The Stool Pigeon

Back in late 2004, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out a live DVD which, unusually, included unreleased songs that were actually good - and not merely good but, in the case of ‘Cheated Hearts’, mind-blowing.

Filmed at the Fillmore in San Francisco, that version of ‘Cheated Hearts’ lengthily extends the song’s now-familiar reverberating intro. As it unfolds, we see spell-binding frontwoman Karen O slowly reel in a microphone that’s been flung to the side of the stage, feeding the lead through a fingerless leather glove as drummer Brian Chase taps out a beat. When the mic eventually reaches her, she picks it up and, arm extended, starts to arc it slowly towards her lips, on which a wicked smirk is playing. Then she languidly intones the song’s opening couplet: “Cheated by the opposite of love / Held on high from up up up above.” Cue guitarist Nick Zinner to ignite a typically explosive riff - and your heart to leap into your mouth.

Everything that so enriches the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ music is present in this clip: romance, theatre, melancholia, adrenalin, sexuality, poise. All had been present on Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 debut album Fever to Tell, a riot of trashy, punky rock’n’roll. All would be present on the intense, monolithic 2006 follow-up Show Your Bones, of which ‘Cheated Hearts’ formed the centrepiece. And now, all are present on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ third album, It’s Blitz!

Sonically, however, It’s Blitz! opens a new chapter in the story. Synths are in the ascendant at the expense of guitars, and the influence of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer is stronger than that of any rock bands past or present. The connection to classic disco is strengthened by the album’s mood, which is caught between brashly energetic and wrenchingly sad.

It’s well known that a war broke out inside the Yeah Yeah Yeahs during the Show Your Bones era, with Karen O on one side and Zinner on the other. To judge from It’s Blitz!, Karen won. So did we: It’s Blitz! may be a very different record from its predecessors, but it’s no less brilliant.

In a hotel suite on Old Park Lane, Karen Orzolek is choosing her words carefully as she explains the long gaps between Yeah Yeah Yeahs records. “The gaps probably have to do with just pacing ourselves: ‘Are we ready? Yeah, we’re ready now.’ But I think the problem is that once we do start we can get caught up in a vicious cycle of self-doubt - and then euphoria,” she offers, with a burst of laughter.

Immaculately styled and beautiful, the offstage Karen is otherwise unrecognisable from the onstage one. Far from bolshy and extroverted, she’s demure and somewhat nervous - most of her clauses end with a reflexive ‘y’know?’ - but she’s cheerful and forthcoming too.

After the troubles that flared within the band during the recording of Show Your Bones, Karen was determined to ring in the changes. “I personally felt the only way we could write a record was if we really had a different attitude about it and generally a feel-good attitude,” she says. “It was really different from last time, which is great because writing studio records is so difficult, especially today when you have the option of putting maybe 500 tracks on something and taking them away, Chinese Democracy-style. You have to use a lot of self-restraint and know when to push yourself and when to pull it back. But generally it was far more pleasurable this time [laughs].”

However, it’s plainly not all peace, love and harmony in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs camp, not just yet. When I ask if the interpersonal dynamic has improved, Karen says it has, but quickly adds, “I have the job of always shoving everyone out of their comfort zone. Nobody likes that person!”

It’s tempting to read the history of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as the story of Karen gaining in confidence and gradually assuming more control. Karen adds some context: in the early days, she says, it simply wasn’t necessary for someone to take things in hand. “We were just starting off and every song we made we were highly satisfied with - we could do no wrong, in the beginning,” she recalls. “It was after people started taking us seriously when we really had the identity crisis - that’s when this role had to be born. Also, because we don’t put out records every year, we saw some of our colleagues.... [It was] like watching a chess game, seeing what moves they were making and which ones were falling and which ones were persevering, and I think it was really informative to see all that go down. So yeah, out of my own need, my lack of patience with doing the same thing, or lack of attention span, I always really wanted to push it somewhere new.”

In this she had a natural ally in David Sitek, TV On The Radio guitarist, emerging super-producer and long-time Yeah Yeah Yeahs collaborator. On It’s Blitz!, Sitek shared production duties with Nick Launay (of PiL and Arcade Fire fame). Sitek’s philosophy has been memorably encapsulated by Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis as follows: “Why mess around when you can fuck around.” Yeah Yeah Yeahs took up the challenge.

Given their current lofty status, it’s hard to believe that the band started life as a playful experiment. Orzolek and Zinner, who lived together in Williamsburg, Brooklyn were dabbling in folk music under the name Unitard when they dreamed up a sleazy rock band called the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the name being a quick-fire New York phrase that Karen herself uses regularly in conversation. After a debut gig with The White Stripes in 2000, momentum was established quickly, and a major label bidding war gave way to almost instant success, with Karen deified both as style icon - thanks in part to her designer friend Christian Joy - and as a force-of-nature frontwoman extraordinaire.

Today, she repeats the point that the band were never meant to be taken seriously. “That spun us out - honestly, it was the last thing we were expecting. We were so innocent it was ridiculous. We were passing out flyers and getting really psyched that 200 people were showing up to our shows. We had no aspirations - I didn’t know what touring meant or anything like that... It’s definitely a lot to take in, especially in your turbulent twenties.”

Prior to relocating to New York and meeting Zinner, Karen had befriended Chase at Oberlin, a liberal arts college in Ohio. A jazz fanatic, he played in several bands and Karen would come to watch. ‘Stage Karen’ did not, at this point, exist. That persona only started to emerge later, on the dancefloors of New York City, with the help of copious alcohol (though she reckons there might have been a flicker of it when, as a normally shy fifth-grader, she strapped on a pair of blindfold-dark sunglasses and lip-synched to ‘Twist And Shout’ at a variety show, shocking classmates and teachers).

