Songfacts®:

• This horn-driven, hip-hop influenced tune was released as the third single from Wild World on August 31, 2016. "We wanted to sort of make a big, bombastic, swaggering hip-hop track," frontman Dan Smith told BBC Radio 1. "And then have, obviously, my vocals come in and it suddenly becomes all depressing and Bastille-y."
• This was debuted by Bastille at the Rose Bar in New York City on December 1, 2015.
• With regard to the song's theme, Dan Smith commented on Twitter "It's Othello meets The Exorcist."
• The song starts off with a modified quote from the 1977 movie War of the Planets. Dan Smith explained to Radio.com: "Originally the quote is from this Italian sci-fi film from the '70s. It was a slightly different quote, and we wanted it to basically open up with a bit of slightly bragging, like call to arms, then it leads into this kind of really over-the-top like brass riff, almost like a swaggery hip-hop tune. But then basically, we couldn't find, we couldn't track down the rights to this quote. We tried really hard. Some of our workers at our label in Italy drove down to the old film company, this closed down film company, and ended up rewriting it slightly and re-recording it. But yeah, I think it nicely sets the dramatic tone."
• Dan Smith explained the song's meaning: "'Send Them Off!' I guess is a kind of, it's a song of irrational relationship jealousy told very dramatically by the language of Desdemona in Othello, which is such a famous, classic jealousy narrative, but using some of the imagery from The Exorcist. So I guess it's kind of quite symbolic of how we write, and how our music comes out as sort of moments that are like little scenes in themselves but via all these references that we have and nods towards things that we like and enjoy and just try to tell things in a slightly different way."
• The darkly provocative video is a modern twist on Dante's medieval poem Divine Comedy. The original work finds Dante traveling through hell, purgatory and eventually paradise, but in the clip the man at the heart of the action appears to be stuck in purgatory. During the surreal visual, the band channel the Stanley Kubrick erotic drama Eyes Wide Shut as well as the horror movie Rosemary's Baby.