The Look

Joseph Mount wrote "The Look", track four of The English Riviera, 4:37, released as the second single on March 11, 2011 (Beats Per Minute reports April 4 for the worldwide release). In his note for the tenth-anniversary edition, as reported by Dork, he wrote it in his first Paris apartment within sight of Sacre-Coeur while tinkering with a keyboard belonging to Marion Cassan, and doubted it sounded like Metronomy. He finished recording it at the Smokehouse in London about four months later. After its first live performance at the Cockpit in Leeds in January 2011, a journalist asked about it, probably the moment I realised it had something about it, and hearing crowds sing the hook, he says, often brings a tear to my eye. He told Gigwise that the jaunty organ was deliberate, a tip of the hat of sorts to the seaside theme; the video shows him playing a Yamaha Electone EX-2.

It reached 190 in the UK, 43 in France and 84 in Wallonia, and is gold in the UK. The video, directed by Lorenzo Fonda (Beats Per Minute spells it Lorenza), has the band in a white room in London with stop-motion seagull animation made in Los Angeles. Camo and Krooked and Two Inch Punch remixed the single, and an MGMT remix was shared on March 27, 2021; the 2012 single pairs it with "Corinne". It plays over the end titles of Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited! (2013).

Setlist.fm counts 362 setlists with it, the band's most played song, ahead of "The Bay" (352) and "Corinne" (323). The Current recorded a studio session on April 6, 2012 with "She Wants", "The Look" and "The Bay". We found no direct statement from Mount on the lyric, no true covers, and did not check which version our upload is.