This was released in the United Kingdom on April 20, 2012 as the lead single from AlunaGeorge's first studio album, Body Music. The song originally didn't chart but a year later it peaked at #55 on the UK Singles Chart after being used in a an advert for the Tesco supermarket chain. It was re-released on July 28, 2013, as a double A-side with "Bad Idea" to tie in with the release of the album.
Vocalist Aluna Francis explained the song's meaning to Billboard magazine. "It's about being yourself and being that person on the dancefloor that's making a total fool out of themselves but having a good time and saying to the person in the corner, 'Idiot! Come on, you love it!"'
A music video was filmed to accompany the song directed by Laurence Matthew Blake and Matilda Finn. Shot in black and white and released onto YouTube on August 31, 2011, it features clips of Francis dancing. The singer told Coup De Main magazine: "That was actually the director's idea - it was just something fun and fresh but something very true to us, and I like to dance so that was kind of easy."
A different music video was filmed to accompany the DJ Snake remix. The clip shows a gorilla who sells drugs and has trouble fitting in.
French DJ and producer DJ Snake's remix of the track became AlunaGeorge's first Hot 100 hit in the US. Aluna Francis told Billboard magazine how the new version came about: "We just heard [Snake's] 'Bird Machine' and we loved it, so we contacted him directly and asked for a remix and he was like, 'OK!'"
"We have a lot of really really excellent remixes, so people kind of associate us with that, and more than not the people who we ask will be excited to do them. So he just did the remix and, I guess we call it a soft release and just pushed it out. He's contacted us a year later and was like, this is pretty popular and we should release it properly."
Aluna Francis told the story of the song: "That was a time when me and George (Reid, beatmaker) hadn't really found our writing formula. Even now, we still do it different every time. We were both writing separately at that moment, and he had written a track where he was trying to experiment with not using a kick drum and using a bassline to be significant. I was writing a song that was trying to embody breaking out of the norm and the backlash that you get, when ultimately they kind of love you for it though they'll say that they hate you. So that was the premise of the idea of the song."
"Then listening to the track, I was kind of humming the sentence 'You know you like it but it drives you insane.' I came back and was like, 'George, I can't think of anything else but this and it's really annoying.' And he was like, 'What is it?' And I sang it to him and he was like, 'No, that's it, that's it.' So it was all kind of pieces that had to get fit together. The rest of the song somehow managed to go with this random piece of lyric that I came up with."
Asked during a Reddit AMA how the song went from being an AlunaGeorge song remixed by DJ Snake to being an AlunaGeorge x DJ Snake single, Aluna Francis replied: "He just proposed releasing it to his own fan base and we were happy for the song to get a new lease of life. We aren't ego maniacs so who's name is on the tin isn't that important!"