When the pandemic hit in 2020, Karen Lee Orzolek set about building what she thought of as a “portal” in a closet at the foot of her stairs. Orzolek, better known as Karen O, the spectacularly charismatic leader of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, was experiencing the closed contraction of her world along with everyone else. However, unlike everyone else, Orzolek is a rock star in the truest sense of the word: a woman used to selling big venues with a triple Grammy-nominated band whose driving spirit is the latter. 22 years comes from a whirlwind of notions that now seems almost outdated: that rock music will set you free, that challenge can change the world, that transcendence through art is possible.
Remembering that strange year at his home in Los Angeles, Orzolek, 43, thinks first of worms: “My son loved to hunt worms in our backyard; I remember that life was reduced to going worm hunting with him, “he says with a smile. Second, think of the concerts he did in that closet, mini-shows on Instagram for which he would transform his little space “a different world” every time.Balloons, streamers, whatever it takes: the band’s cheerful DIY spirit prevails.
Those pandemic months were the first time since childhood that Orzolek had lived the time as irrelevant: “Isn’t it so fascinating how these difficult times can bring so much revelation?” Now, nine years after Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ latest album, this sense of revelation is on his fifth hit album, Cool It Down. Finely calibrated between the excitement of the widescreen and the sound precision, it sounds ready to take the tired out of its stupor, and is the band’s best witness to date in its idealistic spirit.
It’s mid-May, and Orzolek has soon arrived on the sunny terrace of a Los Angeles hotel in a sky-blue jumpsuit that makes her look like an elegant garage attendant. An old and elegant woman jumps from a neighboring table to tell her it’s amazing: did she do it herself? Orzolek thanks him and says no, his best friend did. This is the designer Christian Joy, whose costumes shaped the band’s iconography from the beginning. On the phone, Joy recalls the first thing she did for Orzolek: “It was this very ugly, torn blue party dress that said ‘Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ everywhere and had all these plastic flowers hanging. It was ugly and it went. shake “.
In September 2020, Orzolek re-enlisted Joy. The band was 20 years old and Orzolek wanted to celebrate it with a performance in the closet that was a kind of transmission of love. To do that, she needed a dress that reminded her of the messy exuberance of her 2003 debut album, Fever to Tell. The concept, Joy says, was something like, “Crazy mom at a kids’ party that had gone all over the table.” He sometimes wonders when Orzolek “will get to the point where he says, ‘Okay, I can’t wear these things anymore.’ I mean, we’re all in our 40’s … “
In the clip, Orzolek appears with a backdrop of bright rainbow streamers, a bright headdress filled with balloons, and a dress made of a shower curtain with a party tattoo of a dollar store. Then, with drummer Brian Chase and guitarist Nick Zinner streaming the video, he sings his most indelible love song, Maps. It seems like a sweet irony that a band known for not giving a lot should have this raw-hearted distillation of longing as their most famous song. However, both Maps and the carnivalesque disinhibition of live shows seem to come from the same source: a rejection of self-awareness.
Zinner is about to arrive on the terrace: pale, dressed in black, and making a big mummy in the sun, she mutters dryly about being “a diva” as she searches for the darkest corner of the table. His behavior, that of a haunted character by Tim Burton, makes him endearing against Chase’s labrador enthusiasm, who raises a chair with a: “Okay! Angels!” Chase, 44, is the only detainee in New York; Orzolek moved to Los Angeles in 2004, and Zinner, after moving back and forth between the two cities, finally moved in 2020. People still assume, Orzolek says cheerfully, that they all still live in New York.
Karen O performing at T in the Park near Kinross in 2013. Photo: PA Images / Alamy
As much coffee and kale is in demand, I sense the magnitude of these three people who have known each other for so long. “When we started in 2000, we were inspired by the music that came out in 1980,” says Zinner, who is quietly amazed. “You know, ESG or New Order … and I can’t understand the fact that the beginning of our band is the middle ground between these things.”
