karen o tour

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs Return With New Music and Tour Dates

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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Early 21 st century New York rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — singer Karen O , guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase — have announced new music and tour dates in the summer and fall. The group, which recently signed with indie powerhouse Secretly Canadian, say they will have new music in the fall.

The group will play a brace of dates in Europe and Australia in the summer before hitting North America, with dates at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl in October, where they will be joined by high school punk rockers the Linda Lindas on both dates and (in Los Angeles) by Japanese Breakfast. It seems likely more dates will be added.

YYY US DATES!  It's with true life affirming pleasure to announce our two headline shows in our two hometowns NYC AND LA! pic.twitter.com/PQehIatfdV — Yeah Yeah Yeahs (@YYYs) May 2, 2022

Tickets go on sale Friday, May 6 at 10 a.m. local time.

“It’s with true life affirming pleasure to announce our two headline shows in our two hometowns NYC AND LA supported by two wildly gifted bands Japanese Breakfast and The Linda Lindas at the Hollywood Bowl, with The Linda Lindas supporting in Forest Hills and our other support TBA soon! Representin’ a few generations yo! Cannot wait to see you there!  New music! New Era! And New Home with Secretly Canadian ! Much to celebrate!“ says Karen O.

The group teased the appearances on social media hours on Sunday, before the announcement was made Monday morning.

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YEAH LA! ☁️🤘⛅️ pic.twitter.com/GaZbPr5CyS — Yeah Yeah Yeahs (@YYYs) May 2, 2022

Formed in 2000, the group was one of the leading lights of the turn-of-the-century New York City rock scene that also included the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio, the National, Liars, the Rapture and many others. Their unusually spare lineup created a very full sound, dominated by O’s shape-shifting vocals and wild stage presence, Zinner’s effects-laden guitar and Chase’s propulsive drumming; their self-titled debut EP displayed an unexpectedly versatile sound and, in “Our Time,” an anthem for the burgeoning NYC rock scene of the era, which has since been documented in the Lizzy Goodman’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” memoir and film.

The group signed with the formidable major label Interscope in 2002 and released their debut full-length, “Fever to Tell,” the following year, which spawned the alternative hit “Maps” and launched Karen as a major media figure. An equally strong sophomore effort, “Show Your Bones,” followed three years later and the more electronic-based “It’s Blitz!” three years after that, and the group finished out the decade as a major festival headliner and one of the biggest alternative groups in the business, outlasting the impact of most of their contemporaries. However, they embarked on solo projects and reunited for a final Interscope album, “Mosquito,” in 2011, which finished out their contract with the label. All three were musically active throughout the 2010s, Zinner with production work most prominently with Karen’s 2019 excellent “Lux Prima” collaboration with songwriter-producer Danger Mouse, which sonically recalled ’60s artists like John Barry and Serge Gainsbourg and showed yet another side of her musical talent.

Yeah Yeahs Yeahs on tour:

June 5: O2 Apollo @ Manchester, UK [Support: English Teacher]

June 7: O2 Academy Brixton @ London, UK [Support: Dry Cleaning, Anika]

June 8: O2 Academy Brixton @ London, UK [Support: Porridge Radio, Anika]

June 11: Primavera Sound 2022 @ Barcelona, ES

Jul 20: Margaret Court Arena @ Melbourne, Australia [Support: Wet Leg]

Jul 24: Hordern Pavilion @ Sydney, Australia [Support: Wet Leg]

July 29: Osheaga Music and Arts Festival 2022 @ Montreal, QC

October 1: Forest Hills Stadium @ New York, NY [Special Guest TBA, The Linda Linda]

October 6: Hollywood Bowl @ Los Angeles, CA [Japanese Breakfast, The Linda Lindas}

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There is no doubt that South Korean born Karen O is one of the biggest names in music in the last ten years with her success with the hit band, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the name that she’s made for herself in the fashion industry, she even graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has worked on various soundtracks such as the Jackass series, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and even a track with Har Mar Superstar for the film House of Wax. To most people, she is probably best known for her electrifying live antics when performing live.

She has made quite a name for herself as an artist in her own right too, tonight she performs an array of hits from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s catalogue, including the smash hit, “Date with the Night”, in which the whole audience sings back at her. “Maps” is an intimate moment for everyone as she walks into the crowd really engaging everyone. She is care free and incredible to watch as an artist. The highlight for me is when she performs the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song, “Heads Will Roll”. Everyone is fist pumping on each “Off” from the hookline “Off off off with you’re head…” The defining feature of that is that she did the A-Trak remix of the song. Truly a wonder to be in the presence of such talent, Karen O is a truly seasoned and whimsical entertainer. Definitely worth the watch if you have an open mind!

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O: ‘The one thing I hold in sacred regard is rockers’ hairstyles’

The lead singer of the US indie rockers on gaining humility in her 40s, her signature bowl haircut and the benefits of living in Los Angeles rather than New York

A fter almost a decade away, the American rock trio Yeah Yeah Yeahs are back with an urgent, electrifying album, Cool It Down . Front and centre as always is Karen O, 43-year-old Karen Orzolek, the band’s singer and one of the most charismatic and intriguing figures to emerge from the New York indie scene of the 2000s. She now lives in Los Angeles with the British film-maker Barnaby Clay and their seven-year-old son.

Did you ever doubt you could make music again that would be up there with anything you’ve done before? I don’t know the answer to that question, because I’m a pretty future-oriented person: I think more about what’s next than what came before. But the secret sauce on Cool It Down was just that we waited to be supercharged and inspired and completely swept up in the urgency to enjoy making music again together. So that helps.

Would it be fair to say this record came more easily and was more harmonious with the band than some previous ones? Well, because of the extreme separation of those two years, because of the pandemic and stuff, there was just this very deep sense of joyous celebration that it was back on the table. Having that choice taken away from me, I really did understand how precious it was. Then on top of that, everything was percolating in a very intense way for the years leading up to that: there was just so much to respond to as a human being and also as an artist.

What are some of the differences making an album in your 40s as opposed to making one in your 20s? For one thing, humility. You’ve been knocked around by life. In our 20s, it felt freewheeling, devil-may-care, like: “Who cares what happens tomorrow? Let’s celebrate like tonight’s the last night of our lives!” So there’s less self-consciousness in that sense, but you’re also very self-absorbed in your 20s. Now that I’m in my 40s, there’s humility, but also compassion and a deeper care for things larger than myself. I understand that I’m not the centre of the universe any more! The tough period was probably in-between: my 30s.

You still have the distinctive black bowl cut. When was the last time you had a different style or cut? I did go blond for Mosquito , our last record, so I lived as a blond for almost three years.

Did that feel different? Yeah, it was really important at that stage in my life to disconnect from the black bowl cut and experience the world as a blonde, which at times was more fun, I think. But yeah, I return to the bowl, because I feel like I look weird without the fringe; I don’t even recognise myself without bangs at this point. And that’s one thing that I hold in sacred regard: rockers’ hairstyles.

In the 00s, you used to say: “I want to be successful but I don’t want to be famous.” Do you think you’ve achieved that? To a certain degree. And that sentiment is still one that I hold. After having my kid in 2015 I was thinking: “I’m going to steer my career towards a behind-the-scenes one now.” But somehow I kept finding myself back in the limelight. But yes, the holy grail is to be successful without being famous.

Is that easier to achieve living in LA than New York? I guess, yeah. In LA, even if you’re not necessarily antisocial, you can be somewhat reclusive. There’s a lot of privacy in that sense. But then a lot of celebrities seem to have moved to New York, because New Yorkers play it cool and they don’t generally pester people too much.

There’s a new documentary based on Meet Me in the Bathroom , Lizzy Goodman ’s oral history of the New York rock scene of the 00s. Do you think the book and the film portray the scene accurately? Lizzy did a pretty awesome thing with that book: she did capture the essence of the scene and the feeling of what it felt like to be in a band in New York at that time. And the film, it’s like a time warp back to the early 00s. It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago in some ways, but there’s also a realisation – circling back to the age thing – that it was 20 years ago and that’s enough time for people to think of it in an almost historical way.

What contemporary music are you most excited by? One of my favourite records was Comfort to Me by [Australian punk band] Amyl and the Sniffers. I just love [frontwoman] Amy [Taylor] so much, I think she’s the real deal. And the record is this incredible combo of heart, grace and balls-to-the-wall punk.

What else in culture have you liked recently? I was a big fan of the show Severance , I thought it was brilliant. It really resonated with me.

There’s some big themes on the new record, especially the climate crisis, but you don’t seem pessimistic. Is that hard to sustain? The gift of being able to write music is that you’re operating from a higher self that leads past all the noise and the despair. Making music, it’s such a euphoric process: it feels not too unlike what I imagine a near-death experience would be, where you tap into deeper truths. There’s a lot of fear and disconnection and loneliness and despair, but what music helps me to do is tune into this deeper understanding of how interconnected everything is. That buoys me and I hope you can feel that in the music.

Cool It Down by Yeah Yeah Yeahs is out now

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Karen O, self-destruction and rubber bones: Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, 20 years on

As ‘fever to tell’ celebrates its second decade, mark beaumont looks back at the glitter-stained, tequila-soaked origins of yeah yeah yeah’s iconic debut record, article bookmarked.

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L anding clean out of the blue, in a shockwave of cheek glitter and sweat, she was a very postmodern Gotham superhero. When mild-mannered film student and acoustic singer-songwriter Karen Ohm donned her endless array of outlandish outfits and drank her special potion – margaritas, champagne, tequila, fan beers – she transformed into Karen O , the art punk chaos queen of the Noughties New York scene.

As the singer of Yeah Yeah Yeahs – the Brooklyn trio comprising Karen O, guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase whose iconic, million-selling debut album Fever to Tell was released 20 years ago on 29 April – Karen O was formidable. She could shape-shift in an instant, morphing between a she-wolf howl and pussycat purr. She could swallow virtually an entire microphone while still singing; spew beer from the height of any lighting rig; and mesmerise indie fans in their thousands with her incredible concoction of celebratory raunch rock, fun-time innocence and open-hearted fragility. Most vital of all, with one lick of liquor, she grew rubber bones.

“My insanity onstage had been escalating and the more I hurt myself, the more the crowd enjoyed it,” Karen O told Billboard in 2013. “I was like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler .” She found that performing drunk imbued her with a looseness that prevented injury whenever she fell – and she fell a lot. She thinks it was the alcohol that saved her life when on 9 October in 2003 at Sydney’s Metro Theatre, the O show almost reached a gruesome, premature end.

“During the song ‘Rich’ I was on the edge of the stage, sort of draped over the monitor with my legs in the air,” she told Lizzie Goodman for the scene’s renowned oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom (2017). “And I was really drunk. I flipped off headfirst, hit the guardrail and landed on my back. Then the monitor fell on my head…The only thing that saved me from breaking my neck and my spine was the fact that I was so wasted, I was limber. I fell off like a wet noodle.”

