Cool It Down, the primary new report from Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 9 years, is a product of fearless evolution.
Jason Al-Taan/Courtesy of the artist
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Jason Al-Taan/Courtesy of the artist
Cool It Down, the primary new report from Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 9 years, is a product of fearless evolution.
Jason Al-Taan/Courtesy of the artist
The audacity, to be an artist who waits almost a decade to launch a undertaking — to take a seat out the dialog that lengthy. The information cycles that whirr by, the social feeds left to rot on the vine. The refusal to chase the foreign money of fixed, insistent relevance. It is jarring these days. And when that artist is, say, a beloved rock band that is demonstrated near-pathological urgencies — to wail essentially the most stirring choruses, to plumb the deepest melancholies and the raciest elations, to spray beer in your face and go away you begging — it is a good louder vacuum.
However once you’ve constructed up religion in an artist’s vitality — once you consider they’ve spent a silence curating, not idling — it might probably really feel gratifying to observe their lead. That is a good rarer belief a creator can encourage; we do not see it typically. Richard Linklater’s Earlier than trilogy involves thoughts — three movies that every waited 9 years between launch, dropping in on its loquacious heroes Celine and Jesse at pivotal moments of their romance, their conversations at all times taking pictures out sparks. Within the third installment, Earlier than Midnight, Celine marvels at how unusual it’s to have a dialog with Jesse “about one thing else than scheduling, meals, work,” as they amble via impossibly photogenic Greek ruins — however, given our funding in them already, we’re sure these characters (and the creatives behind the digicam) have not spent the previous years completely mired in home tedium; their sharp minds have been deliberating, stirring, constructing towards this substantial dialogue. And although we could have been desperate to reunite with them, actually, we would not have wished to listen in on them any sooner.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs waited 9 years, too, earlier than releasing its fifth album, Cool It Down. And although every member of the trio stayed busy with numerous consuming initiatives, from bedroom-pop LPs to avant-garde jazz labels to kids, this sabbatical clearly compiled a strain they’re now releasing, thoughtfully and after a lot private scrutiny. Cool It Down is a brief, thorny report that confronts environmental smash and pandemic-era isolation, ending at a vantage of hope that sounds prefer it took all of the period in-between to succeed in. To those that miss the microphone-gulping, yelping delirium of the art-punk group’s 2003 debut, Fever to Inform, and its legendary dwell exhibits: Although the band can clearly nonetheless harness that vitality onstage, there aren’t any glitter-smeared bangers right here. However to those that’ve been following its fearless evolution — its rising embrace of silky manufacturing and meditative stillness, via which the band has grown whereas so many different early-2000s darlings faltered — that is each an intuitive and exhilarating step ahead.
As New York hedonism as soon as coursed via Yeah Yeah Yeahs, now Los Angeles pathos does. It is the place ever-riveting frontwoman Karen O now lives, together with each different individual you as soon as tore up Misshapes with. (Drummer Brian Chase nonetheless lives in New York, and guitarist Nick Zinner splits his time between each cities; their lengthy fealty to ever-sanitizing New York is quietly reassuring, like a diner with peeling linoleum and lukewarm omelets wedged between natural markets.) It is also the place the band partially recorded the album, shortly after a wildfire season that left skies crimson and raining ash. “It was apocalyptic,” Karen O informed Vulture. “That basically seeps into your psyche, particularly after a yr of whole dystopia of the pandemic.” That angst is express on lead ballad “Spitting Off the Fringe of the World,” which laments the local weather disaster whereas elevating a fist with the younger rebels assembly its encroach — the youngsters hocking into the void, center fingers raised to the collapse they’ve inherited — in nice, filmic swaths of synths and ominous percussion. Karen O’s full-bodied wail braids with Fragrance Genius‘s shivering eager (his supply of “she’s melting homes of gold” is especially agonizing), and collectively they construct slowly via this ache, finally embracing an aura of heels-down defiance, a religion within the path of resistance. What makes somebody renewed for an extended struggle forward, after years of despair? Maybe extra concentrated time with family members; maybe establishments lastly seeming to bow to public uproar. Or maybe simply enduring the pure timeline of grief, emotionless to our wishes that it hasten.
