In The Affirmative

New York trio get their mojo back on album five.

- Shaun Curran

Yeah Yeah Yeahs 

Cool It Down

Secretly Canadian SC 470 LP (CD, LP)

It's been nine years since Yeah Yeah Yeahs last released an album, an eternity in the attention-span-deficit modern pop landscape. To put that in some context, the first nine years of their career saw the trio blaze a trail as New York's new millennium premier artpunkers, a flash of raw energy and dirty glamour that boasted in Karen Orzolek - aka Karen O a frontwoman for the ages. They released three albums: 2003 debut Fever To Tell wired itself to the same zeitgeist as The Strokes and The White Stripes; its successors, the more polished Show Your Bones (2006) and the electro-glitz of It's Blitz! (2009) fleshed out their sound far beyond the misdirected style-oversubstance jibes.

But the world has turned into a very different place since 2013's underwhelming Mosquito, and the band's fifth long-player, Cool It Down - the title taken from the Velvet Underground song processes what the hell has happened in the interim. A musical evolution into an exalted, symphonic synth soundworld, Cool It Down mixes the personal - Orzolek and drummer Brian Chase have started families with the general distress of modern America: the Trump era, the pandemic and, especially, the escalating climate emergency. The latter was a prompt as Orzolek and guitarist Nick Zinner reactivated their songwriting partnership in early 2020. Orzolek watched in horror as the Los Angeles wildfires of 2020 devastated parts of her home city; Cool It Down, a plea to check our collective temperature, came together quickly thereafter.