks on the planet.
“The monkeys represent art in its true form, just fucking mess,” says James. “I think it’s about time we have a fucking mess. We were a year and a half ago in the studio, going ‘fuck them, fuck her, fuck him’. We want to perform music that, if we heard it, we’d go ‘oh, who’s that?’ rather than ‘here’s another fucking 60s soul artist’. It was stressful, panicky and hard work. It’s the nature of how we work, it’s like trying to put a jigsaw together where you don’t know what the picture is at the end. I feel like we’ve come across the finish line with our pants hanging halfway down our legs.”
But what a triumphant finish. Fusing their original concoction of Justice, Metronomy and Prodigy with a new sense of stylistic adventure and synthetic violence all their own, ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ promises to be one of 2011’s most visceral and inventive – yet surprisingly accessible – assaults on the senses. When it’s not delving into Soviet squelches, Billy Holiday-esque vocal samples and grime raps courtesy of educated battler Trip on ‘Wondering’, it’s recreating the Blade Runner soundtrack on ‘The Knife’, or coming on like a meta-Muse on ‘John Hurt’ – so named because the legendary actor was due to feature on the track, until the band’s ex-manager missed his ‘window’.
Acoustic guitar segments drop unexpectedly out of hardcore techno thrashes. Zulu chants weave around cartoon monster glam stomps. ‘Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You’ surprises and astounds at every turn; unpredictability is king, no barrier is left un-demolished. It’s a spectacular rebirth, a breaking out of boxes, as evinced by the two tracks which bookend it. At the far end you have the devastating ‘Broken Arms’, a virtually synth-free suicide ballad redolent of Radiohead’s ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’, the first song written for the album in an attempt to do “something completely different”.
And how. Finally free of their major label shackles , DIOY,Y? couldn’t feel more unleashed, in control, reanimated. They’re one of the few bands around today who feel capable of anything, restrained by no-one and thrilled to be beating at the boundaries of their own possibilities.
“This is our break-out album,” says Dan. “It has got balls-out angry stuff and serene melancholic, quite depressing stuff as well. We’d rather show all our hands like that rather than write a whole album that sounds the same.”
A good plan, since this is hair-raising stuff: a laser blast from the underground, future rock rebels running riot. Don’t say they didn’t warn you…
March tour dates
Wed 02 Cardiff The Globe.
Thu 03 High Wycombe Bucks Student Union.
Sat 05 Peterborough Club Revoluition.
Sun 06 Brighton Coalition.
Mon 07 Leeds The Cockpit.
Tue 08 Leicester sub91.
Wed 09 Sheffield The Leadmill.
Fri 11 Glasgow ABC2.
Mon 14 Newcastle Academy 2.
Tue 15 Stoke Sugarmill.
Wed 16 Birmingham Academy 2.
Thu 17 Liverpool Academy 2.
Fri 18 Manchester Academy 3.
Sat 19 Preston 53 degrees.
Mon 21 Reading sub89.
Tue 22 Southampton The Talking Heads.
Wed 23 Bristol The Fleece.
Thu 24 Kingston New Slang @ Hippodrome.
April
Mon 04 London Heaven
DON’T SAY WE DIDN’T WARN YOU
Track listing
1. we are the dead
2. john hurt
3. pull out my insides
4. yeah
5. the monkeys are coming
6. wrong time wrong planet
7. wrestler
8. wondering
9. the knife
10 broken arms
CD
cat number COOKCD528
Barcode 711297492828
Digital
cat COOKDL528
Barcode 711297492842
Itunes album
includes Bonus track – Survival of the Thickest
cat number COOKDL528X
barcode 711297492880
DIOYY ARE
James Rushent
Dan Coop
Rob Bloomfield
Matty Derham
Chloe Duveaux
www.doesitoffendyou.com
link
www.facebook.com/doesitoffendyou
www.myspace.com/doesitoffendyou
www.cookingvinyl.com