While their New York peers such as The Strokes and Interpol took great pains to look unflappably cool onstage, Yeah Yeah Yeahs were undoubtedly the most heart-in-mouth live experience of the age. The sort of exhilarating spectacle it’s almost impossible to capture on a studio recording. Fever to Tell , though, did just that. Garage art rackets “Y Control”, “Tick” and “Pin” – sounded as if they were distilled from the sweat sloughing off a Williamsburg basement club ceiling. Sleazy blues rockers “Black Tongue”, “Cold Light” and “Date With the Night” – a song Karen O described as “seeping with sex” – gave lascivious voice to New York’s post-millennial lusts. Her inherent hotline-to-the-heart rang out on the more fragile “Modern Romance” and “Maps”. The latter was a visceral love song addressed to her boyfriend Angus Andrew of Liars. It became the album’s tear-sodden calling card.

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“At the time it was really hectic with us touring and my boyfriend being away with his band,” Karen O told Spin in 2004. “The line ‘They don’t love you like I love you’ was like, ‘Why are you over there with them when you should be with me?’ It’s about missing someone.” Later, she told Rolling Stone that her candour had shocked even herself. “I exposed myself so much with that song,” she later told Rolling Stone .

Fever to Tell certainly shocked anyone that had watched Karen O’s rise through New York City’s thriving ranks. A reserved and studious Jersey girl, she’d originally met Chase at Oberlin arts college in Ohio, bonding despite in-built musical differences. He was a jazz fiend who wrote classical pieces; she was a stan for The John Spencer Blues Explosion. To get herself through Ohio’s stultifying winters, Karen O decided to learn guitar and began writing songs on a karaoke machine: “The ultimate in lo-fi.”

In 2000, seeking less spirit-sapping environs, she relocated to NYU to study film – and knee-slide across the dancefloors of the city’s burgeoning alt-rock club scene. It was at grungy East Village haunt, the Mars Bar, that she first met Zinner, a freak-haired photographer and guitarist who seemed to be in every warehouse art band in New York. “All her songs were really morbid,” he told NME in 2003, which he saw as a challenge: “These are great, but I can make them better.” The first time they played together, Zinner instantly sensed the magic. “I felt it,” he told Goodman. “Just woooooshhhh. Immediate connection.”

Together they became Unitard, a gentle folk duo playing what Zinner called “great, haunting ballads…very Paris, Texas ”. They began making waves in the anti-folk scene emerging from the Sidewalk Café, which also produced The Moldy Peaches. But such a combo could never contain the natural trouble-making exuberance that went on to make Karen O a literally intoxicating presence on the scene. Zinner called her a party-in-a-bag. “She had this infectious, super-wild, didn’t-give-a-f***, awesome, fun, silly thing,” he said. “Unitard was super dark but that lightness, that silliness, was inside us and Karen was an expert in bringing it out and embodying it. We really needed that and New York needed that too.”

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One night in Zinner’s loft, playing around with a drum machine, Karen Ohm drank her superhero potion – rum fruit cocktails, and plenty of them – and became Karen O. “We drank brass monkeys and literally in two hours wrote four songs, and two or three of them were on our first EP.” The first song they wrote was “Bang”. As a f***, son, you suck,” that febrile, clatter punk debut track declared, shaking awake the sparse crowd lucky enough to catch Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ first show at New York’s Mercury Lounge in 2000, fifth on the bill to The White Stripes. And of the city’s swarm of new post-Strokes sounds, it was “Bang” and its parent Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP that blew up biggest.

By the summer of 2001, NME ’s We Love NY issue and The Strokes’ first album Is This It? had made the New York scene an international phenomenon. If the cult cool of the scene was captured by Julian Casablancas and his roughed-up Rat Pack staring out from a monochrome photo frame, collapsed around an East Village bar in slept-in suit jackets, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP encapsulated all of the wild colour coming along in their wake. “Mystery Girl” and “Art Star” spoke to the city’s art punk pulse, “Our Time” to its place as the wellspring of the 21 st Century zeitgeist. As the EP – eventually voted the second best single of 2001 by NME – and word of Karen O’s beer-guzzling, hard-partying onstage antics filtered through New York, Yeah Yeah Yeahs quickly became a sensation.

“There was just such urgency and self-destruction,” Karen O told Goodman, “the need for release, hedonism”. YYYs gladly fulfilled it. They tore up NYC fashion parties, wrecked the backstage area at SXSW 2002 and, though Karen O claims to have no memory of the event, allegedly shoved Courtney Love into a catering table when she turned up backstage unannounced to hob-nob with the band. “We set out to conquer,” she recalled, “with the invincibility of rebel youth times a hundred, fuelled by tequila and really, really naughty prankster behaviour [plus] all those people trying to find us and woo us.”

Among so many archly wasted male peers, Karen O was adopted as a champion of forthright feminism, unashamedly indulging desire, despair and delight in equal measure. “A lot of girls, myself included, finally felt we had someone onstage we could relate to,” her designer friend Christian Joy told Goodman. “Someone who did not give a f*** in the same way we did and didn’t mind being dirty and unsexy and was just being herself and was not a dude.” Joy designed all of the outfits, which were key to Karen O’s onstage persona. No two ever remotely the same: ruined cheerleader dresses, psychedelic catsuits, new age sci-fi work-out garb. They were often put together at very short notice, too. “I’d call her up the day before a shoot and say, ‘I need something tomorrow!’” Karen O told NME in 2003. “She’ll burn the midnight oil, but the next day, I’ll put it on and it’ll be really short or my boobs will just be popping out. I guess it’s her way of venting frustrations.”

The band chose a friend of theirs to produce their debut album – their tour manager David Sitek, later of rock group TV on the Radio but back then an unknown. “They said I should record their new record,” he told Spin in 2007. “I said ‘I dunno, you guys have a lot of momentum. I might screw it up.’” But by the time the band came to record it the industry scrum to sign them, coupled with the “overwhelming” fanaticism and physical toll of living up to the fervid expectations they had set for their live performances, had caught up with them. Karen O later likened the experience to feeling like the celluloid cowboy knocked from his horse “but his foot is still on the stirrup and he’s just being dragged by this f***ing mustang”. Having rushed through much of the record in a day or two, she insisted that the band cancel a scheduled tour, including an appearance at Reading & Leeds 2002, in order to concentrate on finishing the album. Organisers offered to triple their fee, but no dice.

“I was at the tipping point,” she told Goodman, fearing burn-out at such a pace. “I definitely felt like I was on the verge of a meltdown… The record was more important than dragging ourselves around on the road. And for me personally, just like health-wise.” She soon moved out of the city to the New Jersey farmlands with Andrew, then later to LA, her departure signifying the beginning of the end of the New York scene. “We had to survive that insanely precarious razor’s edge that you walk on as a band that’s hyped so young, trying not to get sliced down the middle.”

The extra time on Fever to Tell was well spent. Though YYYs would go on to make more consistent, refined albums – Show Your Bones (2006); It’s Blitz! (2009) – and attract a new generation of electro-modernist fans with last year’s Cool it Down , their debut remains one of the most vibrant burst-from-the-underground records of all time. Despite glowing initial press notices, still it is perhaps no surprise that album sales tripled upon the release of “Maps” as a single. After all, that moment Karen O’s anguished trills of the title collide with Zinner’s highway pile-up of a guitar solo is among the most heart-stopping in pop.

“I’m going to rewrite history right here,” Karen O told Goodman of the lyrics “they don’t love you like I love you”, which she had lifted from an old email love letter. “I wrote it with a quill. It was a feather quill, written in blood,” she insisted instead. “It might as well have been.”

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Karen O Hypes New LP ‘Crush Songs’ With Intimate Shows & Secret Listening Sessions

Karen O, the show-stopping front woman of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, will release her solo debut Sept. 9 and she's announced a stream of intriguing live events to get her fans even more excited.

By Chris Payne

Chris Payne

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Karen O , the show-stopping front woman of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs , will release her solo debut Sept. 9 — and she’s announced a stream of intriguing live events to get her fans even more excited.

In the month following the Sept. 9 release of Crush Songs , Karen will perform a series of gigs in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Berlin — all of them big undersells compared to what she’d play with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Tickets go on sale Aug. 15, with details available here .

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Karen shared the following message via press release:

“I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be performing Crush Songs to some very intimate audiences. If you’re in the mood for love please come join my crush odyssey at these limited engagements. I apologize in advance that these shows are so few but I guess that makes them all the more special if you can make it SO don’t miss out! LUV KO”

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O Announces Solo Album ‘Crush Songs’

Trending on Billboard

And fans outside of those four cites will also have a chance to attend a unique Karen O listening experience. On Aug. 27, 21 cities worldwide will play host to exclusive first listen sessions of Crush Songs ’ deluxe vinyl edition. The sessions will take place for private audiences inside homes and apartments, overseen by Sofar Sounds, a live music discovery community that curates secret shows around the world. For a chance to attend one of the parties, visit Karen O’s Sofar Sounds site .

Crush Songs was recorded in 2006 and 2007 and is hyped as “an intimate collection of lo-fi, bedroom recordings in the vein of Karen’s Oscar-nominated “The Moon Song.” Crush Songs will come out via Cult, the record label owned by The Strokes ’ Julian Casablancas . So far, Karen O has shared the music video for one new song, a somber, lo-fi number called “Rapt.”

Here are Karen O’s upcoming live dates:

Sept. 9: New York, NY (Manderley Bar at The McKittrick Hotel) Sept. 10: New York, NY (Manderley Bar at The McKittrick Hotel) Sept. 11: New York, NY (Manderley Bar at The McKittrick Hotel) Sept. 12: New York, NY (Le Poisson Rouge) Sept. 17: Los Angeles, CA (The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery) Sept. 18: Los Angeles, CA (The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery) Sept. 19: Los Angeles, CA (The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery) Oct. 4: London, England (Bush Hall) Oct. 5: London, England (Bush Hall) Oct. 7: Berlin, Germany (Heimathafen)

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The Story Behind Karen O’s Epic Cool It Down Tour Wardrobe

By Liam Hess

Earlier this month, 14,000 Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans thronged the pit and lined the seats of Forest Hills Stadium in Queens for the band’s first hometown show in four years. And as the thundering glam-rock stomp of “Spitting Off the Edge of the World”—the lead single from their fifth album and their first in nine years, Cool It Down —erupted through the stadium’s speakers, Karen O stepped onto the stage, shrieking: “We’re the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and we’re back!” Wearing a headpiece dripping with red tinsel and swaying and twirling her enormous black cloak like a high priestess, the crowd was under her spell within moments.

Since the band’s earliest gigs on the Lower East Side at the turn of the millennium (the riotous energy of which is memorably captured in Meet Me in the Bathroom , a recent documentary on the New York indie scene of that period), O’s stage presence has maintained an electric, elemental quality that was in full force at the gigs the band played—first in Forest Hills, then at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles—to kick off their Cool It Down dates. Not only was their return to the stage a cathartic moment for longtime fans, but it also brought to life a record that the band recorded in a frenetic burst of energy during the summer of 2021, as they reemerged from lockdown. “I felt so joyful it was almost explosive, you know,” O says of the writing process. “Everything that I’d bottling up during the pandemic, and really everything that had been percolating for nine years before that, all came out at once.”