Chase joins Karen halfway through this interview. He answers questions politely and in rambling fashion, but when he’s not directly participating in a conversation, he zones right out, as if someone’s flicked his off switch. Still, he seems to share with Karen a genuine enthusiasm for the New York scene of the early 2000s, which is novel given that most bands tediously disavow membership of any scene or deny that scenes exist.

Karen elected to desert New York for Los Angeles prior to the making of Show Your Bones. “I was grieving the dissipation of the scene,” she explains. “That was so exciting when it came up and when it started going away... I wanted to just get out and move onto the next thing. I didn’t want to stick around and just watch it go away. Me personally, I just felt almost too nostalgic for when everything really happened, because it was like a flash - the shelf life for those things these days is super-short. So it was hard for me to stick around and watch that specific scene die off.”

Chase stayed and rode it out. “By the time 2004, 2005 rolled around, it was kind of at the end of a very bizarrely huge peak,” he remembers.

“Freak peak,” suggests Karen. “To the max.”

Chase: “Everybody was just playing music, you know.”

Karen: “It was nuts! And good music! Everywhere!”

Chase: “Nobody asked for the attention but... everybody wanted to play music and they were very passionate about it, but then for it to become a huge international success out of something so innocent was very jarring. And that scene couldn’t really sustain itself in that environment, necessarily, so it needed... to crash.”

With Show Your Bones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs strode confidently from the wreckage, and with It’s Blitz they again show their capacity for survival through reinvention.

Much has been made of the band’s supposed abandonment of the guitar, but in reality it’s still present on several of the album’s tracks, most prominently on the pulverising ‘Shame and Fortune’. However, there was “a strong focus on the keyboard”, admits Chase. “We were fascinated with the sounds and wanted to explore those options, but it was also a really effective tool and device to get out of old habits. And that’s important, too - to find yourself in a new context and a new setting, with different parameters.”

At this point Karen addresses Chase directly. “I always count you as really supportive of just opening up more. You don’t have a resistance to change so much. I feel like you’re just down to go with the flow. You don’t really stir up too much drama or anything like that. The drama’s just between Nick and I. But it’s really not that - especially on this record - not that dramatic.”

There was more drama with the last one, I suggest. “Yeah! Right! I can’t play that down but that was pretty dramatic. But still probably less dramatic than most people make it out to be.”

Nick Zinner, whose ears must be burning, joins the interview 10 minutes from its end. He’s a short, delicate man with a ghostly pallor and a shock of stylishly tousled, jet-black hair. On arrival he does what he always does when he arrives somewhere: he takes a photo. He then takes a seat next to Chase, and the atmosphere in the room suddenly changes.

When Karen speaks, she seems more hesitant than before: she struggles to find a word she’s looking for and starts to say ‘y’know?’ with Caroline Kennedy-like frequency. The impression is less that she’s intimidated by Zinner, more that she’s wary of treading on his toes.

She brings him up to speed on the conversation we’ve been having about the creative push and pull between them, and says: “Subconsciously, I think there are goals or directions that we all feel, y’know? And it kind of happens naturally even though there’s definitely... what is it? The id and the ego, there’s this battle going on, because once that change gets going I just want to run with it, y’know? But I think you want to put the brakes on a bit more.”

“Yeah,” he says softly, in his infinitely assured manner. “Sometimes I may sort of stop and think about what I’m doing, and that when the danger of stepping back is - Karen’s great at encouraging...” He adds: “It’d be so boring if we all thought the same. If we all said, ‘Oh, we need to sound like this.’ ‘Yes, I agree.’ ‘I agree.’ So dull.”

We move on to discussion of the album leak, which compelled the band’s label to move forward the online release date. “I don’t really know how much difference it makes in the end, because I just don’t know if less people get to hear the music because of that or more people do,” shrugs Karen. “There’s no way of telling. You don’t have record sales to quantify how much people are listening to your music, so it’s just more abstract, which is hard to get used to, but not that hard.”

Nick pipes up: “I guess we’ll know when we go on tour and start playing shows, and just get a sense of how...”

Karen interrupts: “What do you mean ‘go on tour’? I’m never going on tour again.”

Mercifully, this turns out to be an exaggeration. The band will continue to tour, but only in “manageable bursts”. Inevitably, what puts her off about touring is the 23 hours of the day when the band aren’t onstage. “It’s the 23 hours that are just fucking draining, man, between the travel and terrible sleep cycle and general malnutrition,” she says. “It’s still a constant battle to keep your body on track and therefore your mind. It’s just that stuff really, because the shows are great. They’re really something to treasure. They bring us to places we’ve never been and, man, just the energy of them is so remarkable and kind of an exceptional experience to have. I think that’s the highlight. The rest of it? Not so much.”

Dates in London and Manchester at the end of April, and the Reading and Leeds festivals in August, will find Nick Zinner in a familiar role. “I’m pretty much playing guitar exclusively,” he says. “I’m doing a little bit of keyboards, maybe a little more loop-triggering and stuff, but for the most part I’m still playing guitar.”

Have they nailed the new songs? “I felt like, in this last week of practice, I was getting to a point where I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, and that’s the ultimate goal.”

Karen: “The last six days out of the 10 days we were practising.”

Zinner: “Ten days? Two months!”

It’s an intriguing flashpoint. Maybe the guys have started to rehearse without her. Maybe they’re plotting a coup ahead of their next record.

Either way, you suspect there’ll still be romance, theatre, melancholia, adrenaline, sexuality, poise. You suspect there will still be brilliance. Nine years in and they’ve yet to let us down.

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