Barnaby Clay
Standing center stage at London's Royal Albert Hall, dressed in a flowing red jumpsuit and gold boots, Karen O is recalling her frustration at an old friend. The fellow musician, she says, used to refuse to play a slow, sad song she loved in his live shows as it "wasn't punk rock." That kind of macho posturing is anathema to Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band who, for 25 years now, have mixed high-octane thrills with an open-hearted softness. "There's nothing more punk rock than being vulnerable," she says to huge cheers from the crowd of largely elder millennials, underlining the subtext of the band's anniversary tour.
The Hidden In Pieces tour, a run of special shows at theaters across Europe and North America, feels like both a celebration and a recalibration for a band whose heart has always beat louder than its amps have rattled. Digging deep into their back catalog, tonight's show acts as a kind of black tie gala for a band born a quarter of a decade ago on the grimiest New York City stages. Karen O and guitarist Nick Zinner first met at The Marz Bar, the now-shuttered East Village dive where the jukebox was loaded with Tom Waits and Blondie tunes and patrons were warned "no free ice - don't even ask." Now they’re performing at the Royal Albert Hall, a venue where a 12-seat Grand Tier box costs $4 million, a feat that’s less a graduation and more like a feat of metamorphosis.
The band, O, Zinner, and drummer Brian Chase alongside a fleet of extra members including a four-piece string section, revisit those very early days via a cover of Bjork's "Hyperballad." O, then a student at Oberlin, and Zinner performed together under the name Unitard and would cover the song, in the same earnest style of their twee misfit peers in The Moldy Peaches. A heart-swelling electronic pop song about the crazy things people do to stay together, “Hyperballad” in the YYYs’ hands is a more lush affair, the string section making themselves heard early on. "I go through all this before you wake up, so I can feel happier" O sings as if being gently pulled back to the anti-folk era. It's Yeah Yeah Yeahs, not as they are now, but as they were then.
Quite what happened between those very early days and the band's debut EP, released in 2001, to transform Unitard into the ripped-fishnets and vodka-spitting Yeah Yeah Yeahs is best saved for the biopic. The band don't try to hide their wild side, though, despite the relatively stuffy surroundings. "There's going to be moments when you might want to get up and move your body... and I just want to say if they seem like the right moments to you, please do that," O says prior to "Mystery Girl," a song from the band's frenzied early days. Though they stick to acoustic instruments only, guitarists Zinner and Imaad Wasif don't let the muscular essence of "Cheated Hearts" and "Gold Lion" be forgotten, the latter ending with a crushing squall that gets people out of their seats.
Karen O famously cried real tears in the video for 2003 single “Maps” and evokes similar weepiness tonight.
That early sincerity acts as something of an origin story for Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a performance that leans heavier on big feelings than volume. It's Blitz!-era single "Skeletons," alongside "Despair," are among the band's most fragile moments and tonight take center stage, the latter underpinned through use of the venue's organ which dates back to 1871, long before anyone had even considered the idea of "indie sleaze." Karen O famously cried real tears in the video for 2003 single "Maps" and evokes similar weepiness tonight with the sniffly ballad acting as a reminder that Yeah Yeah Yeahs have always been vulnerable punks.
Through "Maps" and debut album Fever To Tell, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are unmistakable icons of the early-2000s New York indie rock scene. Yet they have never felt like a band tied to a time and place. Perhaps its because all three of them have barely aged a day in a quarter of a decade, or that their songwriting has remained on point (large chunks of the set are made up from 2022's excellent Cool It Down) but the band have allowed time to move alongside them elegantly. "Mars," one of the Cool It Down tracks, is dedicated to Karen O's son Django, while Chase's kids can be spotted dancing yards away from their dad's kit during the encore.
At their core, these songs are about lifting off the shackles and baring your biggest emotions to the world. Speaking to The FADER in 2003, Karen O had a clear-eyed sense of the role the band played then and has continued to over two decades later. "[The fans] use me as a vessel to find themselves or express themselves a little more outrageously," she said. "That’s really what I’m trying to do... to get away with it." As she returns to the stage for an encore of "Zero," boots now swapped for sneakers lined with flashing neon lights, there is no sense that time is catching up to Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
