ELECTRIFYING, EMOTIONAL RETURN
After nearly decadelong break, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are back with an album that dares to imagine bold, fresh future
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were planning to cry. Nothing dramatic about it, but the day before the band returned to Montreal’s Osheaga festival stage in July — gearing up for the release of its first album of new music in almost a decade — frontwoman Karen O, guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase knew the tears were going to flow.
“A tiny moment of being overwhelmed and appreciative,” Zinner said of welling up onstage at a British arena in June. Karen O noted that she had been weeping before shows to “hopefully get it out of my system — so I can make you cry.” She laughed, but it worked.
At Osheaga, in an outfit that made her look like a Viking crossed with Evel Knievel in a Nick Cave soundsuit, with tear-like electric blue streaks painted below her eyes, Karen O engaged the audience with a chant: “Love. And. Tenderness! Love. And. Tenderness!” By the time the band played “Maps,” its influential 2003 romancer, I was a puddle.
Emotional release has always been the governing aesthetic of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the art-rock trio born in New York more than two decades ago, known for a sound and a performance style that crunches molten punk fury with clear-hearted lyrical vulnerability.
Over four studio albums — the last and highest charting, “Mosquito,” was released in 2013 — Yeah Yeah Yeahs came to define the resurgent New York rock scene of the aughts. The group evolved from its lo-fi roots, bringing in acoustic strumming, club beats and electro-pop weirdness, earning Grammy nominations along the way. But when its major label deal with Interscope ended after “Mosquito,” its members happily scattered to do their own stuff — to mature artistically and personally.
“So much has changed, radically, in our lives,” Karen O — short for Orzolek — said.
But perhaps nobody expected their pause to last as long as it did — enough time for the band’s members to move cross-country, have children, start experimental record labels, be quoted on a Beyonce album, blast out riffs for the flame-throwing guitar in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” lose an Oscar to the Disney juggernaut “Frozen,” endure a pandemic and see rock albums, the spine of their own transformative, gut-grabbing sound, fall deeper out of favor as streaming became the dominant form of music consumption.
Now they are returning, at last and in full throttle, with “Cool It Down,” recently released by the indie label Secretly Canadian. Its eight songs are characteristically spiky and grand, encompassing dance-floor rattle, synths and strings. Running just over a half-hour, it takes on big themes including environmental collapse, the burden for future generations and the primal longing for closeness after our global separation. But its anthems and ballads point toward hope, including the closing track, “Mars,” lo-fi poetry partly taken from a conversation with Karen O’s son. “Karen didn’t want to make a ‘rock band in a room’ record,” Zinner said. “For her, the unfamiliar is the most exciting terrain.”
The album arrives with what Karen O called “a mic drop” of a single, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” a deep-set apocalyptica featuring ethereal vocals from Perfume Genius, accompanied by the biggest music video the band has ever produced (and they once recorded one atop the Empire State Building).
“I wanted our first song to sound like the future, bold and fresh and powerful,” Karen O, 43, said. “We’re back,” she added with an expletive.
The road to the band’s return rested largely on her shoulders. In between albums and tours, she
moved, fairly permanently, from New York to Los Angeles with her husband, Barnaby Clay, a filmmaker; their son, Django, was born in 2015. In 2014, she released a solo album of demos, bedroom recordings about romance. That same year, she was nominated for an Oscar for “The Moon Song,” from Spike Jonze’s film “Her.” (It lost to “Let It Go.”) A project with Danger Mouse, which yielded the album “Lux Prima,” and more film scoring followed.
Zinner, 47, who splits his time between New York and (more often) Los Angeles, played in side projects like the hardcore act Head Wound City and worked as a producer and an exhibiting photographer, with multiple books.
Chase, 44, who lives in New York City with his wife, Erin, a dentistturned-art history student, welcomed a son, Isaac, in 2016. A prolific artist deeply enmeshed in New York’s experimental jazz scene, Chase started the indie label Chaikin Records and worked on his solo project Drums and Drones, a meditation on percussion.
As the years ticked on, Karen O, who operates mostly from instinct, was willing to wait for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs mood to strike. “Nick is a studio rat, and Brian will play music every day of his life eternally,” said Dave Sitek, their friend and frequent producer. “When Karen says it’s time, it’s time.”
Zinner agreed: “We’re always ready when she’s ready.”
Even when she was, the lead-up to recording involved false starts, creative paralysis and a sake-fueled dark night of the soul between Zinner and Karen O. They first began thinking about songwriting again after short tours in 2017 and 2018, celebrating a reissue of “Fever to Tell,” their 2003 breakout debut. As much as fans still loved it, playing just the back catalog “started feeling a little bit stale,” Karen O said.
Before they could really get rolling, though, the pandemic hit, and Zinner found himself struggling to create anything. “All of 2020 was a wash for me,” he said.
Karen O, meanwhile, was fueled by the sudden realization that her musical bedrock could crumble if it wasn’t cultivated. She and Zinner usually began their collaborations with informal jam sessions. But they had butted heads in the studio before, to the point of hatred, Zinner once said.
This time, they got together at a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles to hash things out first. “How are we going to do this with the least amount of suffering and the most amount of joy? We got into the nittygritty of that with each other, with our defenses down,” Karen O said. “Lots of oxytocin, thanks to the Black Dragon sake.”
Last summer, they started making demos again, in Zinner’s basement studio, surrounded by toy keyboards and other musical trinkets. Chase sent drum loops from across the country. New producers were invited in — a pre-pandemic session with Justin Raisen (Spoon, Charli XCX) became the basis for “Mars.” And Karen O rummaged through a vast Dropbox of musical ideas that Sitek made. One became “Spitting Off the Edge of the World.”
The snippet was just synth and drums — “a David Lynch kind of vibe,” Sitek said. “I knew it had some emotional potency, but I never could have imagined what they turned it into. Karen had a vision for it.”
Onstage, Karen O is still mesmerizing, geysering liquids and power-posing on monitors, but she has tamed, ever so slightly, her wild dervish style. “There is a bewitching goddess energy that very few people have — it’s like an aura that kind of takes over the crowd,” said Cody Critcheloe, who directed the “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” video.
Speaking with the conviction of someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about her role as a frontwoman, Karen O noted that “disarming is another specialty of what I try to do with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”
“I’m being absolutely ridiculous, quite overtly sexual, totally heart-on-mysleeve,” she said. “I’m going to steamroll you, and you’re going to like it.”