The Yeah Yeah Yeahs Will Teach You About The Power Of Mystery

Nine years is a long time in the music business. And a lot has changed since New York band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs released their last album, Mosquito. Streaming platforms have exploded. Social media has narrowed the distance between stars and fans. Some of the youths who once sang along to Maps, Zero and Heads Will Roll have grown up and cut their hair.

For Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen Orzolek, aka Karen O, it’s her hair that’s, ironically, remained a constant — she still sports a shaggy bowl cut, despite the occasional avant-garde dalliance with black and blonde.

Elsewhere though, life has been just as changeable. She’s had a baby with her director husband Barnaby Clay (her son, Django, now 7), moved from New York to Los Angeles and observed, along with the rest of the world, as it’s gone to hell in a Trump-esque handbasket.

All of which has provided plenty of fodder for Cool It Down, the band’s fifth studio album, and arguably one of their best. Appearing on the Zoom audio as ‘Karenoia’ before guitarist and keyboardist Nick Zinner joins the line, the American-Korean singer says she’s feeling a renewed passion for music, even if today, her girlish voice has the fragmented stutter of nervousness.

“The world just changes so dramatically between our records,” she says. “So it’s always like having to relearn the ropes with putting something new out in a totally different industry and world. But as far as spiritually, fan-wise, it’s the best feeling, you know? It feels deeper than it’s felt in a long time. It’s a very emotional experience.”

Cool It Down packs a punch into its 35 minutes, sounding both apocalyptic and joyful, cinematic and intimate. While they’re just as edgy as when they first blasted onto the scene with drummer Brian Chase in 2000, opening for the White Stripes and former Cramps guitarist Kid “Congo” Powers, there’s the sense their growing maturity has leeched into their day jobs, with Cool It Down exhibiting a mature sonic lushness, producer Dave Sitek tempering the searing guitars with strings, keys and deep, bassy grooves.

“It feels reflective of the world we’re living in to a certain degree,” says Karen. “Who would’ve thought in some of the darkest moments of the pandemic, people would understand true happiness? It’s such unusual times and the stakes feel the highest they’ve been since I’ve been alive. I feel like that reverberates throughout the record, this shimmering joy.”

Climate change is addressed in songs such as Burning, which Karen says she wrote both about the time she accidentally set fire to her New York apartment by leaving a candle burning, and the Californian wildfires that lost control on the cusp of Covid.

“I think those highs are absolutely there, but there’s a stronger dynamic range,” says Nick, of the punk-rock grit they’re beloved for, their fiery live shows. “You can’t really take that away from us. When you put the three of us together, it’s literally in our DNA.”

Contrast the excitement of this album to the preceding years, when the band weren’t together. Mosquito, released in 2013, marked the end of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s contract with Interscope Records, leaving the band free agents, at which point Karen says her biological clock started to tick louder than ever.

So how did it feel parking the performer renowned for immersing herself so much in the music she once fell off the stage and hurt herself at a show in Australia? How does the queen of early 2000s “indie-sleaze” reconcile settling a baby in the middle of the night?

“Well I thought being a rock star and having that extreme lifestyle was going to prepare me,” she laughs. “Like, I got this, I’ve been through some extremes already but I was totally blindsided, the rug pulled out, you know? I was a beginner. At that point in my life I felt like I had a lot of things dialled in and then having the kid was just like, here you are at square one. There’s no passing with flying colours, it’s so out of your control, you’ve just really got to roll with it. It was a very humbling and cosmic experience.”

Meanwhile, Nick was buying himself creatively, playing in hardcore bands, writing film soundtracks and collaborating with musicians around the world, (his list of credits includes Santigold, Bloc Party, Bright Eyes and Liam Gallagher). Even so, he says not working with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a trio of musicians that essentially grew up in the limelight together, was “a little more challenging, more turbulent than the other times”.

It was 2020 when the band had the itch to record, a year that coincided with their 20-year anniversary — and the first of global lockdowns. Rather than feel cheated, Nick says they felt more for the artists who were due to release finished albums. Anyone who followed the band on Instagram would’ve seen Karen mark the occasion by producing a one-woman show from her glitter-strewn home wardrobe. By the time they did make it back into the studio, they felt a sense of urgency to record.

“This connection that Karen and I have, it’s so mysterious and powerful but it feels like it’s a constant,” says Nick. “Working with each other again felt similar… in a lot of ways it felt how we made music the first year or so we were a band, in the sense that it was just Karen and I on a floor somewhere, in my old loft or her apartment, no producers, sometimes not even Brian our drummer. Just us. And that super DIY spirit.”

She’s also still rocking the outlandish costumes by friend Christian Joy, which she refers to as her “Clark Kent, Superman situation”. Her outfit at a recent LA show was a dress with yellow chains, a riot of graffitied colour, as though Vivienne Westwood and Basquiat had collaborated.

She was an outlier on the fashion scene when she and Christian started making clothes, she adds. “No one had personal stylists. No one was like, rocking up on stage with costumes. We were trying to take a page from the glam-rock days of 20-30 years ago.”

Their scrappy rise to fame was captured in the bestselling book-turned-festival film, Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goldman, which also marked a pivotal time for fellow New York bands the Strokes, Interpol and LCD Soundsystem. The band oversaw much of their own chapter in the film, which Nick says does a good job of capturing that heady time.

“But it’s weird, man. By the same token, it’s something I literally cannot wrap my head around,” he says. “It’s still really bizarre... I can appreciate it but I can’t fully process or understand it.”

Recently the band played two huge shows, the biggest they’ve ever played in the US, sharing the stage with two other acts fronted by Asian-American women, Japanese Breakfast, and the Linda Linda’s at the 17,500-capacity Hollywood Bowl. The crowd was populated by kids, including Karen’s seven-year-old son, “all the way through to 80-year-olds,” she says, and the changing face of diversity on stage was not lost on them.

In the early days, Karen suspects they were often taken less seriously because of her gender. They could be lonely times, she says, moments she would’ve appreciated female camaraderie, but that was before you could slide into the DMs of the likes of PJ Harvey, Shirley Manson, Patti Smith or Debbie Harry.

“There was definitely a lot of sexism in rock, you know? But I never let it get to me. If anything I just fed off of it, and it made me feel more empowered.”

Now, as they prepare to do shows in Mexico and release a remix of Wolf, a Duran Duran-referencing slice of goth-pop and one of the highlights of Cool It Down, there’s the sense that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are back not only to slay another generation with cathartic rock atmosphere, but to teach them a thing or two about the power of mystery.

“In heaven, lost my taste for hell,” goes the line Karen says she’d rather leave open to interpretation. Older, wiser, still cool.