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Cool It Down revels in fixed synths and the affected person noir soundscapes they conjure. On “Lovebomb,” producer Dave Sitek stacks them in pensive, rising hues, evoking palm bushes slowly catching daylight after heat navy nights; Karen O’s cratering gasps shortly settle right into a form of half-spoken intone, including an ominous breeze. Songs are remarkably unhurried and nonchalant, prepared to mutate in a means the band hasn’t explored earlier than: On “Wolf,” round lyrics that may dip arduous into Duran Duran (not as arduous as they as soon as leaned on LL Cool J, however not far off), the keys begin acerbic and squiggly a la M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, glacially blooming right into a densely orchestrated New Wave sprawl primed to soundtrack a Hollywood automotive chase. (If Keanu Reeves makes a improper flip and the scene runs lengthy, they will tack on the sinister piano opus “Burning,” the album’s religious sequel to “Sacrilege,” the bombastic centerpiece of 2013’s Mosquito.)
Karen O broke via the testosterone of early-2000s New York along with her ecstatic howl, which was each bit a present as her nervy stage antics, spiking dangerously in opposition to Zinner’s waspish riffs and Chase’s swingy cadences. (It is much more outstanding now to think about how fearless Karen O was then, as an Asian American lady in a music scene totally devoid of them, in an period the place Pinkerton was nonetheless scripture for neckbeards appraising our humanity. Her impression can’t be overstated, and it is pleasant to observe her return, queenly, to a rock scene now full of numerous younger artists she helped kick open doorways for.) However her covert weapon has at all times been her singsong vocals; when she veers into nursery-rhyme supply, it is an instrument all its personal, impish but honest. It will get loads of airtime on Cool It Down, beginning with “Fleez,” essentially the most boisterous dance monitor of the bunch; she lilts in cheery, acquainted falsetto over crunchy bass and a chirpy electropop chorus that pirouettes inside an odd, leisurely strain — by no means actually resolving melodically, refusing to blow up into the sort of huge, cathartic refrain Yeah Yeah Yeahs might provide in its sleep. It seems like a path the group would not have thought-about beforehand — why would they, with hooks like “Heads Will Roll” and “Y Management” of their again pockets? — and because of this, it is oddly transfixing.
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Karen O’s equally playful on “Completely different Immediately,” the report’s twin emotional apex alongside “Spitting” and the symmetrical stability to that single’s livid valor; she revels within the grace of connection, the harmonies to listen to on this planet nonetheless rotating round her. As she chants delicately, “I really feel completely different immediately, completely different immediately / Completely different immediately ’bout you,” atop Zinner and Chase’s synth-pop pulse that’s virtually belching sequins, her peace is seductive; it feels hard-won, the sort you’ll be able to’t attain with out having, inexplicably, survived one thing that ought to have consumed you. (Or so I hope? All I do know is, strolling in East Village the opposite day, I handed a tequila bar I frequented a dozen years in the past, once they performed the band’s “Zero” incessantly and I as soon as almost shattered the floor-length home windows face-first at 3 a.m. Now, catching sight of my jutting, pregnant stomach in its detached panes, it appeared miraculous we each have been nonetheless intact.)
Cool It Down closes with “Mars,” a delicate little blip of naturalistic poetry, partially plucked from a dialog Karen O shared along with her son. What does the sundown appear to be, she asks him? “‘Mars,’ he replied / With a glint in his eye.” Clearly, he is inherited his mother’s romantic brio; the arrival darkness might be horrifying to the kid, however as a substitute, he sees the potential of a brand new world. Could all of us discover such a farsighted gaze to hold us ahead — via the subsequent weeks, months, or 9 years. Some issues are clearly well worth the wait.
