Take Me Out

Kapranos and McCarthy wrote it while sharing a flat in Glasgow. Kapranos had seen Enemy at the Gates the night before, and its two-sniper stand-off became his metaphor for a shy romantic stalemate. He told American Songwriter that the verses and choruses would not fit; halving the tempo suited the verse but was too slow overall, so the verses stay at the start tempo and slow for the chorus, which sounded cool. He wanted a call-and-response blues feel that still worked as dance music, and McCarthy played along on an old synthesizer. In an SRF 3 interview at the Gurtenfestival on July 25, 2025 he gave a humorous version, that the tempo shifts were not planned, the band wrote part, went for drinks and came back faster, probably whisky, and that the chorus riff was borrowed from a preset bluegrass-style accompaniment on a Yamaha keyboard. Wikipedia says the tempo change was recorded live, compiled from the best takes. Song Exploder covered it in episode 226 in January 2022.

It was the second single, released in the UK on January 12, 2004 and in the US on April 12, produced by Johansson at Gula. It reached 3 in the UK, 66 on the Hot 100 and 3 on US modern rock, and went four times platinum in the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. Jonas Odell directed the video, live action with Dadaist animation; Kapranos cited Dada, Busby Berkeley and Soviet propaganda, and it won the MTV VMA for breakthrough video. It was number 1 in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2004, announced on January 26, 2005, where a live version was played after the studio one. Q ranked it 41st among guitar tracks, NME 16th among indie anthems, Pitchfork 44th among tracks of the 2000s, and Rolling Stone placed it 327th in 2010. Setlist.fm counts 1,258 performances, their most played song.

Scissor Sisters covered it as a B-side in 2004, Weird Al Yankovic included it in "Polkarama!" (2006), and Daft Punk and Naoum Gabo made 2013 remixes. It was used in a 2005 PSP advertisement and in For All Mankind. We could not tell which version our upload is.