Cansei de Ser Sexy is the name of the first international release by the group Cansei de Ser Sexy. It was released on July 11, 2006 on the Sub Pop label, and re-released in early 2007 by Warner. The album received mainly positive reviews (it was featured in UNCUT's list of the 50 best records of 2006 at position #18, NME's list of the 50 best records of 2006 at position #5 and Q's list of the 100 best records of 2006 at position #89). Despite the reviews, it failed to chart in the USA. The tracks were selected from two previous Brazilian releases by the band: the EP CSS SUXXX and their first full-length album, also called Cansei de Ser Sexy.
The song "Alala" and video for "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" have been included preloaded on the Zune multimedia player, released in November 2006. The songs "Alala" and "Off The Hook" are featured in Forza Motorsport 2 and FIFA 08 respectively, videogames for the XBOX 360 The song "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex" was featured in a Zune advertisement in 2006 and an iPod touch advertisement in 2007. The album won the 2007 PLUG Independent Music Award for Best Punk Album. The album was certified Silver for UK sales.
James taught Simon how to play guitar, and with Reynolds' redundancy money they bought a studio kit. They began recording under their early guise of "Klaxons (Not Centaurs)", a quote from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's futurism text The Futurist Manifesto. Initially the band played with drummer Finnigan Kidd in 2005, until Kidd left to play with fellow New Cross band, Hatcham Social. The band added repacement live drummer Steffan Halperin, with the band announcing him as an official member in an interview in Prefix Magazine in early 2007. Halperin became a semi-official fourth member of the band, being listed on Klaxons' MySpace page and present in several interviews. He remains mostly absent from the band's music videos, appearing only in the early video "Atlantis to Interzone" and briefly in the 2007 re-release of "Gravity's Rainbow".
HMV describes Klaxons as "acid-rave sci-fi punk-funk", a phrase lifted directly from Tim Chester's Radar feature in NME, while their MySpace page touts 'Psychedelic / Progressive / Pop'. However, they are one of the isolated acts being referred to as New Rave, a genre term coined by Angular Records founder Joe Daniel, who released the trio's first single. Though the band's sound is rock-based, they draw upon some less common influences - notably the rave culture of the 1990s, which they appropriate and redefine in a post-modern fashion. Their influences are perhaps most represented in their covers of rave hits "The Bouncer" by Kicks Like a Mule and "Not Over Yet" by Grace. Both tracks have since been released by the band, the first as part of a double a-side with "Gravity's Rainbow" in March 2006 and the latter as a single on June 25, 2007 titled "It's Not Over Yet".
While the band is consistently hailed as the defining act of the sparsely-populated New Rave movement, Klaxons have worked to avoid being typecast as champions of the genre. Even so, Klaxons member Jamie Reynolds expressed no regrets at the dubious honour, saying that "...it's great that it started as an in-joke and became a minor youth subculture".