The result is a triumph. Cool It Down is sprinkled with production quirks that feel exhilaratingly fresh—the glittering funk of “Fleez,” the icy synth stabs of “Wolf,” the clipped, rattling beat of “Blacktop”—while still unmistakably Yeah Yeah Yeahs in its restless ambition and lyrics that balance bravado with tenderness. After such a long hiatus, did the stakes feel higher? “Life just feels so high stakes these days, you know? Everybody’s still quietly reeling from the past few years under the surface,” says O, noting that the closest parallel to the “uncertainty and lack of control” that she felt making Cool It Down was when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs released 2003’s Fever to Tell in the aftermath of 9/11 in New York City. Still, despite the epic, widescreen nature of the songs—“Spitting” touches on the climate crisis, while album closer “Mars” serves as a spoken-word lullaby inspired by O’s son watching the night sky—her approach to songwriting, and her ability to write a lyric at once cryptic and strangely profound, remains as instinctive as ever.

“A lot of it is trying to tune into something deeper but also just trying to stay as open as possible,” she says. “You want to be a lightning rod, almost, to download or receive whatever’s coming through. Songwriting still feels like a very mysterious process to me—just seeing what comes from above or what bubbles up from below.”

Returning to the stage this year also came with another dilemma for O: How could she bring the record’s rough, resilient spirit to life sartorially? After all, aside from her innate musicianship and ferocious charisma as a performer, O’s renegade approach to fashion has made her a style icon in her own right—a status partly owed to her now decades-long partnership with the costume designer and artist Christian Joy. The pair first met in the late ’90s, after O began frequenting the East Village store at which Joy then worked; after spotting one of Joy’s own designs—as Joy describes it, laughing, a “hacked-up prom dress covered in blood after the movie Carrie and stenciled all over”—O immediately requested one of her own. The rest is, well, history.

Christian Joy in her Brooklyn studio.

At the center of that relationship is their deep, and now wordless, mutual trust. “In 20 years, I’ve never even shown her a sketch,” says Joy. “She’s always basically allowed me to make whatever I’ve wanted, which is pretty next-level. But that also means that I need to do my best to knock it out of the park each time, and that can feel pretty daunting.”  

“We do have this secret, sort of sacred way that we work together,” adds O, “but it’s kind of more like sadomasochistic torture—I’m either torturing her, or she’s torturing me.” She laughs wildly. “She’s tortured because she’s putting so much pressure on herself to make this thing and she probably hates my guts while she’s doing it, and I’m tortured because I’m seeing it for the first time right before I’m supposed to wear it onstage. But it always works out beautifully. I think sometimes the best relationships are the ones where you have that beautiful friction of never knowing what’s going to happen—that push and pull.”

Over the years, the starting point for O’s tour wardrobes has usually been a specific item O is keen to wear—for the It’s Blitz! tour, O requested a studded leather jacket, while for the shows supporting Mosquito, she asked to try out some tailoring—or a more enigmatic missive from O that reflects the spirit of the record. For Cool It Down, O went for the latter. “It was about feeling kind of tattered or torn,” she says. “I wanted it to feel really exuberant but also a little bit shredded up from everything we’ve been through.” With her typically off-kilter eye, Joy translated that idea into an Evel Knievel–esque cape patterned with a flaming red, sparkling sunburst—a nod to “Burning”—and a Bowie-inspired jumpsuit studded with crystals, with further tinsel fringing the flares. “I wanted the audience to have a feeling of her being an erupting volcano, exploding on the stage and sending her flashing hot rays into the audience,” says Joy.

For her Los Angeles date, however, O dipped her toe into new waters, enlisting the help of the Tokyo-based designer Yuima Nakazato to create a custom look inspired by an armor-like holographic bodysuit from his very first collection. “It’s the first time I’ve ever worked with him, but because with this record we’re kind of taking this bold step into a different place than we’ve ever been sonically, it just really lit up my imagination,” says O, who first discovered Nakazato’s work on Instagram. For Nakazato, designing for O felt like a full-circle moment. “It was interesting that Karen gave me an image from my debut collection as a reference—obviously it’s a very important collection for me, and it felt like fate that Karen was also paying attention to it,” he says, describing the final look as a blend of the “past and the future.”

After all, it’s O’s gimlet-eyed ability to pull references from different points in time, and fuse the highbrow with the low, that feels like her greatest sartorial signature. But so too does her aesthetic—one she describes as equal parts John Waters and Kansai Yamamoto—feel like a playful send-up of the scene she came up in, taking the stuffy formula of the rock singer who takes themselves (and their fashion) far too seriously and injecting it with a welcome dose of humor. “I mean, when Christian and I started making these stage costumes back in the early 2000s, it just wasn’t a thing: It was just a bunch of cool boys in, like, Members Only jackets and striped shirts and skinny black jeans,” says O, laughing again. “Which is a great look, but I was like: What are the women going to wear?”

For O, part of her motivation for going all-out with her onstage style was to show anyone attending her gigs that you didn’t have to be white, male, and dressed in skinny jeans to be a rock star. “Christian and I just had the most fun,” O remembers. “We were really tongue-in-cheek about it, and we always wanted it to feel very DIY so that any girl anywhere in the world could see what we made and be inspired by it. Those deconstructed prom dresses, for example—you could just pick one up at a thrift store and go crazy with it, make it bespoke, then show up to the show and look like me onstage. I wanted it to feel accessible. We were thinking a little bit in terms of Madonna in the ’80s and how everyone was recreating her ‘Like a Virgin’ look. It was something fun and cheeky. We’ve gone through many different phases and eras of looks over the years, but at the heart of it has always been this kind of punk-rock, do-it-yourself spirit.”

And if O needed proof of her legacy, she need look only to the supporting acts at her most recent shows. While she noted feeling nervous ahead of her first hometown show in years, the tour at large was also a celebration of a new wave of indie-rock acts fronted by Asian American women, with Japanese Breakfast and the Linda Lindas opening for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in both New York and Los Angeles. “I feel like I’ve gone my whole career without there being another frontwoman who looked like me, and I’ve just been kind of forging ahead in the darkness,” says O. “There’s just going to be so much excitement and love in the air. It’s never really happened in my career before, and I couldn’t even imagine it happening five years ago. So it’s really exciting.”

Still, more than anything, O is excited to just get back out there and connect with her audience again—in a dazzling, glitter-spangled cape, of course. “I think I’m someone who, in particular, really feeds so much off of the audience—it’s just the kind of performer I am. Emotions are running quite deep, and there’s a feeling of gratitude and love that feels bigger than ever before because I think it feels like we need it more than we ever have before,” she says, adding after a pause: “Hopefully our audiences need it more than ever before too.”

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“A Real Purity”: Karen O on Performing Before the Internet Changed Everything

By Mike Hilleary

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From the moment she introduced herself to a packed crowd at New York City’s Mercury Lounge over 20 years ago, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ singer and songwriter Karen O, born Karen Lee Orzolek, has been regarded as one of the most captivating performers in music.

In those early years spent as the only frontwoman in an explosive male-dominated music scene that gave birth to bands like the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, and TV on the Radio, Karen wielded the microphone like a bullhorn, simultaneously commanding and submitting to a crackling energy of bodily chaos and emotional catharsis. Many of these sweaty, beer-spitting exorcisms are on full display in the newly released film Meet Me in the Bathroom , a documentary adaptation of music journalist Lizzy Goodman ’s acclaimed 2017 book of the same name. 

Directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival back in January, but its nationwide distribution seems serendipitously timed, released just a month and half after the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ latest effort, Cool It Down , the band’s first record nine years. With the 20th anniversary of the trio’s debut album, Fever to Tell, also set to occur next year, Karen has found herself in a unique period where her past is in steady conversation with her present. After recently performing two of the biggest headlining shows of her band’s career at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, she spoke with Vanity Fair about the evolution of her performance, seeing a version of herself through archival footage, and being part of an artistic movement that could never be duplicated today.

Last month, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs headlined two big shows in New York and LA, where the Linda Lindas and Japanese Breakfast were opening acts. That must have been incredibly satisfying for you as an Asian American, being able to elevate other Asian American musical artists, giving them the kind of opportunity that maybe you weren’t afforded when you were starting out.

It’s funny, because I really feel that it was such a mutually beneficial situation. I feel in a lot of ways the Linda Lindas and Japanese Breakfast gave me an opportunity, elevating me and selling out the biggest shows we’ve ever played in the States. Michelle [ Zauner ], especially with her book, [ Crying in H Mart ], she just cracked open this view on Asian American artists and Asian American women, putting them so much more on the radar. She’s generated so much interest from her story. I feel she opened a lot of doors for people to notice that I’m half-Asian again. Because I’ve gone through the majority of my career where most conversation topics were “what’s it like to be a woman in rock?” and so rarely was asked about being biracial or having Asian heritage. And then with the Linda Lindas, speaking to just sharing the shows with them, normally playing any sort of hometown show in New York, I don’t know what happens to me, but I generally go really dark. It’s just so much, and pressure, and there are a lot of ghosts. There’s an intensity to playing New York. And if it wasn’t for the Linda Lindas literally dancing in unison during our soundcheck like they were in a musical—and just seeing them in this empty tennis stadium—it filled me with just so much joy seeing that freshness of their perspective and worldview where everything is just amazing. They did me a real solid just taking the edge off the anticipatory anxiety I had about that show. It was meaningful to all of us and our fans. I was getting texts from people who were saying “I’ve never felt this represented before.” It was just such a joyful, cathartic show. 

I have my copy of Meet Me in the Bathroom on my shelf and have watched the documentary. When you look back to that past self, to that freshness as you were describing with the Linda Lindas, what tends to stick out in your mind in terms of your growth, not just as an artist but as a person?

By Brooke Baldwin

By David Canfield

By Bess Levin

Being Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was born out of such a precious, naive innocence that’s almost impossible to achieve these days. Everybody who lands in New York in their late teens and early 20s, they generally have a vision and mission—even if it’s an unconscious one. You want to go there because it’s one of the greatest cities in the world and you want to be somebody. But back then, we just didn’t have the self-consciousness of actually having some kind of influence. We were bored and just kind of found each other and in the most typical New York way of just going to shows, hanging out at bars, meeting people in person. 

And even though it was New York City and [it] is this incredible springboard for anything, I think that there was this real beautiful naivety of not having any kind of agenda. If there was any agenda at that point, it was just let’s shake things up, have a bunch of fun, and hang out with our friends. There was a real purity about it that I think is really hard to achieve now. We were following the footsteps of Patti Smith and Lou Reed and the Ramones, the New Yorkers that were looking toward poets and literature, other music, and art as their influences rather than influencers. It was an amazing thing to be there in that moment right before the internet just changed everything. 

As far as my growth, I was reeling quite a bit in the beginning because shortly after we started the band, the world turned upside down. A close friend died the same year 9/11 happened, and then, just getting so much attention as a band so soon, it sent me in a kind of self-destructive spiral. It really took me falling off the stage in Australia to kind of put me on a different path. When you’re young you’re in the flow, but you’re also getting sucked into a tornado if you’re not super grounded. My artistic journey has been kind of a balance of just finding my footing while trying to stay in the flow and do everything on my own terms as much as possible.

