nu rave!

Jamie Reynolds grew up in Bournemouth, before moving to Southampton in his early twenties. He dropped out of studying philosophy at Greenwich University to work in a record shop, before moving to London and being made redundant. He met James Righton and Simon Taylor-Davis, who was his girlfriend's roommate. All three had previously played in various other groups, including Reef and Oasis cover bands. Simon and James grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, where they attended the same school. They shared a house with members of Pull Tiger Tail in New Cross, London, briefly playing a gig together as 'Hollywood Is a Verb' in 2004. Live tracks from the gig are available on the band's MySpace page.

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".