Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Kill or Cure

This cover story is taken from Issue 135. Get your copy via the online store.

At Brixton Academy, somewhere between the dressing room and the stage, Karen Orzolek is transforming into the exuberant invention she calls Karen O.

The body they share speaks in radically different languages, depending on its occupant. Orzolek potters through conversations in a tone of avoidance and apology, sporadically effervescing when she hits on an epiphany. Karen O, in Brixton, wears a wide-brimmed Technicolor hat, a sparkly cape and a single magenta glove, as if she had stepped out of Willy Wonka’s boudoir. Beneath a glitter monsoon, she screams “love and tenderness!” like a threat and fills lulls by vomiting out goblin growls. She is always effervescing.

The run of dates is Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ first in three years; the album it promotes, Cool It Down, is their first in nearly a decade. More than nostalgists on a victory lap, here they steward the Yeah Yeah Yeahs legend with the panache of a misfit gang raising hell while they still can. “It’s quite astonishing how somewhere else I am on stage,” laughs Orzolek when reminded of her antics. “Even that growling noise is probably muscle memory, like, ‘Oh yeah, this is what you do in a weird moment between songs.’”

When we video call a few weeks after the gig, Orzolek is propped on pillows in her mother-in-law’s London basement, and drummer Brian Chase is at home in Brooklyn, with the charmingly befuddled air of an unkempt maths professor. In another window is Nick Zinner, spookily untouched by time, a moody teenager’s idea of a dolled-up goth poster boy. Though the guitarist and synth whiz usually lives in LA (like Orzolek), he is currently “experiencing normality” in New York’s East Village – which he says entails “walking around and seeing people”, an exotic experience to gridlocked Californians. He likes to haunt Tompkins Square Park, “adding some flavour and character”, Orzolek teases. “In our 20s, we needed old guys like you skulking around.”

Fortunately for Zinner, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are punk Peter Pans – the patron saints of eternal adolescence. Orzolek has long preached a philosophy of reckless optimism, and Cool It Down revives that teenage idealism – in part to tackle the climate crisis. The record feverishly twirls between It’s Blitz!-style dance anthems, wistful indie-pop, sultry electronica and antsy synth-punk, Orzolek by turns an enraged goddess and bewildered witness. On Burning, she interrupts ominous visions with an apocalyptic come-on: “Lay your red hand on me, baby!” Spitting Off the Edge of the World, which opens both the LP and the Brixton concert, is the elliptical album’s closest thing to a manifesto, Zinner casting meteor-shower synths over Orzolek’s paean to young climate revolutionaries. She begins it by hollering “cowards!” – a provocation to lapsed radicals.

“The percentage of people it takes to start a revolution is shockingly low,” Orzolek says, mounting a case for hope. “We underestimate the power of the people. I believe the youth not only can but will change the world.” A laugh slips out; an innate resistance to such romantic terms. She dispels the impulse to self-censor. “What makes me hopeless is the system,” she concludes. “But kids, and moms, are gonna make change happen.”

Twenty years ago, the same Brixton Academy stage hosted their first UK show. Afterwards, breathless NME coverage helped to fuel intrigue around the band who had risen out of a beautifully chaotic downtown scene. Yeah Yeah Yeahs had cross-appeal: Chase bludgeoning out danceable beats as Zinner teleported around his fretboard with lustrous virtuosity. Orzolek conjured Karen O from a cauldron of margaritas and pent-up rebellion. “I think about the music scene then as a fucking beautiful mess,” she says, transported back to the chaos. “A lot of us were self-medicating, trying to get through that time. But so much good came out of it.”

The band played their first proper show supporting the White Stripes at New York’s Mercury Lounge. Worried she looked insufficiently erotic, Orzolek cut the boobs out of her dress, stuck on heart-shaped pasties and doused herself in olive oil, creating an optical illusion she describes as “humongous nipples”. The Karen O invention was sexually and spiritually unhinged. For every beer she downed on stage, she drenched herself in two.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 debut, Fever to Tell, fused salacious guitar squeals and antsy drums with the horniest rock vocals of the century: an orgy of bratty yelps and sledgehammer euphemisms about fucking, masturbating, weirdly sexual siblings, submission, domination and whatever else spurted out of Orzolek’s psyche. “Coming up as a woman at that time was definitely a mixed bag,” Orzolek says, lamenting an NME cover that featured an unauthorised upskirt photo. “But I felt liberated and defiant. A free agent, not beholden to any rules or the hierarchy of male rock. That was a blessing, even though I felt taken less seriously as a result of being a woman.”

Lizzy Goodman’s gloriously sordid scene history, Meet Me in the Bathroom, has now been adapted into a documentary, with the band happily on board. “I think the only reservation was: will it suck or not?” Orzolek says, laughing. “In that era, we had a postmodern way of thinking: question everything. If you’re having a great time, is it really a great time? It wasn’t cynicism – there was just a disconnect, in that weirdly self-deprecating, Gen X sense of not knowing if it’s the real deal.” Amid the retrospective celebration, she now sees that Yeah Yeah Yeahs showed people how to be. At the time, “we didn’t allow ourselves to feel that”.