You were obviously a huge part of this time in New York City music history, and while the book Meet Me in the Bathroom beautifully captures that time in its oral history format, there is something different in seeing those testimonials juxtaposed against all these images and footage and stolen moments, many of which haven’t been seen before. How did you feel watching your segments of the documentary?

I don’t know how involved other bands were with trying to guide them a little bit with the story, but in an early meeting with the directors I was like, “You guys realize that it was a very different experience for me being one of the only women in this scene that you’re going to be covering.” And they were like, “Yeah, we want to know. What was it like?” I just knew that I would have to be a little bit more involved to feel like they were representing an experience that they couldn’t quite relate to. I think they did a really good job of really capturing the way it felt. It does feel time capsule-y. 

Seeing myself there, it’s kind of a mixed bag because what I see is the agony and ecstasy of my experience of it. It was saving my life, but I was also very unmoored at that moment. I’ve mentioned this to others but there wasn’t really a road map for how a leading lady would do it. I just wasn’t expecting that amount of success and interest. When I look at it, I experience a kind of psychic fugue, which is an incredible thing because that’s what made the shows so out of this world, kinetic, and visceral. It was also interesting seeing the guys’ side of things. I didn’t know very much about the Strokes’ or Interpol’s or LCD’s experience. It was interesting to see how everybody, these sensitive and slightly self-destructive souls, were struggling with this reckoning of very uncommercial bands becoming commercial.

One thing that has always been evidently clear throughout your career is how special being onstage has been for you. How has your approach and perspective changed over the years in regard to the experience of performing?

I think more than anything, being up there onstage was an opportunity for me to live as dangerously as I could ever live, because I don’t live dangerously in life. I wanted to be unpredictable. I wanted to be in touch with a more carnal, sexual representation. I wanted to be unhinged and deeply vulnerable as well as wildly powerful and funny. Because those are all aspects of something that’s inside of me. There’s definitely a real dork up there as well. All those things just came out naturally. I can’t really explain why, but I wanted our shows to feel like a happening. I wanted the audience to feel not just like they were watching us but that they could become us. That was a really important part of the early shows. And we would pull it off often. We would just get the crowd in this state where they were losing themselves making out and dancing and moshing, just totally losing themselves. 

I would have to lose myself to kind of instigate that and as the years went on, that would just take so much out of me physically. All the boundaries were kind of blurred when I was younger performing, and it was a beautiful thing but a beautiful mess in so many ways. And I started thinking, whatever is taking over onstage, is it taking over me or am I wielding it ? In any given show it would be a toss-up of those two things. I think over the years, especially lately, I feel I’ve been able to harness what moves through in an intentional way. I’m understanding that one of the gifts that I’ve been given is really being able to connect in the heart space with an audience. That for me is the holy grail of what you can do up there. So I’ve been focusing more on that connection and feeling less inclined to be thrashing myself around or engaging in the self-destructive aspects that were really fun when I was younger. I still have echoes of that energy, that confrontational and playful side of things, but I like honing [in] on what a pure connection is supposed to be. People always comment on how much I smile when I perform and I’m like, “Oh yeah, I guess I do do that.” 

It would be almost irresponsible of me not to bring up the importance of “Maps.” It’s arguably one of the greatest songs to be made in the last two decades. What does it mean for you that it has such longevity and impact?

I’m so glad it’s “Maps,” to be honest. It’s such a hard thing to pull off, a love song, especially one that stands the test of time. When you’re writing music, you just don’t know what’s going to strike a chord, if anything strikes a chord at all. But it’s such a simple song. The lyrics are so freakin’ simple and the way we wrote was incredibly simple and came together within minutes. But I don’t know, when you write a song that resonates it becomes its own thing. But again, I’m so grateful that it was a love song. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Karen O and Michelle Zauner on Smashing Expectations and the Power of ‘No’

By Angie Martoccio

Angie Martoccio

A bout a year ago, Karen O was scrolling through Instagram when she came across a photo of Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner that left her a little concerned. It was from a stop on Zauner’s relentless tour over the past couple of years, which has included more than 100 concerts and promotional appearances on the heels of her Grammy-nominated third album, Jubilee , and her bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart . “She had the million-mile stare,” says Karen O, who turns 44 in November.

Listen to the ‘Musicians on Musicians’ podcast featuring Karen O. and Michelle Zauner

Karen O erupts with laughter. As the frontwoman of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs , the indie-rock band she formed in 2000, she can relate. “[The road] can wear you down,” she says. “The best thing to do in that situation is smash some glass. For me, it was a poster of us. I put my foot through it. It takes the edge off.”

Zauner grew up idolizing Karen O, a fellow Korean American who became famous for her magnetic stage presence — spitting beer into the crowd was not an infrequent occurrence — and New York swagger. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs recently released Cool It Down , their first album in nine years. Karen O is more than happy to pass down some advice: “Michelle, if you ever wanted to bitch to me about the pains of anything, I’m your woman.”

Karen O: I feel very familiar with you, in some funny way. Do you feel that way with me at all?

Zauner: I also have that feeling. I mean, I guess we’ve lived somewhat similar lives.

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Zauner: I think we also both talk fast, and jolty, with a lot of filler. And that makes me more comfortable. “Someone else does that too!”

Karen O: Totally. And I could tell you’re a very authentic person, and I’m the same way, to a fault —where I wish I could be Snappy McSnap-Snaps, just charm the pants off of everybody. But, yeah, I just got to be me, and I can sense that off of you as well.

How did you discover each other’s music? Michelle, you wrote beautifully in “Crying in H Mart” about discovering a Yeah Yeah Yeahs DVD as a teenager.

Karen O: That’s a crazy DVD, too. It’s, like, a deep-cut DVD.

Zauner: Yeah. I was hooking up with this guy. The only cool thing he had to offer was—

Karen O: That DVD?

Karen O: Actually, I was born in Seoul.

Zauner: You were born in Seoul, that’s right! Your Wikipedia used to say [Busan].

Karen O: Does it still say that?

Zauner: Yeah, it still says that.

Karen O: We changed it two years ago. I guess they went back—

Zauner: Busan really wants to claim you [ laughs ]. It seemed like this crazy cosmic thing, that someone could have had a similar background, at the time when I didn’t even know another human being that had that same experience as me.

Karen O: I heard a lot of echoes about the excerpt of your book, when it came out in The New Yorker . I felt like it was a pretty wild experience reading your memoir, because I’ve just never read a memoir that I related to so completely. I’ve never read a half-Asian — halfie, that’s what we’ve always called it — but half-Korean, half-American woman’s memoir, who started a band. There’s just so many parallels. It was a really awesome experience. Even the ties of you going to Korea with your mom, I had the same thing. It was pretty profound to be able to read such a raw and incredibly soul-bearing memoir, but also, it [was] from someone like me. It made a huge impression on me, and it’s brilliant. Everybody should have a memoir as a companion piece with their records. Especially these days, because of the way we consume everything. Things just wash over you like droplets on the surface, and it’s a shame. Making a record, you’re putting every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears, and really going to wherever music takes you, which is almost like a spiritual thing. And then the way people consume, it’s lucky if you get past skin deep. Having the memoir to go along, I’m so glad that you do have that. 

Zauner: I would read the shit out of a Karen O memoir. There’s the film [2022’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, an upcoming documentary on Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the early-2000s New York rock scene], but I haven’t seen it yet. Have you seen it?

Karen O: Yeah. I had to give some notes, to steer it in the direction that I felt was more—

Zauner: You.

Karen O: Yeah, representative of what I was going through. Because it was me in a sea of dudes for most of my career.

Karen O: Of being the only girl? I mean, there’s definitely perks to being the only girl. For instance—

Zauner: The bathroom line.

Karen O: [ Laughs. ] Yeah. There’s no bathroom line, ever. And, yeah, I think it’s exhilarating. I just felt very mischievous and defiant, and I loved breaking all the rules that the boys had to follow. I was competitive, so in my mind, it just felt like it was just always me versus a bunch of, as I call [them], “boy bands.” But, yeah, it was really lonely. There were so many times where I felt like I could have really used a mentor. Someone that I could’ve asked, “Hey, what do you do when you feel this way?” Another woman who has already been through it. But there were just so few, and there wasn’t the connectivity that there is now. I couldn’t DM someone.

Zauner: I think, when I came up, it was probably slightly less of a boys’ club, but it still felt that way at the time. It wasn’t until Japanese Breakfast happened that that landscape began to change.

Karen O: It’s hard for me to relate to being able to have other women in what you’re doing, to have any sort of camaraderie, because I was really isolated in what I was doing. But it fills me with joy that you have that now, and that bands like Linda Lindas are coming up and making such a splash, too. Not feeling like outsiders. Like, “Yeah, I belong here.”

Zauner: We got to grow up, seeing you in that space, and that definitely paved the way for so many people.

Karen O: That makes it all worth it.

Zauner: I genuinely don’t think that I’d be playing music if I didn’t see that, and just be like, “Well, she can do it. She’s doing everything my mom would be horrified to see me doing, and that’s exactly what I want to be doing.”

Karen O: Oh, my God [ laughs ].

Zauner: I’m actually kind of nervous about opening for you [at one date this fall], because I’m like, “What rock moves did I accidentally steal from Karen?”

Karen O: Oh, don’t worry about that. I was reading [something] about how we’re all mosaics of the people that we love, or the people that have influenced us over the years. You’re this mosaic of everything that’s ever moved you, or inspired you, or that you’ve loved. And I really think that’s the case. I’ve stolen so many moves from people that I’ve known, and you just make them your own. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Karen O: Oh, yeah. Graminated.

Zauner: [ Laughs. ] Yeah, when we got Graminated, I was like, “Wow, Karen sent me some words of encouragement to go into the Grammys, and to be prepared that it was going to be sort of weird.” Ben Gibbard, who’s another hero of mine, told me that it was really wild, because the year that Death Cab [For Cutie] was nominated for their Grammy [in 2007], they lost to “My Humps.” Do you have any Grammy memories like that?

Karen O: We only went once [in 2004]. We were brimming with excitement. My best friend made my outfit on her sewing machine. It was super DIY, which was kind of amazing. Our seats were nosebleed seats, by the way. I just remember there being a Cirque du Soleil swing, and I think Usher was swinging on it. [ Editor’s note: He wasn’t, but we wish he were. ] We lasted about 10 minutes, and then we all vacated to the stairwell. I have this picture of us smoking in this stairwell. Like, “Oh, shit, that’s rough. That’s just so not our vibe.”

Zauner: Do you remember who you lost to?

Karen O: No clue. 

Zauner: That doesn’t stick with you for years? Karen O: No. I have no idea.

Zauner: What were the Oscars like? [Karen O co-wrote “The Moon Song” with Spike Jonze for Her ; it was nominated for Best Original Song in 2014.]

