When the pandemic hit in 2020, Karen Lee Orzolek set about developing what she regarded as a “portal” in a closet on the foot of her stairs. Orzolek, higher often called Karen O, the spectacularly charismatic frontwoman of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, was experiencing the locked-down contraction of her world together with everybody else. Not like everybody else, nevertheless, Orzolek is a rock star within the truest sense of the phrase – a girl used to promoting out large venues with a triple-Grammy-nominated band whose driving spirit these previous 22 years comes from a swirl of notions that now appear virtually antiquated: that rock music would possibly set you free, that defiance can change the world, that transcendence by means of artwork is feasible.
Remembering that odd yr spent at house in Los Angeles, Orzolek, 43, thinks first of worms: “My son was actually into worm-hunting in our yard; I bear in mind life shrinking right down to happening worm hunts with him,” she says with a smile. Second, she thinks of the concert events she did in that closet, mini broadcasts over Instagram for which she would remodel her tiny area into “a special world” every time. Balloons, streamers, no matter it took – the band’s gleeful DIY spirit prevails.
These peak-pandemic months had been the primary time since she was a toddler that Orzolek skilled time as irrelevant: “Isn’t it so fascinating how these fraught occasions can deliver a lot revelation?” Now, 9 years after the final Yeah Yeah Yeahs document, that sense of revelation thrums by means of their triumphant fifth album, Cool It Down. Finely calibrated between widescreen emotion and sonic precision, it sounds prepared to comb the jaded out of their stupor, and is the band’s finest testomony but to their idealist spirit.
It's mid-Might, and Orzolek has arrived early to the sun-drenched terrace of a Los Angeles resort sporting a sky-blue jumpsuit that makes her appear like a classy storage attendant. A classy older girl leaps up from a neighbouring desk to inform her it’s unimaginable: did she make it herself? Orzolek thanks her and tells her no, her finest buddy did. That is designer Christian Pleasure, whose outre costumes formed the band’s iconography from the beginning. By telephone, Pleasure remembers the primary one she made for Orzolek: “It was this actually ugly, shredded blue promenade gown that mentioned ‘Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ throughout it and had all these plastic flowers hanging off it. It was ugly and he or she rocked it.”
In September 2020, Orzolek as soon as once more enlisted Pleasure. The band had been turning 20 and Orzolek wished to have a good time with a closet efficiency that might be some type of transmission of affection. For this, she wanted an outfit that recalled the messy exuberance of their 2003 debut album, Fever to Inform. The idea, Pleasure says, went one thing like: “Loopy mother at a children’ social gathering who’d walked away with the entire desk.” She typically wonders when Orzolek will “attain the purpose the place she’s like: ‘OK, I can’t put on these things any extra.’ I imply, we’re all in our 40s now …”
Within the clip, Orzolek seems in opposition to a backdrop of shiny rainbow streamers, sporting a spangly headdress bristling with balloons and a gown comprised of a bathe curtain studded with dollar-store social gathering tat. Then, with drummer Brian Chase and guitarist Nick Zinner beamed in by way of video, she sings their most indelible love music, Maps. It appears a candy irony that a band identified for not giving a rattling ought to have this raw-hearted distillation of longing be their most well-known music. But each Maps and the carnival-like disinhibition of the reside exhibits appear to come back from the identical supply: a refusal of self-consciousness.
Zinner is subsequent to reach on the terrace: pale, clad in black, and wincing from the solar, he murmurs drily about being “a diva” as he seeks the shadiest nook of the desk. His manner, that of a bewitched Tim Burton character, makes him an endearing foil to the labrador-like enthusiasm of Chase, who pulls up a chair with an: “All proper! Los Angeles!” Chase, 44, is the lone NYC holdout; Orzolek moved to LA in 2004, and Zinner, having gone forwards and backwards between the 2 cities, lastly moved in 2020. Individuals nonetheless assume, Orzolek says good-naturedly, that all of them nonetheless reside in New York.
