Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Stayin' Alive

Photographs by Takay

Because Karen and Zinner are still interested and adept at writing sticky hooks and melodies, and because Karen has as much Cyndi Lauper in her as, say, PJ Harvey, It's Blitz shouldn't get confused with Kid A -- lush, kinky new-wave dance tracks like "Zero" (the first single) and "Heads Will Roll" have more chance of catching on than anything they've released since their tearjerking breakup ballad "Maps." "There's no comparison to the feeling you get when you're dancing like your life depends on it," Karen says. During her undergraduate stint at NYU, she and her friends were habitués of a weekly soul-music party thrown at a nearby nightclub. "The dance floor would be pretty empty when we got there, and so I'd be out there doing slides on my knees," she recalls brightly. "I think that's where my persona was born -- on Sunday nights at Bar 13." (Another, less likely, inspiration: "I loved Grateful Dead shows," she says. "Everyone danced their asses off.") Ax nerds and noise junkies may hate on her for defanging their guitar hero, but after listening to any of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs discuss the past few years, you come to understand that blowing things up was the best, maybe only, way to keep things together.

"Show Your Bones was, obviously, a really painful record to make," says Karen. The sudden ascendancy of "Maps," compounded by her breakups with Angus Andrew of the band Liars and filmmaker Spike Jonze, led to all the usual quandaries faced by young, ambitious fringe-dwellers when confronted with mainstream success. "Sophomore records are historically really difficult. We were definitely going through an identity crisis."

Was Show Your Bones one of those dreaded "examining our fame" albums? "Of course!" she exclaims. "We're not immune to the rites of passage, for God's sake!"

In September 2004, newly settled into the Silver Lake section of L.A., her bandmates back in New York, Karen started work on -- rite of passage alert! -- a solo project with Jonze's younger brother, Sam Spiegel, a.k.a. Squeak E. Clean (now of N.A.S.A.), a producer and DJ with an alt-hip-hop bent. The record never transpired, but Karen brought Spiegel in to work on Show Your Bones. Nick and Brian chafed. "It felt like egos were getting in the way," says Chase. "We weren't sure what direction to take. We didn't know exactly who we were or what waited on the other side."

"With It's Blitz," says Zinner, "when Karen and I were working on some- thing, and one said, 'I don't like that,' the other would say, 'Oh well, let me try something else.' With Show Your Bones, it was more like, 'Fuck you!' "

Eventually coproduced by Spiegel and Dave Sitek, Show Your Bones sold half the number of copies as the gold-certified Fever to Tell and received a lukewarm critical response. "Sometimes I think I'm bigger than the sound," Karen sang on "Cheated Hearts," a line that Zinner and Chase had to hear as threat. Fans continued to flock to their spellbinding live shows, where her Dadaist getups were alone worth the ticket price. But even onstage, where she had always projected a preternatural swagger and self-confidence, Karen says she was off her game, the result of a change in preshow ritual.

"I was much more self-destructive about how much I drank during the first album," she says. Performing exacted an enormous physical toll, so to salve the wounds from the night before and gird her for the coming bruises and gashes, she'd medicate in the dressing room before gigs, sometimes with tequila, sometimes champagne, sometimes whiskey. The boozing didn't mesh so well with her West Coast tranquility quest, and so she decided to perform stone-cold sober for the first time at a 2006 gig in Toronto, where Yeah Yeah Yeahs had always enjoyed enthusiastic crowds. "I was sooo fucking paranoid that whole show," she recounts. "I'd be standing somewhere onstage, and the thought would go through my head while I was singing, 'If I stand here too long, someone's gonna throw something at my head.' If I heard someone laugh in the audience, I thought they were laughing at me." Throughout the Show Your Bones tour, she says, "I couldn't look the audience in the eye."

The six-hour flights just to write a song, the tiresome in-studio bickering, the disappointing second-album sales, the threatened solo album, the tequila withdrawal -- anyone who's watched a Behind the Music episode knows what comes next. But sorry, deep-voiced narrator guy, the story didn't end with a we-wish-our-preening-dickwad-singer-the-best-of-luck breakup. Rumors did fly, given air by a 2006 cover story in this magazine in which Karen and Zinner exuded all the warmth of an unhappily married couple in a Bergman film. But they persevered, touring relentlessly behind Show Your Bones, knocking out Is Is to buy time, and finding creative outlets in assorted side projects. (Most publicly, Karen performed in nautical couture with a group named Native Korean Rock & the Fishnets.)