Karen O: That was a whole other experience. We were part of the show, because we were performing. It felt very VIP, in a funny way. My mouth went completely bone dry — literally not a molecule of moisture — right before I went on. I was like, “Fuck.” After we did the song, Leo DiCaprio stood up, and he was clapping. He was so pumped for our performance.

Zauner: If you want to impress one person, it’s him. How are you feeling, going into this new cycle? How long has it been?

Karen O: It’s been nine years. Since our last record, I now have a seven-year-old kid, and it’s been the pandemic for almost three years. Doing those shows this summer was very much needed, just to connect with an audience again. We really can feel what it feels like to return to an audience who have been your fans for almost 20 years. They need it, and we need it. It’s a lot of joy.

I feel excited about the shows that we’re going to do with you and the Linda Lindas. A big “We’re back. Check how much the world has changed since last time we’ve been here; we have these incredible Asian American women supporting us.” That wasn’t a thing at all for me, for the majority of my career.

Karen O: The question I always got was, “How does it feel to be a woman?” Because that was the exotic thing at the moment. But the half-Asian thing, I do find it interesting. I’m curious to hear your point of view on it, because it’s just so much more on the radar. Being part Korean — and just Korean culture in general — was invisible growing up in the States. I’m still getting more in touch with that aspect of me, because it was invisible for so long. Even though it might get old to be asked about, you’re more deeply dialed into that than I am, being younger than me. It’s become extremely culturally relevant.

Zauner: I don’t think I really felt that way until the last five years, with the popularity of K-pop and BTS. And the internet has such a huge part of it now. You’re scrolling through TikTok and you can watch a Nigerian family eating their cuisine. You have this crazy insight into representation that we never saw before, because there’s no gatekeeping. I feel like it’s so much cooler to be mixed race, and so not cool to be a white person right now [ laughs ].

I never felt ashamed of being Korean, but I really didn’t like feeling like people were projecting some kind of stereotype on me in a way that I had no control over. I never wanted anyone to think of me as docile, or agreeable, or hyper-feminine. In some ways, my personality morphed into something that was in direct opposition to that. To a point where it’s like, I don’t even know if those parts were true to who I am, or if they were just my rebellion to what I felt like was being projected onto me.

Even with Crying in H Mart, it’s like, why does it have to be an Asian American story? This is a mother-daughter story. This is a coming-of-age story. It would be insane to call Catcher in the Rye a Caucasian coming-of-age. It feels unfair to see it through that lens, even though that lens is very important to me.

Karen O: It seems like you really deeply relate and connect to your Asian roots, probably more than even me. It’s been extra cool to experience it through your prism.

Zauner: When you wrote “Maps,” were you like, “Oh, I fucking did this?”

Karen O: Oh, yeah.

Zauner: Was that the lead single?

Karen O: No, that was our third single off of that record, so by the time it came out, the label had given up on us. Then “Maps” really struck a chord with the public, with the peeps. Most of what we had written for Yeah Yeah Yeahs up to that point was hard and rebellious and sexy, and this was a very vulnerable, super simple song. And also, very in our style, because Nick [Zinner] had this blue drum machine that felt signature to us. So we felt, “There’s something to this.” It feels like there’s kind of a shift in the ions in the room. Another presence has just entered. It’s mysterious and inexplicable.

Zauner: What was the writing process like for this record? I feel like when you get to the place in your life where you’re a mom and things are so settled … so much of songwriting can, at least initially, come from a place of personal chaos and drama. But how did you go about writing this record, and what were the kind of themes that you found, and how did you tap into that?

Karen O: Yeah Yeah Yeahs were born in this time of turbulence and disquiet in the world. I was living downtown, in New York City, when September 11th happened. So there was a kind of end-of-the-world feeling at that time. We like to rise to the occasion, and can relate to when the world goes upside down.

Zauner: So right now it feels comfortable for you? Karen O: Yeah. Writing music in these somewhat apocalyptic times is something that we can relate to, in a funny way. When Nick and I got back together, we were so fucking stoked. We have baggage, man. We’ve been a band for 20 years. We were like giggling kids again. We felt fearless about tackling themes that were scaring the shit out of us, like the climate crisis, and impermanence.

I don’t think I would be playing music if I hadn’t seen [Karen] and been like, ‘She’s doing everything my mom would be horrified to see me doing, and that’s what I want to be doing.’

Zauner: What made you make the decision to take such a long hiatus?

Zauner: Not knowing it was going to be so long.

Karen O: Yeah. I did know that I wanted to start a family. I remember having a conversation with Shirley Manson from Garbage at a dinner party, where she was just like, “Yeah, you want to have kids? You really need to make space for it. Because if you don’t, you’re probably going to miss your chance.”

Zauner: Was there a sadness, or a fear, when you went off? I feel like I’m at that place in my life. I’m 33 and I feel really ready for that, but I’m also so scared, because you’re so worried that once you get off the wheel, you’ll lose your true love.

Karen O: Not in the least. I think someone told me: “Don’t worry about the empty plate. It fills up before you’re even ready to chow down again.” And it’s true. Don’t worry about taking a pause. Actually, I’m the master of “no.” I say no so much.

Zauner: You’re famous for it.

Karen O: I’m famous for it? Oh, my God.

Zauner: I was talking to someone who works with you, and they were like, “Yeah, we come to Karen with a lot of stuff, and she usually says no, but it’s cool we get to say that we work with her.” I mean, you have a flawless track record. That’s pretty sick.

Karen O: That’s the thing. Don’t be afraid of “no,” because that’s what makes them want you more, to a certain degree. Especially if what you’re doing is meaningful, and has a deeper truth, or has value to it. So I would say, absolutely, there should be no fear of it going away or vanishing.

Zauner: What was that conversation like with your bandmates? Was there some heartbreak?

Karen O: Well, again, because I’m the master of “no” …

Zauner: They’re used to it.

Zauner: That’s just so need-to-hear. I’m such a road dog, actually.

Karen O: I feel like you’re the hardest-working woman in show business.

Zauner: I literally don’t even want to tell someone when I need to pee. I think I get off on just working myself to death. And now I realize, after six years of doing it, it is not sustainable. Part of it is probably the way that I was raised. Everything is my fault, and I have to fight to the death, all the time. I think both my parents were like that. This year, I’m really learning how to say no. And it is really scary.

Karen O: I don’t think I’ve ever regretted saying no. I’ve regretted saying yes. I’m really happy, for the most part, with the niche I’ve carved out for myself.

Zauner: I think that you have the most admirable, long-standing, timeless career.

Karen O: Thank you. I’m so freaking endlessly impressed by what you’ve put out into the world, and the doors you’ve opened for more of us. I think “no” would be a beautiful cherry on top of it.

Come for the Torture, Stay for the Poetry: This Might Be Taylor Swift's Most Personal Album Yet

Billie eilish would like to reintroduce herself, taylor swift and jack antonoff have reached their limit, trump privately rages about his sketch artist, courtroom nap reports, team trump is ready to lose the supreme court immunity case. they’re celebrating.

Karen O: Yeah. The “no” cherry.

Styling by Natasha Newman-Thomas . Fashion assistant: Peyton Regan . Karen O: Hair by Gregg Lennon Jr. Makeup by Amber D . for A-Frame. Michelle Zauner: Hair by Sami Knight for A-Frame . Makeup by Hinako Nishiguchi for A-Frame .

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Karen O Has Found a More Joyful Kind of Wildness

By Jia Tolentino

Karen O, born Karen Lee Orzolek, was twenty-one years old when she took the stage with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the first time. It was September, 2000, a Sunday night at Mercury Lounge, and they were opening for the White Stripes. The band—Karen, the guitarist Nick Zinner, and the drummer Brian Chase—had practiced together as a trio exactly once. Karen downed four margaritas, drenched herself in olive oil, and stepped into the persona that would catapult the Yeah Yeah Yeahs into the rock pantheon and turn her into a generational icon: a human live wire, snapping and sparking, as acute and raw and responsive as an exposed nerve.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were at the center of the early-two-thousands New York rock revival—a scene, as immortalized by Lizzy Goodman in the book “ Meet Me in the Bathroom ,” that was dominated by all-male bands like the Strokes and Interpol. The Y.Y.Y.s’ headlong sound—chords as bright and as yearning as the neon tubes in a Dan Flavin installation; precise, explosive drums and guitar; and Karen’s voice, an electric snarl that softens and trembles—has evolved, over four albums, without losing its center. So has Karen’s onstage presence. She became famous for onstage anarchy, swallowing the microphone and spitting full cups of beer into the audience, as captured in “There Is No Modern Romance,” a documentary from 2017. Today, her vibe is less GG Allin, more Freddie Mercury and Debbie Harry.

Karen is now forty-three, married to the British director Barnaby Clay, and the mother of a seven-year-old son. And yet, at heart, she remains a punk with the mannerisms of a restless teen-age boy. She has long talked of a split in her identity, between her shy real-life self and the wild person she becomes onstage. (Goodman has described her as an “exhibitionistic Boo Radley, a warped dervish onstage who disappears after the encore and is rarely seen in real life.”) What connects those two selves is guilelessness, a total reliance on instinct.

When we talked on Zoom, late in the summer, her name popped up as “Karen Clay.” She was wearing a Scorpions T-shirt ripped from shoulder to armpit, and her hair fell across her face in her signature lopsided mullet-shag. She was preparing for the release of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ fifth album, “Cool it Down,” at the end of September, on the indie label Secretly Canadian. Despite clocking in at less than thirty-five minutes, “Cool It Down” has an expansive sweep and is full of a galvanizing mercy. I told her I had spent the previous Saturday on acid in the mountains, listening to the record and crying. We spoke again, at the end of August. These conversations have been condensed and edited.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ last album, “Mosquito,” came out in 2013, ending your contract with Interscope. How did you know it was time to make the new one?

I started to feel itchy to have new material in 2019. We’d been doing these back-catalogue celebratory shows, which were fun—there was no pressure to showcase anything new—but it was feeling a bit like we needed some fresh blood in here. And 2020 was supposed to be a cool year. We were going to headline Pitchfork Festival; we had all these things planned.

Obviously, that and everything else didn’t materialize, and in 2020 we had that shared sense, among other musicians and many other types of artists, of a profound separation from what we do. It dawned on me, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to play live again. I don’t even know when we were going to be able to be in the same room together again. It was sobering, especially because there’ve been times in our career where I was, like, Can I do this anymore? Do I have it in me? Will the muse visit me at all? But, for the first time, this was, Oh, you might not even have the choice .

But then, in 2021, you and Nick got together and started writing.

Once the vaccines were out. I had no idea what was going to happen. We had been through so much emotionally, but we hadn’t processed it. Still, to this day, I haven’t really processed it—this pandemic, and everything that happened before it: having a kid, four years of Trump.

For the first session we usually start with a really innocuous jam session. We, like, go to Nick’s basement and just mess around. You move around the room, play whatever you want—keys, guitar, bass, vocals. You get to twirl around and just tinker on anything. So we were jamming, playing some silly hooks, some super goth stuff, cracking ourselves up. We were giddy to be reconnecting with this process, which is like a lifeline for us. We did a few sessions like that, and pretty soon we decided to break our own rules a little bit. We work with Dave Sitek [of TV on the Radio], who’s produced all of our records, and feels like the fourth member of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I was, like, “I’m going to go through Dave’s folder because he’s got just thousands of pieces of music, and if there’s a piece I like, let’s just write on it.” And one of his pieces turned into “ Spitting off the Edge of the World .” We did other new things, too—we’d never sampled anything before, but on “Fleez” we sample the ESG .

