Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Stayin' Alive

Photographs by Takay

For proof of her cri de coeur, there's It's Blitz, the upcoming Yeah Yeah Yeahs album and their first since 2006's Show Your Bones. Written and recorded over the course of a year in a series of remote, genteel, off-the-grid locations, the record marks a decidedly drastic shift in musical direction for the trio. Gone, in large measure, is Nick Zinner's spiky guitar roar, the bedrock of the band's sound and nearly as crucial to their identity and success as Karen's supersize, Mick Jagger–meets–Mary Katherine Gallagher live persona.

In place of the guitar are lots and lots of synthesizers (played by Nick, and occasionally Karen), guitars that have been made to sound like synthesizers (Nick), and throbbing, Lexus-sleek dance beats (courtesy Brian). "I remember Karen saying, 'I think Nick shouldn't just play guitar on this record,' " says Nick Launay, who shares production credits on It's Blitz with TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek. "Nick's reaction was similar to mine, which was, 'Wow.' "

"Our producer was flabbergasted," recalls Chase. "He was pleading, 'Nick, you're the best guitarist we have in rock'n'roll right now and here you are, playing all these synths!' "

For his part, Zinner seems remarkably nonplussed about leaving behind his calling card and learning on the fly an unfamiliar set of instruments, pedals, effects, and techniques. "When Karen orders, 'No guitar for Nick!' it makes you approach things in a different way," he says without rancor, sipping from a mug of taro tea not far from his East Village apartment. "I'm still trying to teach myself how to play keyboards and piano." He's just returned from a New Year's trip to Panama with his girlfriend, photographer Aliya Naumoff, where the adorably petite and pale couple traveled the country, searching out vegan restaurants, befriending cab drivers, and snapping hundreds upon hundreds of photos. (Zinner is an accomplished photographer, as well.) "I always want to do more things," he says. "More sounds, more instruments, more everything."

The band all agree that Is Is, their 2007 stopgap EP featuring new recordings of early material, closed the chapter on, in Karen's words, the "raw, guitar-driven, heavy tom-beat, visceral side of ourselves. I had a craving on this record for a sound that left a little more space to work with." I ask whom they think their new stuff sounds like. Chase and Launay proffer the pulsating '70s disco collaborations between Italian producer Giorgio Moroder and R&B orgasmatron Donna Summer. Chase, conservatory trained and a prominent figure in New York's free-jazz microculture, boasts of a new "coolness" on It's Blitz, "in terms of temperament, not faddishness." Karen, when pressed, cites the dance-floor despair of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Some may hear echoes of nouvelle knob-twiddling modernists like MGMT.

Sitek, also a producer on 2003's Fever To Tell and Show Your Bones (and whose band is a unanimous YYY fave), likens their makeover to those of shape-shifters David Bowie and Radiohead. "I write off any band that makes the same record three times in a row," he says. "These guys were totally up for challenging themselves."