#HEADS WILL ROLL YEAH YEAH YEAHS FULL#

These conversations have been condensed and edited.

I told her I had spent the previous Saturday on acid in the mountains, listening to the record and crying.

#HEADS WILL ROLL YEAH YEAH YEAHS FULL#

Despite clocking in at less than thirty-five minutes, “Cool It Down” has an expansive sweep and is full of a galvanizing mercy. She was preparing for the release of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ fifth album, “Cool it Down,” at the end of September, on the indie label Secretly Canadian. When we talked on Zoom, late in the summer, her name popped up as “Karen Clay.” She was wearing a Scorpions T-shirt ripped from shoulder to armpit, and her hair fell across her face in her signature lopsided mullet-shag. (Goodman has described her as an “exhibitionistic Boo Radley, a warped dervish onstage who disappears after the encore and is rarely seen in real life.”) What connects those two selves is guilelessness, a total reliance on instinct. She has long talked of a split in her identity, between her shy real-life self and the wild person she becomes onstage. And yet, at heart, she remains a punk with the mannerisms of a restless teen-age boy. Karen is now forty-three, married to the British director Barnaby Clay, and the mother of a seven-year-old son. Today, her vibe is less GG Allin, more Freddie Mercury and Debbie Harry. She became famous for onstage anarchy, swallowing the microphone and spitting full cups of beer into the audience, as captured in “There Is No Modern Romance,” a documentary from 2017. The Y.Y.Y.s’ headlong sound-chords as bright and as yearning as the neon tubes in a Dan Flavin installation precise, explosive drums and guitar and Karen’s voice, an electric snarl that softens and trembles-has evolved, over four albums, without losing its center. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were at the center of the early-two-thousands New York rock revival-a scene, as immortalized by Lizzy Goodman in the book “ Meet Me in the Bathroom,” that was dominated by all-male bands like the Strokes and Interpol.

Karen downed four margaritas, drenched herself in olive oil, and stepped into the persona that would catapult the Yeah Yeah Yeahs into the rock pantheon and turn her into a generational icon: a human live wire, snapping and sparking, as acute and raw and responsive as an exposed nerve. The band-Karen, the guitarist Nick Zinner, and the drummer Brian Chase-had practiced together as a trio exactly once. It was September, 2000, a Sunday night at Mercury Lounge, and they were opening for the White Stripes. Karen O, born Karen Lee Orzolek, was twenty-one years old when she took the stage with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the first time.

Heads will roll yeah yeah yeahs