And “ Burning ,” the second single, interpolates Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons .

We’d never allowed ourselves this thing that hip-hop artists have been doing since the start—to nod to other artists, incorporate their work in ours. But, this time, we were just, like, “Let’s do whatever feels good.” And then it happened really fast: lyrics coming through and changing, like, the particulate matter in the room. Literally, it feels like a shift in the ions, like there’s another presence all of a sudden. Sometimes we look at each other, like—it almost feels like we’re not alone, like the two of us aren’t alone anymore. Certain songs that we’ve written in the past, including “Maps,” for instance, were like that.

This album feels like a concise roving around a real emotional center—a hard-earned sense of freedom, a sort of jagged desire for catharsis and collective release. The cover photo is of a woman falling across a clear blue sky, above a pit of flames. When did it feel to you that the album was going to be expressing what it does?

Well, the stakes have never felt higher, right? And souls have never felt more lost, you know? And I think that both of those things stoked the flames in my creativity.

I rely on songwriting, on the language of music, to guide me to my higher self. Because I get as lost as everybody else in my day-to-day. Like, as a person, right now, I’m struggling to keep my head above water. But when I make music it feels like I’m really tuning into a deeper truth—some sort of universal truth, something that’s brutal and comforting. I wanted to dive into that more than I ever had in my creative career. It felt for me, like—this might sound really like I’m bullshitting, like I’m full of myself. Like, you might think, She’s lost her fucking mind. . . .

I just told you I wept while listening to this album on acid for hours on Saturday.

O.K. I was, like, It’s time to step up, Karen. It’s time to channel what the David Bowies and the Bob Dylans and the Lou Reeds are channelling. You have to be a container. You have to be a container for the human experience. I felt like pushing myself into big, sweeping themes more than I would normally be comfortable with. I felt that I needed to feel what I was experiencing reflected back to me. I felt like the stakes were high, and I wanted to answer the call.

You’re referring partly, maybe, to how the first two singles are about climate change. The lyrics—“Cowards, here’s the sun, so bow your heads”—are not metaphorical. It’s hard to do this without being too on the nose, but these songs don’t operate in the “raising awareness” realm. They express the feelings that coalesce around the degrading world: anger, despair, desire, distance.

I think I was trying to access something like a mythological perspective. Like when you think about the Greek gods, and their ambivalence about humans.

But then there’s a very human intimacy, too. You sing, “Mama, what have you done?”

It’s personal, too, of course. As a parent, just like all the other parents, I’m thinking about what our children are going to inherit—how this is not the distant future, how it’s happening in real time. California has been so battered by the climate crisis—you feel it so acutely, the wildfires, the heat waves, the drought.

But what makes the songs work for me is that they were written in a spirit of joy, and a desire for transcendence. Not to escape the situation but to let it out, to express it. I think everybody knows that music is one of those inexplicable vehicles where you can deal with really weighty stuff. Any ineffable feeling, whether it be the end-of-the-world ones, or heartbreak—you were dumped by your boyfriend at seventeen—or whether it’s that you just had a perfect day: you drank sangria and went to the zoo. When we were writing, things flooded out of me lyrically that became climate-crisis-related, but the feeling was that of beauty. Of Nick and I returning to each other twenty years after we started, after feeling that we might not ever get to do it again.

You gave birth to your son in 2015. I wondered how the physical ravages of early motherhood felt to you, compared to your years of injuring yourself onstage. You’d already been through a prolonged grind of sleeplessness, pain, not eating properly, all of that. Did those experiences compare to each other?

I joke about this with my husband because my assumption was, like, I’m a rocker , you know, with this really extreme life style for what, at that point, had been fifteen years. Whatever was going to come with having a child, surely it wouldn’t be as extreme as that. And then it knocked me sideways. I mean, my life had not prepared me in the least . Especially the newborn phase. When you have a child later in life—after you’ve established your career, your relationship—I felt like I was sort of an overachiever in many aspects of my life, and then this seven-pound flesh-thing arrives and I was just, like, I am not passing this with flying colors, man. I really felt like I did not know what I was doing, for the first time in a long time. But that was also the thing that was super cool about it. I was, like, I haven’t had a genuinely, completely new experience in a really long time. Nothing could have prepared me for it.

I’ve always craved maximum-intensity experiences. But then, after having a baby—and I don’t know whether it’s hormonal or circumstantial—the baby has acted as sort of a slow drip of all the dopamine and joy, and the draining difficulty, I used to run after.

How far in are you?

Only two years.

I’d say it’s going to come back. Those cravings. Around age four, and then, especially, when they get close to age six. When they go to school, when they become less dependent on you, those desires for those kinds of highs do return, with a force.

And so, age four, that was 2019 for you—when you started wanting to record new music.

Yeah, man, it’s a process after you have a kid, you know? Just to reclaim your bodily functions, your sense of self. Being a mother, you’re going to be a mother from now on, no matter what happens. You have to reclaim everything else.

When you and Nick and Brian got together to record, did anything feel different?

I would say tears were shed every day that we were together. It felt euphoric, and it felt so, so precious. It was summer, 2021, and there was still so much uncertainty—it felt like you couldn’t grasp it in the way you would’ve before. It felt like it would just slip through your fingers. So, because we were trying to savor the experience, everyone in the band was on best behavior, very much so. We set aside a lot of baggage. I mean, there are moments when it comes up anyway, but there was so much drama in life that we felt that this did not have to include any drama.

And you’re all coming back to this as people who’ve had almost a decade of change in your own lives.

Yeah. Brian’s a father as well. Those guys are incredibly patient with me. If it wasn’t for me, would they be making a record every other year? I think the answer is probably yes. And so, for them, when I do come around, it’s, like, Good things come to those who wait.

This record is the best and possibly the only example of a band that originated in the early-aughts indie-rock scene delivering an exciting record in the current era—iterating their original sound in a genuinely progressive way. I don’t mean to be too essentialist about it, but it doesn’t seem coincidental to me that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are the only huge band from that scene fronted by a woman. I wonder if there’s any connection there to you—in the particular kind of humility or bravery or honesty that’s required.

Well, yeah. For one thing, I do not, you know, subscribe to any sense of duty. Which is a thing in the male rock world. It’s like there’s a legacy that’s been established. Even subconsciously, if you’re a dude in a band, you know there’s a map that’s been drawn out by so many rock bands that came before you that you could refer to. You could decide: Which one of those am I? There’s this unspoken—fairly unspoken—expectation, being a dude in a band, that’s, like, you have a good thing going, so keep that good thing going.

But there isn’t a road map for me. Most women in rock bands before me—maybe not even just before me—they were still very much making up the rules as they go along. There’s no net. It does take a lot of defiance. It takes bravery. Sometimes I feel like I’m on the front lines and everyone else is in the barricades being, like, O.K., is it safe to go on yet? Do people like it?

In “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” you talk about an early precursor to Karen O’s emergence being a lip-synch performance of “Wild Thing” at your elementary school, where you dressed up as a boy and put on sunglasses and couldn’t see the crowd, and you just went nuts. I wondered if you remembered being surprised, yourself, by what came out.

It did surprise me, actually. It was so, so out of character. What surprised me the most was probably the adrenaline. It was the first time I experienced that rush , you know? So whatever silly antics I would do for myself, or my parents, or a friend in the privacy and safety of my own home, it just could not compare to the rush of really, really breaking out of your own mold in front of a bunch of classmates that literally—like, their jaws dropped. Like, Who is this person? What is this, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? Like, What happened to Karen?

You grew up in New Jersey—your dad is Polish, your mom is Korean, and you flew back to Korea every few years. How did you understand your racial identity as a kid? Or how did it figure into any conversations about identity that you were having with yourself?

I’m still kind of processing it all, to be honest. Most of my family was Korean, because my dad had no relatives—so it was my dad and a bunch of Korean Americans. But it was also the eighties and nineties, and my family wasn’t really connected to a Korean American community. Culturally, they were sort of trying to fit into American culture more, you know? So I think that was confusing for me. Like, Well, they eat Korean food, they look Korean, they don’t act like Americans per se, but it also feels disconnected from Korea to a certain degree.

Typically, the people I connected to most deeply, most effortlessly, were other half-Asian kids. But the Korean kids at school, not so much, and the white kids, not so much. I tried. It’s one of those funny things—when you’re a kid, you want to fit in, but it didn’t take me very long to realize—by high school, certainly by college—what an asset it was to be half-Korean. I remember taking an East Asian cinema class, and exploring that aspect of myself culturally, because there was so little in American culture that spoke to the Asian or Asian American experience. It was a fucking desert for so long, and I remember just feeling—just waiting, waiting, year after year, for Korea to be on the map somehow, culturally. And now, holy shit. It wasn’t a thing growing up. I saw nothing, almost nothing, that reflected back what I saw when I looked in the mirror, nothing that looked like me.

And now you’re playing Forest Hills in October, with Japanese Breakfast and the Linda Lindas opening. Three rock bands all fronted by Asian women.

This feels totally unprecedented for me. It feels so new. To me, it feels like the world changed overnight—that we can do this thing that didn’t exist for ninety-five per cent of my career. I don’t even think I fully comprehend it, because I live in such a closed-off little bubble myself. To have started a band twenty-two years ago, and then to have inadvertently paved the way for other bands who look like me. It is incredibly life-affirming, and I am dumbfounded.

What music did you gravitate toward when you were little?

The really, really formative stuff was my dad’s mail-order-CD collection—he would get these pretty obscure compilations from the fifties and sixties, doo-wop and girls’ groups, which had a deep impact on me musically, melodically and lyrically, later in my life. But I went through a lot of phases. I went through a nineties hip-hop phase, an alternative-rock phase, a Grateful Dead and Phish phase. Then I got into indie rock, and that’s when I started seeing shows in New York City, because I was right over the bridge.

You’ve said that you took four guitar lessons when you were eighteen, and from there, you’ve written hundreds of songs.

You’d be surprised what you can do with six chords. Pretty much every great song you’ve ever loved was written with those six chords. And I was kind of lazy, too. I knew that if you add a capo into that mix, the world is your oyster.

“There’s no net,” Karen O says, of being a woman in rock. “It does take a lot of defiance. It takes bravery.”

What did your parents think you were going to do when you grew up?

Oh, my God, I have no idea what they thought I was going to do. But I went to film school—I started at Oberlin and transferred to N.Y.U. for film.

Was that more for the film program or to be in the city?

Well, I’d fallen in love with a boy. But also my big brother had made home movies growing up, and I’d idolized him. And Oberlin didn’t have much of a film program, so I thought I would transfer just for a semester and give it a try. But then the band was happening on the side, and that totally blew up and became my career.

