Shut Up & Kiss Me - Reece Mastin
🎙️ Shut Up Month Continues on 1001 Songs That Make You Want To Die 🎙️
All month long, we're celebrating songs that open with attitude and close with confusion — all united by one shared desire: that someone, somewhere, would just shut up. This week, we swerve into the spray-tanned heart of Australian Idol aftermath with a rock-pop anthem that asks, “What if a leather wristband wrote a love song?”
Today’s offender: Shut Up & Kiss Me by Reece Mastin — a track that smells faintly of Lynx Africa and underage drinking in a council skate park.
Reece Mastin – “Shut Up & Kiss Me”
Sony Music Australia / 2012
★☆☆☆☆ (1.2)
By Scarlett Varnish
At some point in the early 2010s, a committee of sleeveless denim jackets convened to ask the question: “What if Green Day had a concussion and a crush at the same time?” The answer, apparently, was Reece Mastin’s Shut Up & Kiss Me — a hormonal three-minute tantrum that sounds like it was recorded during a sugar crash in the back of a P-plated Commodore.
Let’s begin with Mastin himself, a man-boy hybrid engineered in a lab to appeal to girls who shop exclusively at Jay Jays. His voice, perpetually caught between a raspy snarl and a GCSE drama audition, pushes through every lyric like he's trying to impress a crowd of mums at Westfield.
The song opens like it’s late for its own music video. “Shut up and kiss me / No more messing around,” he commands, firmly establishing that this is not a track about emotional maturity. No, this is 2000s pop-rock seduction — where communication is for cowards and the best foreplay is shouting.
Musically, it’s what happens when you microwave a Simple Plan song and forget to take the foil off. Overproduced guitars buzz like someone angrily mowing a lawn next to a trampoline party. The chorus lands with all the subtlety of a Monster energy drink to the face, and by the second verse, you’re genuinely concerned that your headphones might start secreting hair gel.
There’s a bridge. Of course there’s a bridge. It sounds like it was written while standing outside a girl’s house with a boombox and a restraining order. The production tries to slow down, but only so it can pretend there's a sensitive heart beneath the leather wrist cuff. There isn’t.
What’s most impressive is how aggressively Australian this whole thing feels without ever mentioning the word. It’s in the attitude. The fake swagger. The unwavering belief that a school talent show can lead to a record deal and a face tattoo. This isn’t just a song — it’s a rite of passage for anyone w