Both Chase and Orzolek are parents now, but the three still seem uncomfortable and occasionally surprised art school kids who met in New York. When I suggest that nonsense is the core of the band, Orzolek seriously accepts, then looks at the table to let a thought come together: “God, give me a second because this is huge …” Still thinking, he offers a phrase to use: “Don don’t stick your tongue out of your cheek!”
“Did you just get this?” says Chase, impressed. “This is great.”
She laughs at that. The creative ideal, for Orzolek, is “if you can be in the sandbox forever. On the one hand, it’s disarming. ”That was something he tried to figure out in the early days of the band.“ I mean, New York is tough people. There are a lot of people who are a little tired and have seen it all. ” of self-consciousness. “It sets me free! And the idea is that if he sets me free, he will set everyone else free. Free Brian and Nick! I mean, shit, when we’re up there, it really sounds like radical freedom. “
“Acting with this band,” says Zinner simply, with full eye contact, “is the best thing in the world.”
The band in 2022. Photo: David Black
After the release of Mosquito in 2013, however, I wasn’t sure there would be another Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. The band had fulfilled their contract with Universal and thus freed themselves from a cycle of writing, recording and touring. A couple of years later, Orzolek had a son, Django, with her husband, Barnaby Clay, the director. “I’m glad I was able to get one out,” he says. “And then I was ruined for a couple of years after that.” The band maintained close contact but it wasn’t until the end of 2019 that they started talking about new music. In early 2020 came what they call the “Black Dragon Conversation.”
“Karen and I had dinner and spent time drinking this sake called Black Dragon,” says Zinner. It turned out, Orzolek says, to be the worst hangover of his life. But that night was also the first time she was willing to rewrite.
“They’ve had a lot of patience waiting for him to come,” he says of his bandmates. The Black Dragon conversation acknowledged the trauma of the Trump years, as well as “the baggage and pressure of just 20 years of being a family,” and finally left all three with a government question: “How can we do it in the happiest pressure … a free way? “
Shortly after Zinner sent Orzolek a folder of ideas, the pandemic arrived. Not long after that, wildfires began to wreak havoc across LA and Orzolek was reminded of “this clock” of ecological doom. Confused to hear so much music that seemed merely escapist, she longed to feel her emotions reflected, especially the vertigo of fatherhood, and “to introduce a new life into a world that feels so uncertain.” The mood of the album’s first track, Spitting Off the Edge of the World, is challenging, in particular, “Ruin Challenge.” It was me who wanted to convey to my son that not everything is lost. “
You have to be so open and almost innocent … Making music in this band, this is the safe haven for great feelings Karen O
“There’s what I describe as a quality of enlargement and distance to live in right now,” Chase says. “The farther I go, the more I realize how problematic life is. In what sphere do I place myself?
“I’m just stumbling across this every day,” Orzolek says. “To write music you have to be great friends with mystery and uncertainty. When Nick and I get into “jam” or whatever, we have this affinity and confidence in the mysterious process of how music arrives. You have to be so open and almost innocent. I know I’m good at making music in this band, this is the safe haven for great feelings. “
The songs came out faster than ever, with Orzolek gripped by an urgency he hadn’t experienced since Fever to Tell. The result is a bombastic studio album, which conveys a sense of cosmic admiration with a punk smile: when guest artist Perfume Genius sings in the euphoric opening song about the sun “source the golden houses”, it is at the same time a “fuck” for the capitalist. greed and an “I love you” with my arms on our planet. Cool It Down is also, Orzolek points out, “the most peaceful record between Nick and me; I found it so nice.”
“Just to see these things emerge from Karen, seemingly instantly …” Zinner murmurs, “it was so great.”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2001. Photo: Allstar Picture Library / Alamy
Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ first show in 2000 was the first of three openers for a little-known costume called White Stripes. “Playing a show at the Mercury Lounge, playing a show in New York City, that was all!” says Orzolek. Beyond that, they had little or no ambition. “I don’t know if the Strokes did it, or someone did it. Everyone did it just because they wanted to do it; it was just …