When you think about that stretch in New York—the really early days, and then as everything started happening, really fast—what do you see? What bar are you sitting at, what are you doing? What are you worried about? What do you want?

Most likely Mars Bar, the dive-iest of the dive bars—a friend of ours bartended there, and it was almost like a place for squatters. I’d probably be drinking a whiskey sour or a margarita, which became my main thing. And I was boy-crazy, you know? You hear about guys wanting to be in a band because they want to hook up with chicks. I was a little like that myself—I wanted to be in a band so guys would want to hook up with me. But then I was also a prude. Whatever. I think I just wanted to be adored, to a certain degree.

But it was also just, you know, getting free. Getting as free as I could. I knew that music was a pathway to that. Once I started performing live with our band, it surprised me again, just like it did the first time I got onstage. I was pretty unaware of myself up there. My main incentive, I think, was to free myself and everyone else in the room. Because New York, even though it’s one of the greatest cultural cities in the world, it was pretty fucking conservative at that point, man. Going to a show, it was people standing there with their arms crossed, wondering: Are you up to snuff? And I was kind of on this warpath—to just set them free of self-consciousness, and myself as well. To lose ourselves in reverie and sexuality and rage and emotional transcendence and all that stuff.

What you did onstage meant, and required, a refusal of self-consciousness. But then the paradigm you were working in essentially invites and produces self-consciousness—the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were near-instantly under so much scrutiny and getting a lot of hype.

I struggled a lot with that. It burst the bubble, you know? I was making shit in a very naïve way, like, in a genuine, playful, emotionally honest way. And then the industry starts shining its light on you, and you have to reframe this experience of making shit as something that makes money and is commercially viable and gets sucked into the grinder of capitalism. Our conception of the band coincided so quickly with the commercialization of the music we were making.

The plus side of that—it’s so insane that we were in the right place at the right time so that what we were doing was actually on the radar. It was a fever pitch. Being courted by labels, being put up in penthouse suites at South by Southwest. It kind of felt like comedy to us—we could not even comprehend it. But we weren’t really cut out for the mainstream in a lot of ways.

That hype also gave you the power to write creative control into the contract with your label. But, at the same time, there’s commercial pressure. How have you held onto what feels meaningful to you in the midst of that pressure?

Well, that’s why it took nine years to put out this album. We were out of our record contract, out of the expectation that you put out a record every two or three years.

But, as far as holding onto the innocence, onto the goal of being able to make pure art—I think it’s a complicated process. My thing was: don’t buy into the attention we’re getting. At one point, they wanted me to be on the cover of Vanity Fair , to stand around with a bunch of people, you know, and I thought that was the cheesiest thing ever. My manager got a call from the head of our label, like, “Why the fuck is she not going to be on the cover of Vanity Fair ?” And I get it, man! But there were things we could have done that would have felt like we were pandering. I don’t think of our audience as consumers, you know? I think of them as sensitive people who need music to keep them going, just like me. And I think it’s nonsensical for me to make art unless it feels incredibly meaningful. Deeply valuable for myself. And I think a lot of people get pressured, like, If you’re on a roll, you’ve gotta keep that roll going. I hate that thing—I think it’s bullshit. If the iron’s hot and you keep that fire on, you’re gonna burn out, man, and when you get burned out terrible things happen. Your confidence plummets.

So I realized early on that I had to stand up for how I felt. It felt like exposing weakness to say, “I’m not cut from the same cloth as you guys.” And in those days it was such a male-dominated genre. All the guys were, like, “What are you doing? You just keep going, man, you power through it, it doesn’t matter how sick you are, how fucked-up you are, and if you don’t keep going, it’s a sign of weakness.” But I was, like, “No! It’s a sign of strength.” To be true to that—cancelling shows, saying no to things—was painful and hard, and I disappointed a lot of people, but I saved myself and the band in the process.

You’ve talked about bringing a lot of angst to your performances—channelling it and expunging it onstage. What was the wellspring of that angst?

Circling back to my Asian American or biracial roots, I think, you know, I was pretty repressed. I was certainly sexually repressed. I was so shy, so full of social anxiety. I struggled to, like, be seen. I think a lot of that repression is quite common in Asian culture—it’s this conservative thing where what’s on the outside is more valuable than your feelings. So I had these big feelings that I’d been bottling up for all those years, and when they found the outlet to come out, they were, like— Hello!

And then there was tragedy. One of my best friends died in 2001, took their own life. That was in February, and 9/11 was September, and it felt like we had grown up without religion and we were being completely torn apart by grief and loss with no direction of how to get through it. We were faced with terror and mortality, and Western culture has so little to offer people in terms of how to navigate that. Here we want to sweep death under the rug, not integrate it into our lives.

So I was totally reeling, and I was a girl in a boy’s world, you know? I was empowered by that, but I was very lonely and isolated, also.

And you were the target of a kind of attention the boys weren’t. I just watched the forthcoming “Meet Me in the Bathroom” documentary, and there’s this shot of a male photographer eagerly upskirting you at a show. A lot of the early Yeah Yeah Yeahs coverage is a little gross to read now—a lot of “Karen O is one excitable girl!” kind of thing.

I was definitely very much aware of the predatory gaze. But I think I refused to feel victimized by it. I like antagonism, I like being up against stuff, I like feeling like the underdog. And one of the things that saved me in that respect was that half of our audience was women. That was really unusual and unique about Yeah Yeah Yeahs—the audiences were quite diverse, in the places they could be. And so when I’m sexy up there, when I’m exploring, having fun with sexuality and desire—I’m probably thinking about the women, not the men. I wanted to represent for them. I wanted them to feel as defiant as I did onstage.

I did, watching you perform. And when I think about how that inevitable aspect of being a young woman felt to me then—pursuing liberation, and finding yourself trapped in other people’s framing of that liberation—I remember mostly thinking, like, Yeah, well, joke’s on you, you idiots. You have no idea what you actually have on your hands here.

Yeah, yeah, of course . Like, now I see pictures of weird middle-aged dudes taking crotch shots of me, and my stomach turns a little bit, but I feel like—if I’d started performing differently, changing myself, for you ? No fucking way. For these losers, no fucking way.

So many of my friends, girls especially, felt and feel intensely connected to you and the way you expressed that project of getting free—a project that we shared in, and a project that, for a while, involved a lot of self-obliteration. You’ve talked about watching “The Wrestler,” with Mickey Rourke, and identifying with the symbiotic, dangerous relationship between audience and performer, in which the more Rourke’s character hurt himself, the more ravenous his audience became, and the more he felt that he needed to provide that for them.

“There Is No Modern Romance,” the documentary, captures this in a pretty raw way. You’re at an edge, you’re strung out, you’re needing to drink more to get onstage. You screened it as part of your 2017 tour, and I remember watching it and thinking that it was remarkable that you weren’t shying away from what it was actually like.

The demand for us was so extreme, so early, that it put us in the position of having to tour all of a sudden, and I had no concept of what the process of touring entailed. So the stage became a place where I unleashed all the messiness that I was feeling, and it was highly self-destructive. I remember in college, at Oberlin, talking about GG Allin, and the extent to which he harmed himself as a kind of spectacle, and in my head, I was, like, Cool, man. You know? That was what punk rockers do—roll around in glass, that kind of thing.

But, really, what it was, I found, when we started performing—it was self-destruction, but in a mystical sense. I think I would just enter another plane, and I’d just be done . Whatever was coming out, it was really uncensored, really unhinged. And I was hurting myself more and more. I was spiralling out of control. It crescendoed until I fell off the stage.

This happened in Australia, in 2003.

Yeah. I slipped off the monitor, then I fell off the stage, and my back hit the guardrail—you know, the one holding all the kids back. It was a six-foot drop, and the monitor followed me down and hit me on the head. It was, like, what—eighty pounds? And because I had so much alcohol in me, I was just, like, a noodle. As limp as a noodle. I was so lucky to not get a concussion, not to snap my neck or my back.

You got back onstage, somehow, and sang “Maps.”

And then I ended the set and went to the hospital. It was super traumatic for me, and then two or three days later I had to get back onstage. I was terrified, and I felt like I’d been in a car crash. My boyfriend [Angus Andrew, the lead singer of Liars] wheeled me onstage in a wheelchair, and I couldn’t move because it hurt so bad—I had to just stand there and sing.

It was a wake-up call, and after that, I had to basically reinvent the way that I performed.

Can you tell me about figuring out how to channel that wildness onstage in a way that wasn’t self-destructive?

I had to plan to keep violence out of the equation, you know? I think it was the difference between being, like, Either this thing controls you, or you control this thing. Or maybe you don’t control it—whatever force moves through me onstage—but I had to experiment with not completely losing myself in it. I had to make myself part of the conversation.

And I think, in those early years, I had a real love-hate relationship with the audience. In my head I was, like, You love the violence that I’m doing here, you expect this spectacle of me, and I might have to return the favor, so fuck you guys—you guys suck. I love you, but I hate you. So after that, for the second record, I could look my audience in the eye. I could start to have a more meaningful rapport with them. I went from a raging, out-of-control, unhinged thing to something that echoed that but was more joyful. A lot more joyful.

The party aesthetic of the aughts—the messy, smeary, mismatched, American Apparel thing; ripped tights and dirty shoes and everyone looking drunk or hungover all the time—has recently been discovered and repopularized by young people on TikTok and Instagram. What do you make of the Gen Z interest in so-called indie sleaze?

It’s all news to me, but I get it. There’s parallels to what they’re going through and what we were going through. The world feels so out of control. And, like, millennials were so put together in so many ways. A lot of the millennials I know, at least—they hardly touch alcohol, they eat beet salads and stuff. And that little window of time was so hedonistic and Dionysian. There was less policing of culture. I think that there’s really a kind of honesty to not worrying about saying the wrong thing or facing some kind of retribution. You felt like pushing the envelope. There was this freedom we had—before everything turned, you know. . . .

Into an optimized Sweetgreen mail-order mattress. Well, people are smoking cigarettes and taking bad pictures again, at least, it seems. I want to ask you about “ Maps .” I would love to know what it felt like to write a perfect song—one of the perfect records of the decade.

Well. Wow, it was a long time ago. Twenty years ago. Let me think.

I remember sitting on Nick’s incredibly dirty loft floor. I was passing by his room when I heard the drum machine hit that pattern, and so I came in, and sat on the floor, and said, “Let me try something.” Oh, God, it just felt like a New York moment. Anyone who lives in New York understands what that means. It was really innocent and pure, too. Like, I was in love, you know? And I had just written Angus an e-mail, because he was on tour. I missed him sorely. Part of that was, “Why do they get to be with you? They don’t love you like I love you. You should be here with me.” And it seemed like a pretty fucking good lyric.

So we tried it on that drum machine, Nick’s little blue machine, and we recorded it into a four-track, which was what we did with everything. It’s such a simple song—super pure, super simple. And it didn’t evolve much from that original demo . It’s really hard to take credit for it. It’s one of the great mysteries of being alive for me, being able to write a song like “Maps.”

I want to go back to something you said when you were talking about 2001, the year your friend died, and the year of 9/11, and the way that Western culture doesn’t offer a road map through grief. Did you find your direction, and, if you did, how did you find it?