Orzolek was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1978, to a Korean mother and a Polish father. The family then relocated to New Jersey when she was two years old. Growing up, Orzolek’s cautiousness – which she attributes to her Korean heritage – concealed a latent wildness. Alienated from the white kids at her private high school, she flailed into punk and hardcore, before new friends availed her of marijuana and the Grateful Dead. She was voted ‘Most Atypical’, before enrolling at Ohio’s Oberlin College and connecting with fellow oddball Chase.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ friendship has endured, in part, because the band knew when to say no. During the Fever to Tell whirlwind, Orzolek rejected high-profile press in Playboy and Vanity Fair and, when necessary, canned commitments – including a coveted slot at the Reading and Leeds Festivals – to prioritise mental health. But stardom proved inescapable. The album’s third single, Maps, stormed MTV and triggered half a million album sales, landing them a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album.

By the time 2006’s Show Your Bones arrived, rumours suggested a devastating rift between Orzolek and Zinner. Asked if the fallout was exaggerated, Orzolek raises an eyebrow. “Oh, no. That was really…”

“Yeah, bad,” says Zinner awkwardly. “It was brutal.”

Everyone laughs, and something unclenches. “A lot of it was growing pains,” Orzolek explains. “I was absolutely rejecting the notion of continuing with our [Fever to Tell] sound, and that was very unpopular, especially with Nick. I’ve pushed everybody outside of our comfort zone record after record, and it’s not easy. Show Your Bones was the initial push, and there was a backlash [within the band]. I struggled because I wasn’t understanding why.”

Zinner was losing control after conceptualising the debut alongside Orzolek. To trust her, he admits, was “a great, terrible struggle. I had so much doubt – panic attacks, breakdowns, all that stuff. I was taking musical suggestions personally, which is probably the crux of most bands’ breakups. I was just too young to understand.” He pauses. “I mean, I wasn’t that young, but—”

Orzolek stifles a laugh, and Zinner, seeing the funny side, joins her. “As the world’s oldest living teenager,” he deadpans, “I was still stuck in the mind frame of identity. It was, at times, a horrendous experience. But I think that record is fucking incredible, and it proved to be the greatest lesson.”

In that slow process of reconciliation, one of New York’s most thrillingly volatile bands learned to temper punk anarchy with something more sustainable. They completed their transformation with 2009’s It’s Blitz!, a camp, glammy tour de force that broke the indie rock/DFA binary and notched up two more A-list anthems, Zero and Heads Will Roll. The songs’ spectacular fusion of antisocial brio and clubby euphoria presaged new songs like Wolf, one of Cool It Down’s big-tent synth-pop anthems.

But the intervening decade fragmented the band. Orzolek staged a “psycho-opera” and released her 2014 solo album Crush Songs, while Zinner devised film scores and moonlighted in groups like Damon Albarn’s Africa Express. Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ perpetual reinvention stalled with the patchy Mosquito, and, with their Interscope contract fulfilled, nobody was sure they would sign another.

The pandemic offered an opportunity for recalibration. After years of sharing brain space with Karen O, Orzolek was going “pretty batty” in lockdown. “I was dreaming about it a lot – astral planing to mish-mashes of exotic places we’ve toured,” she drawls. “It was haunting me.” To keep her wild side alive, she opened a portal to Karen O in her under-stairs cupboard, where she staged Instagram concerts in sparkly dresses and tinsel-draped hats.

In early 2021, she and Zinner convened to record demos based on his cinematic productions and her mortal fears for civilisation. Orzolek drew upon abundant wilderness imagery and earthy symbolism to portray what she calls the “trauma” of the pandemic and the fact that “America right now is such a mess”. The result is a smooth blend of romantic clarion calls and oddly noncommittal protest anthems. In a typically radio-ready chorus, inspired by the Four Seasons’ Beggin’, Burning captures the album’s grand scale: “Into the sea/ Out of fire/ All that burning.”

Where a spunkier Yeah Yeah Yeahs would have skewered guilty parties with lethal precision, Cool It Down marinates in the emotional textures of our times. In that arena, the record succeeds: Orzolek channels the nebulous dread of climate collapse – and her own proximity to natural disaster on the West Coast – with her trademark lusty electricity, helping vague lyrics land with an emotive jolt. On the album cover, shot by Alex Prager, a body tumbles from the sky into a furnace, representing Orzolek’s existential headspace. “I’m going for stuff that people are skirting around,” she says, referring to the primal response to catastrophe that the album captures. “I need art to reflect all the big and scary feelings. And not just scary – also euphoric.”

Chase agrees. “We’re surrounded by disappointment in the system,” says the drummer, who, in 2018, established a sanctuary with his own outré record label, Chaikin. “That can easily lead to despondency. But the point of living is to find the steps through that, and feel community with people you trust.”

Orzolek nods, eyes widening. “We’re in this pivotal moment of whether humanity is gonna survive. That’s where I am in the back of my head. I’m gonna dive there. I’m gonna do it with music. It’s fucking magic, man. It’s our medicine.” A gallows laugh. “If I can offer that healing to anybody else, then yes, I’m going to do that.”

At the Brixton show, as Zinner summons the unmistakable Maps tremolo and nerves electrify the crowd, Orzolek mumbles something about heartbreak and expresses gratitude for the existence of women. Drowned out by screams of appreciation, she seems to remember she is Karen O and spontaneously interrupts herself to sing Happy Birthday to somebody called Daisy. Maps can wait.

This is Karen O in her element: wired on adrenaline and deathless charisma, primed to unseal a deluge of collective healing. As the song pulses to a climax, she spews a fountain of water into the air, drawing it out for an inexplicable eternity, as if she had evolved special organs designed to preserve our faith in rock stars. Then, ripping through Date With the Night, Karen O deep-throats the mic, tucks it into her bra, and hops through a confetti-strewn concourse before vanishing into the wings.