As a lot espresso and kale is ordered, I sense the magnitude of those three folks having identified one another for thus lengthy. “After we began out in 2000 we had been impressed by music that got here out in 1980,” says Zinner in quiet wonderment. “You already know, ESG or New Order … and I can’t wrap my head round the truth that the start of our band is the mid-point between these issues.”
Each Chase and Orzolek are dad and mom now, but all three nonetheless appear to be the awkward, sometimes awestruck art-school children who got here collectively in New York. Once I counsel that silliness is on the band’s core, Orzolek agrees critically, then gazes on the desk to let a thought coalesce: “God, give me a second as a result of that is large …” Nonetheless pondering, she presents a throwaway line: “Don’t take the tongue out of the cheek!”
“Did you simply provide you with that?” says Chase, impressed. “That’s good.”
She laughs this off. The inventive superb, for Orzolek, is “for those who can endlessly be within the sandbox. For one factor, it’s disarming.” This was one thing she tried to determine within the band’s earliest days. “I imply, New York’s a tricky crowd. It’s a whole lot of considerably jaded individuals who’ve seen all of it.” It was a query, then, of: “How do I disarm this crowd of their very own self-consciousness?” The reply was by summoning a welter of sexuality and absurdity and angst, ridding herself of self-awareness. “It units me free! And the concept is that if it units me free, it units everybody else free. And it units Brian and Nick free! I imply, holy shit, the three of us once we’re up there: it actually does really feel like radical freedom.”
“Performing with this band,” Zinner says merely, with full eye contact, “is the best factor on the planet.”
After the discharge of 2013’s Mosquito, nevertheless, it was under no circumstances sure there could be one other Yeah Yeah Yeahs document. The band had fulfilled their contract with Common and thus free of a cycle of writing, recording, touring. A few years later, Orzolek had a son, Django, along with her husband, Barnaby Clay, a director. “I’m glad I used to be in a position to squeeze one out,” she says. “After which I used to be rubble for a few years after that.” The band remained in shut contact but it surely wasn’t till late 2019 that they began speaking about new music. In early 2020 got here what they seek advice from as “the Black Dragon dialog”.
“Karen and I had dinner and had been hanging out and ingesting this sake referred to as Black Dragon,” Zinner explains. It resulted, Orzolek says, within the worst hangover of her life. However that evening was additionally the primary time she expressed a readiness to start out writing once more.
“They’ve been extraordinarily affected person in ready for me to come back spherical,” she says of her bandmates. The Black Dragon dialog acknowledged the trauma of the Trump years, plus “the luggage and stress of simply 20 years of being a household”, finally leaving all three with one governing query: “How can we do that in essentially the most joyful, pressure-free type of manner?”
Quickly after Zinner despatched Orzolek a folder of concepts, the pandemic arrived. Not lengthy after that, wildfires started raging by means of LA and Orzolek was reminded of “this ticking clock” of ecological doom. Confused by listening to a lot music that appeared merely escapist, she longed to listen to her feelings mirrored – not least the vertigo of parenthood, and “ushering a brand new life right into a world that feels so unsure”. The temper of the album’s first monitor, Spitting Off the Fringe of the World, is one in every of defiance – specifically, “defiance of destroy. It was me desirous to convey to my little one that every one’s not misplaced.”
“There’s what I describe as a zoom-in, zoom-out high quality to residing proper now,” says Chase. “The extra I zoom out, the extra I realise how problematic life is. Which sphere do I place myself in? Do I preserve issues within the instant, or how a lot do I obligate myself to concern with the bigger circumstances?”
“I’m simply stumbling by means of that daily,” says Orzolek. “In an effort to write music you need to be nice pals with thriller and uncertainty. When Nick and I initially go in to ‘jam’ or no matter, we've this affinity and belief with the mysterious technique of how music arrives. You need to be so open and virtually harmless. I do know I’m good at it on the subject of making music on this band – that’s the protected haven for giant emotions.”