This was Peter, my friend who died. My friend, and Brian’s close friend, too—he was our college friend. He was our age. So young. It was totally unexpected. And no one knew how to help me, and I didn’t know how to help myself. There was tons of self-destruction, self-medication, drinking too much, all of that kind of thing.

But the band did save my life. And I started to realize how much when someone dies, they don’t really go away. They live through you. The thing I was angriest about was that people were going to forget about him, and that felt like a huge betrayal to me—a huge betrayal on the part of the world. But then my idea was to just bring him into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ music. Bring him into the way I perform, into the way I express myself, tune into him when I need to access deeper emotions onstage. And I realized that when people die they continue to live through the people that love them. That I’m a mosaic of all these people I’ve loved. ♦

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concerts and tour dates

Karen O Talks Returning to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in New Interview: "There's Just the Teenager in Me That Just Will Never Die"

The band's first album in nine years arrives September 30

BY Kaelen Bell Published Jun 10, 2022

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Karen Lee Orzolek, better known by her stage name Karen O, is a South Korean-born American singer and musician. She is the lead vocalist for American rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

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SPEAKEASY: Karen Hauer & Gorka Marquez Are Back With Their Biggest Ever Tour For 2025!

Strictly come dancing professionals karen hauer and gorka marquez are thrilled to bring their all-new show speakeasy to theatres in 2025..

Expect exhilarating live music and breath-taking choreography with Karen and Gorka’s newest offering, which follows their debut tour FIREDANCE, which toured the UK in 2020, 2022 and 2023. Unlock the door to an undercover world of elegance and iconic dance flavours. From the clandestine New York Speakeasy to the sultry Havana dance floors and from the Burlesque Cabaret Clubs of the mid 1900’s to the glittering mirror balls of Studio 54, SPEAKEASY will be a delicious dance experience. Mamba, Salsa, Charleston, Foxtrot and Samba the night away with our electrifying cast of world-class dancers, vocalists and musicians.

It will be their biggest tour to date and will also include their West End debut as a duo (date and venue coming soon).

Gorka said “I’m so excited to be going back on the road with Karen and seeing everybody across the UK. We’re going to immerse the audience in an undercover world of dance and I can’t wait!’

Karen added:

“Partnering again on a new tour with my good friend Gorka is so exciting and we can’t wait for audiences up and down the UK to see what we’ve put together for them. We’re bringing a new look and feel to this show; all new music, dances and a theme where we’ll be bringing you behind a secret door for an evening of total entertainment and escapism. We are also absolutely thrilled that for the first time we will be taking our tour to the West End. It’s shaping up to be the most incredible adventure and we can’t wait for people to join us on the journey.”

Karen Hauer is Strictly Come Dancing’s longest standing professional, having spent 12 series on the iconic show. She has partnered with celebrities including Westlife’s Nicky Byrne, The ‘Hairy Biker’ Dave Myers, Mark Wright, Jeremy Vine, Chris Ramsey and Jamie Laing. Crowned 2008 World Mambo Champion, Karen was also a finalise of So You Think You Can Dance USA and Principal female dancer in the original Broadway cast of Burn the Floor and subsequent World Tours. Following the success of Karen and Gorka’s FIREDANCE, Karen is delighted to be returning to the stage in 2025 with SPEAKEASY, at which she also undertakes Associate Choreographer and Associate Creative Producer roles.

Gorka is a favourite Strictly Come Dancing professional with past celebrity partners including Helen Skelton, Alexandra Burke and Maisie Smith. He is currently a judge on Spain’s Dancing with the Stars. Gorka is also a qualified personal trainer and fitness model. He also has his own reality TV series ‘Life behind the Lens’, which gives a glimpse of his family life with fiancée Gemma Atkinson and their children. Gorka is looking forward to getting creative with some exciting and dynamic new choreography for this brand new dance show, following on from the electrifying FIREDANCE.

Creative Producer and Director Stuart Glover (We Will Rock You, Footloose, The SpongeBob Musical, Cirque Enchantment, Elysium, Rock the Circus, Get on the Floor!, Broken Strings, Anton & Erin and FIREDANCE with Karen and Gorka) said:

“This brand new show is a celebration of vintage and iconic dance styles set in the seductive secret underworld, with live music and a sensational supporting cast. Karen and Gorka are always a delight to work with, they have excellent creative vision and a real passion for dance and storytelling. SPEAKEASY is set to be a must see in 2025”. 

Triple A Entertainment are well known for promoting iconic acts including Eric Clapton, Kylie Minogue, The Cure and Mark Knopfler, and also have an impressive reputation for bringing more diverse entertainment to UK audiences, covering a wide range from WWE wrestling and The Harlem Globetrotters to Cirque du Soleil, Lord of the Dance and Dirty Dancing.  This blend of rock and roll knowhow and an appetite for diversity brings that extra touch of pzazz to the shows they choose to work with. They are delighted to be associated with Karen & Gorka’s new show and look forward to bringing SPEAKEASY to audiences across the country.

The tour opens in Dartford on 24 February 2025 and travels across the England, Scotland and Wales and will include a West End venue, details of which will be confirmed soon. Don’t miss the must see dance show of 2025 – SPEAKEASY is on sale from 26 April 2024 and is coming to a theatre near you.

Catch Speakeasy across the UK in 2025:

For more information visit www.speakeasylive.co.uk

Tickets available from Friday 26 April at 10am BST at www.bookingsdirect.com or via the individual venue box offices.  

* Tickets for Truro Hall will go on general sale on 20 May

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• Preplanned tours
• Daytrips out of Moscow
• Themed tours
• Customized tours
• St. Petersburg

Moscow Metro

The Moscow Metro Tour is included in most guided tours’ itineraries. Opened in 1935, under Stalin’s regime, the metro was not only meant to solve transport problems, but also was hailed as “a people’s palace”. Every station you will see during your Moscow metro tour looks like a palace room. There are bright paintings, mosaics, stained glass, bronze statues… Our Moscow metro tour includes the most impressive stations best architects and designers worked at - Ploshchad Revolutsii, Mayakovskaya, Komsomolskaya, Kievskaya, Novoslobodskaya and some others.

What is the kremlin in russia?

The guide will not only help you navigate the metro, but will also provide you with fascinating background tales for the images you see and a history of each station.

And there some stories to be told during the Moscow metro tour! The deepest station - Park Pobedy - is 84 metres under the ground with the world longest escalator of 140 meters. Parts of the so-called Metro-2, a secret strategic system of underground tunnels, was used for its construction.

During the Second World War the metro itself became a strategic asset: it was turned into the city's biggest bomb-shelter and one of the stations even became a library. 217 children were born here in 1941-1942! The metro is the most effective means of transport in the capital.

There are almost 200 stations 196 at the moment and trains run every 90 seconds! The guide of your Moscow metro tour can explain to you how to buy tickets and find your way if you plan to get around by yourself.

Moscow Metro Tour

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Description

Moscow metro private tours.

• 2-hour tour $87:  10 Must-See Moscow Metro stations with hotel pick-up and drop-off
• 3-hour tour $137:  20 Must-See Moscow Metro stations with Russian lunch in beautifully-decorated Metro Diner + hotel pick-up and drop off. 
• Metro pass is included in the price of both tours.

Highlight of Metro Tour

• Visit 10 must-see stations of Moscow metro on 2-hr tour and 20 Metro stations on 3-hr tour, including grand Komsomolskaya station with its distinctive Baroque décor, aristocratic Mayakovskaya station with Soviet mosaics, legendary Revolution Square station with 72 bronze sculptures and more!
• Explore Museum of Moscow Metro and learn a ton of technical and historical facts;
• Listen to the secrets about the Metro-2, a secret line supposedly used by the government and KGB;
• Experience a selection of most striking features of Moscow Metro hidden from most tourists and even locals;
• Discover the underground treasure of Russian Soviet past – from mosaics to bronzes, paintings, marble arches, stained glass and even paleontological elements;
• Learn fun stories and myths about Coffee Ring, Zodiac signs of Moscow Metro and more;
• Admire Soviet-era architecture of pre- and post- World War II perious;
• Enjoy panoramic views of Sparrow Hills from Luzhniki Metro Bridge – MetroMost, the only station of Moscow Metro located over water and the highest station above ground level;
• If lucky, catch a unique «Aquarelle Train» – a wheeled picture gallery, brightly painted with images of peony, chrysanthemums, daisies, sunflowers and each car unit is unique;
• Become an expert at navigating the legendary Moscow Metro system;
• Have fun time with a very friendly local;
• + Atmospheric Metro lunch in Moscow’s the only Metro Diner (included in a 3-hr tour)

Hotel Pick-up

Metro stations:.

Komsomolskaya

Novoslobodskaya

Prospekt Mira

Belorusskaya

Mayakovskaya

Novokuznetskaya

Revolution Square

Sparrow Hills

+ for 3-hour tour

Victory Park

Slavic Boulevard

Vystavochnaya

Dostoevskaya

Elektrozavodskaya

Partizanskaya

Museum of Moscow Metro

• Drop-off  at your hotel, Novodevichy Convent, Sparrow Hills or any place you wish
• + Russian lunch  in Metro Diner with artistic metro-style interior for 3-hour tour

Fun facts from our Moscow Metro Tours:

From the very first days of its existence, the Moscow Metro was the object of civil defense, used as a bomb shelter, and designed as a defense for a possible attack on the Soviet Union.

At a depth of 50 to 120 meters lies the second, the coded system of Metro-2 of Moscow subway, which is equipped with everything you need, from food storage to the nuclear button.

According to some sources, the total length of Metro-2 reaches over 150 kilometers.

The Museum was opened on Sportivnaya metro station on November 6, 1967. It features the most interesting models of trains and stations.

Coffee Ring

The first scheme of Moscow Metro looked like a bunch of separate lines. Listen to a myth about Joseph Stalin and the main brown line of Moscow Metro.

Zodiac Metro

According to some astrologers, each of the 12 stops of the Moscow Ring Line corresponds to a particular sign of the zodiac and divides the city into astrological sector.

Astrologers believe that being in a particular zadiac sector of Moscow for a long time, you attract certain energy and events into your life.

Paleontological finds 

Red marble walls of some of the Metro stations hide in themselves petrified inhabitants of ancient seas. Try and find some!

• Every day each car in  Moscow metro passes  more than 600 km, which is the distance from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
• Moscow subway system is the  5th in the intensity  of use (after the subways of Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai).
• The interval in the movement of trains in rush hour is  90 seconds .

What you get:

• + A friend in Moscow.
• + Private & customized Moscow tour.
• + An exciting pastime, not just boring history lessons.
• + An authentic experience of local life.
• + Flexibility during the walking tour: changes can be made at any time to suit individual preferences.
• + Amazing deals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the very best cafes & restaurants. Discounts on weekdays (Mon-Fri).
• + A photo session amongst spectacular Moscow scenery that can be treasured for a lifetime.
• + Good value for souvenirs, taxis, and hotels.
• + Expert advice on what to do, where to go, and how to make the most of your time in Moscow.

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