"I'm not a quitter," she says. "I believe in following things through. If I had thrown in the towel after Show Your Bones, all I'd have left to show for that record would be the pain and misery that came from it, and that was unacceptable to me. I couldn't have that be the final taste in my mouth. Giving up on those terms wasn't an option." The close quarters of the tour actually helped the onetime roommates resolve their drama, and in November 2007, after a few months of necessary "me time," they rented a house in Woodstock, New York, and began writing It's Blitz. "It's not very exciting to hear, but we trust each other a lot more now than we ever have before," says Karen.

They fostered this trust in isolated locales, like dysfunctional coworkers communing on a corporate retreat. "In New York and L.A., it's impossible to find places to focus and write," adds Zinner. "We had a really nice time in Woodstock, so we started looking for other residential-type studios." The search for secluded, Camp David–like neutral turf led to Long View, a former dairy farm in rural Massachusetts, which offered little in the way of distractions. "There's blizzards, white horses, wood fires, that whole thing," says Zinner. "Feeding animals, building snowmen. I didn't leave the barn once."

Sonic Ranch studios, outside of El Paso, where the band holed up for two separate sessions, was even more surreal, a 1,700-acre spread on the U.S.- Mexico border where they would drive for miles and see nothing but pecan trees. "It was a magical place," Zinner marvels. "It felt like the Wild West."

"You could throw an effects pedal and hit Mexico," says Launay. Zinner grew close to a domesticated raccoon named Geronimo; they all learned how to shoot a gun (not to worry, vegans, they were aiming at tin cans). On the rare occasions when they did leave the ranch, they'd browse the pawnshops of El Paso, or head across the Rio Grande to the border town of Júarez, Mexico, where they toasted Chase's 30th birthday over dinner. "We tried to go a second time," Zinner says, "but it was too dangerous." War had erupted between rival drug cartels. "Decapitated heads were showing up on the highway every day. I heard later that the restaurant we ate at got burned to the ground."

Urbanites seeking out the pastoral or exotic to tap back into some mythical creative wellspring is a cherished rock cliché (perfected, as so many were, by Bob Dylan, who put Woodstock on the map as a hideout from New York City). For the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the cliché totally worked. Unlike, say, Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes, It's Blitz bears no sonic trace of its backwoods settings; more tellingly, it's also miles removed from the jittery blare of their first records. You could say it sounds like nowhere at all.

And yet despite that, and notwithstanding Karen's westward expansion, this is still a New York band at heart. Zinner and Chase live in town (Chase in Williamsburg), and Zinner in particular reeks of downtown cool -- his publicist calls him "the mayor of the East Village," for his omnipresence at shows, exhibit openings, and other cultural happenings. And when he and Karen end up at a Second Avenue bar late one evening, tossing back cocktails with friends and admirers, including comedian David Cross, his actress girlfriend Amber Tamblyn, and Flight of the Conchords' Kristen Schaal, Zinner is clearly at home, holding court while Karen and Schaal huddle over an iPhone word game, pausing only to dart outside for the occasional smoke. Like every good New Yorker (and Madonna), he loves to complain about the city's inexorable yuppification -- "It's gotten so boring now....It's impossible to get shit done here....I think about moving out all the time....I can't even find a practice space" -- but it's hard to picture him living anywhere else.

As for Karen, when she gets wind of the hour—2 a.m., practically dinnertime in New York City—she puts down the dirty martini she's been nursing, makes her apologies to the table, and starts looking for her coat. When I'd asked earlier if she considered L.A. home yet, she shook her head. "No, no, no. It's more a sanctuary than a home. You wake up, you get in your car, and you decide what your day is going to be. In New York, there are a million things that can happen to you between waking up and going to sleep. I used to believe that California was going to break off into the sea one day from an earthquake." She bursts into a brash, unmistakably New Yawk laugh. "I've been completely repressing that thought lately."