The songs flowed out sooner than ever earlier than, with Orzolek seized by an urgency she hadn’t skilled since Fever to Inform. The result's a bombastic studio document, conveying a way of cosmic awe with a punk sneer: when visitor artist Fragrance Genius sings on the euphoric opening monitor concerning the solar “melting homes of gold”, it’s each a spitting “fuck you” to capitalist greed and an arms-wide “I like you” to our planet. Cool It Down can be, Orzolek notes, “essentially the most peaceable document between Nick and I – it simply felt so simpatico”.
“Simply to see these items emerge from Karen, seemingly immediately …” murmurs Zinner, “it was so cool.”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ very first present in 2000 was as the primary of three openers for a little-known outfit referred to as the White Stripes. “To play a present on the Mercury Lounge, to play a present in New York Metropolis – that was it!” says Orzolek. Past that, that they had little or no ambition. “I don’t know if the Strokes did, or anybody did. Everybody was simply doing it as a result of they wished to do it; it simply occurred to be the precise place on the proper time.”
The dirty, heedless glamour of that second is now present process a resuscitation. There’s the forthcoming documentary adaptation of Lizzy Goodman’s oral historical past Meet Me within the Toilet, which memorialises the rise of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and their cohort – the Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio. We're additionally witnessing the so-called “indie sleaze” revival, whereby all of the sweat, glitter and spilt beer of an early 2000s subculture is being reclaimed by a technology who weren’t born on the time: Orzolek and her iconic bowl lower characteristic prominently on the Instagram account indiesleaze. When the US songwriter Lucy Dacus (of Boygenius) first heard Yeah Yeah Yeahs in highschool, Karen O “opened up a world of chance,” she tells me. Dacus was seized by Orzolek’s “wild confidence … her exhibiting up in a manner that felt reserved for rock legends. She was like, ‘Really I’m a rock legend.’”
There are, Orzolek will readily admit, two completely different Karens: the self-effacing one at this desk, only a shy woman from New Jersey, after which the onstage drive that's worldwide rock goddess Karen O, howling and yelping right into a mic.
“I actually revelled in there being little to no precedent or legacy for me,” she says. “I felt like as a result of there are so few [women] they usually’re all fucking loopy mavericks – Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry – all they taught me was you make it up as you go alongside. So I felt extremely liberated in that sense.”
It's one motive she felt pretty unscathed by the sexism of that point. “However yeah, the photographs up the fucking skirt … That sucked.” It additionally irritated her that individuals paid extra consideration to the spectacle than to the songwriting. “I used to be a sizzling mess, man,” she says. “The quantity I wished to please the group by means of self-destruction was escalating and escalating.” After she fell off a stage in Australia and injured herself in 2003, “I actually needed to reconfigure the best way I carried out. I needed to perceive that I didn’t must destroy myself up there with a purpose to attain some type of transcendence.”
On the band’s forthcoming tour, they are going to be supported by Japanese Breakfast, whose songwriter Michelle Zauner is Korean-American, and youthful punk band the Linda Lindas, who determine as half-Asian, half-Latinx. Orzolek, who's half Polish-American and half-Korean, is gratified by the “Asian-American illustration blossoming” in music. “I really feel like I’ve been ready all my life for that. It’s loopy, man, how issues like that change swiftly.”
Additionally it is life-affirming another way, she provides: “It looks like, ‘Man, we’re cool sufficient for these cool bands to open for us!’” The astonishment in her voice goes a way, I feel, in explaining Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ enduring coolness – as a result of what’s cooler than marvel? Listed below are three folks nonetheless not taking a factor as a right, whether or not it’s worms or the huge mysteries of the inventive course of.
Now, forward of their exhibits for Cool It Down, Orzolek is puzzling over how she would possibly “arrive as who I'm proper now on this second” – with vulnerability and braveness. “There’s going to be a brand new performer up there,” she says. “I simply haven’t met her but.”
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